Martijn Cohen

Artist

Martijn Cohen · martigeon.com/escherly-seeds ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/martijn-cohen ↗

Practice

Generative art combining real-time 3D graphics, algorithmic systems, animation, and interaction

In the set

Escherly Seeds ↗ · 30 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Martijn Cohen’s Escherly Seeds translates the visual language associated with M. C. Escher into a browser-based generative system. Rather than reproduce a particular print, Cohen organizes the project around recognizable spatial problems: impossible perspective, recursive growth, interlocking solids, and the tension between a convincing object and a geometric contradiction. Caleb Levy describes its forms as colorful trees built from connected cubes, with impossible figures appearing as fruit.¹

The project contains exactly 30 editions. Each edition presents an individual configuration produced by the same governing system while remaining visibly part of a compact, coherent body of work. Marketplace documentation independently records 30 digital items on Ethereum and gives a release date of December 4, 2023.² The limited scale frames the collection as a concise sequence of related specimens rather than an exhaustive survey of every possible output.

Drawing an impossible organism

The tree gives Escherly Seeds an immediately legible structure: trunk, branches, extremities, and fruit. Yet its components do not obey the stable spatial order that this botanical metaphor appears to promise. Chains of cubes turn, reconnect, and loop through viewpoints that cannot be reconciled as ordinary physical construction. Levy identifies both the Penrose triangle and the compound commonly called Escher’s Solid among the project’s terminal forms.¹

This use of contradiction belongs to a broader history of Escher’s investigations into repetition, symmetry, and spatial deception. Escher in The Palace identifies the regular division of the plane as a recurring core of his practice and explains how his tessellations typically depend on repetition, reflection, recognizable forms, and color contrast.³ Cohen shifts that inheritance from the printed plane into animated three-dimensional space. Pattern is no longer confined to a tiled surface. It becomes an articulated object whose apparent coherence changes as it rotates.

The arboreal motif softens the rigor of the geometry. Growth supplies an organic analogy for procedural generation: a small set of instructions can branch into a complex whole. The title’s “Seeds” consequently works at several levels. It names botanical beginnings, evokes the seed value from which a generative output is determined, and suggests that every edition is one realization of a shared latent structure.

Live on Art Blocks: escherly-seeds-by-martijn-cohen ↗

Code, motion, and encounter

Animation is central to how Cohen tests spatial certainty. Rotation allows a form to appear plausible from one angle and contradictory from another, making duration part of the work’s construction. The project’s blocks normally rotate together, while pointer proximity changes their periods before they return toward their default positions.¹ The viewer does not redesign the tree, but temporarily disturbs its coordination.

That distinction matters. Interaction here is neither a decorative button nor an unrestricted editing tool. It is a controlled interruption of an otherwise determined performance. The work retains its identity while briefly exposing the separately moving units from which its apparent organism is assembled.

Art Blocks describes its protocol as joining an artist’s on-chain generative script to a token-specific hash, with the same hash producing the same visual output.⁴ In Cohen’s project, this computational relationship gains a particularly apt metaphor. The seed is both technical input and imagined biological origin. The resulting tree appears to grow, but its growth is the unfolding of rules.

Escherly Seeds is strongest when these registers remain inseparable. Its references to graphic art establish a historical vocabulary, its 3D construction converts that vocabulary into an object, and its interactive motion makes perception an event. Research into generative Escher meshes likewise demonstrates the continuing computational potential of Escher-like tilings.⁵ Cohen’s contribution is more intimate and playful: a small grove of 30 editions in which code repeatedly cultivates the logically impossible.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Martijn Cohen links page ↗.