Matt Jacobson (NumbersInMotion)

Artist

Matt Jacobson (NumbersInMotion) · iammattjacobson.com ↗

Based

Born 1990. Lives and works in New York, NY

Practice

Generative art using algorithms, browser-based systems, plotting, and digitally mediated physical production

Now

Co-creator of Stitchables, whose first onchain embroidery collection, connect-close, launched in November 2024⁸¹⁰

In the set

Watercolor Dreams ↗ · 600 editions
Blaschke Ballet ↗ · 600 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Matt Jacobson describes himself through several overlapping roles: recreational mathematician, educator, and generative artist. Born in 1990 and based in New York, he studied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder before developing a practice centered on creative computation. Art Blocks characterizes his work as an investigation of mathematical aesthetics and the frequently obscured rules that organize the surrounding world.¹ This language is instructive. Jacobson does not employ mathematics merely to decorate a surface with complex geometry. He uses systems to make structures perceptible, then gives those structures enough visual latitude to behave in ways that seem fluid, contingent, and alive.

His route into art began not with conventional studio training but with looping GIFs encountered online around 2015. Learning that code could produce those moving images transformed programming, a medium in which he already felt capable, into an artistic instrument. He later attended the School for Poetic Computation, where Zach Lieberman's course Recreating the Past introduced him to foundational practitioners including Vera Molnár, John Whitney, Ken Knowlton, Lillian Schwartz, and Nancy Burson.² That education situated computation within an artistic history rather than treating it as a novelty. Jacobson's stated preference for “more poetry, less demo” defines the resulting practice: technical sophistication matters, but only when it sharpens an aesthetic proposition.

Painting as a visible procedure

Watercolor Dreams brought this position to Art Blocks Curated on April 30, 2021, as a collection of exactly 600 artworks.³ The title announces an encounter between two apparently opposed material conditions. Watercolor is associated with pigment, absorbent paper, gravity, and the irreversible spread of moisture. A browser-based algorithm operates through formal instructions, numerical variables, and repeatable execution. Jacobson does not attempt to erase this difference. Instead, he asks what computation can disclose about painting's temporal logic.

In conversation before the release, he explained that the project grew from an interest not only in finished watercolors but also in the process through which a blank surface becomes an image. He directed viewers toward the moments when colors meet, the directions in which movement develops, and the relation between a composition's beginning and its end.² These cues encourage a procedural mode of looking. The image is not simply a field of translucent color. It is evidence of successive decisions made by a system.

The official p5 program makes that process literal. A token's hash seeds a noise-driven flow field, and paired streams move through it in opposite directions from weighted layouts of circles, rectangles, lines, and occasional letterforms. Translucent trails accumulate for roughly 30 seconds through varied palettes and optional mirrored, rotated, striped, inverted, or wave-like behavior. The space bar restarts the animation, while the D key exports a still.³

The ten selected outputs demonstrate the collection's range without dissolving its coherence. Soft-edged bands can resemble diluted pigment pulled through wet paper, while sharper circular and linear organizations disclose the computational armature beneath the wash. Color functions as both sensual material and information. Each meeting of hues records an interaction among rules, yet the result avoids the sterile finish often associated with digital precision. The algorithm has been tuned to preserve uncertainty as an aesthetic effect.

This tension between control and contingency is central to Jacobson's historical position. Holladay Saltz identifies serial algorithmic art as serial, algorithmic, and performative: a system generates related but distinct works, code structures their emergence, and public participation activates individual outputs. Saltz illustrates this argument with Watercolor Dreams, placing it within a broader account of constraints as engines of novelty.⁴ Jacobson's collection makes that theory tangible. Its unity belongs not to one privileged image but to the bounded space of possibilities expressed across 600 editions.

Live on Art Blocks: watercolor-dreams-by-numbersinmotion ↗

Movement inside the unit circle

Released through Art Blocks Playground on September 30, 2021, Blaschke Ballet is likewise a collection of exactly 600 artworks.⁵ Its title joins mathematical terminology to embodied choreography. A Blaschke product is a construction from complex analysis associated with mappings of the unit disk. Jacobson translates this abstract domain into a stage on which repeated forms gather, separate, turn, and sweep across pictorial space. Mathematics establishes the conditions of movement, while “ballet” supplies an interpretive vocabulary of rhythm, balance, ensemble, and controlled variation.

