Nicole Vella

Artist

Nicole Vella · nicolevella.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/nicole-vella ↗

Based

Lives and works in Toronto, Canada

Practice

Generative and computer art using code, shaders, motion, color, and immersive installation

In the set

This Is Not A Rock ↗ · 350 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Nicole Vella is a computer artist and web developer whose practice joins technical experimentation to questions about how digital images acquire meaning. She studied art at OCAD University, where she also worked as a teaching and research assistant in computer programming and wearable technology.¹ An OCAD publication describes her approach succinctly: she treats code as paint and screens as canvas, using generative art to explore the boundary between digital and physical experience.² This formulation is useful because Vella’s work does not present computation as an invisible production tool. Code remains conceptually active in the finished image, shaping what viewers see and how they understand its claim to material presence.

Her route into generative art connected early interests in photography and web development. Vella has recalled learning to code by examining the source of web pages, then encountering Processing in 2014 and moving more decisively toward creative coding after entering art school in 2018. A 2020 course in shaders brought these interests together by allowing mathematical instructions to address pixels directly through the graphics processor.¹ The resulting practice often relies on simplified form, saturated color, and carefully modeled movement. In a 2022 Nuit Blanche profile, Artscape characterized her work as an inquiry into technology’s capacity to express and elicit human emotion.³

Representation under pressure

This Is Not A Rock (2023) is Vella’s AB[500] project, issued in 350 editions. The work began as an attempt to synthesize convincing rocky textures. Vella used fractional Brownian motion, noise, and ray marching to map procedural surfaces onto three-dimensional forms.¹ Yet the project’s central concern is not simulation as technical display. Its title invokes René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images and redirects attention from the depicted object to the conditions of depiction. What appears to be a rock is neither a geological object nor simply its picture. It is an executable system producing a contingent visual proposition.

This distinction gives the series its critical tension. Each output encourages recognition through familiar cues such as irregular mass, mottled coloration, shadow, and granular texture. At the same time, the project frustrates any stable claim that the represented form possesses material substance. Vella asks viewers to look past surfaces and consider the components beneath apparently coherent things.¹ The rock therefore becomes a compact philosophical device, one that joins the long history of pictorial illusion to the specific operations of generative software.

Live on Art Blocks: this-is-not-a-rock-by-nicole-vella ↗

Systems, motion, and collaboration

The project also clarifies Vella’s broader investment in software as an active artwork rather than a fixed recording. At Nuit Blanche, Colour Field was presented as continuously generating software that never loops, its changing forms addressing individuality and collective movement.³ Bright Moments similarly identifies immersive experience and shader-based art as central to her practice.⁴ Across these works, variation is not decorative abundance. It is the means by which a system makes time, difference, and possibility perceptible.

Vella’s practice developed through collaborative contexts as well. In 2023 she participated in Feral File’s N=12, a group exhibition curated by Aaron Penne.⁵ Its catalogue documents twelve artists collaborating across seven time zones through shared code, process discussions, weekly meetings, critiques, and reviews.⁶ Vella’s contribution, Text Me When You Get Home, emerged within this networked exchange. Contemporary coverage emphasized that the artists wrote their own code while occupying the dual roles of artist and engineer.⁷ The exhibition positioned computation not only as a medium of production and distribution, but also as infrastructure for collective thought.

A Bright Moments residency followed in August 2023, when Vella released If You Could Do It All Again.⁸ Later that year, Fingerprints announced Ghosts in the Machine, a work based on quines that uses a single hash to generate source code and ethereal figures.⁹ Coverage of that release described the source code appearing within the artwork’s background and its imagery changing over time.¹⁰ These projects extend the concern established by This Is Not A Rock: the visible image is never autonomous. It is an event generated by rules, hardware, time, and acts of interpretation.

Vella’s rocks persuade the eye, then redirect attention toward the code that makes persuasion possible.

Seen within this wider practice, This Is Not A Rock is both an accomplished study in procedural texture and a reflection on digital ontology. Its 350 editions hold recognition and doubt in productive balance. Each output resembles a singular found object, while every surface discloses the logic of a constructed system. Vella’s achievement lies in making that contradiction immediately legible without resolving it.

Bibliography

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