Alexis André

Artist

Alexis André · Art Blocks profile ↗

Based

Born 1982, France. Lives and works in Paris. Previously resided in Tokyo for nearly two decades.

Raster

raster.art/artist/alexis-andre ↗

In the set

720 Minutes ↗ · 720 editions · 2021
Void ↗ · 500 editions · 2021
Messengers ↗ · 350 editions · 2021
Obicera ↗ · 529 editions · 2021
24 Heures ↗ · 137 editions · 2021
Departed ↗ · 350 editions · 2021
Friendship Bracelets ↗ · 38,965 editions · 2022

Now

Navette tapestries with TRAME (2023); Frontline on Bitcoin Ordinals (2024)

Links

X ↗ · Full bibliography ↗

Alexis André was born in 1982 in France and followed the elite engineering track through the French grandes écoles system, earning a degree in computer science before moving to Japan in the early 2000s. He completed a Master's in machine learning and then switched tracks to pursue a PhD in computer graphics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. It was during this period that he discovered Processing, the creative coding framework that would become the foundation of his practice, and the work of generative pioneers such as Casey Reas, Jared Tarbell, and Robert Hodgin.¹²³

The creative engineer

In 2009 he joined Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL) in Tokyo, where he spent over a decade researching new digital media and creative exploration. His inventions there include toio, a compact robotic toy platform released by Sony in 2019 that allows children to attach handmade creations to small cube-shaped robots and program their behavior through intuitive controllers. He also developed Tomonami, a creativity acceleration system that extracts an artist's characteristic features and translates them into generative parameters for exploration, and has collaborated with architect Kengo Kuma on a version for spatial design. André is currently based at Sony CSL Paris, and he serves as a Director of the Japan Generative Art Foundation.²⁴

Sound, fashion, and the infinite

André's research practice regularly crosses into cultural collaboration. In 2019 he partnered with electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre to create the visual algorithm for EoN, an iOS application that generates infinite, ever-evolving music and organic visuals from original compositions. Jarre described the project as one of his most exciting since Oxygene, and the app was featured in 143 countries. Earlier in his career, André worked with fashion house Issey Miyake on generative performances and collections, including an extraordinary performance in one of Tokyo's greatest gymnasiums. He collaborated with LIXIL, one of Japan's largest construction materials companies, to create a custom collection of generative ceramic tiles. His generative clock application, which displays time through algorithmic visuals, appears on one of Shibuya's massive digital screens every thirty minutes.³⁵

Daily practice and technical frontiers

Parallel to his institutional research, André maintains a daily generative art practice, posting under the handle MacTuitui. By early 2021 he had completed over 1,500 consecutive days of daily sketches, a discipline that forces constant experimentation and prevents creative stagnation. His technical curiosity pushes him to learn new programming languages periodically: after Processing came Scala, and then Rust with the Nannou framework. He favors Nannou for its WebGPU integration, which allows true floating-point color channels and eliminates the banding that plagues traditional 8-bit graphics. This precision gives his work a luminous quality, particularly in the gradient-rich pieces he calls glowcircles. The daily practice also built a community of followers who watch his technical and aesthetic evolution in real time, creating a feedback loop that informs his larger projects.³⁶

720 Minutes and the Playground trilogy

André arrived on Art Blocks in March 2021 with 720 Minutes, a Curated project of 720 editions that displays the time remaining in a twelve-hour cycle. It was the first NFT to display time, and it was inspired by the scale of the Shibuya crossing screens. The work demands a certain scale to be experienced properly, and a custom version now runs on one of those Shibuya screens, validating his belief that generative art belongs in public space.⁷⁸

Live on Art Blocks: 720 Minutes ↗

The success of 720 Minutes led to a trilogy in the Playground sector that remains one of the most narratively ambitious sequences in the AB[500]. Void (May 2021, 500 editions, project id 42) presents planets and stars rendered with the glowcircles technique against empty space. André designed it as a cohesive collection where adjacent mints tell a story, a direct response to the Art Blocks community's habit of curating monochrome sets and thematic collections. The project id, 42, is a nod to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.⁹¹⁰

Messengers (May 2021, 350 editions) followed, with ethereal structures generated through force-repulsion dynamics that resemble reverse gravity. The forms evoke the alien language from the film Arrival, and their palettes deliberately link back to Void. The title comes from the Japanese word for message, and the description reads: "Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don't talk to us. Yet."¹⁰¹¹

Obicera (August 2021, 529 editions) completed the trilogy. The title is Arecibo spelled backward, and the 529 mints (23 times 23) form a map puzzle that encodes a message from the Messengers. Collectors solved the riddle within hours of release, manually assembling the 529 images into a coherent star map. One team reverse-engineered the code before launch, though they flipped the coordinates and produced an incorrect map, which André discovered with panic and relief. The correct assembly revealed a message that linked Void, Messengers, and Obicera into a single science-fiction narrative.¹⁰¹²

Live on Art Blocks: Obicera ↗

24 Heures, Departed, and Friendship Bracelets

Later in 2021 André released 24 Heures (October 2021, 137 editions), a commissioned piece depicting vehicles on an endless track, and Departed (350 editions), a meditation on absence and form rendered in his signature circular style. These smaller editions maintained his interest in narrative cohesion and limited supply.¹³¹⁴

In November 2022 he collaborated with Art Blocks founder Erick "Snowfro" Calderon on Friendship Bracelets, a project of 38,965 editions that was free to claim for anyone holding an Art Blocks NFT as of October 26, 2022. Conceptualized by Snowfro and programmatically designed by André, each token is a generative friendship bracelet in a spectrum of colors. The project became a community phenomenon, generating over 18,300 ETH in secondary volume and inspiring holders to weave physical versions from embroidery floss. It was designed as a token of appreciation to the creators, makers, builders, and collectors who had contributed to the Art Blocks community, and it remains one of the most widely distributed generative art projects on Ethereum.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

Live on Art Blocks: Friendship Bracelets ↗

From tapestries to Bitcoin

André's practice extends consistently beyond the screen. In 2023 he created Navette, the debut collection of TRAME's Craft Nouveau series, marrying generative code with traditional Aubusson weaving. The algorithm outputs instructions directly to a Néolice digital loom, and eight large-scale physical tapestries were produced alongside 200 digital works. The collection was exhibited at Le Bon Marché in Paris, and it represents a new art movement where code becomes the brush and the loom the canvas.¹⁸¹⁹

In 2024 he released Frontline, his first collection on Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol. The 10,000-piece generative work sold out to over 4,000 unique wallets and was inscribed directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, rendered live from the chain itself using recursive inscriptions and parent-child provenance. André described it as a personal journey about drawing lines between good and bad in an imperfect world, and he chose Bitcoin for its security and longevity. The work was created in collaboration with OnChainMonkey, and it linked on-chain to OCM Genesis Inscription 20219.²⁰²¹

Why he belongs in the AB[500]

The AB[500] records the first five hundred Art Blocks projects, the moment generative art assembled its canon on-chain. André holds seven places in that set, a rare breadth that spans curated minimalism, science-fiction narrative trilogies, and community-scale drops. His work has been shown at Art Basel, Siggraph, and COP26, and featured in auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's. More importantly, he treats generative art not as a genre but as an engineering discipline: code is the brush, the loom, the toy, and the clock. That engineering mindset, combined with a deep narrative instinct and a daily practice of relentless experimentation, is why he belongs in the set.²²

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete and growing bibliography on André, see the Alexis André links page ↗.