The project extends concerns already visible in Watercolor Dreams, but it changes their expressive register. The earlier collection evokes diffusion, flow, and layered translucency. Blaschke Ballet appears more explicitly choreographic. Shapes seem to occupy positions relative to one another, as though responding to a score. Repetition becomes a form of phrasing, and rotational movement suggests dancers tracing prescribed paths while retaining individual presence.

Its p5/WebGL program selects 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 moving points and one of three named choreographic layouts: La Sylphide, The Nutcracker, or Swan Lake. Token-derived choices alter time, spatial, angular, and color mappings while a fragment shader recomputes the Blaschke-inspired complex-plane field every frame.⁵

The relationship between discipline and surprise is especially important. Ballet depends upon practiced constraints, yet a performance is experienced as continuous motion rather than as a catalogue of rules. Jacobson's algorithm works similarly. Its mathematical apparatus is neither concealed nor offered as an end in itself. The viewer perceives ordered behavior, but that order produces visual events whose grace cannot be reduced to a formula. The work thus proposes computation as a choreographic medium, capable of distributing agency between an artist's authored system and the output generated through its execution.

The project also clarifies why Jacobson's alias, NumbersInMotion, is more than a convenient signature. Numbers here do not remain inert quantities. They become positions, rates, curves, intervals, and relationships. Motion is the perceptible state of calculation. Across the collection, an equation's consequence is encountered visually and temporally, even in a still output, because every form implies the path that placed it there.

Live on Art Blocks: blaschke-ballet-by-numbersinmotion ↗

From screen to plotted and stitched matter

Jacobson's wider practice shows that his investment in systems is not confined to the screen. His Art Blocks biography records his use of plotters and notes that he launched the Art Blocks Engine platform Plottables in 2022.¹ The platform's marketplace includes his Streamlines and the collaborative Endless (5,607,250 to Infinity), situating his own production within an infrastructure built for other artists as well.⁶ An independent collaboration with illustrator Jocelyn Renouf similarly combines generative plotting with traditional ink sketches, placing programmed patterns into dialogue with observed urban subjects.⁷

This movement between code and material production matters because it complicates any simple division between digital and physical art. A plotted line is calculated, but it also encounters pen pressure, paper texture, registration, and mechanical duration. More recently, Stitchables, created by Jacobson and Luke Shannon, has translated algorithmic outputs into machine embroidery. Art Blocks describes the platform as bridging code and craft through physically embroidered objects, an initiative that developed from a live activation at Art Blocks Marfa Weekend.⁸ Its first onchain collection, connect-close, was released on November 11, 2024.¹⁰ In each case, the system reaches outward into a material process whose constraints alter what the code can become.

A 2023 collaboration with Samsung offered another translation of generative logic into domestic space. Jacobson created 100 generative designs based on colors from the company's Bespoke appliance range, with imagery inspired by the flow of water and air. The works were intended for customized refrigerator panels, making the appliance surface a site for algorithmic variation.⁹ Although commercial in setting, the project remained consistent with Jacobson's interest in revealing how rules generate perceptible difference.

Teaching systems, building contexts

Education is not incidental to this practice. Art Blocks records that Jacobson began teaching creative computing at Parsons School of Design in 2019.¹ His work as an educator, artist, and platform builder suggests a shared commitment: systems become culturally meaningful when people can inspect, modify, and activate them. Code is therefore not a private mechanism hidden behind an image. It is a medium with histories, conventions, and teachable methods.

This orientation also explains Jacobson's emphasis on precedent. He has described his art as standing on the shoulders of earlier figures spanning computer art, design, photography, and conceptual practice.² Such acknowledgments resist the rhetoric of technological rupture. Generative art did not suddenly appear with blockchain distribution. Its contemporary forms extend decades of experiments in rule-based composition, computational graphics, instruction, chance, seriality, and machine drawing.

The distinctive achievement of NumbersInMotion is not the simulation of painting or dance, but the conversion of mathematical relations into conditions for sustained attention.

Seen together, Watercolor Dreams and Blaschke Ballet form a concise statement of that achievement. Both contain exactly 600 editions, yet neither treats multiplicity as simple abundance. Each collection is an argument made through variation. One renders procedure as atmospheric color; the other renders mathematical mapping as choreography. Their individual outputs matter, but their deeper subject is the system that holds difference together. Jacobson asks viewers to look across a series, infer its boundaries, and recognize that an algorithm can be simultaneously rigorous and expressive. In his hands, computation becomes less a demonstration of technical power than a means of making relations visible.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Matt Jacobson (NumbersInMotion) links page ↗.