{
  "schema": "ab5d-dossier/1",
  "slug": "matt-deslauriers",
  "name": "Matt DesLauriers",
  "subtitle": "Artificial surveys.",
  "lede": "*Subscapes* and *Meridian* resemble landscapes, but they do not describe existing places. They survey the parameter space of their own algorithms. Across 1,650 works, Matt DesLauriers builds mountains from rules, hashes, and hundreds of thousands of marks, then carries those worlds between browser, blockchain, book, and print.",
  "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/matt-deslauriers/",
  "bibliography_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/matt-deslauriers/links/",
  "content_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/artists/matt-deslauriers.json",
  "updated": "2026-09-02",
  "tier": "standard",
  "editions": 1650,
  "collections": 2,
  "otdh": {
    "rank": 69,
    "score": 17811,
    "collector_identities": 813,
    "holder_addresses": 828,
    "projects": 2,
    "current_works": 1650,
    "raw_collector_days": 2138684,
    "median_project_hold_days": 1442,
    "snapshot_at": "2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z",
    "methodology_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/otdh/",
    "api_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/otdh/matt-deslauriers"
  },
  "identity": {
    "artist": "Matt DesLauriers",
    "website": "https://www.mattdesl.com/",
    "based": "Canadian artist based in the United Kingdom",
    "practice": "Generative systems, creative coding, plotter drawing, print, interactive installation, open-source software, and research",
    "now": "*Meridian #686* and *#870* have entered the V&A's permanent collection. A print of *#870* is planned for *Degrees of Disruption*, opening 16 October 2026.",
    "raster": "https://www.raster.art/artist/matt-deslauriers",
    "otdh": "[17,811 · rank 69 of 308](/artists/otdh/#artist-matt-deslauriers)",
    "holding signal": "813 collector identities · 828 holder addresses · 2,138,684 raw collector-days · 14 Sep 2026",
    "collector tdh": "[madTDH](/artists/matt-deslauriers/madtdh/) · dashboard"
  },
  "socials": {
    "website": "https://www.mattdesl.com/",
    "x": "@mattdesl",
    "instagram": "mattdesl_art"
  },
  "profile_image_url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1493175468836720647/bJgDLWD9_400x400.jpg",
  "profile_image_source": "https://x.com/mattdesl",
  "works": [
    {
      "name": "Meridian",
      "editions": 1000,
      "supply": 1000,
      "artblocks_slug": "meridian-by-matt-deslauriers",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/meridian-by-matt-deslauriers"
    },
    {
      "name": "Subscapes",
      "editions": 650,
      "supply": 650,
      "artblocks_slug": "subscapes-by-matt-deslauriers",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/subscapes-by-matt-deslauriers"
    }
  ],
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": null,
      "paragraphs": [
        "Matt DesLauriers writes software to discover images he could not draw in advance. A Canadian artist based in the United Kingdom, he works across code, prints, installations, websites, and physical drawing systems. He is also an active open-source contributor, building tools through which other artists can develop and export generative work.",
        "He had coded since adolescence, but around 2014 began joining that knowledge to an artistic practice. An early JavaScript sketch transformed a photograph into an autonomous impressionistic painting. The browser became a studio in which a brief program could be run, adjusted, and run again. DesLauriers later built workshops and public libraries around that same iterative method.",
        "> The landscape is not the subject placed inside the algorithm. It is the evidence left by the algorithm's behaviour."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Subscapes: surveying a multiverse",
      "paragraphs": [
        "*Subscapes*, released through Art Blocks Curated on 23 April 2021, comprises 650 isometric terrains. DesLauriers wanted his first Art Blocks project to feel natural and familiar while remaining clearly artificial. Each output occupies its own ecosystem of colour, topology, structure, and rendering style. Together they form a multiverse of possible worlds rather than views of one continuous planet.",
        "The isometric view recalls strategy games and simulated construction. DesLauriers grew up with games such as *SimCity*, where a world is presented as a system that can be inspected and changed. In *Subscapes*, however, the viewer has arrived after the process. The terrain sits like a collected specimen or a survey model from an inaccessible dimension.",
        "DesLauriers has described the project as an artificial survey. A conventional surveyor converts measurements of an existing place into a diagram. His code reverses the relation: equations and parameters produce the terrain, and the image records a place that exists only within that generative space. Nature supplies not a picture to copy but examples of how local rules can create coherent large-scale form.",
