Michael Alexander (Indonesian, b. 1990), also credited in press as Michael Micasso and working under the name MEK.txt, is a pixel artist, typographer, and designer who hand-places every pixel in his work, minimizing automated tools. He draws on Japanese ukiyo-e and shin-hanga woodblock prints, describing how the old masters translated something “rigid and rough” into something soft.
He began posting digital art on DeviantArt in 2008 but set personal art-making aside after college, spending fourteen years as a co-founder and Principal Designer of a graphic design studio in Indonesia. After nine years without making personal work, he returned to art through Tezos, where he became a prolific minter under the name MEK.txt. He has since released work on Ethereum through Foundation and Nifty Gateway, and on Solana through Exchange.art, alongside his continuing output on Tezos via Objkt. He frames his practice partly around “the battle for relevancy between humans and machines in art creation”, pointing to debates like Garry Kasparov's chess matches against Deep Blue as historical parallels.
