Ben Kovach

Artist

Ben Kovach · bendotk.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/ben-kovach ↗

Based

Born 1991. Lives and works in Burlington, Vermont

Practice

Generative abstraction using code, mathematical structures, randomness, drawing, and print

In the set

Edifice ↗ · 976 editions
100 PRINT ↗ · 100 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Ben Kovach approaches the computer as both a precise instrument and an engine of uncertainty. An American visual artist born in 1991, he began making artwork with code in 2017, seeking what Art Blocks describes as natural aesthetics within a digital medium.¹ That formulation identifies a productive contradiction at the center of his practice. Kovach writes strict procedures, often in the functional programming language Haskell, yet the resulting images suggest fibers, pigment, architectural fragments, pressure, and hand-worked surfaces. The system is mathematical, but its evidence is sensory.

Kovach's route to generative art joined two interests that had previously seemed separate. He studied art before moving toward computer science and professional software development, then returned to visual practice by treating programming as a bridge between those fields.² Haskell became especially important because its mathematical foundations require relationships to be defined rigorously. Kovach has described maintaining a large personal program containing years of sketches, artworks, and experimental modules, a cumulative studio infrastructure rather than a disposable tool.²

This continuity matters. Kovach does not treat each series as an isolated technical demonstration. Algorithms, textural devices, and compositional strategies migrate between projects, accumulating nuance through reuse. In his account of Inertia, he describes a substantial personal library of generative techniques, including rectangular subdivision, physics simulations, convex hulls, and procedures for constructing jagged lines.³ His practice therefore resembles an evolving vocabulary. A familiar operation can return in a different configuration, scale, or material setting and produce an image with a distinct emotional temperature.

Code as accumulated touch

Kovach's images often seem to negotiate between the handmade and the computational. His artist statement emphasizes procedural generation as a means of preserving stylistic choices, adding extensive detail, and rapidly testing ideas.⁴ These qualities do not simply produce technical efficiency. They help explain why the work can evoke drawing, fibers, pigment, and printed matter while remaining recognizably computational.

The artist's attraction to randomness is similarly specific. It is not an abdication of authorship but a way of discovering capacities embedded in a system. Kovach has written that randomized outputs can surprise even their maker and that his aim is to explore the portion of computational possibility that reflects his own taste.⁴ The artist establishes constraints, evaluates populations of results, adjusts relationships, and repeats the process. Judgment is distributed across the construction of the system rather than concentrated in the execution of a single image.

This method helps explain why Kovach cites apparently opposed artistic traditions. In a 2025 interview, he discussed influences from minimalist and maximalist art while describing the combination of mathematical structure and visual intuition in his practice.² A computer can support both tendencies. A small rule set can remain conceptually spare while producing images dense enough to resist immediate comprehension. Kovach's strongest works sustain that dual reading: they are lucid as systems and unruly as encounters.

Edifice, variation under pressure

Edifice is the decisive statement of this approach. Released through Art Blocks Curated on November 8, 2021, it comprises exactly 976 editions.⁵ The unusually large set required Kovach to shift from selecting preferred outputs to engineering a system capable of producing a convincing result for every possible mint-time input. He generated batches of more than a thousand images while developing the work, scrutinizing them for failures, weak contrasts, and compositional dead ends.⁶

The title refers both to the images' architectural presence and to the labor of constructing their generator. Kovach describes the visual mechanism through a metaphor of flexible nets subjected to explosions. Rectangular structures behave as if their crossing points possessed mass, while simulated forces stretch and displace their connections.⁶ The resulting cells can look woven, cracked, brushed, or compressed. Geometry supplies the armature, but deformation gives the work its bodily character.

Variation arises through interacting features including cell size, aspect, fill style, symmetry, displacement, and dimensions.⁶ Their effects are multiplicative rather than merely additive. A change to one parameter alters the visual consequences of several others, making the output space feel deeper than a menu of interchangeable traits. Across the collection, blocks may gather into monumental masses, disperse into atmospheric passages, or vibrate as fine-grained fields. Color alternately clarifies the underlying construction and pulls it toward optical ambiguity.

The long-form format also changed how the artist encountered his own work. Kovach wrote that, immediately after minting, he did not yet know the full body of images. Collectors and artist discovered the set together over time.⁶ This reversal is important to the cultural logic of on-chain generative art. The artist completes the generator before the complete collection becomes visible. Authorship lies in shaping a possibility space whose individual manifestations remain partially unknown.

Edifice makes rigor tactile: its grids are built to survive disruption, and disruption becomes their texture.

Live on Art Blocks: edifice-by-ben-kovach ↗

From latent set to physical room

If Edifice foregrounded the difficulty of anticipating a large on-chain collection, 100 PRINT reconsidered how such a collection could be encountered. The project consists of exactly 100 editions. Kovach worked with Bright Moments to display the complete set as framed prints in its New York gallery in May 2022.⁷ Each work was pre-minted, printed, framed, and installed before collectors selected an NFT and its associated physical print.⁸ The complete set therefore entered the world not only as a digital collection but as an environment.

The series is based on visual perspective. Kovach began developing it while studying M. C. Escher's sketches and considering perspective trickery, then used principles associated with constructing three-dimensional scenes to produce nonfigurative imagery.⁷ Lines and shapes imply scaffolds, folded planes, impossible rooms, and improvised drafting. Perspective is not used to secure a coherent world. It creates enough spatial expectation for the system to bend, interrupt, and multiply it.

Distribution was part of the work's argument. Instead of preserving the standard condition in which buyers receive an unknown output, 100 PRINT gave participants greater agency over which visible work they obtained.⁷ Looking became consequential. Collectors had to compare the whole set, decide which formal relationships mattered to them, and understand each edition as both an autonomous image and a member of a larger population.

Kovach later reflected on the intensity with which participants analyzed the set, including its rarity, aesthetic relationships, pairings, and statistics.⁷ The observation clarifies the significance of the project's physical form. Printing was not merely a translation of digital files into saleable objects. It slowed circulation, created a period of co-presence, and allowed artist and audience to grasp the collection's scale through bodily movement. Bright Moments' account confirms that the installed works were selected in person with their corresponding prints.⁸

Live on Art Blocks: 100-print-by-ben-kovach ↗

A practice between histories

Kovach's work belongs to a renewed public history of computer art while retaining the specificity of contemporary blockchain distribution. In 2023, GEN/GEN: Generative Generations placed him alongside figures including Harold Cohen, Ernest Edmonds, William Latham, Sougwen Chung, Tyler Hobbs, and Monica Rizzolli.⁹ The exhibition framed generative practice across six decades, allowing contemporary code-based work to be read through longer histories of rule-based image making rather than solely through the market category of NFTs.

His participation in The Armory Show in 2022, within a C-VERSO presentation of generative artworks, likewise situated his practice in dialogue with gallery and fair systems.¹⁰ Yet Kovach's writing remains an unusually important extension of the work. Essays on Edifice, Inertia, and the difficulties of generative art expose testing, failure, selection, and technical compromise without reducing aesthetic experience to an instructional diagram.¹¹ They insist that computational art has craft, and that its craft can be discussed precisely.

Across Edifice and 100 PRINT, Kovach repeatedly asks where an artwork resides. It may be in the code, in a single output, in the statistical character of a set, in a collector's act of selection, or in a room filled with prints. His practice declines to settle the question. Instead, it uses each release format to redistribute attention among those possibilities. The enduring subject is not randomness alone, but the structures through which randomness becomes legible, judged, shared, and ultimately felt.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Ben Kovach links page ↗.