        "The project's independence is part of its meaning. Its code has no external dependencies and can run in a command-line terminal. DesLauriers imagined it moving beyond the original browser into mechanical plotters, emulations, and remixes. The blockchain stores not only a receipt for an image but decentralised drawing software capable of being performed again."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Meridian: coordinates without geography",
      "paragraphs": [
        "*Meridian* followed through Playground on 28 September 2021. Its self-contained JavaScript program is only 15 kilobytes, yet each output constructs a stratified landform from hundreds of thousands of small coloured strokes. The token hash becomes a coordinate within a multidimensional parameter space, locating one composition along one of many possible longitudes.",
        "The title refers to longitude, but there is no corresponding Earth. Cryptographic seeds replace physical coordinates. A holder's token does not point to a mountain waiting elsewhere; it supplies the position from which the algorithm resolves one mountain from its field of possibilities.",
        "DesLauriers spent months developing the single program, a marked change from the short sketches that had previously circulated briefly on social media. Long-form release meant all 1,000 results would be collected, compared, and scrutinised. The system therefore needed to sustain both individual composition and population-scale variety."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Marks that behave like matter",
      "paragraphs": [
        "*Meridian* gains its tactile character from accumulation. Thousands of short strokes produce strata, atmosphere, and depth. DesLauriers compares the system to pen plotting, except that a physical pen would have to change colour with nearly every mark. Many outputs use only two or three ink-like colours, but their interleaving creates tonal richness beyond that limited palette.",
        "This makes print more than merchandise attached to a digital work. At large scale, the marks become individually visible. The 272-page *Meridian* book reproduces all 1,000 outputs with code examples, technical essays, trait analysis, and large details. It also records how to recover the project from the chain if Art Blocks' own interface disappears.",
        "The work's preservation model is distributed. DesLauriers imagines the code suspended by invisible threads among network nodes. Old web sketches can vanish when hosting lapses or platforms close; the on-chain projects persist because many participants maintain the shared system. Permanence remains contingent, but responsibility is no longer attached to the artist's server alone.",
        "That distributed work has also entered museum stewardship. On 1 September 2026, DesLauriers announced that the Victoria and Albert Museum had acquired *Meridian #686* and *#870* for its permanent collection, and that a framed print of *#870* would appear in *Degrees of Disruption*. The V&A describes the display as an account of Vera Molnar's influence across more than fifty historical and contemporary works. It opens at V&A South Kensington on 16 October 2026. The placement joins the work's on-chain life to an institutional history of computer art and plotter drawing."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Tools as public work",
      "paragraphs": [
        "DesLauriers' contribution to generative art extends beneath his own images. His *canvas-sketch* framework gives artists a common JavaScript workflow for rapid sketches, browser preview, high-resolution export, animation, print dimensions, and shareable builds. Companion utilities provide seeded randomness, geometry, colour, shaders, and pen-plotter output.",
        "That infrastructure now extends into formal research. In the 2026 ACM pictorial *Synthetic Gestures: An Evolutionary Sketching Machine*, DesLauriers presents a gradient-free system that turns text prompts into plotter drawings. Drawing gestures are represented as implicit neural forms and optimised through an evolution strategy, with semantic guidance from CLIP. Because the browser-based system runs locally and gives the artist real-time feedback, it supports noise, discontinuities, discrete operations, and multicolour marks that are difficult to accommodate in end-to-end differentiable renderers. Machine learning appears here as an artist-built drawing instrument, not a finished-image endpoint.",
        "A collector's statement by SonOfLasG gives that research a view from inside one work. Writing about the *Bicycle* drawing from *Latent Dispatch: Studies*, he reads its continuous line as a pre-entanglement artefact: the system's distilled idea of a bicycle before audience drawings, noise, disconnected strokes, and multicolour operations complicated its certainty. His own history with cycling sharpens the distinction between a computationally legible archetype and the particular bicycles through which a life is actually lived. The study records the assumptions of one model at one moment, not a universal form.",
