Tyler Hobbs is an American visual artist from Austin, Texas, working with algorithms, plotters and paint to explore computational aesthetics and the possibilities of creation at scale.He coined the term “long-form generative art” to describe collections that generate hundreds or thousands of outputs and deliver them directly to collectors with no curation step.
He earned a degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010 and took a programming job working on the open-source database Cassandra.In his spare time he tried to fold programming into his art, first through mathematical drawings by hand and then through hacked Matplotlib scripts, before discovering Processing and the work of Casey Reas.,
On June 11, 2021 he launched Fidenza on Art Blocks, a collection of 999 algorithmically generated works built on a flow field algorithm he had developed over several years.He named it after a small town in northern Italy, chosen at random from a map to avoid influencing how viewers read the work.Months after release, Fidenza #313, known as “The Tulip”, sold for 1,000 ETH, about $3.3 million.Fidenza #479, once held by the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital's Starry Night Capital, was sold at Sotheby's 2023 Grails auction after the fund's bankruptcy.
In 2022 he released QQL with Dandelion Wist, reintroducing a curation step to the long-form model by having the wider collector community select outputs together.His work has been shown in solo exhibitions including “Progress” at Galería Dos Topos in León, Mexico, in 2018, “Incomplete Control” at Bright Moments Gallery in Manhattan in 2021, and “Mechanical Hand” at Unit in London and “QQL: Analogs” at Pace Gallery in Manhattan, both in 2023.In 2023 LACMA and SFMOMA both acquired pieces by Hobbs for their permanent collections.
