pxlq is a generative artist and creative coder working primarily within the Ethereum ecosystem. He writes his own code for every project, producing abstract, code-based work released across platforms including Art Blocks.,There is usually no deep meaning behind his work beyond how it looks, he has said.
pxlq traces his early creative interests to pottery and drawing, and discovered procedural generation while playing Minecraft and watching a trailer for the video game No Man's Sky. Working as a software developer, he found creative coding through repositories he came across on GitHub, citing Anastasia Opara's Procedural Lake Villages as a formative discovery. He had been working in the Ethereum ecosystem for some time before crypto art resonated with him, a shift he traces to the arrival of SuperRare.When SuperRare did not accept him as an artist, he minted Automaton himself in 2019, a series of fifty deterministic cellular automaton simulations and an early experiment with the ERC-721 standard for tokenized art.,
In early 2021 he released Dynamic Slices on Art Blocks, a 512-piece seriesinspired by the rows of serial variations associated with Manfred Mohr, to which he added a real-time interactive component made possible by Art Blocks' rendering.He followed it the same year with Cyber Cities, an abstract take on a futuristic city in space in which spaceships move continuously within the rendered image.,In collaboration with the artist WhaleStreet, he released Space Debris on Art Blocks Factory in August 2021, a 93-piece series built around a fictional distress transmission from a damaged spacecraft.,His piece Sentience illustrated Art Blocks' recap of its Playground track, a space for Curated artists to experiment before Art Blocks Presents replaced it.A token from Dynamic Slices was included in Sotheby's 2023 “Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part II” auction of digital art.More recent work includes Envelop, a piece built from a recreation of Aldo Giorgini's numerical visualization software FIELDS. He has also released Syndication, a prototype that distributes hashes of generative artworks through RSS feeds.
