Anthony Hiley-Mann (MountVitruvius)

Artist

Anthony Hiley-Mann (MountVitruvius) · mountvitruvius.art ↗

Based

Born in London, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London

Practice

Generative artist working with code to create algorithmic compositions that balance geometric precision with nature-inspired processes

Now

Selected for EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500 at the Museum of Art + Light, Manhattan, Kansas, opening March 2026

In the set

Trichro-matic ↗ · 600 editions
Renders Game ↗ · 325 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Anthony Hiley-Mann, known professionally as MountVitruvius (or MV for short), has established himself as a distinctive voice in contemporary generative art through a practice that treats code not merely as a tool, but as a contemplative medium capable of carrying history, emotion, and experimentation ¹. Growing up in a creative household where his mother worked as a fashion designer, Hiley-Mann developed an early appreciation for process and materiality, witnessing firsthand the care that went into every stage of garment creation, from sourcing wool to finishing details ². Unlike many artists who transitioned from analogue to digital media, Hiley-Mann came to creation with the computer as his primary medium, beginning his creative journey as a teenager making music and programming his own instruments when existing tools proved insufficient ².

This self-directed approach to tool-making established a creative cycle that remains central to his practice: building custom systems, using them to explore ideas, and refining both the tools and the output through iteration. Over nearly two decades, he has created procedural graphics and art with code, though he initially struggled to define this work as "art" within conventional frameworks ². His trajectory shifted in the late 2010s when he observed procedural graphics entering popular culture through television, web design, and VJ systems, and again in late 2020 when he encountered Art Blocks and recognised how on-chain generative art could resolve longstanding questions of permanence, provenance, and ownership that had troubled code-based artwork ².

"I distinctly remember the moment I realized how on-chain generative art worked: It was like a huge slap in the face. It felt so obvious." ²

Hiley-Mann's work is characterised by a deliberate oscillation between technical complexity and conceptual clarity. Each project begins with a simple idea that is encoded, explored, deconstructed, and reimagined, with the generative aspect of his practice enabling discoveries that controlled execution might never yield ². His creative process today, he notes, resembles the bedroom experimentation of his teenage years more than the corporate methodologies he later encountered, albeit informed by years of experience ².

Early Works and Foundational Practice

Before his Art Blocks releases, Hiley-Mann established his generative practice through a series of self-published and platform-based collections that explored fundamental concerns of colour, constraint, and mark-making. In October 2021, he released Z-Huge, a collection of 512 generative sketches examining curl noise, colour relationships, and formal constraints ³. This was followed in February 2022 by Mind the Gap on gmStudio, a 999-edition series inspired by childhood memories of painting and the playful, carefree nature of creative exploration ⁴. The collection's title references the London Underground announcement, reflecting the artist's origins and the rhythmic spacing systems he developed for the algorithm ⁴.

In June 2022, Hiley-Mann released Shapes on a Plane on fxhash, a series exploring imaginary structures and worlds through simple geometric forms, designed specifically for smaller-scale print outputs ⁵. These early works established his interest in creating algorithmic systems that could produce outputs ranging from the boldly graphic to the subtly detailed, while maintaining a consistent conceptual through-line. The technical approach across these projects favoured simplicity and limitation: working without 3D rendering or shaders, using only point and vector mathematics, lines, and colour to evoke the feeling of hand-drawn illustration ⁴.

Art Blocks and the AB[500]

Hiley-Mann's relationship with Art Blocks began with Renders Game, released in February 2023 as a 325-edition Factory collection ⁶. The project represented a self-reflective examination of his own creative process, taking its title from Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game and the countless outputs generated during development ⁶. The artist describes the work as "a note to myself on creativity," reflecting his practice of believing strongly in an idea, confronting its realised output, deconstructing it, and growing something new from a beloved detail ⁷. The generative structure draws inspiration from cubism: procedurally generated curves are layered, intersected, and fragmented at shifting scales, with each fragment rendered using ink-like outlines and bold, loose colour application that balances organic imperfection with digital precision ⁶.

Trichro-matic, released in November 2023 as a 600-edition Art Blocks Curated project, marked a significant evolution in Hiley-Mann's practice ⁸. The work meditates on perception through rhythmic colour and form, displacement, and juxtaposition to create structures that invite interpretation and exploration ⁷. The title derives from "trichromatic" (the ability to perceive using three primary colours), hyphenated to "o-matic" as a nod to the fictional machinery of the generative system ⁸. The piece uses both hand-selected and algorithmically-generated colour palettes, with the latter designed to evoke emotions comparable to the former ⁹.

