Carolina Melis

Artist

Carolina Melis · kubikino.com ↗

Based

Born 1975, Italy. Lives and works in Sardinia, Italy

Practice

Multidisciplinary practice spanning animation, illustration, choreography, textile design, surface pattern, and generative systems

Now

Artistic Director at Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission, with ongoing digital and physical extensions of Kubikino

Raster

raster.art/artist/carolina-melis ↗

In the set

Kubikino ↗ · 320 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Carolina Melis is an Italian-Danish artist, designer, and animation director whose practice has moved across choreography, commercial direction, illustration, textiles, and digital art. Her training began in choreography at Dartington College of Arts and continued in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, where she specialised in animation before working in London for MTV Europe and Nexus Productions.¹ That trajectory matters for Kubikino, because the project is not a sudden arrival at code. It is a translation of long-standing concerns: timing, balance, modular composition, bold colour, and the design of characters that can operate between abstraction and personality.

Melis has described her practice as moving between animated films, textiles, book covers, and unique art pieces, with elegance and playfulness as paired values.² She also identifies rhythm as a structuring principle, whether a work is static or animated.² In Kubikino, that rhythm becomes a generative grammar. The work uses a reduced vocabulary of geometry and colour to produce faces that are not portraits in the conventional sense, but coded arrangements of signs. Each output suggests a persona, mask, animal, or physiognomy, while retaining the legibility of a modular system.

From choreography to modular faces

Before Kubikino, Melis had already built a career around movement, sequencing, and graphic clarity. Her London years included music videos, short films, commercial campaigns, and brand identities, including work connected to BBC, Fendi, Prada, Sony PSP, Volkswagen, MTV, and Save the Children.³ Her biography records major commissions including As The Crow Flies, a Channel 4 and Arts Council animated short, Regarding Gardens for Ham House and Garden, and Le Fiamme di Nule for the Institute of Ethnography in Sardinia.¹ These projects locate her practice between public culture, design communication, and narrative animation rather than within a single medium.

The same breadth appears in her exhibition and film work. Dove Cade L'Ombra, commissioned by Museo Nivola, combined film and installation, using rhythm, colour, shape, transformation, and development as central devices.⁴ Exhibition listings place the project at Museo Nivola in Orani from December 2016 to February 2017, curated by Davide Mariani.⁵ LUX also lists Melis in relation to As The Crow Flies, underscoring the moving-image strand of her career.⁶ These sources make Kubikino easier to read: it is a generative work, but one informed by choreography, animation direction, surface design, and a sustained interest in how simple forms can carry narrative charge.

Live on Art Blocks: kubikino-by-carolina-melis ↗

Kubikino on Art Blocks

Kubikino was released through Art Blocks Presents on 29 November 2023 as a collection of 320 unique artworks.⁷ The edition count is central to its AB[500] status: 320 editions place the project within the broader register while preserving a compact scale. Art Blocks describes the collection as 320 unique artworks, while press coverage frames it as a system of geometric portraits generated through code.⁷⁸ The project was made by Melis with the support of creative coder Enrico Penzo, and Melis has stated that it took roughly 18 months to develop.²

The project's visual logic is deliberately economical. It begins with circles, primary colours, simple geometry, and the face as a cultural template. NFT Magazine described Kubikino as an idiosyncratic face formed from graphical elements and colours generated by code, with outputs that resemble human physiognomy, animals, or traditional masks.⁹ Creative Boom similarly situated the work as a transition from traditional tools into blockchain-based generative art, noting its animated loops and its questions about authorship and value.⁸ This is a useful reading because the project does not treat code as spectacle. It uses code to test how much identity can be implied by rearrangement.

Craft, authorship, and system

Melis's later statements on AI and generative media emphasise process, authorship, and intention. In The AI Art Magazine, she frames AI not as an answer but as a medium that requires direction, rules, doubt, and instinct.¹⁰ That position is consistent with Kubikino, where the system is defined by constraint rather than by excess. The portraits are bright and direct, but the conceptual structure is compact: a limited visual vocabulary becomes a field of difference.

This also connects Kubikino to Melis's design market and craft background. Profiles of her design work describe a practice that includes surfaces, textiles, and objects, not just screen-based work.¹¹ That continuity gives the Art Blocks collection a particular place in her career. It is a blockchain-native work of 320 editions, but it also belongs to a longer inquiry into pattern, composition, and character. Its importance within AB[500] is therefore modest but clear: Kubikino brings a design and animation language into generative portraiture, using the face as a small theatre for rhythm, identity, and permutation.

Bibliography

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