Michael Perusse is a generative artist who studied computer science alongside musicals, writing, and improv at Harvard's School of Engineering. After graduating he worked on Google's Doodles team, and in 2020 began making generative art before he had a name for it. In 2022 he released Theatergoers on fxhash, a collection of black-and-white generative figures in which small shifts in eye position change the emotional read of each piece.
His genesis project on fxhash was The Emoji Finder Game, a free generative version of Where's Waldo? built with emoji assets and released before the end of 2021. Twenty percent of Theatergoers' primary sales were donated to CITYArts, a nonprofit that partners youth with artists on community murals. His following series, Clerestory, grew out of trigonometric patterns shaped into abstract stained glass and was his first project built with WebGL. Perusse has also written joke coffee-table books, including The World's Largest Prime Number, which prints the digits of the largest known prime number in a barely legible two-point font. He owns a pen plotter and has cited the watercolor pen-plotting work of Licia He and Lars Wander as an inspiration for future physical pieces.
