Raphaël de Courville, known as Sableraph, is a generative artist who has been coding art for more than a decade, working across on-chain generative collections and standalone digital pieces. His process favours what he calls the unguided serendipity of creative coding: he begins from a rough idea without a preconceived visual outcome and lets the code's own behaviour shape the result.
Long before NFTs, de Courville explored how digital art's value could be determined: in the early 2010s he made Pricetag, a physical artwork that displayed its own price. In 2015 he attended a hackathon run by the Berlin blockchain-art startup Ascribe, where he devised, and won with, a concept for editions and artist royalties that resembled what NFTs would later become. He first heard about crypto art's environmental concerns from Memo Akten, Kyle McDonald and Joanie Lemercier and decided to wait for alternatives. Lemercier told him about Hic et Nunc shortly before it launched in March 2021, and de Courville minted his first piece there soon after. He calls that first weekend transformative: it was the first time in more than a decade of making generative art that he earned significant income from it.
