Nonfigurativ

Artist

Nonfigurativ · nonfigurativ.com ↗

Based

Norwegian artist. Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

Practice

Generative art, interactive installation, computational drawing, browser-based systems, particle simulation, GLSL, JavaScript, and plotter work

Now

Represented by ARTXCODE and focused on an independent practice after leaving Void in 2023

Raster

raster.art/artist/bjorn-staal/about ↗

In the set

The Liths of Sisyphus ↗ · 777 editions
Immaterial ↗ · 280 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Nonfigurativ, the alias of Bjørn Staal, enters AB[500] through two Art Blocks collections that bracket a major shift in his public practice: The Liths of Sisyphus, a 777 edition Art Blocks Factory release from August 2021, and Immaterial, a 280 edition Art Blocks Presents release from January 2024.¹² The first belongs to the early expansion of long-form on-chain generative art, where myth, procedural geology, and edition scale meet. The second arrives after Staal had consolidated a broader language of particle behaviour, browser performance, installation thinking, and organic abstraction.

Staal is described by Raster as a Norwegian artist, programmer, and researcher whose work explores interactions between digital systems and human perception and behaviour, and whose career includes co-founding the experimental design studio Void in 2015.³ That biographical line matters because his Art Blocks work is not an isolated NFT practice. It grows from a decade of computational design, interactive installation, and public-facing spatial systems. Right Click Save later framed him as an artist whose technical virtuosity pushed generative art while also engaging community, charity, and cross-chain culture through projects including Entangled, Immaterial, and Losing Oneself.⁴

From computational design to personal systems

Staal's practice has a clear before and after. Before 2023, he was associated with Void, a studio working across architecture, art, technology, and large-scale interactive installations. After leaving the studio, he shifted toward an independent artistic practice concerned with how algorithms shape experience and agency. In Fakewhale's long interview, Staal described code and art as two sides of the same coin, developed together since he began programming as a teenager.⁵ The remark is not merely autobiographical. It clarifies why his best-known works do not treat code as a production tool hidden behind an image. Code is the site where the image, its motion, its behaviour, and the viewer's uncertainty are negotiated.

That negotiation is already present in The Liths of Sisyphus. The title invokes the condemned labour of repetition, but the images do not present a figure pushing a rock. They stage a more geological and computational version of the myth: forms accrete, fracture, lean, and erode within a field that feels simultaneously mineral and synthetic. The edition count, 777 works, is central to the project's AB[500] status because the series depends on the long-form promise that a single generative system can sustain variation across hundreds of outputs without collapsing into sameness.¹ In this sense, Sisyphus becomes less a character than a procedural condition. The algorithm repeats its task, but the viewer encounters difference each time.

Live on Art Blocks: the-liths-of-sisyphus-by-nonfigurativ ↗

Immaterial and the problem of organic abstraction

Immaterial refines the earlier interest in emergent structure into a more sensuous and ambiguous register. Art Blocks lists the project as a 280 artwork release on Art Blocks Presents, dated January 3, 2024.² In the Fakewhale conversation published just before that release, Staal described the work as beginning with algorithms that mimic organic phenomena, including recursion, growth, fluidity, and fractal noise, developed through a GPU-accelerated particle system that allowed real-time exploration.⁵ That real-time element is crucial. The work is not simply rendered imagery. It is an investigation into how a system behaves before it is fixed as an output.

The visual field of Immaterial often appears to hover between fungal gills, rippling fabric, topographic membranes, and luminous biological tissue. Staal's discussion of studying colour interactions as sunlight meets organic material helps explain why the series does not read as monochrome technical virtuosity alone.⁵ Its surfaces are built from ambiguity: isometric suggestion and 2D composition, organism and architecture, digital simulation and tactile matter. The title is therefore not a negation of materiality. It is a challenge to where materiality is located. The "material" is not canvas, pigment, or sculpture, but the behaviour of points, fields, colour gradients, and viewer recognition.

