- Artist
- Michael Connolly · michaelconnolly.work ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/michael-connolly ↗
- Based
- Born 1981, Leeds, England. Lives and works in the United Kingdom
- Practice
- Machine-based concrete art spanning creative coding, graphic design, motion, live visuals, and installation
- In the set
- Elementals ↗ · 600 editions
Divisions ↗ · 500 editions - Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Michael Connolly describes his practice as a machine-based approach to concrete art, an objective investigation of line, form, and colour conducted within artist-defined parameter spaces.1 The formulation is precise. His programs do not surrender composition to unrestricted chance. They establish visual grammars, determine permissible relationships, and then let individual outputs negotiate those constraints. Across Elementals and Divisions, the grid acts less as a visible template than as an organising intelligence, holding together works that range from restrained emblems to dense, syncopated fields.
Connolly was born in Leeds in 1981 and completed a BA in Graphic Media Communication at Bradford School of Art in 2007.2 His route into generative art began through music and graphic design. Record sleeves made him attentive to visual communication, while experiments connecting sound, data, and image led him to Processing during his studies. His final degree project used that software for an audio-responsive installation and prints derived from recordings of the gallery space.3 This history helps explain why his generative work retains the directness of designed communication even when its outcomes escape prediction.
His professional experience included print, web, motion, interaction, three-dimensional work, and commercial production. After creative burnout, he returned to generative strategies because code allowed ideas to be tested and revised rapidly.3 The resulting practice combines a designer’s concern for hierarchy and cohesion with an artist’s appetite for emergence. Connolly’s systems are recognisably authored, yet they remain open enough to surprise their author.
A grammar of elementary forms
Released through Art Blocks Curated in April 2021, Elementals comprises exactly 600 editions.4 The project distilled interests accumulated across Connolly’s earlier design and coding practice. Its visual vocabulary begins with circles, squares, triangles, lines, and fields of colour, invoking physical printmaking and early Bauhaus principles. Connolly has specifically connected the work to Wassily Kandinsky’s teaching on form and colour, treating the algorithm as a contemporary response to that pedagogical legacy.3
The project’s apparent simplicity is structurally layered. Each composition is assembled from three principal grids of differing densities, with two sublayers in the base grid. Blend modes produce interactions where colours and forms overlap.5 A transaction hash governs variations in grid scale, offset, background, stroke, orientation, and one of two parent palettes. Dots and vent-like bars interrupt the elementary geometry as visual punctuation. The algorithm therefore works through accumulation: modest rules, repeatedly superimposed, generate complex relationships that could not be designed individually at the scale of the full series.
Connolly wanted every generated result to remain credible as a finished work. He iterated the program to balance variation against family resemblance, then accepted the loss of final-output curation inherent in the minting process.5 This transfer of selection from artist to system and collector is central to Elementals. Six hundred works were generated in under an hour, each appearing in response to another participant’s action.5 Authorship resides in the construction of possibility rather than the manual approval of every image.
The series moves between optical fullness and pause. Some outputs pile translucent geometries into energetic colour mixtures. Others retain broad areas of quiet around a few sharply placed forms. Across the set, repeated circles, diagonals, and rectangular interruptions establish rhythm without becoming a fixed motif. The strongest images appear composed in the conventional sense, although their compositional decisions emerge from a system designed to perform consistently across hundreds of unpredictable seeds.
Elementals makes constraint legible as abundance: a small alphabet of forms becomes a sustained exercise in difference.
The project was longlisted in the still-image category of the 2021 Lumen Prize.6 Connolly submitted the series as a whole, emphasising both its visual outputs and its fully on-chain generative construction. He regarded the recognition as a step toward broader understanding of generative art and as inseparable from the Art Blocks context that enabled the work.7 The longlisting affirmed that the project’s significance lies not only in isolated images, but also in the relationship among code, distributed production, and the complete edition.
