- Artist
- Motus Art · owenmcateer.com/ilumz ↗
- Raster
- raster.art/artist/motus-art ↗
- Based
- Born 1986, Ireland. Lives and works in Madrid
- Practice
- Generative digital art, creative coding, kinetic displays, and interactive installation
- Now
- Exhibited Resonance at Centre del Carme, Valencia, in 2025
- In the set
- Balletic ↗ · 200 editions
ilumz ↗ · 57 editions - Links
- Full bibliography ↗
Motus Art is the moniker of Owen McAteer, an Irish visual artist and creative coder whose practice centers on animated digital art and interactive installations. Art Blocks describes his work as a search for the hidden beauty in numbers, pursued through a minimalist language of movement and flow.1 An institutional account of the 2025 installation Resonance identifies McAteer as born in Ireland in 1986 and based in Madrid.2
His work begins with computation but does not treat code as a neutral production tool. Algorithms establish behaviors, limits, and relationships, while animation makes those structures perceptible over time. This concern extends from browser-based generative editions to physical displays and responsive environments. Expo Sunderland presented three works by McAteer in 2025, describing a practice that uses mathematics to negotiate clarity and chaos, wandering and order, and continuous transformation.3
Choreographing the grid
Balletic is Motus Art's clearest statement of movement as an organizing principle. Released through Art Blocks on August 12, 2022, the collection comprises exactly 200 editions.4 Each output arranges rotating blocks within a fixed grid, then coordinates their motion through algorithms, easing curves, and timing modifiers. The apparent rigidity of the underlying structure becomes the condition for fluidity: blocks gather into waves, pulses, diagonals, and fleeting figures before dissolving into new alignments.5
The title frames computation as choreography. No individual block carries the composition; the work emerges from synchronization across the field. Negative space is equally active, revealing forms between and behind the moving units. Its reduced, often two-tone vocabulary concentrates attention on rhythm, phase, and the contrast between geometric hardness and organic-looking motion.
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Live on Art Blocks: balletic-by-motus-art ↗
From programmed order to organic variation
For ilumz, Motus Art collaborated with British abstract artist Emily Jackson, working as Wolffia Inc. The Art Blocks project comprises exactly 57 editions.6 Its premise joins creative coding with the visual habits of physical studio practice: hand-drawn shapes, layered textures, patterns, brush-like marks, and deliberately imperfect contours. The title refers both to bioluminescence and to the Spanish verb associated with illumination.7
The collaboration required code to preserve irregularity rather than polish it away. Hand-drawn forms were interpreted through a bespoke angle-randomizing process so that recurring shapes would not appear identical. Circle packing supplied an underlying compositional skeleton, while collision checks, variable growth, and occasional small overlaps introduced controlled instability. Three palettes evoke morning, noon, and night, with neon accents sharpening the impression of forms glowing from within.7
This shift does not abandon Motus Art's interest in systems. Instead, ilumz broadens what a system can hold. Mathematical placement coexists with the evidence of drawing, and repeatable instructions yield surfaces that retain variation and apparent touch. Wolffia Inc.'s account of the project describes the collaboration as an encounter between physical composition and algorithmic art, grounded in recurring forms and collective pattern.8
2023, series
Live on Art Blocks: ilumz-by-wolffia-inc-and-motus-art ↗
Motion beyond the screen
The two Art Blocks releases establish a productive range. Balletic extracts fluid behavior from a strict modular grid, while ilumz asks computation to accommodate handmade difference. Across both, motion is more than animation. It is a method for exposing relationships that a still arrangement might conceal.
McAteer's later installation practice carries this logic into shared space. In Resonance, sensors and a controller translated participants' actions into changing color and movement, making observation part of the work's operation.2 His 2025 Pulsewidth Selection likewise used real-time generative rules and a custom two-tone dithering language called PWM.9 These projects clarify the continuity of the practice: coded constraints remain visible, but their meaning is completed through duration, variation, and encounter.
Bibliography
The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Motus Art links page ↗.