Live on Art Blocks: immaterial-by-bjorn-staal ↗

Interactivity, Entangled, and the public scale of code

Although AB[500] records Staal through Art Blocks, his larger reputation has been shaped by works that test the public and spatial implications of generative systems. Entangled became the decisive example. The project was presented by fxhash VERTEX at Wintercircus in Ghent, where the event text described it as a digital art installation joining physical experience, digital interaction, and quantum mechanics.⁶ Euronews later reported that Staal brought the first exhibition to the newly opened Ghent Wintercircus Arena, calling Entangled a digital art installation combining robotics, generative algorithms, and digital interaction.⁷

That institutional movement from browser to arena clarifies the latent scale of Immaterial. Even when an Art Blocks work is encountered as a token, Staal is thinking about systems that can become environments. ARTXCODE's 2026 announcement of representation describes him as an Oslo-based artist and software developer examining how algorithms shape human experience, and notes his large-scale interactive background through Void.⁸ Its artist profile adds that Staal began using computers for creative expression in his parents' basement in the early 1990s, exploring graphics, animation, and electronic music production.⁹ The continuity is important: generative art, for Staal, is not an art-market category added late to a design career. It is the current form of a long practice of computational expression.

Maps, minds, and charitable systems

Staal's post-Immaterial trajectory also clarifies his interest in structure under pressure. Cure³ listed Losing Oneself within its 2025 exhibition, part of a section that included generative artists minting NFT artworks to support Parkinson's research.¹⁰ Right Click Save's Cure³ article presented Staal among the artists contributing to that effort and quoted him on the meaning of supporting a cause directed at reducing suffering.¹¹ nft now separately listed Losing Oneself by Bjorn Staal as a Cure3 digital section release on fx(hash), with proceeds benefiting Parkinson's research.¹²

This context matters for reading the Art Blocks works retrospectively. The Liths of Sisyphus is about repeated effort under cosmic indifference. Immaterial is about emergent life-like pattern in a digital substrate. Losing Oneself then turns toward psychogeographic mapping, degeneration, and disorder. Across the sequence, Staal's systems do not promise mastery. They show that algorithmic structure can reveal the limits of control. That is why the works resist a narrow reading as technical demonstration. Their elegance depends on instability, on the way a system can appear coherent while remaining open to drift.

Networks, archives, and generative culture

Staal's place in generative culture is also documented through collecting and archival platforms. Le Random's artist profile identifies him as Nonfigurativ and places him within a collection-oriented history of digital and generative art.¹³ Verse indexes his works and activity, including Entangled, Immaterial, Losing Oneself, and the humorously titled bro here are the codes.¹⁴ Fakewhale's FW CROSS essay on GENERATIVE placed him among artists working with code and described Parent and Child (Divided) through computational irreducibility and rule-based structures that unfold into high-resolution compositions.¹⁵

The technical and cultural debate around openness is equally central. In Fakewhale's interview, Staal distinguished between sharing generalizable tools and simply releasing project-specific code, arguing for care, maintainability, and usefulness in open-source practice.⁵ That position is representative of a mature phase of generative art: the artist acknowledges open-source culture while defending the integrity of authorship. Linktree and arte.bio function as practical public indexes of this practice, linking audiences to Art Blocks, fx(hash), Fakewhale, AOI, and interviews without reducing the work to a single platform identity.¹⁶¹⁷ A video context is supplied by Sanity's Behind the Code episode on mem_brane, which places Staal's practice in a wider conversation about AI, light, sound, growth, and software-based art.¹⁸

AB[500] reading

Within AB[500], Nonfigurativ is valuable because his two included works show the distance a generative practice can travel without abandoning its core. The Liths of Sisyphus uses the long-form edition structure of 777 works to stage variation as labour, myth, and generated terrain. Immaterial, at 280 editions, compresses that procedural confidence into a richer inquiry into living pattern, perception, and synthetic matter. Together they show an artist moving from formal emergence toward embodied systems, from collectible outputs toward works that imply motion, installation, and behaviour beyond the frame.

The dossier therefore reads Nonfigurativ not as a stylist attached to a particular look, but as an artist of dynamic relations. His work asks how code can produce images that feel less like pictures than conditions: geological pressure, organic growth, mental mapping, robotic gesture, communal linkage, and the uncertain place of the human observer inside a computational field.

Bibliography

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