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Live on Art Blocks: elementals-by-michael-connolly ↗
Subdivision as compositional engine
Divisions, released through Art Blocks Playground on 2 July 2021, consists of exactly 500 editions.8 It extends Connolly’s earlier experiments with subdivision and recursion while shifting toward a more explicitly graphic register. Its premise is concise: define an area, split it, and repeat. From this elementary procedure, the program develops arrangements that can resemble posters, flags, mosaics, architectural elevations, or textiles without representing any of them.
Connolly connects recursion to natural and constructed structures, from branching trees to subdivided city blocks.9 In Divisions, that logic is not merely a technical device. It produces the work’s tension between order and irregularity. Each subdivision inherits the authority of the containing frame, yet introduces new proportions, colours, and decorative possibilities. The eye can read the whole composition immediately, then move inward through nested decisions.
The project developed through adjustments to horizontal and vertical division, palette, and layout. Connolly has cited Auguste Herbin’s rule-like abstract structures as a meaningful encounter during development, while noting that his own experiments with related principles had already been underway.9 The affinity is especially visible in the use of hard-edged colour and elementary shape, but Divisions translates that inheritance into an executable system. Historical concrete abstraction becomes not a style to imitate, but a problem of procedural organisation.
Four overarching modes regulate the set: Regular, Macro, Deconstructed, and Quilt.9 Regular maintains the clearest expression of the initial recursive structure. Macro enlarges components into bold, sparse layouts. Deconstructed rotates grid elements at right angles according to the transaction hash, unsettling the parent structure. Quilt increases grid density and subdivision, producing textile-like intricacy. Seven palettes further modulate these structures, with shared near-black and off-white tones helping otherwise varied outputs retain continuity.9
These categories make the algorithm’s range intelligible without exhausting it. A Macro output can feel monumental despite the screen’s scale, while Quilt compresses numerous decisions into a patterned surface. Deconstructed works introduce a productive friction between the governing rectangle and its rotated internal fragments. What remains consistent is Connolly’s sensitivity to graphic weight. Dense passages are countered by open ones, bright colour by neutral ground, and repetition by a carefully rationed break.
The rapid collection of all 500 works demonstrated the communal temporality of long-form generative art, but the project’s lasting force comes from slower comparison.9 Seen as a series, Divisions reveals recursion as a curatorial instrument. The program does not simply manufacture variety. It organises differences into families, edge cases, and unexpected correspondences. Collectors can pair works by palette, scale, rhythm, or structural opposition, effectively continuing the artist’s investigation through acts of selection.
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Live on Art Blocks: divisions-by-michael-connolly ↗
From graphic discipline to material suggestion
Connolly’s later projects clarify that Elementals and Divisions established a method rather than a closed signature. Repeater began with an even grid of stripes and triangles, then applied successive copy-and-paste operations that could preserve repetition or fragment it into digital disorder.10 District grew from a tiled exercise and an accidental rotation behaviour, using stacked forms to pursue concrete art through algorithmic means.11 In both cases, a simple initial structure is subjected to operations that produce outcomes beyond straightforward planning.
The lineage also shows Connolly testing how digital images can imply physical qualities. Elementals evokes layered ink and print registration through blend modes. The Quilt mode in Divisions suggests fabric through density and repeated partition. Later work including Elefante incorporated photographic material and collage-like remixed canvases, seeking texture without literal imitation of physical media.12 These are not attempts to disguise computation. They explore how code can summon material associations while remaining visibly systematic.
Connolly’s practice is consequently best understood through the relation between control and release. His design background supplies economy, legibility, and a conviction that every element must earn its place. Generative procedure introduces duration, multiplicity, and encounters he could not author one by one. The work succeeds when neither side dominates. Rules remain palpable, but they do not become diagrams. Surprise remains active, but it does not dissolve coherence.
Within AB[500], Elementals and Divisions form a compact account of that balance. The first layers a finite alphabet until interactions proliferate; the second subdivides a field until structure becomes rhythm. Together they demonstrate how long-form generative art can operate as both a set of individual compositions and a single distributed artwork. Their grids are frameworks for variation, but also social structures through which artist, algorithm, platform, and collector participate in the final form.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Michael Connolly links page ↗.