        "Open-source infrastructure rarely appears in a museum display, yet it shapes what a field can make. A tool encodes assumptions about scale, export, reproducibility, and material translation. By making those decisions reusable, DesLauriers turns private workflow into a public resource. The framework supports other artists while continually feeding back into his own practice.",
        "This reciprocal model also appears in his teaching and historical work. Workshops introduce creative coding to new practitioners; the ongoing documentary project *Generative* reconstructs lineages that the rapid rise of blockchain art risked flattening. Producing tools and producing history are related forms of maintenance."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Worlds, games, and natural signals",
      "paragraphs": [
        "*Wayfinder*, made with the National Film Board of Canada, turns procedural landscape into an ephemeral journey. Players cross forest, grassland, and tundra, collecting words that combine into poetry while vegetation and animals respond. Visual assets, verse, and terrain are assembled in real time, so each traversal becomes a temporary work that will not recur exactly.",
        "Later projects continue to move between natural model and artificial trace. The Sferic Project records low-frequency atmospheric radio far from electrical interference. *Sierra* began with a generative mountain whose chance arrangement suggested alpenglow, then translated the digital palette into fifteen layers of silkscreen ink and four CMYK-linked tokens.",
        "DesLauriers is careful not to claim that code surpasses nature. His interest is in simulating a system rather than simulating an image of nature. The distinction keeps the work from becoming landscape illustration. What matters is how parameters interact, where order breaks, and when an artificial process produces a form that feels inevitable."
      ]
    },
    {
      "heading": "Why he belongs in the AB[500]",
      "paragraphs": [
        "Matt DesLauriers belongs in the AB[500] because *Subscapes* and *Meridian* demonstrate two complementary models of the generative landscape. One presents discrete isometric worlds as surveyed objects. The other maps hashes into a continuous high-dimensional terrain and renders each coordinate through accumulated marks.",
        "Both projects connect code to material practice. Their systems can become terminal drawings, pen plots, archival prints, large displays, or a complete book. They are digital-first without treating the screen as the only legitimate surface.",
        "The canon also needs the infrastructure around the works. DesLauriers did not only use a creative-coding ecosystem; he helped build it. His art and tools share a principle: a compact system should open a large field of possible action. The mountains are the visible evidence. The deeper work is the space that makes them possible."
      ]
    }
  ],
  "body_markdown": "Matt DesLauriers writes software to discover images he could not draw in advance. A Canadian artist based in the United Kingdom, he works across code, prints, installations, websites, and physical drawing systems. He is also an active open-source contributor, building tools through which other artists can develop and export generative work.\n\nHe had coded since adolescence, but around 2014 began joining that knowledge to an artistic practice. An early JavaScript sketch transformed a photograph into an autonomous impressionistic painting. The browser became a studio in which a brief program could be run, adjusted, and run again. DesLauriers later built workshops and public libraries around that same iterative method.\n\n> The landscape is not the subject placed inside the algorithm. It is the evidence left by the algorithm's behaviour.\n\n## Subscapes: surveying a multiverse\n\n*Subscapes*, released through Art Blocks Curated on 23 April 2021, comprises 650 isometric terrains. DesLauriers wanted his first Art Blocks project to feel natural and familiar while remaining clearly artificial. Each output occupies its own ecosystem of colour, topology, structure, and rendering style. Together they form a multiverse of possible worlds rather than views of one continuous planet.\n\nThe isometric view recalls strategy games and simulated construction. DesLauriers grew up with games such as *SimCity*, where a world is presented as a system that can be inspected and changed. In *Subscapes*, however, the viewer has arrived after the process. The terrain sits like a collected specimen or a survey model from an inaccessible dimension.\n\nDesLauriers has described the project as an artificial survey. A conventional surveyor converts measurements of an existing place into a diagram. His code reverses the relation: equations and parameters produce the terrain, and the image records a place that exists only within that generative space. Nature supplies not a picture to copy but examples of how local rules can create coherent large-scale form.