Michael Kozlowski (mpkoz)

Artist

Michael Kozlowski (mpkoz) · site ↗

Based

Born Kalispell, Montana · lives in Seattle, Washington

Raster

raster.art/artist/michael-kozlowski ↗

In the set

Chimera, 987 editions · Metropolis, 940 editions · Bokeh, 300 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Michael Kozlowski, who works under the handle mpkoz, was born in Kalispell, Montana, and is based in Seattle, Washington. He describes himself as a media artist and software developer whose central interests are real-time graphics, mixed reality, and interactivity.¹ His path into the field was incidental rather than planned. He moved to California in 2010, worked construction and odd jobs, enrolled in community college, and eventually entered the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where a single elective in creative coding redirected him entirely. After graduation he worked as a developer at mixed-reality technology companies, including a stint on the HoloLens research team at Microsoft, before quitting in 2021 to make generative art full time.²

That trajectory, from a film student remixing Processing sketches and watching Daniel Shiffman tutorials to a full-time artist on Art Blocks, is the spine of his early interviews.³ It also explains the recurring tension in the work. Almost everything he makes takes in something human, analog, or natural, such as a photograph, a sound, or a three-dimensional scan of a biological object, and pushes it toward the synthetic and simulated. He has framed this as the condition of a transitional generation, alive at the moment when our digital presence begins to outweigh our physical one.⁴

Chimera: still life as an old tradition in a new medium

Chimera, an Art Blocks Curated project of 987 editions, was begun in the summer of 2021 and released in January 2022.⁵ Kozlowski has said it started life as an "orchid generator," a two-dimensional parametric line renderer that slowly grew into a full three-dimensional still life engine.⁶ The name carries two meanings. There is the mythological chimera, a two-headed monster, which describes a process he says he loved and sometimes hated, and there is the genetic sense of a single body fusing two distinct lineages: generative art and still life painting.⁷

Chimera variety grid · live on Art Blocks ↗

The system is unusually legible for collectors. Each work renders a still life with a bouquet of up to ten flowers drawn from eight species, including dahlias, roses, sunflowers, and notably variable orchids, every flower defined purely by mathematical functions rather than 3D models or signed distance fields.⁸ The pieces vary across twelve stroke styles, among them oil, charcoal, watercolor, and textile, each an attempt to render an analog manner in simple geometry with no textures, and they may carry table objects ranging from fruit and books to a pipe or a memento mori skull.⁹ Kozlowski frames still life deliberately. Long dismissed at the bottom of the academic hierarchy of genres, it is, in his reading, a kind of time capsule, timeless yet historically specific, and therefore a natural subject for an on-chain medium meant to persist.¹⁰

The project also carried a personal and charitable weight. The first thirty-two editions sold included a hand-stretched giclee print on canvas, and a portion of proceeds was directed to cancer research and patient care, including the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, after his mother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma during its development.¹¹ Commercially, Chimera became one of the stronger early generative collections on the secondary market, a fact cited when later partners introduced him.¹²

Metropolis: the city as a node-based system

In early 2023 Art Blocks formalized a partnership with the gallery Bright Moments, which specializes in in-person, or IRL, minting, and the first commission in that collaborative series was Metropolis by mpkoz.¹³ Where Chimera looked to the still life table, Metropolis looks outward to the city. Kozlowski describes it as a long-form work exploring the node-based systems that enable modern society, the same logical structures that underlie computing, blockchains, and logistics, abstracted into sprawling architectural compositions.¹⁴ The collection, of 940 editions, was released on 24 February 2023.¹⁵

Left, Metropolis on Art Blocks ↗ · right, Bokeh on Art Blocks ↗

The design fused two minting models. Every mint in the primary sale reflected one of five Bright Moments cities, New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, encoded as an on-chain trait that drew on abstract architectural forms and palettes associated with each place.¹⁶ After the sale, holders could generate a diptych: a second, complementary piece, derived from the same seed and minted in person, free of gas, only in the city tied to their token, during a gallery tour that ran across each location in March 2023.¹⁷ Stylistically the project leans on cubism and abstract expressionism while attempting, technically, to emulate painting within an on-chain algorithm. Kozlowski told CoinDesk that the appeal of the IRL format was watching a work resolve in front of you while standing beside the artist who made it.¹⁸

Bokeh: light, perception, and the return to the physical

If Chimera moved still life onto the chain and Metropolis moved the city, Bokeh, an Art Blocks Curated release of 300 editions published in October 2024, takes light itself as its subject.¹⁹ The project is built on a single base algorithm that studies the interplay of light, form, and perception, and it closes a loop back to the physical world that runs through his whole practice.²⁰ The three hundred digital works were sold through a ranked auction, and winning bids became eligible to purchase one of thirty unique wall sculptures, each a hand-built physical expression generated from the same algorithm as its digital counterpart.²¹

The physical side of Bokeh extended into sculptural lighting, with a set of distinct lamps released as a companion edition, objects that respond to movement and viewpoint and invite the viewer to handle them.²² This emphasis on performative, touchable objects is consistent with his sculptural work outside the AB[500], such as Empath, a gravity-powered mechanical piece of more than two thousand moving parts that he ties to his family's horology heritage.²³ Read together, the three Art Blocks works trace a deliberate arc: the painted table, the built city, the quality of light, each treated as a generative system and each tested against a physical counterpart.

A practice between the analog and the synthetic

Kozlowski's commercial and institutional footprint has widened alongside the on-chain work. He has produced editions with Avant Arte, which frames him as a generative artist who puts his own spin on art history, and his projects appear in collector-facing archives such as the Kanbas collection.²⁴ His statement, that he believes generative art will have a tremendous influence on how we experience and consume art within our lifetimes and that everything he makes is an attempt to push that transformation forward, reads less as promotion than as a thesis the three AB[500] works set out to prove.²⁵

What unifies Chimera, Metropolis, and Bokeh is not a single look but a single method. Each takes a subject with a deep pre-digital history, the still life, the metropolis, and the optics of light, and rebuilds it as code that can run forever on a public ledger, while reaching back across the gap toward canvas, gallery wall, and physical object. It is the transitional condition he keeps describing, made into work.²⁶

Bibliography

For the complete bibliography see the Michael Kozlowski (mpkoz) links page ↗.