Jimmy Griffith (remnynt)

Artist

Jimmy Griffith (remnynt) · vibes.art ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/remnynt ↗

Based

Lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina

Practice

Systems art, generative software, simulated physics, digital painting, and world-building

Now

Developing an independent generative practice shaped by games, code, and networked media

In the set

Proscenium ↗ · 400 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Jimmy Griffith, working as remnynt, describes himself as a systems artist. His practice joins a long engagement with digital media to the procedural thinking he developed in game design. Griffith studied computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spent approximately a decade in the games industry, and created EverWing, named Facebook Game of the Year in 2016. He subsequently left that industry to concentrate on generative art, approaching software as an unusually open medium for constructing rules, worlds, and unexpected behavior.¹

His first encounter with programming came through making games on a TI-83 calculator. In 2008, while studying computer graphics, he built a generative terrain system based on a custom height-map algorithm. The pleasure of finding unplanned forms within that system established an enduring method: Griffith creates relatively simple interacting rules, then works through the emergent visual field they produce.¹

A landscape that paints itself

Proscenium began when Griffith revisited those early terrain experiments while learning WebGL. Its premise is deliberately counterfactual: paint behaves like rubber, falling and bouncing across a three-dimensional landscape while leaving marks at every collision. Once the motion ends, the terrain collapses into a flat plane, preserving the paint traces while concealing the world that shaped them. Art Blocks characterizes the result as generative geometry that begins with a world and ends as paint on canvas.²

The project comprises exactly 400 editions, released through Art Blocks Curated in 2024. Each edition is not merely a static composition but the conclusion of a live simulation. The finished image retains evidence of gravity, topography, and impact, even though the underlying terrain has disappeared. This tension gives the title its force. A proscenium marks the boundary between theatrical action and its audience, while Griffith’s digital surface similarly separates the visible picture from the coded event behind it.

Live on Art Blocks: proscenium-by-remnynt ↗

Simulation as mark-making

Griffith worked on Proscenium for nearly 600 days and wrote more than 9,000 lines of JavaScript. He avoids relying directly on libraries where possible, preferring close contact with graphics APIs because technical constraints, errors, and extreme parameter changes can become aesthetic discoveries. One breakthrough came from making the simulated terrain dramatically taller. When projected back into two dimensions, its exaggerated heights stretched the paint traces into forms that the artist had not anticipated.³

Color is handled with comparable deliberation. The system contains 17 palettes, most derived from physical pigments or pigment mixtures, alongside monochromes and palettes informed by photographs taken while hiking. Nineteen terrain styles alter the routes along which paint falls and pools, ranging from rugged mountains to structures recalling science-fiction cities and low-polygon game graphics.¹ These parameters do more than diversify appearance. They establish relationships among environment, motion, and residue, making each output a record of a particular world’s internal conditions.

Proscenium makes abstraction legible as the remains of an event.

This causal structure distinguishes the work from an image generator concerned only with visual variation. The live render allows viewers to follow individual drops through repeated impacts before the landscape is flattened. Looking becomes retrospective: each mark can be understood as evidence of a trajectory, while the final composition withholds much of the mechanism that produced it.

Between game, painting, and performance

Griffith’s experience in games remains fundamental, particularly his understanding of pseudorandomness as a multiplier of possibility. Yet Proscenium redirects that logic away from goals and toward sustained attention. There is no level to complete. Instead, the simulation stages a passage from virtual world to painterly field, asking viewers to consider code not simply as a tool but as an artistic substance with its own affordances.³

A participatory physical interpretation presented during Art Blocks Weekend in Marfa clarified this concern. Visitors sent paint-covered bouncing balls across canvas laid over plywood ramps. Although the physical action shared the digital work’s initial idea, its result diverged because matter and software guided the process differently. Griffith used the comparison to argue that software constitutes a medium in its own right, rather than an invisible substitute for paint.³

The broader practice supports that position. Griffith released the color-focused on-chain series vibes in 2021 and the evolving smart-contract work the reliquary in 2022. Art Blocks placed Proscenium within its Curated program, whose stated criteria include innovation, technical rigor, and aesthetic quality.⁴ Across these works, Griffith’s recurring subject is not randomness alone but the expressive capacity of rule-bound systems. Their wonder arises when a constructed world begins to exceed the artist’s initial picture of it.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Jimmy Griffith (remnynt) links page ↗.