\n\nThe project's independence is part of its meaning. Its code has no external dependencies and can run in a command-line terminal. DesLauriers imagined it moving beyond the original browser into mechanical plotters, emulations, and remixes. The blockchain stores not only a receipt for an image but decentralised drawing software capable of being performed again.\n\n## Meridian: coordinates without geography\n\n*Meridian* followed through Playground on 28 September 2021. Its self-contained JavaScript program is only 15 kilobytes, yet each output constructs a stratified landform from hundreds of thousands of small coloured strokes. The token hash becomes a coordinate within a multidimensional parameter space, locating one composition along one of many possible longitudes.\n\nThe title refers to longitude, but there is no corresponding Earth. Cryptographic seeds replace physical coordinates. A holder's token does not point to a mountain waiting elsewhere; it supplies the position from which the algorithm resolves one mountain from its field of possibilities.\n\nDesLauriers spent months developing the single program, a marked change from the short sketches that had previously circulated briefly on social media. Long-form release meant all 1,000 results would be collected, compared, and scrutinised. The system therefore needed to sustain both individual composition and population-scale variety.\n\n## Marks that behave like matter\n\n*Meridian* gains its tactile character from accumulation. Thousands of short strokes produce strata, atmosphere, and depth. DesLauriers compares the system to pen plotting, except that a physical pen would have to change colour with nearly every mark. Many outputs use only two or three ink-like colours, but their interleaving creates tonal richness beyond that limited palette.\n\nThis makes print more than merchandise attached to a digital work. At large scale, the marks become individually visible. The 272-page *Meridian* book reproduces all 1,000 outputs with code examples, technical essays, trait analysis, and large details. It also records how to recover the project from the chain if Art Blocks' own interface disappears.\n\nThe work's preservation model is distributed. DesLauriers imagines the code suspended by invisible threads among network nodes. Old web sketches can vanish when hosting lapses or platforms close; the on-chain projects persist because many participants maintain the shared system. Permanence remains contingent, but responsibility is no longer attached to the artist's server alone.\n\nThat distributed work has also entered museum stewardship. On 1 September 2026, DesLauriers announced that the Victoria and Albert Museum had acquired *Meridian #686* and *#870* for its permanent collection, and that a framed print of *#870* would appear in *Degrees of Disruption*. The V&A describes the display as an account of Vera Molnar's influence across more than fifty historical and contemporary works. It opens at V&A South Kensington on 16 October 2026. The placement joins the work's on-chain life to an institutional history of computer art and plotter drawing.\n\n## Tools as public work\n\nDesLauriers' contribution to generative art extends beneath his own images. His *canvas-sketch* framework gives artists a common JavaScript workflow for rapid sketches, browser preview, high-resolution export, animation, print dimensions, and shareable builds. Companion utilities provide seeded randomness, geometry, colour, shaders, and pen-plotter output.\n\nThat infrastructure now extends into formal research. In the 2026 ACM pictorial *Synthetic Gestures: An Evolutionary Sketching Machine*, DesLauriers presents a gradient-free system that turns text prompts into plotter drawings. Drawing gestures are represented as implicit neural forms and optimised through an evolution strategy, with semantic guidance from CLIP. Because the browser-based system runs locally and gives the artist real-time feedback, it supports noise, discontinuities, discrete operations, and multicolour marks that are difficult to accommodate in end-to-end differentiable renderers. Machine learning appears here as an artist-built drawing instrument, not a finished-image endpoint.\n\nA collector's statement by SonOfLasG gives that research a view from inside one work. Writing about the *Bicycle* drawing from *Latent Dispatch: Studies*, he reads its continuous line as a pre-entanglement artefact: the system's distilled idea of a bicycle before audience drawings, noise, disconnected strokes, and multicolour operations complicated its certainty. His own history with cycling sharpens the distinction between a computationally legible archetype and the particular bicycles through which a life is actually lived. The study records the assumptions of one model at one moment, not a universal form.\n\nOpen-source infrastructure rarely appears in a museum display, yet it shapes what a field can make. A tool encodes assumptions about scale, export, reproducibility, and material translation. By making those decisions reusable, DesLauriers turns private workflow into a public resource. The framework supports other artists while continually feeding back into his own practice.