Anthony Hiley-Mann, known as MountVitruvius, is an artist and computer scientist based in London who works in generative art.,His pieces merge geometric precision with nature-inspired processes, producing surrealist representations of his algorithms,,drawing on cubism and abstract art from the 1940s to the 1980s.He taught himself to code as a teenager, first making music software, before turning fully to code-based art.
Hiley-Mann began creating procedural graphics in his early twenties, though for years he struggled to call the work art, since it did not fit expectations of what art should be. He spent his late twenties and early thirties working with technology companies, watching procedural graphics and code-driven work spread into television, VJ performances and prints sold by other coders long before NFTs existed. After first encountering the blockchain through a Bitcoin faucet around 2010, he returned to it via CryptoPunks in 2018 and committed to on-chain generative art after discovering Art Blocks in late 2020 or early 2021.
He released Shapes on a Plane on fxhash,an on-chain piece made from simple isometric shapes that he traced back to childhood memories of building with Lego.Mind the Gap, a 999-piece collection referencing the London Underground and the city where he was born, became the genesis release on the platform gmStudio.,In 2023 he released two pieces on Art Blocks: Renders Game, which grows cubism-inspired curves into fragmented, ink-like illustrations,,and Trichro-matic, a study of shifting perception dedicated to his father.,Materialistic continued that line of thought, a series of 92 works drawing a connection between Cubism and early computer graphics research.