William Mapan (French, b. 1988) is a Paris-based generative artist and creative coder whose code-driven work translates painterly qualities of texture, color and mark-making into digital form.,He worked for over a decade as a creative developer in the tech industry before turning fully to art.,
He started in motion design using Flash and After Effects before teaching himself Processing and then JavaScript, and later taught creative coding at the Gobelins School of Arts in Paris. He found a name for his practice after discovering the generative art of Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár.,In March 2021 Mapan minted his first NFT on Hic et Nunc after Mario Klingemann told him about the platform and Matt DesLauriers helped him set up a wallet. That year he released Dragons on fxhash, a 512-iteration series in which combinations of color, texture and traits such as age and temperature give each generated creature its own personality, with the untamed algorithm itself standing in for the mythical dragon.
In 2022 he released Anticyclone on Art Blocks, a project built around conveying emotion through color and movement rather than a specific algorithmic idea.His 2023 project Intimacy, shown at Verse's London exhibition, paired Sketchbook A, a 64-edition series that let collectors curate outputs from an algorithm he modeled on his physical sketchbooks, with Through Your Eyes, works imagined as seen through the algorithm's own perspective.That same year he released Distance, a code-based reinterpretation of classic paintings produced with LACMA and curated by Cactoid Labs.
Alongside his code work, Mapan hand-mixes pigments and paints on canvas, a physical practice he treats as inseparable from his algorithms.In 2022 and 2023 he made his first oil paintings, including Bain de couleurs.,In February 2023 Unit London presented “COMPUTE: Sinking Patterns”, his solo exhibition exploring texture and materiality in code-generated art.His installation Paysages Plausibles, which uses his own code to generate constructed landscapes, was shown with Art Blocks at the Zero 10 digital art section of Art Basel.,