\n\nThis reciprocal model also appears in his teaching and historical work. Workshops introduce creative coding to new practitioners; the ongoing documentary project *Generative* reconstructs lineages that the rapid rise of blockchain art risked flattening. Producing tools and producing history are related forms of maintenance.\n\n## Worlds, games, and natural signals\n\n*Wayfinder*, made with the National Film Board of Canada, turns procedural landscape into an ephemeral journey. Players cross forest, grassland, and tundra, collecting words that combine into poetry while vegetation and animals respond. Visual assets, verse, and terrain are assembled in real time, so each traversal becomes a temporary work that will not recur exactly.\n\nLater projects continue to move between natural model and artificial trace. The Sferic Project records low-frequency atmospheric radio far from electrical interference. *Sierra* began with a generative mountain whose chance arrangement suggested alpenglow, then translated the digital palette into fifteen layers of silkscreen ink and four CMYK-linked tokens.\n\nDesLauriers is careful not to claim that code surpasses nature. His interest is in simulating a system rather than simulating an image of nature. The distinction keeps the work from becoming landscape illustration. What matters is how parameters interact, where order breaks, and when an artificial process produces a form that feels inevitable.\n\n## Why he belongs in the AB[500]\n\nMatt DesLauriers belongs in the AB[500] because *Subscapes* and *Meridian* demonstrate two complementary models of the generative landscape. One presents discrete isometric worlds as surveyed objects. The other maps hashes into a continuous high-dimensional terrain and renders each coordinate through accumulated marks.\n\nBoth projects connect code to material practice. Their systems can become terminal drawings, pen plots, archival prints, large displays, or a complete book. They are digital-first without treating the screen as the only legitimate surface.\n\nThe canon also needs the infrastructure around the works. DesLauriers did not only use a creative-coding ecosystem; he helped build it. His art and tools share a principle: a compact system should open a large field of possible action. The mountains are the visible evidence. The deeper work is the space that makes them possible.",
  "images": [
    {
      "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/53000349.png",
      "title": "Subscapes #349",
      "caption": "DesLauriers, 2021 · AB5D treasury",
      "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/53000413.png",
      "title": "Subscapes #413",
      "caption": "DesLauriers, 2021 · featured series work",
      "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000319.png",
      "title": "Meridian #319",
      "caption": "DesLauriers, 2021 · AB5D treasury",
      "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders"
    }
  ],
  "references": [
    {
      "n": 1,
      "note": "Matt DesLauriers, official site: biography, UK base, generative practice, projects, and open-source work.",
      "url": "https://www.mattdesl.com/",
      "label": "mattdesl.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 2,
      "note": "Art Blocks, In Conversation on Subscapes: coding background, 2014 sketch, JavaScript workflow, teaching, and open source.",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-matt-deslauriers-on-subscapes",
      "label": "artblocks.io"
    },
    {
      "n": 3,
      "note": "Art Blocks, Subscapes: 650 works released 23 April 2021.",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/subscapes-by-matt-deslauriers",
      "label": "artblocks.io"
    },
    {
      "n": 4,
      "note": "Right Click Save, The Interview: artificial surveys, isometric games, parameter space, and natural systems.",
      "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-matt-deslauriers-generative-art",
      "label": "rightclicksave.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 5,
      "note": "Art Blocks, In Conversation on Subscapes: dependency-free code, terminal execution, plotters, emulation, and decentralised drawing software.",
      "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-matt-deslauriers-on-subscapes",
      "label": "artblocks.io"
    },
    {
      "n": 6,
      "note": "Matt DesLauriers, Meridian: 15 KB program, hundreds of thousands of strokes, hash coordinates, longitudes, and archival structure.",
      "url": "https://meridian.mattdesl.com/",
      "label": "meridian.mattdesl.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 7,
      "note": "Right Click Save, The Interview: months-long development and the change from ephemeral sketches to long-form scrutiny.",
      "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-matt-deslauriers-generative-art",
      "label": "rightclicksave.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 8,
      "note": "Right Click Save, The Interview: plotter influence, limited ink palettes, and changing colour between strokes.",
      "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-matt-deslauriers-generative-art",
