{protocell:labs} is a digital laboratory merging artistic and research practice, investigating computational structures, mathematical forms of organization and emergent morphogenesis. It was founded in 2021 by the architects Luka Piskorec and Kane Borg, who favor chain-agnostic long-form generative collections marked by complex 3D geometry, choreographed animation and interactivity.
Piskorec and Borg met as researchers in the Aalto Design of Structures group in Helsinki. Before founding {protocell:labs}, they separately co-founded the architecture studio TEN Studio in Zürich and Belgrade, the computational design consultancy Borg Markkula Oy in Finland, and a fablab in Valletta, Malta. They began releasing long-form generative collections on fxhash in 2021, keeping their code unminified and published on GitHub, which also serves as the lab's website.
In 2022 {protocell:labs} released the generative collection O B S C V R V M on fxhash.{protocell:labs} also collaborates with the design research collaborative office ca, led by Galo Canizares and Stephanie Sang Delgado, on generative long-form collections.The two studios showed together in the group exhibition “Generative Architecture. The Making of a Room” at Verse.{protocell:labs} also built the technical system behind fxFacetune, a collaboration with the artist Gretchen Andrew that turns a collector's uploaded photograph into a generative portrait. For the piece, {protocell:labs} developed a custom image compression scheme and an offline machine-vision pipeline that stores the resulting artwork directly on the Tezos blockchain.
