- Artist
- ilithya · netnetnetgenproject.netlify.app ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/ilithya-x-erin-wajufos ↗
- Based
- From México. Based in Hamburg, Germany
- Practice
- Shader-based computational art, generative systems, audiovisual performance, and interactive installation
- In the set
- Net Net Net ↗ · 33 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
ilithya is a multidisciplinary artist, technologist, and educator from México, based in Hamburg. A background in creative development and design informs a practice built principally with code and algorithms, especially fragment shaders written in OpenGL Shading Language. Her images often combine saturated color, layered forms, rhythmic repetition, and real-time motion. Artpoint characterizes this work as an effort to create emotionally compelling encounters at the intersection of art and technology.1
The artist’s route into generative art began through creative coding. In a 2020 essay, she recalled discovering the field around the end of 2018 and recognizing that algorithmic images had already surrounded her in concerts, galleries, video, and television.2 That retrospective recognition remains useful for understanding her practice: computation is not treated as a detached technical subject, but as an image-making culture embedded in everyday screens.
Painting with parallel processes
Shaders became ilithya’s preferred instrument after she began learning WebGL and Three.js. In a 2022 CodePen Radio interview, she described their appeal for web work and large-scale installations, emphasizing both their visual immediacy and scalability.3 Because fragment shaders calculate pixels in parallel, they support the dense patterns, fluid transitions, and continuous animation that recur throughout her work. Yet her stated method begins with introspection as much as with algorithms. The resulting compositions use emerging technologies to explore feeling, consciousness, sanity, and hypnotic sensation.4
This combination of technical specificity and affective intention has moved across formats. At Hamburg’s Pop Up Art Galerie in 2022, thirteen real-time animations were projected onto two walls, allowing visitors’ moving shadows to become an analogue layer within the installation.5 In 2024, Floral Neurons at MARKK Museum used GLSL shaders, a webcam, and browser-based hand tracking so visitors could alter kaleidoscopic patterns derived from flowers, sugar skulls, and Mexica symbols associated with Día de Muertos.6 These projects demonstrate a consistent concern with images that behave as environments rather than fixed illustrations.
Net nostalgia as generative architecture
Created with Erin Wajufos in 2022 and released in 2023, Net Net Net is a long-form generative project shaped by net art, glitch aesthetics, and memories of early graphical interfaces. Its imagery stages a productive conflict between chaos and order: colored geometric fragments accumulate like unstable windows or corrupted interface elements, while repeated grids and pathways attempt to organize the screen. The collection comprises exactly 33 editions.7
The collaboration treats nostalgia as a structural condition rather than a decorative filter. Limited graphics hardware, unfamiliar interfaces, command-line cultures, and the exploratory character of the early internet are translated into rules governing patterned architectural collages. Each output is distinct, but recurring colors, frames, lattices, and interruptions make the series legible as one system. The screen functions simultaneously as picture plane, remembered desktop, and speculative ruin.
2023, Net Net Net
2023, Net Net Net
2023, Net Net Net
2023, Net Net Net
2023, Net Net Net
2023, Net Net Net
Live on Art Blocks: net-net-net-by-ilithya-x-erin-wajufos ↗
Code in public
ilithya’s practice also extends through teaching and live presentation. The 2022 Generative Art Learning Summit in Mexico City listed her among instructors teaching shaders, p5.js, and randomness in Spanish.8 This educational activity complements the accessibility she advocates in interviews, where visual feedback becomes a way to approach mathematical ideas without requiring mastery at the outset.
Her exhibition contexts reinforce the portability of shader work. Refraction’s 2024 Dig Shibuya program included ilithya among artists shown on the large screen at Shibuya Scramble Crossing.9 The 2024 exhibition After Dark: Around the Fire situated her work within a group of animated generative projects conceived as contemplative presences for domestic screens.10 Across browser, projection, installation, performance, and on-chain edition, the central proposition remains stable: a computational image can be systematic without becoming impersonal, and technologically exact while still carrying memory, emotion, and atmosphere.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the ilithya links page ↗.