      "label": "rightclicksave.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 9,
      "note": "Vetro Editions, Meridian: all 1,000 outputs, essays, code, traits, technical analysis, and second edition.",
      "url": "https://vetroeditions.com/products/meridian",
      "label": "vetroeditions.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 10,
      "note": "GitHub, canvas-sketch and canvas-sketch-util: public creative-coding framework and utilities.",
      "url": "https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch",
      "label": "github.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 11,
      "note": "National Film Board of Canada, Wayfinder: procedural landscape, generative poetry, WebGL, and ephemeral journeys.",
      "url": "https://mediaspace.nfb.ca/comm/what-ageless-tale-is-the-landscape-whispering-today-it-may-never-be-whispered-again-wayfinder-an-animated-interactive-journey-across-the-poetry-of-the-land-matt-deslauriers-nfb-gen/",
      "label": "nfb.ca"
    },
    {
      "n": 12,
      "note": "Avant Arte, Sierra: chance-generated mountain, alpenglow, CMYK translation, fifteen ink layers, and four linked NFTs.",
      "url": "https://avantarte.com/products/matt-deslauriers-sierra",
      "label": "avantarte.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 13,
      "note": "Matt DesLauriers, Synthetic Gestures: An Evolutionary Sketching Machine, Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, ACM, pages 443 to 456: an artist-centred, gradient-free method for synthesising text-guided plotter drawings.",
      "url": "https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3803784.3809282",
      "label": "ACM Digital Library"
    },
    {
      "n": 14,
      "note": "SonOfLasG, Collector's Statement: Latent Dispatch: Studies (Bicycle): a collector's reading of the work as a pre-entanglement record of one model's bicycle archetype, informed by a personal history of cycling and updated after publication of DesLauriers' ACM paper.",
      "url": "https://paragraph.com/@sonoflasg/collectors-statement-%F0%9D%90%BF%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%9B%F0%9D%91%A1-%F0%9D%90%B7%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%A0%F0%9D%91%9D%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%90%E2%84%8E-%F0%9D%91%86%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%A2%F0%9D%91%91%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%A0-%F0%9D%90%B5%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%90%F0%9D%91%A6%F0%9D%91%90%F0%9D%91%99%F0%9D%91%92-%F0%9D%91%8F%F0%9D%91%A6-%F0%9D%91%80%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%A1-%F0%9D%90%B7%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%A0%F0%9D%90%BF%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A2%F0%9D%91%9F%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%9F%F0%9D%91%A0",
      "label": "Paragraph"
    },
    {
      "n": 15,
      "note": "Matt DesLauriers announced that the V&A acquired Meridian #686 and #870 for its permanent collection, with a framed print of #870 planned for Degrees of Disruption.",
      "url": "https://x.com/mattdesl/status/2094869869560787263",
      "label": "x.com"
    },
    {
      "n": 16,
      "note": "Victoria and Albert Museum, Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art: more than fifty historical and contemporary works, opening 16 October 2026 at V&A South Kensington.",
      "url": "https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/degrees-of-disruption-vera-molnar-and-generative-art",
      "label": "vam.ac.uk"
    }
  ],
  "bibliography": [
    {
      "category": "Works and the artist's own sites",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "DesLauriers' official site presents selected projects, biography, research, public talks, and open-source practice.",
          "url": "https://www.mattdesl.com/",
          "label": "mattdesl.com",
          "meta": "artist site"
        },
        {
          "note": "The official Meridian site documents its 15 KB program, token-hash coordinates, print logic, and archival structure.",
          "url": "https://meridian.mattdesl.com/",
          "label": "Meridian",
          "meta": "artist project · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "The studio shop biography describes DesLauriers' work across software, images, prints, installations, and websites.",
          "url": "https://shop.mattdesl.com/pages/about",
          "label": "About Matt DesLauriers",
          "meta": "artist biography"
        },
        {
          "note": "The studio's Subscapes page documents the 650-work release and its token-gated signed-print programme.",
          "url": "https://shop.mattdesl.com/pages/subscapes",
          "label": "Subscapes prints",
          "meta": "artist documentation · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "canvas-sketch is DesLauriers' open-source framework for generative artwork in JavaScript and the browser.",
          "url": "https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch",
          "label": "canvas-sketch",
          "meta": "open-source tool"
