collecting the Algorithm: Meridian
Matt DesLauriers is one of the most respected figures within generative art. In addition to being a pioneer with his artwork, DesLauriers works diligently, often underappreciated in the background, to move the field forward with his major contributions to open source projects, his teachings and writings, and his archival efforts to help tell the story of generative art. He tends to be not as loud as others, rarely exhibits his work, and is less focused on his personal brand, but without him, the tools and techniques used by many generative artists wouldn’t exist in the same way.
In 2021, he released Meridian, a collection of 1,000 generative landforms constructed from many tiny strokes of color. In a 15kb Javascript program, DesLauriers manages to produce an incredibly wide range of beautiful outputs, each with richness and depth that can only be appreciated by looking closer — much like appreciating DesLauriers’ artistic practice.
In this editorial, we share more about the artist, why we appreciate Meridian, and how we’ve collected the algorithm at Curated.
Matt DesLauriers is a Canadian-born artist currently based in the UK. He studied Film and Media at Queens University, where he first discovered creative coding. His art practice has mainly focused on Javascript-based art in digital works.
Matt DesLauriers teaching a course on ThreeJS, a popular graphics library he’s contributed to
DesLauriers is a prolific contributor to the open source community, authoring hundreds of Javascript libraries and tools used widely amongst creative coders and developers. Some of the most notable include:
He often teaches workshops and gives talks on creative coding:
Prior to the generative art boom in 2021, his artwork was already being shown in galleries and interactive installations around the world, including special events at the Louvre Museum, Reykjavik’s 2019 Winter Lights Festival, and an award-winning experimental art and poetry game for the National Film Board of Canada.
The artist first premiered on Art Blocks in April 2021 with his Curated release Subscapes. While he was already well known amongst the creative coding community, Subscapes put DesLauriers on the map with generative art collectors.
In September 2021, DesLauriers released Meridian on Art Blocks. Despite being on “Art Blocks Playground”, a place for art projects not curated by the Art Blocks curation board, the collection was very well received, selling out near instantly and becoming perhaps DesLauriers’ most popular generative art collection.
Meridian has been exhibited and displayed around the world, including at Assembly Curated, Art Blocks Marfa, and MoCA Taipei.
Since the release of Subscapes and Meridian, the artist has grown in both his reputation as an artist and leader in the ecosystem. He’s created celebrated collections, including his Folio collection on Bright Moments, published the acclaimed Meridian Book, and is releasing a work-in-progress documentary on the story of Generative Art. He’s also the creator of the widely used Art Blocks Renderer, a public good that the generative art community has relied on for generating high resolution assets for Art Blocks collections — and a direct inspiration for our Curated Renderer.
Meridian is an algorithm that creates unique compositions of landscapes with a wide variety of color and texture, inspired by structures found in nature and the physical world.
The collection title Meridian was inspired by the Earth’s coordinate lines. Instead of longitude and latitude coordinates, Meridians are found using cryptographic hashes based on its digital token to locate the output in parametric space.
During the creation of Meridian, DesLauriers was in Canada on summer vacation on a lake, surrounded by landscapes and forests. The beautiful backdrop of nature served as the starting point for the early sketches of Meridian. The artist had a history of exploring natural systems on terrain and rock structures, and as he started working on Meridian, it developed into a structure centered around layers of rock sediment.
DesLauriers’ extensive work with shaders and creating high fidelity imagery using small strokes also had a major influence on Meridian. He had played around with mechanical pen plotters, which added significant constraint in how works get created. The constraints on color and shading of pen plotters made for much more interesting work. That became a big part of Meridian: fixed number of colors and small “pen” strokes.
One of the most underappreciated aspects of Meridian is its reproducibility. Most generative art projects are dependent on specific browser features and versions, which makes them vulnerable to feature deprecation, potentially leaving the project no longer renderable. Meridian and Subscapes are crafted to be independent of any particular browser functionality. The code can be executed via the command line or Node.js, and it can generate SVG files, pen plotter instructions, or be integrated into other rendering frameworks.
As is with many aspects of Deslauriers’ craft, there is a tremendous amount of time and energy spent on meaningful technical details that are often just as important to value as the aesthetics.
One of the most impressive aspects of the Meridian collection is the wide versatility of the algorithm, especially when taking into account the uniqueness of the explicit grails: Charcoal (n=9), Prime (n=8), and Topographics (n=8) — the three rarest styles. While each still carries the general structure of Meridian, they look wildly different from each other.
Beyond explicit grails, Meridian also contains perhaps one of the best examples of emergence in generative art: Meridian #801 aka “Starry night”. It’s a unique duochrome output where uniquely stacked layers of black form the night sky over blue mountains. The gap between the tiny strokes of black form a field of stars.
