Matto – Shinkai is a Buddhist multidisciplinary artist who moved from photography and experimental filmmaking into on-chain generative art.His Zenerative series, released on Art Blocks and Plottables, applies Zen and Ch'an Buddhist practice to generative code, including a program that simulates painting an Ensō in ink.,He holds an MFA in Film and Animation from the Rochester Institute of Technology and lives in North Carolina.
Born in the early 1980s, Matto discovered photography in the darkroom at age eleven and computer programming through a school BASIC Language Programming Club at age twelve, and made his first generative artworks combining chemistry-lab and darkroom processes while still in high school.He earned a Bachelor of Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003 and then spent most of the 2000s making award-winning experimental short films that toured more than 75 festivals and university exhibitions, before stepping away from filmmaking in 2012.,
Matto began experimenting with NFTs in 2017 and taught himself Python, Processing, Ruby, HTML, p5.js and JavaScript before releasing Ensō on Art Blocks, a project that mimics the practice of painting an ensō in ink using values from each token's transaction hash.It became the first work in his Zenerative series, later joined by Time Between the Lines is Thread Through the Mind, a plotter piece exploring efficiency, order and aesthetics through drawing order, and At the Still Point of the Turning World: Algorithmic Self Portrait, 2025, which was shown in the Durham Art Guild's 71st Annual Juried Exhibition in December 2025.,He funds monthly renewable-energy credits to offset the environmental footprint of his blockchain activity and of each Zenerative project.
Alongside Zenerative, Matto develops experimental smart-contract projects such as Chainlife, an on-chain collection of generative scripts that evolve based on a token's ownership history and let owners switch between a cellular-automata rendering and a dynamic 3D environment.He also created BLONKS, his first fully on-chain solidity and SVG project, a collection of 4,444 tokens that raised funds split between the artist and charity and has since gained additional owner-selectable rendering states.On Bitcoin, he created Strange <Block> Buddha, which generates a unique variation of the Buddhabrot fractal from the data of each new Bitcoin block.
