Matty Mariansky is a generative artist based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is also a lecturer in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design master’s program and an entrepreneur working in the field of Synthetic Media. I had an opportunity to catch up with Matty to discuss his background in generative art and upcoming Art Blocks project Para Bellum.

Jeff Davis: Hi Matty! It’s great to get a chance to know you better. How did you first get into making art?

Matty Mariansky: During the time I studied engineering, I had to pick up a 3D software for one of the projects I did. I liked it so much better than anything engineering had to offer and ended up as a 3D artist and later an animator, doing broadcast commercial work. From there I transitioned into web design (I owned a very prolific studio, Supersize). Eventually, I became a co-founder of several startup companies—first as head of design, and eventually as a product manager. First as head of design, and eventually as a product manager. All this time, I’ve kept a strong separation between the work I was doing for hire and my own private projects, which I was almost secretly doing and showing off just to close friends. It was only when my first Art Blocks project saw light that I quit my job and moved to pursuing art full time as my sole occupation.

JD: I love it so much when I find out that artists are able to pursue their art full time. So the work you were doing before Brushpops, would you have classified it as generative?

MM: I don’t think I ever did any art that was not generative in nature. I picked up Flash from the very early days (when it was called “Future Splash Animator” and had no real coding features to speak of). As Flash evolved into containing basic loop structures, and later full-fledged ActionScript, I evolved with it. I think it was Joshua Davis’ work that really opened up my eyes to where this can go. I also really loved Gmunk’s stuff. I distinctly remember myself going over one of his pieces frame-by-frame trying to reverse-engineer what was going on. My first artworks in Flash used to be party flyers I did for free for a club in Tel Aviv. I really loved combining code and animation in a way that made the flyers look different for every viewer, or even every time you hit refresh.

JD: How would you describe your approach to generative art?

MM: A generative art piece is a lot like a quantum wave function. All the possible outcomes exist inside it in superposition, floating in a latent space bowl of probabilities. As is true for Schrödinger’s cat, only when a spectator appears and asks to check on the system’s condition, do they actually get to see its true form. For Art Blocks, the act of minting makes the probability universe collapse into a single, undeniable reality, eventually in the form of a colorful array of pixels. But that pixel array is nowhere nearly as compressed as the code that created it, which is the most elegant and minimal way this art can take form.

And so, over the years I’ve come to think about generative art as carving out a tiny space of possible pixel formations, out of the infinite possible ways pixels can fall into different shapes and patterns. And eventually, the viewer enters this space of possibilities and forces it (even by merely hitting F5 for refresh) to take its true shape. As my knowledge and interest in machine learning increased in the past years, I’ve tried to carve other algorithms to take the place of the spectator (alongside the generator algorithm) and have them work together in discovering interesting art inside that space of possible formations.

JD: That’s some deep stuff! How did you discover NFTs as a possibility for your work?

MM: The first NFT I really noticed was Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers. When I dug for more information, I bumped into the Art Blocks site and the idea of on-chain code that generates the art immediately clicked for me and I applied to join a day later.

JD: That’s awesome. I actually hear that quite a lot—that Ringers was the entry point for artists to discover Art Blocks. So that brings us to Para Bellum. Tell me about the inspiration for the project!

MM: As an always-novice student of Kabbalah, I collect antique amulets. I’m very fascinated by the idea that specific, just-right letter combinations could have an effect on reality as it unfolds. I experimented with quite a few language generator algorithms, to see which one would be small enough to fit on-chain, but would still generate interesting almost-words, whose secret meaning the viewer will have to decipher.

At the same time, I was trying to figure out a worthy adversary to the language generator, and I realized that I should pit it off against something that would represent emotion, while the language would stand for logic and rationality. I iterated quite a lot on the idea of using color fields (with Mark Rothko’s art being a very visible inspiration) and seeing how they’ll clash with the letter forms. Eventually, my choice of font and the surprising emergent compositions started to look like classic Swiss design posters, and for the first time I chose to use a non-square canvas for my work to emphasize this further. You can read more about the inner workings of the algorithms in the project page on my site.

JD: Yes, that is what caught my eye about your project, it felt like generative designed art magazines or book covers. What should collectors watch for as the series is generated?

MM: In an Art Blocks project, I always try to think about combinations of several outputs that would be interesting to juxtapose as a pair or even triptych. I’m personally less interested in mathematical rarities, but rather in interesting emergent visual compositions that could occur just by the algorithm doing its thing. Specific to Para Bellum’s language engine, I would definitely look for words or word-like combinations that have a special meaning to the viewer. Meditate carefully on the possible meaning of a piece that you minted, for the blockchain has a message for you, and it will not be in plain sight!

JD: I’m really looking forward to it! What’s the best way for people to follow your work?

MM: I regularly upload works in progress and updates to my Twitter, and update my website when things evolve into more defined projects. If you read Hebrew, you’re very welcome to join the community I founded, “Rise of the Machines,” where I post regularly. With 45K members, we have daily discussions on the intersection of AI and culture.