The technical realisation of Trichro-matic represented Hiley-Mann's most complex release to date, relying on a custom GPU render process that demands significant computational resources despite outputs that may appear deceptively simple ⁹. The artist dedicated the work to his father, who suffered vision loss from a stroke in September 2023, adding a layer of personal resonance to the project's exploration of how perception shapes understanding ⁹. The work's interactive quality, in which the viewer's understanding of spatial relationships shifts depending on their starting point, functions as a broader commentary on empathy and the validity of multiple perspectives ⁸.

Live on Art Blocks: trichro-matic-by-mountvitruvius ↗

Materiality and Recent Directions

In May 2025, Hiley-Mann released Materialistic through The Disruptive Gallery, a curated edition of 92 works exploring surface, texture, and the boundaries of digital materiality ¹⁰. The project examines the striking connection between Cubism and early computer graphics research, two disciplines separated by less than twenty years that shared fundamental goals: representing a broader view of the world than single-perspective vision allows, and codifying formal systems to achieve this ¹⁰. Materialistic employs TypeScript and GLSL to reconstruct output across multiple perspectives using deconstructed geometry and primitive objects, with a mark-making process that embodies a "virtual material" inspired by pen, paint, and ink ¹⁰.

Each curated work in the Materialistic series is accompanied by a plotted representation of the underlying data structure, created during the piece's generation. These physical plots form a deliberate contrast with their parent digital prints: feeling more digital than the digital works themselves despite being rendered in real-world physical media, furthering the project's conceptual exploration of reconstruction and materiality ¹⁰. The algorithm bypasses browser resolution and colour depth limitations, allowing any piece to be progressively rendered at arbitrary resolution with significantly expanded colour gamut ¹⁰.

Live on Art Blocks: renders-game-by-mountvitruvius ↗

Institutional Recognition and Exhibition History

Hiley-Mann's work has gained increasing institutional recognition, culminating in his selection for EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500, a major exhibition opening March 4, 2026, at the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) in Manhattan, Kansas ¹. The exhibition, running through August 16, 2026, brings together ten internationally recognised artists who write code as their primary creative medium to commemorate the completion of Art Blocks' 500th flagship project ¹. The museum, which opened in November 2024 with an inaugural exhibition featuring Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon and generative artist Tyler Hobbs, positions EMULATION as a significant expansion of its engagement with on-chain generative art ¹.

The exhibition roster spans algorithmic drawing, interactive systems, textile translation, machine intelligence, and conceptual abstraction, with each piece generated by the artist's algorithm at the moment of execution ¹. Museum executive director Erin Dragotto emphasised that the exhibition highlights artists "using code not as a novelty, but as a deeply intentional medium, one capable of carrying history, emotion, and experimentation forward in meaningful ways" ¹. Hiley-Mann's inclusion alongside artists such as Kelly Milligan, Carolina Melis, Harvey Rayner, Grant Oesterling, Sterling Crispin, Licia He, Iskra Velitchkova, Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez, and Loie Hollowell confirms his position within the leading generation of generative practitioners ¹.

Critical Reception and Market Presence

Hiley-Mann's work has attracted sustained collector interest across primary and secondary markets. Trichro-matic, his 600-edition Curated release, has achieved significant trading volume on secondary platforms, with individual works commanding prices well above their original mint value ¹¹. The collection's floor price and trading activity reflect sustained demand for outputs that range from bold geometric compositions to more subtle, textured explorations of colour and depth ¹¹.

Critical attention has focused on the conceptual sophistication underlying Hiley-Mann's technical execution. His Trichro-matic project, in particular, has been noted for its meditation on perception and the shifting nature of visual understanding, with outputs that challenge depth perception conventions while manipulating explicit structural cues and intentional imperfections ⁹. The work's interactive dimension, in which the viewer's position and attention determine their experience of the structure, has been recognised as a significant contribution to generative art's capacity for creating personalised aesthetic encounters ⁹.

The artist's practice of embedding personal narrative within algorithmic systems, whether through the dedication of Trichro-matic to his father or the childhood memories informing Mind the Gap, has distinguished his work within a field often characterised by formal abstraction ⁴⁹. This synthesis of emotional content and computational method represents a mature approach to generative art that privileges meaning-making alongside visual innovation.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Anthony Hiley-Mann (MountVitruvius) links page ↗.