Per Kristian Stoveland

Artist

Per Kristian Stoveland · perkwerk.art ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/per-kristian-stoveland ↗

Based

Oslo, Norway

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, digital landscapes, and technology-led installation

In the set

The Harvest ↗ · 400 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Per Kristian Stoveland approaches code as both a compositional instrument and a framework for fiction. Based in Oslo, he has worked across design, programming, installation, and generative art. He co-founded the interdisciplinary studio Void in 2015 after years spent as a designer and coder, while his engagement with creative programming reaches back to experiments with Flash in the early 2000s.¹ This combination of technical fluency and speculative imagination gives his work its distinctive tension: every image is governed by a system, yet appears to document a world beyond ordinary explanation.

Stoveland has described childhood years in Kenya and Zimbabwe, a Montessori education, music, science fiction, and fantasy world-building as formative influences.¹⁶ These references do not enter the work as illustration alone. They inform a method in which rules establish terrain, atmosphere, light, and implied events, leaving viewers to assemble a narrative from partial evidence.

Coding a landscape

Stoveland's process typically begins with an idea, followed by sustained thought, coding, testing, and revision. Experiments can alter the original premise as unexpected visual behavior emerges.² He works primarily with JavaScript and p5.js, with some earlier pieces developed through C++ and openFrameworks.³ The resulting practice is generative in a precise sense: the artist designs a system capable of producing related but non-identical compositions, then evaluates its range before release.

This iterative method connects his independent art to the spatial concerns of Void, whose projects operate between art, architecture, design, and technology. Yet Stoveland has distinguished blockchain-based generative work as a route back toward self-directed creation, separate from the logistical and client-facing demands of studio practice.¹ In this context, code is not simply a production tool. It defines the boundaries within which chance, variation, and authorship negotiate each image.

The Harvest

Released through Art Blocks on 18 January 2023, The Harvest comprises exactly 400 editions.⁴ Its landscapes stage encounters between monumental terrain and luminous airborne or architectural forms. Beams traverse ridges, valleys, pits, and layered surfaces, while controlled palettes produce conditions ranging from misty calm to theatrical darkness. The collection's parameter system includes variations in reach, yield, feature, palette, surface, approach, alignment, elevation, atmosphere, topography, and the configuration of its imagined harvesters.⁵

Live on Art Blocks: the-harvest-by-per-kristian-stoveland ↗

Systems of wonder

The collection grew from landscape experiments and the image of beams striking an unfamiliar world. Stoveland developed an intentionally open science-fiction premise around entities harvesting sustenance across planets, allowing each output to suggest an episode without fixing a definitive plot.¹ Architectural scale and contrasts between darkness and radiance turn the landscape into a stage for an event that remains unseen but strongly implied.

Across the series, procedural variety serves atmosphere rather than novelty. The recurring horizon, terrain, and radiant intervention make the 400 editions legible as one world, while shifts in topography and illumination prevent that world from settling into a single description. The Harvest therefore demonstrates Stoveland's central achievement: using a tightly authored system to preserve ambiguity. Code determines what can appear, but narrative begins precisely where that determination ends.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Per Kristian Stoveland links page ↗.