Eric De Giuli

Artist

Eric De Giuli · eeedg.ca ↗

Based

Lives and works outside Toronto, Canada

Practice

Algorithmic art informed by theoretical physics, complexity, emergence, and interactive simulation

Raster

raster.art/artist/eric-de-giuli ↗

In the set

Glass ↗ · 300 editions
Mazinaw ↗ · 256 editions
Calian ↗ · 256 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Eric De Giuli’s practice begins from a productive overlap. He is both a theoretical physicist concerned with the emergence of complexity and an artist who constructs generative systems. His education in mathematics, physics, geophysics, and applied mathematics was followed by research appointments in New York, Lausanne, and Paris before his return to Canada. In a 2023 Art Blocks interview, he described scientific work on the origin of life and the structure of language alongside an artistic history stretching from adolescent experiments in BASIC, Turbo Pascal, and C to virtual landscapes made with Mojoworld in the early 2000s.¹ The parallel is substantial, but the art is not an illustration service for the science. It is a domain in which a serious question can be loosened from the demand for empirical proof and experienced through color, motion, variation, and interaction.

That distinction helps explain the peculiar authority of De Giuli’s images. They often resemble phenomena without settling into depictions of phenomena. A surface might suggest mineral growth, stained glass, circuitry, roots, sediment, tissue, or an aerial map, yet the code continually frustrates any single identification. The Art Blocks profile places this movement within a longer trajectory, from early geological forms through speculative languages and beings to abstraction, quantum interpretation, and the question of life.² His Raster archive, meanwhile, gathers the work as an oeuvre whose continuity lies not in a signature motif but in repeated tests of how simple rules become visually and conceptually dense.³

Ambiguity in De Giuli’s work is not a decorative haze. It is the perceptual condition through which viewers confront the limits of recognition.

Code as a model of becoming

De Giuli’s scientific research supplies more than subject matter. It establishes a way of thinking in terms of ensembles, transitions, competing states, and macroscopic order arising from microscopic rules. His research on random language models asks how structured syntax can emerge within weighted grammars, with an ordered phase requiring broken symmetry.⁴ Later work with Fatemeh Lalegani tests the robustness of this transition and relates the model to language acquisition.⁵ Research on Markov models similarly examines how broad timescales and predictive complexity can emerge near a phase transition.⁶ These studies do not decode the artworks, but they clarify why his algorithms so often stage a passage from latent possibility to organized form.

The artistic process retains room for judgment. De Giuli has explained that he begins with a clear concept, works directly toward it, and only starts to play once the code captures the intended spirit. Parameters and variations are then assessed for whether they widen the system without betraying it.¹ This is an important account of long-form generative art. The artist does not select a single resolved composition. He designs a bounded field within which many compositions can arrive, each testing the coherence of the system. The release is therefore both an edition and an argument about what belongs.

Glass, released in 2022 as 300 editions, makes this argument through crowded, crystalline organizations. The collection’s attributes include alternate styles, palettes, waves, shadows, focus states, flow, and ziggurat structures, evidence of a system designed to vary at several interacting levels.⁷ Its title encourages a material reading, but the images resist becoming pictures of panes or shards. Forms pack, buckle, refract, and overlap as if pressure were being applied to a field whose physical laws remain just beyond comprehension.

The conceptual prompt is quantum ambiguity. De Giuli connects Glass to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, while describing its relation to Mazinaw and Calian through a shared concern with ambiguity.¹ The strongest outputs make this concern spatial. Figure and ground exchange roles, local structures imply incompatible global organizations, and color seems simultaneously embedded in and projected across the surface. The viewer encounters not a diagram of uncertainty but a visual system in which certainty cannot stabilize.

Live on Art Blocks: glass-by-eric-de-giuli ↗

The unknown hand

Mazinaw, 256 editions released by Art Blocks on April 7, 2022, offers a different route into uncertainty.⁸ Its linear networks can evoke drawing, engraving, topography, weather, or an invented notation. The title recalls a place, while the system produces markings that appear culturally or geologically deposited. Loops, branching paths, roots, poles, echo effects, hatching, attenuation, and degrees of complexity are among its recorded variables.⁹ Such features give the work the appearance of an encoded procedure whose purpose has been lost.

