encapsuled

Artist

encapsuled

Raster

raster.art/artist/encapsuled ↗

Based

Italian artist

Practice

Generative and on-chain works using conventional language, asemic marks, typography, and code

In the set

Your Story ↗ · 102 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Encapsuled approaches language as material rather than transparent communication. Writing, in this practice, can be broken into lines, symbols, gaps, and rhythms, then reorganized by code. The artist, also identified as Michelangelo, is described by NEORT++ as an Italian artist working with conventional and asemic language, with meaning and simplicity as core themes. The same profile treats the audience and context as parts of the experience.¹ This positioning makes interpretation active: viewers participate in deciding whether marks are letters, images, or invitations to imagine.

A 2023 profile and group interview places encapsuled within a broader field of artists using Web3 for experimentation. The artist describes entering the field while relatively new to crypto and NFTs, then learning through the VerticalCrypto Art Residency.² The profile also emphasizes education, collaboration, and experimentation rather than sales alone. These priorities help explain why encapsuled does not equate generative complexity with visual excess. Constrained systems instead produce spare compositions whose typographic incidents imply narratives larger than what is visibly written.

The book as generative system

Released through Art Blocks on December 5, 2022, Your Story consists of 102 unique editions.³ The collection presents individual outputs as pages within a dispersed book. Its visual vocabulary includes typographic blocks, annotations, illustrations, footnotes, changes of line height, highlighted passages, and apparent printing errors. OpenSea's trait record confirms that these page-like variables are distributed across the collection.⁴ The result resembles a publication whose sequence and content have been unsettled, leaving collectors and viewers to reconstruct relationships among fragments.

The title shifts authorship toward the reader. There is no fixed narrative to decode and no single ordering that restores a complete original. Each page offers evidence of a possible story while withholding enough information to keep that story provisional. Code therefore functions less as an automated storyteller than as an editor of narrative conditions. It determines the page, while the reader supplies continuity, character, and consequence.

Live on Art Blocks: your-story-by-encapsuled ↗

Asemic language and shared meaning

Encapsuled's later statements clarify the conceptual framework visible in Your Story. In a conversation with poet and curator Elisabeth Sweet, the artist connects generative art's seeded randomness to the way ideas emerge from prior perceptions. What appears new or random is understood as a recombination of existing experience.⁵ This also describes the experience of reading Your Story: familiar signs and publication conventions are rearranged until they suggest, but do not enforce, meaning.

A later movement distinguishes arbitrary marks from marks that retain an intention capable of being interpreted. Encapsuled argues that asemic writing can invite a private act of decoding, activating the viewer's imagination and allowing the audience to complete the work.⁶ The project consequently occupies a threshold between semantic language and abstraction. Its marks look available to reading, yet their significance remains contingent on attention, memory, and expectation.

This inquiry has continued through public presentation. The 2025 exhibition Computational Poetry included encapsuled alongside four other artistic positions under the name michelangelo (encapsuled).⁷ A critical exhibition account described his two exhibited generative works as JavaScript-based NFTs and examined their use of time-derived seeds and cursive-like lines.⁸ The exhibition context reinforces a central feature of the practice: language is not merely represented by the algorithm. It becomes an event unfolding through execution.

Across these works, the page is both interface and metaphor. It offers order through margins, lines, emphasis, and hierarchy, while code introduces variation that destabilizes that order. Your Story turns this tension into a compact model of authorship. The artist defines a grammar, the algorithm realizes one configuration, and the viewer constructs a possible account. Meaning is neither wholly encoded nor entirely free. It arises in the exchange among system, output, and reader.

Bibliography

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