r1b2, the alias of Arwan Beetooh, is a French artist, programmer and musician based in New York City. His generative art draws on jazz improvisation, computer programming and traditional painting, embracing randomness produced by custom-built software. He has also released two experimental ambient albums, Everything Is Music (2020) and At The Edge Of Feedback (2021).
In 2022 he released Sinking Cities, a fixed series of 3,000 generative artworks on the Polygon blockchain intended to raise awareness about rising sea levels. He has also collaborated with the artist Laxraven, including on The City and on Mining Structures, a collection on fxhash based on one of Laxraven's architectural drawings. Circle Of Life, released on the platform Alba, simulates organic growth in a constrained environment, with cells spawning, dying and making room for new ones, set to a generative ambient soundtrack. The project was inspired by a Gorilla Sun blog post on recursive circle packing algorithms for organic growth patterns. Several of his other generative pieces translate classic computer science problems into visual systems. The Beauty In Small Things connects millions of rotating points into overlapping lines using a sweep line algorithm to find the closest pairs in the set. The Traveling Salesman, named after the classic shortest-path problem, was released as an open edition of 574 on fxhash using the platform's fxparams system to let collectors shape each output.
