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.