        },
        {
          "note": "canvas-sketch-util provides reusable modules for randomness, geometry, colour, shaders, and pen plotting.",
          "url": "https://github.com/mattdesl/canvas-sketch-util",
          "label": "canvas-sketch-util",
          "meta": "open-source library"
        },
        {
          "note": "Vetro Editions' second-edition Meridian book reproduces all 1,000 works with essays, code, traits, and technical analysis.",
          "url": "https://vetroeditions.com/products/meridian",
          "label": "Meridian book",
          "meta": "monograph · 2023"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Research and publications",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "DesLauriers' ACM pictorial presents Synthetic Gestures, a locally run, gradient-free evolutionary system for turning text prompts into expressive mechanical-plotter drawings.",
          "url": "https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3803784.3809282",
          "label": "Synthetic Gestures: An Evolutionary Sketching Machine",
          "meta": "ACM Creativity and Cognition · 2026"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "In the AB[500]: Art Blocks",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Art Blocks' artist profile gathers DesLauriers' biography and two foundational projects.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/artists/matt-deslauriers",
          "label": "Matt DesLauriers on Art Blocks",
          "meta": "artist profile"
        },
        {
          "note": "Subscapes comprises 650 artificial surveys of procedurally generated ecosystems released in April 2021.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/subscapes-by-matt-deslauriers",
          "label": "Subscapes",
          "meta": "collection · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "Meridian comprises 1,000 stratified landforms released through Playground in September 2021.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/meridian-by-matt-deslauriers",
          "label": "Meridian",
          "meta": "collection · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "Jeff Davis interviews DesLauriers on early creative coding, open source, natural systems, and Subscapes.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-matt-deslauriers-on-subscapes",
          "label": "In Conversation on Subscapes",
          "meta": "interview · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "An Art Blocks collector profile documents how Subscapes and Meridian were collected and compared as generative sets.",
          "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/articles/art-blocks-collector-spotlight-acthecollector",
          "label": "Collector Spotlight: AC",
          "meta": "collector interview · 2023"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Museums and institutions",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "DesLauriers announced that the V&A acquired Meridian #686 and #870 for its permanent collection, with a framed print of #870 planned for Degrees of Disruption.",
          "url": "https://x.com/mattdesl/status/2094869869560787263",
          "label": "V&A acquisition announcement",
          "meta": "artist post · 2026"
        },
        {
          "note": "The V&A's official display record presents Degrees of Disruption as an account of Vera Molnar's influence across more than fifty historical and contemporary works.",
          "url": "https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/degrees-of-disruption-vera-molnar-and-generative-art",
          "label": "Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art",
          "meta": "museum display · 2026"
        },
        {
          "note": "The National Film Board of Canada introduces Wayfinder, a procedurally assembled landscape and generative poetry game.",
          "url": "https://mediaspace.nfb.ca/comm/what-ageless-tale-is-the-landscape-whispering-today-it-may-never-be-whispered-again-wayfinder-an-animated-interactive-journey-across-the-poetry-of-the-land-matt-deslauriers-nfb-gen/",
          "label": "Wayfinder",
          "meta": "institutional project · 2021"
        },
        {
          "note": "MIT's arts programme records DesLauriers' participation in the Future Sketches symposium on creative-coding tools.",
          "url": "https://arts.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2020-21-CAST-Booklet_web_.pdf",
          "label": "Future Sketches at MIT",
          "meta": "institutional programme · 2021 · PDF"
        },
        {
          "note": "Bright Moments' artist archive identifies DesLauriers' Canadian origins, London base, and generative practice.",
          "url": "https://www.brightmoments.io/artists",
          "label": "Bright Moments artists",
          "meta": "institutional archive"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Galleries and exhibitions",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "The FOLIO film documents DesLauriers' recursive typographic drawing system and its Bright Moments London exhibition.",
