Piter Pasma

Artist

Piter Pasma · Art Blocks profile ↗

Based

Groningen, the Netherlands

Raster

raster.art/artist/piter-pasma ↗

Practice

Generative systems, demoscene code, path tracing, raymarching, signed-distance functions, plotter drawing, and open technical education

In the set

Skulptuur · 1,000

AB[500]

1 project · 1,000 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Piter Pasma is a generative artist formed by drawing, mathematics, and the discipline of making computers perform beyond their apparent limits. He began programming at nine and entered the demoscene in 1997. That international computer-art subculture prizes self-contained audiovisual programs, technical ingenuity, and severe size constraints. Pasma produced four prize-winning demos whose complete executables fit within four kilobytes.¹

He later studied computational science and machine learning, but his artistic method retained the demoscene's practical ethic: build from first principles, understand the machine, and make every character of code do visible work. For Pasma, compression is not merely engineering. It is a way to reveal how much form can be latent in a small symbolic system.

Skulptuur treats code as a block of potential. The algorithm removes possibilities until one object, one light, and one viewpoint remain.

One thousand sculptures without matter

Skulptuur was released through Art Blocks Curated on 27 September 2021 as 1,000 unique real-time works. Its title is Dutch for sculpture, but the objects have no physical model behind them. They exist as mathematical descriptions rendered by the collector's browser.²

Pasma describes the series through the classical metaphor of carving. A sculptor faces a block of stone that could become many things, then makes one reality by removing the rest. Skulptuur begins with a sea of mathematical possibilities. A token hash drives a deterministic sequence of selections until the program isolates one form, surface, lighting environment, and camera.³

The resulting objects look heavy, polished, translucent, metallic, chalky, ceramic, or mineral. They can resemble impossible maquettes, alien monuments, folded machinery, bones, reliquaries, or design objects from a civilisation that never existed. Photorealistic light persuades the eye that the surface has weight even when the geometry resists physical construction.

Intersecting grids and polyrhythms

The generator begins by choosing two grid sizes. Each grid receives a shape that may be solid, hollow, or double-shelled. The grids are intersected, so only space common to both remains. Colour and material are then assigned in relation to the resulting form. A compact procedure can therefore produce extensive variation in topology, void, thickness, and rhythm.⁴

Four evenly spaced outputs show the flagship algorithm's range.

Pasma connected this structure to polyrhythm. In music, two different rhythmic divisions can occupy the same duration and produce a composite pattern. His early Algorithmic Sculpture 1 intersected stacks of double-shelled spheres with rounded cubes, a spatial analogue to the 2:3 hemiola. Skulptuur generalises that idea across variable grids and shape families.⁵

The analogy clarifies why the forms feel ordered without becoming repetitive. Each grid has its own regularity. Their overlap creates a third structure that belongs fully to neither. Voids, ribs, chambers, and extrusions emerge as beats produced by the interference between systems.

Path tracing in the browser

Geometry alone does not make Skulptuur sculptural. Its sense of presence depends on light. Pasma wrote a Monte Carlo path tracer in WebGL2, allowing the browser to approximate light bouncing through a three-dimensional scene. Reflective surfaces cast caustics onto diffuse ones; backlighting frames thin shells; internal chambers catch or withhold illumination.

The path tracer is progressive. A newly opened work begins noisy and resolves as samples accumulate, so viewing includes the passage from calculation to image. Keyboard controls let a collector raise or lower rendering speed, stop computation, and use tiled rendering for higher-resolution output without overwhelming the graphics processor.⁶

This is sculpture understood through optics rather than fabrication. The object is inseparable from the lighting model that makes it visible. A form with the same geometry could feel like glass, metal, plaster, or resin because illumination and material response alter its apparent substance.

Six thousand three hundred and seventy bytes

The entire generator and renderer occupy 6,370 bytes, less than half a page of compressed symbols. That economy descends directly from demoscene size coding, where each instruction competes for scarce space. On-chain storage gives the constraint an additional material consequence because every character has a cost.⁷

Compression can sound like a technical stunt, but in Skulptuur it is conceptually exact. A tiny symbolic object unfolds into an edition of highly varied visual objects. The contrast between code's physical smallness and its representational capacity becomes part of the work. The program does not contain 1,000 images. It contains a way to construct them.