It’s DesLauriers’ favorite Meridian, having gone through the algorithm tens of thousands of times prior to the official Meridian mint and not seeing anything close to it. It’s a reminder of the magic of generative art, where the serendipity of randomness from the blockchain yields special outputs from a system of simple rules.
In our primer for on-chain generative art, we shared that physical prints still remain the best display medium for many generative art collections. Meridian is not only an example of such a collection, but DesLauriers designed the collection with physical prints in mind.
As the collection started to come together, the foundation of the work became the aesthetic of thousands of tiny strokes of color — which doesn’t show as well on a screen. Print was the only real way to experience the artwork, as the viewer could get close to it and see the detail. “I knew this was going to become a print project” said DesLauriers in a chat with Curated.
The artist viewed the value of the work to be held entirely in the digital asset itself, while the print was the best way to enjoy it. This is reflected in the policy for official prints of Meridian:
If you sell or give away your Meridian token; the new owner of the token will then be eligible to purchase a print as well. Since Meridian is a digital-first project, and provenance is tied specifically to the token, rather than the physical artefact, I have decided to take this limited and token-ownership approach, rather than attempting to tie each token to a unique and single edition print.
DesLauriers even made prints of select out-of-band Meridians (outputs that are generated randomly and not as part of the official collection) available for anyone to buy at a lower cost to reduce the friction of enjoying the art.
In 2022, DesLauriers published the Meridian book. It is one of the best books created on a long form generative art collection and includes essays from the artist about the collection’s conceptualization and development, along with showing every single piece in the collection. These essays provide deeper insights into DesLauriers’ creative process and the more technical aspects of his work.
The book documents the evolution of the project and illustrates the iterative nature of generative art. It features process images showing earlier iterations and the progression during development. The Meridian book stands as a comprehensive overview, allowing the reader to explore the full scope of the collection by viewing the diversity and range of outputs that is otherwise difficult to see.
In his own words, the book was always part of the plan:
As I was releasing it, I had envisioned it as a book. It’s a monumental project and there’s so much detail that its hard to see on the screen. You need to see all of the detail and effort. With a book, you can easily appreciate the full scale of the project, even if you quickly scan through.
Our curation of Meridian was inspired by seeing incredible physical prints in various galleries and homes around the world. Our bar for curation is quite simple: how good will it look in large print, while covering a range of traits and palettes. We’ve curated across palettes and styles by focusing on aesthetic “center of the algorithm” artworks as well as a few rarer outputs.
Prismatics are the true center of the algorithm for Meridian. In his commentary of Meridian #39, DesLaurier says “Prismatic is my favorite aspect of Meridian because of its chaotic nature”.
The core of our collection is a set of Prismatics unique in composition and color.
We love monochrome outputs in generative art, especially in collections where they truly stand out. Within Meridian, we’ve curated a triptych of monos.
Primes are one style that is truly distinct from the rest of the algorithm, and it came about from a happy accident. “A bug in my code reduced the palette to a single colour, but it looked so stunning that I decided to make it into a series of its own.” writes DesLauriers in his commentary on Meridian #127.
Topographic: Topographic was voted by the community as their favorite type of Meridian, as highlighted in the Meridian book. The topographic style shows an incredible amount of depth and detail, evoking the imagery of gold and white rays of light hitting mountainous terrain. DesLauriers said “topographic is one of the few styles where I really leaned into the underlying 3D terrain structures of Meridian. I wanted this style to stand apart.” Meridian #660 was one of the first Meridians we ever collected.
Gilded: Gilded is a rarer style and is a fitting pairing for our Topographic. Meridian #299 was exhibited at “Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain” by Assembly Curated in Houston. It was also the first Meridian added to the Curated collection.
Our collection also includes many aesthetic standouts, including:
Meridian is an encapsulation of Matt DesLauriers’ artistic practice. It’s a beautiful collection with a stunningly wide variety of outputs from a small bit of code. And to truly appreciate the collection, one must look closer — not just at the small strokes that compose each work, but at the thoughtfulness of code.
For DesLauriers, he’s forging his own unique path as an artist, unfettered by the need to make a lot of noise or network:
There was a point where I was striving for more art world connections. Now I’ve shifted — I’m not trying to do all the “professional artist” stuff. I’m selective, and I’m giving more time to do research and build tooling. I think over time, my hope is that the art world will come around.
Thank you to Nat Emodi, PlutoniumF, and Matt DesLauriers for reading drafts and shaping our thinking on this piece.
