- Artist
- johan · johan.studio/work/steps ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/johan ↗
- Based
- Born 1988, Paris. Based in Alameda, California
- Practice
- Generative art, creative coding, graphics engineering, electronic music, and audiovisual installation
- In the set
- Steps ↗ · 360 editions
- Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Johan Ismael’s practice joins two modes of attention that are often treated as opposites: exact computation and spiritual contemplation. A 2025 exhibition biography identifies him as a Paris-born artist and electronic musician based in Alameda, California, with work rooted in mathematics and spiritual practice.1 His professional record adds a technical foundation in computer graphics and human-computer interaction, as well as experience in shaders, rendering, virtual reality, and creative coding.2 These contexts matter because his images do not use computation merely as a production convenience. The algorithm becomes a framework through which order can approach, without fully containing, ambiguity.
His wider body of work moves among still images, interactive graphics, sound, and performance. As one half of the French-American duo Night Sea, formed with David Grunzweig, Ismael participates in ambient music and generative audiovisual work shaped around hypnotic, meditative experience.3 Grunzweig’s project archive confirms their collaboration on algorithmic audiovisual works made with web audio, Three.js, and GLSL.4 The resulting practice is technically fluent but oriented toward perception: code establishes a field in which rhythm, repetition, and gradual variation can be experienced rather than simply decoded.
Between unit and continuum
Released through Art Blocks Factory in 2022, Steps is johan’s AB[500] project and comprises exactly 360 editions. The official token record identifies the collection as Steps by johan and exposes system-level traits including size, style, curvature, palette, reflection, and palette count.5 These categories show how each output is not an isolated drawing but one realization of a parameterized visual grammar.
The series builds compositions from repeated, step-like units. Across the edition, linear structures gather into bands, turns, and layered passages whose behavior can appear architectural, topographic, or woven. The title is therefore both literal and conceptual. A step is a discrete increment, yet accumulated steps describe continuous movement. The artist’s exhibition statement frames the project around precisely this relation between the discrete and the continuous, connecting that uncertainty to tensions between conceptual and spiritual experience.1
Rather than staging randomness as spectacle, Steps uses variation with restraint. Changes in curvature, density, scale, and color alter the temperament of each composition while preserving the series’ recognizable syntax. Some outputs read as measured diagrams; others soften into atmospheric fields. The work’s force lies in this controlled instability, where a countable sequence can suggest duration, depth, and states that resist measurement.
2022, series
2022, series
2022, series
2022, series
2022, series
2022, series
Live on Art Blocks: steps-by-johan ↗
Systems that become instruments
Other projects clarify the range behind the apparent quiet of Steps. Code Sketches Series #1 used GLSL shaders and a custom Cinder application supporting live reloading, multiple render passes, and parameter control through GUI, OSC, MIDI, and low-frequency oscillators.6 In the 2018 AR Doodle, Ismael implemented an augmented-reality drawing tool with tapered geometry, animated gradients, and a Fresnel rim inside Facebook’s mobile application.7 His later Horizon Worlds skydome translated procedural shading into an efficient, user-configurable environment for constrained virtual-reality hardware.8 Together, these projects establish an artist accustomed to treating technical limits as compositional conditions.
That approach expands from image to event in Sonatina for Plotter & Laptop (2023), made with Grunzweig and presented during Art Blocks’ Marfa gathering. A microphone captured the mechanical sounds of a pen plotter, algorithms processed them into an ambient soundscape, and visitors received small plotted cards.9 The installation made drawing audible, converting a fabrication device into an instrument. Night Sea’s l.o, released by Art Blocks in 2023, similarly joined generative image and sound across 176 unique artworks.10
Seen in this larger context, Steps is neither a detached formal exercise nor a simple demonstration of code. It concentrates johan’s recurring concerns into a spare visual system: discrete operations accumulate, mechanical procedures acquire atmosphere, and mathematical structures become invitations to sustained attention.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the johan links page ↗.