Louis-André Labadie

Artist

Louis-André Labadie · louis-andre.net/journal/maps-for-grief ↗

Practice

Generative art joining computational systems, graphic design, controlled chance, and tactile mark-making

In the set

Maps for grief ↗ · 500 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Louis-André Labadie approaches generative art as both a designer of systems and a reader of their consequences. Trained in graphic communication, he has developed a practice centered on computer generation and chance while preserving a human, tactile sensitivity.¹ That dual commitment is crucial. The work does not disguise its procedural construction, but neither does it treat computation as a neutral display of technical competence. Rules establish a field of possible behavior, then irregularities, interruptions, and rough-edged traces give each result its particular emotional temperature.

This position also shapes Labadie's account of artistic labor. In a discussion of what makes generative art difficult, he characterized the task as building an artwork-producing machine, learning to recognize subtle differences among its outputs, and repeatedly adjusting the system until the results form a coherent body.² The finished image is therefore only one visible state of a larger critical process. Selection, calibration, and constraint remain present in every line, even when the final iteration is generated without direct intervention.

Maps for grief, released through Art Blocks on January 11, 2022, brings this method into unusually close contact with an affective subject.³ Its title offers cartography not as geographic certainty but as a metaphor for navigating separation. The project asks how people can share intentions, values, and feelings while experiencing those sentiments alone. Its compositions stage that tension through areas of movement and arrest, density and exposure, continuity and rupture.⁴

The system as an emotional instrument

At the center of Maps for grief are two interacting fields. One directs the movement of lines, while the other alters their ability to continue. Labadie's technical account identifies both as two-dimensional fields filled with Simplex noise. The first becomes a flow field that determines direction. The second acts upon the developing marks, shortening lines or transforming them into symbols and clustered anomalies.⁵ The mechanics are legible in the images without becoming diagrammatic. Long currents bend across the frame, but their progress is repeatedly dried out, congested, or broken into particulate events.

Each composition attempts to place a large population of finite lines without allowing them to touch existing shapes. Early marks find open territory; later ones encounter a space increasingly occupied by previous decisions.⁵ This sequential accumulation gives the images a social character. Every trace is individually bounded, yet no trace can be understood apart from the field of others. Proximity becomes consequential even when contact remains prohibited.

The project's language of grief emerges from this structure rather than from illustration. There are no depicted mourners, memorial objects, or narrative scenes. Instead, grief is modeled as a condition of constrained movement through a shared environment. Some paths persist, some diminish, and some condense into signs whose meanings cannot be fully resolved. Labadie described the series as exploring togetherness without contact, a formulation that connects the generator's spatial rules to experiences of communal feeling lived in isolation.³

The work consists of exactly 500 editions. That scale matters because Maps for grief is not a single composition multiplied into variants. It is a distributed study in how one rule system can sustain difference without losing its conceptual identity. The Art Blocks format makes the generator part of the delivered work and reveals an iteration to artist and collector at minting, conditions Labadie associates with long-form generative art.³ Across the edition, the project must hold together not only at its most dramatic extremes but also through quieter and less immediately exceptional outcomes.

Live on Art Blocks: maps-for-grief-by-louis-andre-labadie ↗

Tactility without simulation

The marks in Maps for grief occupy an ambiguous space between screen graphics and drawings. Labadie developed a plotter-like library for tracing lines organically, including small variations that evoke ink moving across rough paper.³ In this series, the technique is aggressively reduced: iteration data becomes a list of colored circles traced on screen to form lines and shapes. A slight jitter remains within the drawing routine, allowing the image to animate gently without changing its underlying data.³

This distinction between data and trace is aesthetically productive. The system establishes stable relationships, but the rendered surface never feels entirely fixed. It trembles at the level of execution. The resulting tactility is not an imitation of a particular physical medium so much as an insistence that computational marks can carry friction, hesitation, and bodily association. The screen becomes less a frictionless endpoint than a site where formal instructions acquire qualities associated with pressure, grain, and touch.

Labadie's earlier Convergence supplied an important foundation. That generator used a flow field to create undulating line clusters punctuated by circular blooms. In later experiments, such blooms became anomalies capable of disrupting an otherwise rigorous structure.³ Maps for grief extends this approach by making disruption integral to the composition. Order is generated, tested, and partially undone. The image acquires meaning in the passage between those states.

Architecture, urbanism, natural structures, and cartography also inform this visual vocabulary.³ Their convergence helps explain why the works can resemble maps, tissues, weather systems, street plans, or microscopic growth without settling into any one referent. Cartography offers an especially useful model because it translates relations into signs. Yet these maps withhold destinations and legends. They orient viewers toward forces, thresholds, and zones of resistance rather than toward named locations.

This ambiguity protects the series from a narrowly illustrative reading. The viewer can recognize the rhetoric of mapping while remaining unable to convert a composition into a practical route. Direction is everywhere, but destination is absent. The generator consequently presents grief as orientation under uncertain conditions, not as a sequence with an assured conclusion. Its fields provide movement without promising arrival.

Variation, responsibility, and the long form

Labadie's reflections on long-form generation reveal a practice governed by responsibility toward the entire output space. In a manually curated series, failed or uninteresting results can be removed. An uncurated release demands tighter control because every possible state must remain viable. Labadie writes that this pressure constrains variability toward a reliable middle, while also changing the standard by which the series is judged.³

That critical recalibration is visible in Maps for grief. Variation occurs through palettes, regional structures, line behavior, symbols, and degrees of persistence, but the edition remains unmistakably one body. Archipelago's collection interface also documents keyboard controls that animate the lines and expose the underlying fields, making the normally hidden forces available for inspection.⁴ These controls do not reduce the work to its mechanism. Instead, they show how a shared system can generate markedly different atmospheres.

The interactive inspection of a field also changes the viewer's position. What first appears as an expressive surface can be examined as the outcome of layered forces. Yet explanation does not exhaust experience. Knowing that noise fields guide and inhibit the marks cannot settle what their separations mean. The work preserves a gap between procedural account and emotional interpretation, allowing technical clarity and affective uncertainty to coexist.

The project's ethics extend beyond metaphor. An Art Blocks charity report associated Maps for grief with donations benefiting SCWST, Wapikoni Mobile, Nikamowin, and Pathways to Education.⁶ This social dimension should not be confused with the work's formal meaning, but it situates the release within a broader understanding of connection and collective obligation.

Labadie's practice has also moved between autonomous art and generative design. A museum innovation identity credited him as generator designer and co-designer, while the project received 2024 Indigo Design Award recognition in branding and logo categories.⁷ This parallel work clarifies the disciplined visual thinking behind Maps for grief: variables must remain open enough to produce difference while coherent enough to sustain recognition. The same balance governs a long-form edition, where distinct outputs must retain a common grammar.

The importance of Maps for grief lies finally in its refusal to separate procedural intelligence from emotional ambiguity. Its rules are precise, yet its images remain suggestive. Its traces do not touch, yet they continually reshape one another's possibilities. Within 500 editions, Labadie turns the generator into a model of coexistence: a space where isolation is real, relation is unavoidable, and every path bears the pressure of a shared field.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Louis-André Labadie links page ↗.