Pasma makes this process unusually available. His project page reproduces the entire source, and Skulptuur Decoded begins a line-by-line explanation with the pseudorandom-number generator. The generator's state is seeded from the token hash and updated through a compact Xorshift128 procedure. Randomness here is repeatable computation: unpredictable before minting, identical whenever the same hash runs again.⁸

No cherry-picking

Before release, Pasma published sequential Ropsten test mints. Their order demonstrates that the sample was not selected to hide weak outputs. This is a practical statement about long-form integrity. The artist's responsibility is to design a system whose ordinary results remain compelling, not to show only a handful of fortunate accidents.

The test archive also preserves development as evidence. Generative art is often encountered after a project has stabilised, when the code appears inevitable. Sequential tests expose uncertainty: the artist did not know which forms would arrive, but had to decide when the generator's space was ready to be released.

That emphasis on the whole system distinguishes Skulptuur from conventional digital modelling. A modeller evaluates one object until it is finished. Pasma evaluates the distribution of a thousand unseen objects and tunes the rules that will produce them.

From shaders back to lines

Pasma's practice moves between pixel-based lighting and physical drawing. After buying an AxiDraw plotter, he confronted a machine that can only draw lines and cannot erase them. Shaders and conventional ray tracing were therefore unusable. He developed the rayhatcher, a system that raymarches signed-distance fields while orienting connected lines along the virtual surface.⁹

The algorithm encodes knowledge of line drawing into a three-dimensional renderer. It can turn a mathematical scene into an SVG, preserve its code as a comment inside the file, and send the result to a pen plotter. In Industrial Devolution, 3,930 characters generate corroded pipes and immense concrete blocks, then expose the output as plotter-ready linework.¹⁰

Skulptuur and the rayhatcher solve related problems in opposite directions. One makes mathematical form appear materially present through simulated light. The other removes pixels and rebuilds volume through economical lines. Both show that a renderer is not neutral infrastructure. It determines what kinds of objects a system can imagine.

Code as a social medium

Demoscene culture mixed competition with intensive knowledge sharing. Pasma carried that combination into generative art through technical essays, shared functions, feedback, and community projects. His 176-byte pseudorandom-number generator circulated through the Art Blocks community and appeared in other artists' scripts.¹¹

He was also lead organiser of Genuary's first editions, gathering thirty-one prompts for a month of daily code art. The exercise treats repetition as practice rather than production pressure. Hundreds of participants compare different solutions to the same prompt, making technique public and difference legible.

Universal Rayhatcher expands sharing into the artwork itself. Participants write signed-distance formulas inside Pasma's compact language; his renderer interprets their code as plotter-ready scenes. More than five hundred outputs were made by many artists. Authorship becomes layered: Pasma creates the expressive machine, while each participant determines what it will describe.¹²

Collaboration and the hidden network

Right Click Save describes Pasma as an artists' artist whose influence often appears through tools, explanations, and small pieces of code rather than signature imagery. His mathematical fluency is paired with a drive to understand systems from scratch and share the resulting shortcuts. This makes technical assistance part of the practice rather than peripheral labour.

Feral File's N=12 made that usually invisible network explicit. Twelve artists met across seven time zones, sharing code, critique, and process before producing distinct works. Pasma's Balls to the Walls used raymarching, sphere packing, a randomised room, and searches for effective light and camera positions, but it also emerged from months of dialogue.¹³

Even Skulptuur's compressed source contains a greeting list to friends. In demoscene tradition, social acknowledgement is embedded within the executable object. The code remains autonomous when it runs, but it records that autonomy as collectively enabled.

Why he belongs in the AB[500]

Piter Pasma belongs in the AB[500] because Skulptuur is a foundational demonstration of on-chain raymarched sculpture. It joins compact code, real-time path tracing, mathematical form, and long-form distribution without relying on external libraries or pre-rendered assets.

The series makes three scales visible at once. At the smallest scale is a 6,370-byte program. At the middle scale is a single luminous object, resolved by one collector's browser. At the largest is an edition of 1,000 forms that maps the algorithm's capacity. None can stand in for the others.

Pasma has argued that generative ownership changes how viewers encounter a system. Endless refreshing collapses outputs into an average impression. A minted work becomes particular: this is your form, worth sustained attention, while the full set remains available as its context.¹⁴ Skulptuur belongs in the canon because it turns that particularity into an encounter with code itself. The object looks carved from matter, but its real material is possibility under constraint.

Bibliography

The references cited here are listed below. For the complete 31-source ledger, see the Piter Pasma bibliography ↗.