          "url": "https://vimeo.com/737652098",
          "label": "FOLIO",
          "meta": "project film · 2022"
        },
        {
          "note": "Avant Arte documents Sierra, a generative mountain translated into a fifteen-layer silkscreen and four CMYK NFTs.",
          "url": "https://avantarte.com/products/matt-deslauriers-sierra",
          "label": "Sierra",
          "meta": "physical edition · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "Vetro's Tracing the Line places DesLauriers among one hundred contemporary artists using drawing machines and pen plotters.",
          "url": "https://vetroeditions.com/products/tracing-the-line",
          "label": "Tracing the Line",
          "meta": "publication and exhibition context"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Interviews",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Right Click Save's extended interview covers Meridian, Subscapes, natural systems, plotters, preservation, and artificial worlds.",
          "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-matt-deslauriers-generative-art",
          "label": "The Interview: Matt DesLauriers",
          "meta": "interview · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "Hyperrhiz analyses DesLauriers' views on natural systems, blockchain decentralisation, textiles, and generative authorship.",
          "url": "https://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz29/5-art-ecosystems/5-essay.html",
          "label": "Decentralizing Creativity",
          "meta": "scholarly interview · 2025"
        },
        {
          "note": "Le Random interviews DesLauriers on the documentary Generative, Bitframes, AI, and historical narrative.",
          "url": "https://www.lerandom.art/editorial/matt-deslauriers-on-a-generative-world",
          "label": "Matt DesLauriers on a Generative World",
          "meta": "interview · 2024"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "category": "Press and criticism",
      "entries": [
        {
          "note": "Curated's guide studies Meridian's 15 KB algorithm, traits, print history, exhibitions, and role in DesLauriers' practice.",
          "url": "https://www.curated.xyz/editorial/collecting-meridian",
          "label": "Collecting the Algorithm: Meridian",
          "meta": "collector guide · 2024"
        },
        {
          "note": "SonOfLasG reads the Bicycle drawing from Latent Dispatch: Studies as a pre-entanglement artefact, connecting a collector's cycling history to the system's evolving model of machine perception.",
          "url": "https://paragraph.com/@sonoflasg/collectors-statement-%F0%9D%90%BF%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%9B%F0%9D%91%A1-%F0%9D%90%B7%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%A0%F0%9D%91%9D%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%90%E2%84%8E-%F0%9D%91%86%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%A2%F0%9D%91%91%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%A0-%F0%9D%90%B5%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%90%F0%9D%91%A6%F0%9D%91%90%F0%9D%91%99%F0%9D%91%92-%F0%9D%91%8F%F0%9D%91%A6-%F0%9D%91%80%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A1%F0%9D%91%A1-%F0%9D%90%B7%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%A0%F0%9D%90%BF%F0%9D%91%8E%F0%9D%91%A2%F0%9D%91%9F%F0%9D%91%96%F0%9D%91%92%F0%9D%91%9F%F0%9D%91%A0",
          "label": "Collector's Statement: Latent Dispatch Studies (Bicycle)",
          "meta": "collector essay · 2025, updated 2026"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "provenance": {
    "schema": "ab5d-provenance/1",
    "contributor": "ab500dao.eth",
    "agent": "Codex",
    "model": "GPT-5",
    "harness": "Codex",
    "models_aux": [],
    "autonomy": "supervised",
    "effort": {
      "duration_min": 86,
      "tool_calls": 37,
      "sources_fetched": 48,
      "revisions": 1
    },
    "tokens": {
      "input": 210000,
      "output": 32000,
      "estimated": true
    },
    "cost_usd": 3.6,
    "links_verified": 28,
    "date": "2026-09-02",
    "note": "Produced in Codex under human direction. Token and cost figures are estimates. AB5D treasury holdings were checked against the live holdings API on 23 June 2026. The Meridian variety grid uses four distinct evenly spaced outputs. Updated 16 July 2026 to integrate Synthetic Gestures and SonOfLasG's collector statement on Latent Dispatch: Studies (Bicycle). Updated 2 September 2026 with Matt DesLauriers' V&A acquisition announcement and the official Degrees of Disruption display record."
  },
  "license": "https://ab5d.xyz/license/",
  "license_note": "Dossier prose is CC0. Embedded Art Blocks renders are not: they remain the property of their respective artists and holders.",
  "attribution": {
    "name": "AB[500]",
    "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/matt-deslauriers/",
    "cite": "AB5D, \"Matt DesLauriers\", AB[500] artist dossier, ab5d.xyz, 2026",
    "required": false,
    "requested": true,
    "note": "Prose is CC0; a credit and link back to ab5d.xyz is appreciated, not required."
  },
  "generated": "2026-09-14T12:58:26"
}