Phaust

Artist

Phaust · phaust.art/pointila ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/phaust ↗

Based

Based in London and Brighton

Practice

Generative art joining code, scientific concepts, natural systems, colour, and collaboration

In the set

Pointila ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Phaust identifies itself as a generative art collective based in London and Brighton, with backgrounds in computer science and neuroscience. Its stated practice considers art and science together, treating randomness as both a creative force and a means of examining complex systems.¹ This collective structure matters: authorship is framed not as a solitary gesture, but as collaboration among people, machines, natural processes, and inherited visual languages.

Pointila brought that approach to Art Blocks Factory on 9 September 2022. The official collection record identifies 200 unique artworks, establishing the exact scale of this long-form release.² Across the series, landscape is less a depicted place than an emergent effect. Accumulated marks gather into ridges, plains, canyons, and atmospheric horizons, while occasional block-like interruptions disclose the screen as the work’s native support.

From pointillism to pixels

The project begins with a precise historical analogy. Pointillist painters used separate touches of colour that blend optically when viewed at a distance. Pointila translates that perceptual structure into computation, linking painted dots to the discrete pixels of a digital display.³ Its algorithm divides the canvas into columns, traverses those columns while placing dots, and builds landscapes from a small number of layered operations. Randomness determines the ultimate placement of millions of marks, but the resulting field remains directed by a carefully delimited system.³

This balance between control and contingency produces five named styles: Grainy, Flowing, Dense, Hazy, and Sparse. They arise through changes to density, distortion, and horizontal or vertical displacement. The distinctions are not cosmetic presets. Each style reorganises the relation between individual marks and the larger scene, making the same basic apparatus capable of producing clarity, haze, banding, turbulence, or graphic compression.³

The project’s thirty palettes extend this inquiry. Monotone, duotone, multicolour, layer-based, point-based, and gradient treatments test how colour can bind dispersed elements into depth. Some palette names refer to works by Georges Seurat, making art history an operational component of the system rather than a decorative citation.³

Live on Art Blocks: pointila-by-phaust ↗

A landscape that performs

Pointila is designed to remain active after minting. In live view, a click initiates or pauses an animated transition between primary and secondary palettes. Number keys select progressively altered glitch states, and the still render can retain traces of the same blocky transformation.³ Interaction therefore does more than reveal optional features. It exposes the image as a running program whose appearance can occupy several related states.

The landscape in Pointila is not fixed behind the screen. It is continually negotiated between optical mixture, algorithmic variation, and viewer input.

Phaust later described Co(r)ral as building upon Pointila, carrying its dot-based construction beneath the ocean and using dynamic colour changes to address coral bleaching.⁴ MuseumWeek’s project record confirms that this later work comprised 100 outputs from one algorithm and could cycle between colourful and bleached states.⁵ The connection clarifies Pointila’s position within the collective’s practice: its landscapes established a reusable visual grammar in which state changes can carry both formal and thematic meaning.

Market and archival records preserve other views of the release. OpenSea identifies the collection as a 200-work Art Blocks project,⁶ while an October 2022 NFT market report lists Pointila among the period’s tracked Art Blocks collections.⁷ A later digital collection display on Deca also records Pointila by Phaust, indicating its continued circulation within collector-built archives.⁸ These records are secondary to the live code, yet they show how a generative artwork moves simultaneously through aesthetic, technical, and collecting systems.

Within AB[500], Pointila is significant for the economy of its premise. Columns, dots, layers, palettes, and bounded variation are sufficient to construct a broad landscape vocabulary. The series makes computational procedure legible without reducing the output to a diagram of its rules. At a distance, dots cohere into terrain. Up close, terrain dissolves into data-like particles. In motion, both conditions yield to the glitch, a reminder that the apparent scene remains an event produced by code.

Bibliography

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