- Artist
- Florian Zumbrunn · florianzumbrunn.com ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/florian-zumbrunn ↗
- Practice
- Generative art, creative coding, print, projection, installation, and hybrid digital-physical production
- In the set
- Tout tracé ↗ · 300 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Florian Zumbrunn’s practice is grounded in a productive exchange between formal rules and unforeseen results. Trained at Gobelins after an early education shaped by science, drawing, and painting, he describes discovering creative coding through the work of Erik Natzke. That encounter redirected programming from a technical skill into an artistic medium. Zumbrunn later co-founded Makio&Floz, a studio operating between Paris and Tokyo, where installations, projection mapping, and experiments in public space established a durable interest in work that crosses physical and computational environments.1
Rather than using software as a neutral production tool, Zumbrunn writes systems whose behavior can redirect the work. Randomness is therefore neither decoration nor an abdication of authorship. It is a structured source of visual incidents that the artist tests, selects, and develops. A Galerie Data dossier describes more than a decade of work with creative code across installations, video mapping, websites, and generative images, particularly through JavaScript and WebGL.2 This technical continuity helps explain why his images can appear spontaneous while remaining tightly organized.
A drawing system under pressure
Tout tracé entered Art Blocks on 8 February 2023 as a collection of 300 editions.3 Its title, which can suggest that everything has been traced or charted, points to drawing as both action and system. Repeated linear marks accumulate into fields, grids, contours, and interruptions. The resulting images hover between diagram and textile, architectural plan and improvised notation.
The series gains much of its energy from the tension between repetition and exception. A grid offers orientation, but variations in density, direction, color, and curvature prevent it from settling into a single stable reading. Lines behave like recorded gestures even when generated by code. Blocks of color and open intervals establish pauses, while abrupt changes in rhythm make the surface feel edited in real time. Across 300 editions, recurrence becomes a way to measure difference rather than suppress it.
This approach also places Tout tracé within Zumbrunn’s broader negotiation between calculation and touch. The London Art Biennale listed his 2023 work Under the Sakuras as generative art printed on watercolor paper and finished with colored pencil and oil pastel.4 That material description clarifies an important aspect of his practice: the algorithm often supplies a beginning rather than a terminal form. Digital structure can be printed, handled, colored, projected, or translated by another machine.
2023, Tout tracé
2023, Tout tracé
2023, Tout tracé
2023, Tout tracé
2023, Tout tracé
2023, Tout tracé
Live on Art Blocks: tout-trace-by-florian-zumbrunn ↗
From software to matter
Zumbrunn’s later projects make this translation increasingly explicit. For Hennessy X.O in 2024, bespoke algorithms generated compositions that customers could preview before a robotic arm painted the selected design onto a molded paper-pulp casing. The collaboration comprised 40 numbered pieces.5 Although commercial in context, its mechanics extend a central proposition of his studio practice: code can function like a brush, but its marks need not remain on a screen.
A related exchange between computation and material memory appears in Collective Memories, made with Benjamin Bardou. Zumbrunn’s algorithms from his seasonal series were combined with Bardou’s image processing and motion techniques, using data associated with Giverny to animate the compositions.6 Here, Impressionism operates less as a style to imitate than as a historical prompt concerning light, atmosphere, and perception.
Zumbrunn’s systems are most persuasive when order remains visible but never complete.
His international presentations reinforce this movement across formats. The 2025 DIG Shibuya program described Odysseys as an Ethereum-minted generative series combining discovery, nostalgia, fantasy environments, and references to ukiyo-e.7 Such projects broaden the visual vocabulary established in Tout tracé, yet the underlying method remains recognizable. Rules create a field of possibility, surprise becomes a compositional test, and the selected output can migrate among blockchain, display, paper, pigment, installation, and robotic gesture.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Florian Zumbrunn links page ↗.