David Lu

Artist

David Lu · conundrumer.com/facets ↗

Based

Born n/a. Lives and works in New York City

Practice

Software engineering, electronic music, media art, generative visuals, and procedural image systems

Now

Focused across code, sound, geometry, and interactive image making

Raster

raster.art/artist/conundrumer ↗

In the set

Facets ↗ · 267 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

David Lu is an engineer, musician, and media artist whose public practice moves between software, sound, visualization, and procedural drawing. His own biography describes a Carnegie Mellon background in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Music and Technology, followed by freelance web development and cross-disciplinary projects in systems programming, computer graphics, signal processing, sound design, music production, photography, and performance art.¹ That list is not incidental. It frames Lu's work as a practice of constrained systems rather than a single-medium studio.

His Art Blocks project Facets, released through Art Blocks Factory on 27 January 2022, consists of 267 unique artworks.² The collection belongs to a lineage of browser-native generative art that treats the output as both image and instrument. On market and archive pages, the project is consistently identified as Facets by conundrumer, with 267 works on Ethereum and a January 2022 launch.³ In the AB[500] context, that fixed edition count matters: Facets is a finite, inspectable set, small enough to read as a coherent visual argument.

Systems before surfaces

Lu's wider portfolio clarifies the technical basis for Facets. His art archive includes Rationalization, described as a 600,000 pixel tall generative journey from zero to one, and projects spanning Line Rider, spatial sound, chromatic photography, audiovisual composition, and Audioscope.⁴ His technology archive presents Line Rider as a game, toy, physics simulator, vector graphics editor, and animation tool, and describes Audioscope as a perceptually meaningful audio visualizer in which "what you see is what you hear."⁵

That phrase is useful for reading Facets. The project does not simply render geometric objects. It asks the viewer to understand a visual system by changing position, scale, and time. Lu's music page identifies Conundrumer as his primary alias for electronic and contemporary music projects, which helps explain the rhythmic and perceptual orientation of his generative work.⁶ Geometry in Facets behaves less like static modelling than like an audiovisual score, a set of relations activated by viewpoint.

Live on Art Blocks: facets-by-conundrumer ↗

Light, sound, and the analytic image

A core strength of Lu's practice is the translation of one technical domain into another. In his 2016 essay on Audioscope, he explains an audio visualizer built from signal processing, Hilbert transforms, phase shifts, pitch class, hue, and saturation.⁷ The accompanying open-source repository describes Audioscope as "audio visualizers true to the sound," implemented in Rust, JavaScript, and GLSL.⁸ His GitHub profile further presents a practical engineering footprint around audio visualization, Line Rider, SVG animation, and other code-based systems.⁹

That background makes Facets legible as a work about perception. Its polyhedral language is not merely decorative. It stages the difference between object, projection, and viewer action. The forms can be read as constructivist sculpture, crystalline abstraction, and interface. Their gradients and voids emphasize light as a computational material. The collection's trait structure on OpenSea, including animation, symmetry, palette, primitive, material, and orientation categories, reinforces the sense that Lu is composing with parameters rather than images alone.³

Networked practice

Lu also appears within broader generative and creative coding communities. Monthly Music Hackathon NYC presented him as a software engineer, electronic musician, and media artist developing generative visuals and expressive interfaces for live, visual electronic music.¹⁰ In an Art Blocks interview, Emily Xie credited David Lu, identified as Conundrumer, with encouraging her to explore NFTs and submit an Art Blocks application, a small but revealing marker of his role within the early Art Blocks social field.¹¹

His Line Rider work offers another reference point. Boing Boing described Lu's long-running Line Rider project as an eleven-year course and pointed readers to his extensive process writing.¹² A separate essay on the Line Rider piece Centrism notes Lu, also known as Conundrumer, in relation to synchronization, circles, and generated track geometry.¹³ These projects share a concern with controlled motion through drawn systems. In Facets, that concern becomes architectural and luminous: the viewer is not riding through a line, but moving around a generated body.

The compactness of Facets is part of its value. At 267 editions, it is neither a vast generative field nor a single proof-of-concept. It is a focused study of how code can produce sculptural ambiguity, where polygon, gradient, void, and interaction hold equal weight. Vimeo's Audioscope documentation describes Lu's earlier audiovisual premise as "what you see is what you hear," and Facets can be read as a related proposition: what you see depends on how the system lets you look.¹⁴ Secondary market listings such as Verse preserve individual tokens within that wider collection record.¹⁵

Bibliography

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