Richard Lord is a freelance digital artist and animator whose practice centers on generative art, world building and artificial life, built in the 3D software Houdini.He began his career as an artist on the Portal video game series, designing mechanical systems and puzzle concepts for Portal 2.,After leaving the games industry he turned to procedurally generated music videos and, from late 2020, to generative NFTs on Art Blocks.
On Portal 2, released in 2012, he worked on puzzlemaker concepts and designed many of the game's mechanical systems.,After leaving the games industry, he directed procedurally generated music videos, including Hesperius Draco, 2019, for Alessandro Parisi on Giallo Disco Records, which won a Vimeo Staff Pick, and Our Pleasures, 2020, for Plus Device on Hefty Records, which won a Vimeo Best of the Month.For Our Pleasures, he designed spherical, tentacled creatures inspired by a photograph of a tick riding on another tick's back. Each creature's parts were procedurally generated and combined with a random algorithm, then rendered with heavy subsurface scattering for a lush, fleshy texture. Their pulsing bodies move in sync with the music's rhythm.
He started following NFTs in late 2020, and after Bryan Brinkman introduced him to Art Blocks in a Discord server, he released his first Art Blocks project, Octo Garden, a static generative collection.His second Art Blocks project, Geometry Runners, released in August 2021, is a curated collection of 1,000 animated NFTs built from physics-based walking systems.,Each runner's form is generated using sine waves, vector math and trigonometry.He described the project as “an exciting, adrenaline-soaked thrill ride” in which the runners are “competing in the race of their lives”.He names the artists Karl Sims and Theo Jansen as influences, since their work searches for the essence of living systems, a quality he wanted Geometry Runners to share.