De Giuli characterizes Mazinaw as suggesting the hand of an unknown creator.¹⁰ That phrase identifies the collection’s central tension. The marks look authored, but their authorial agency is distributed between artist, algorithm, and generated instance. They invite the interpretive habits used for archaeological traces or diagrams, then withhold the referent that would complete interpretation. A path can feel intentional without leading anywhere. Repetition can imply a writing system without producing legible speech. The collection thus converts generative procedure into a fiction of incomplete cultural knowledge.

Its historical position within De Giuli’s practice is equally revealing. Mazinaw and Glass both use p5.js, yet their visual grammars diverge sharply.¹ One organizes linear traces that seem left by an absent maker; the other builds saturated fields that trouble material and spatial perception. Their shared achievement is not stylistic consistency. It is the construction of systems that make viewers actively negotiate what kind of thing they are seeing.

Live on Art Blocks: mazinaw-by-eric-de-giuli ↗

Living computation

Calian, 256 editions released on March 1, 2023, expands the practice from generated image toward navigable, persistent behavior.¹¹ Written as a GLSL shader in JavaScript, it harnesses GPU computation and shares little code with the two p5.js collections.¹ The technical break matters because the work’s subject is not simply biological appearance. It is the behavior of an ecosystem that can be explored, disturbed, and watched.

The collection is infinitely zoomable and scrollable. Species grow, compete, move with elemental forces, and undergo boom, bust, and echo, while interaction affects the ecosystem indirectly. As viewers travel, the shader rebuilds the world from its initial condition and allows the laws governing its dynamics to evolve.¹⁰ These mechanics support the precise philosophical pressure of the project: lifelike behavior is recognizable, but recognition is not an adequate definition of life. Organic and digital forms become deliberately difficult to separate.

This question connects with De Giuli’s research into chemical systems and emergence. His recent theoretical work interprets noise as a form of endogenous control and uses that mapping to address multistable chemical reaction networks, unstable fixed points, and the emergence of agent-like behavior.¹² Again, Calian is not a visualization of a paper. Its freedom lies in making a speculative system available to intuition. The viewer learns through wandering, delay, scale, and consequence.

There are sixteen styles in Calian, each governed by different physics and responding differently to interaction.¹ The number is less significant as a trait count than as evidence that variation reaches into behavior itself. Two outputs can differ not only in palette or morphology, but in how they feel under navigation. The artwork becomes a relation among code, hardware, duration, and a viewer’s interventions.

This performative understanding continues in Zero (Broken Symmetry), presented by SOLOS and Verse in 2025. That series amplifies floating-point instabilities until uniform bands develop into evolving fields, sourcing indeterminacy from the hardware environment at execution rather than fixing it at mint.¹³ The project makes explicit a principle already active across the Art Blocks works: an algorithm can be an event whose identity exceeds any screenshot.

Live on Art Blocks: calian-by-eric-de-giuli ↗

Art and science without hierarchy

De Giuli’s place in generative art rests on the equality he grants his two practices. Science offers verified laws, disciplined abstraction, and models of emergence. Art offers permission to bend those laws, construct alternate worlds, and communicate intuition through experience.¹ Neither practice merely adorns the other. Their exchange produces artworks that are technically specific and epistemically unsettled.

His participation in the 2024 Generative Art Summit at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste situated this exchange within a longer history of art and science. The program joined seven decades of generative practice and included De Giuli in a session with William Latham, P1xelboy, and Joerg Stelkens.¹⁴ Such a context is apt. De Giuli’s work inherits the systems orientation of computer art while insisting that contemporary computation can generate not only forms, but responsive environments with their own temporal and behavioral character.

Across Glass, Mazinaw, and Calian, ambiguity progresses from unstable perception, to uncertain authorship, to uncertain life. Yet the sequence should not be mistaken for a closed thesis. Each collection is an instrument for sustained looking. Their systems produce evidence without a final verdict, asking viewers to recognize pattern while remaining alert to the assumptions through which pattern becomes meaningful.

Bibliography

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