Roni Block

Raster

raster.art/artist/roni-block ↗

Based

Lives and works in Sweden

Practice

Creative coding, generative drawing, graphic narrative, installation, and collaborative software art

In the set

Machine Comics ↗ · 96 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Roni Block is the generative-art identity associated with programmer and artist Roni Kaufman. Kaufman’s 2022 KTH degree project, completed in Stockholm, documents experiments connecting human-powered art, electronic paper, and creative coding.¹ Across these contexts, code is not simply a production tool. It establishes constraints within which images and encounters can unfold.

Machine Comics, released through Art Blocks on 22 February 2022, is the central work in Block’s AB[500] record. The official collection page identifies 96 unique artworks, matching the project’s edition count of 96.² The title brings two systems of organization into contact: the machine, associated with procedural execution, and the comic, associated with panels, pacing, repetition, and reading. An independent NFT market report also places the collection among generative releases from the first half of 2022.³

Drawing as sequential machinery

The collection presents algorithmic image-making through the visual and conceptual language of comics. Each output can be approached as an autonomous composition, yet the title encourages attention to sequence and implied duration. Forms occupy panel-like spaces, marks recur, and differences between generated states suggest incidents without resolving into a fixed script.

Variation is therefore more than a source of visual diversity. It becomes a narrative device. The algorithm distributes graphic events while viewers infer transitions, causes, and possible stories. Repeated geometries establish continuity, while changes in density, scale, and placement interrupt it. The machine does not tell one story. It constructs a grammar through which many provisional stories can be read.

The results retain the directness of drawing while making authorship visibly procedural. Block defines a system and its possible behavior, but each output manifests one arrangement within that range. The project consequently shifts attention from the singular image toward relations among images, and from illustration toward the design of conditions for interpretation.

Live on Art Blocks: machine-comics-by-roni-block ↗

From autonomous outputs to shared systems

Block’s practice also participates in collaborative and open-source cultures. An OpenProcessing essay identifies Kaufman as one of ten artists invited to produce customizable generative projects for Crayon Codes. The initiative exposed source code and allowed collectors to alter selected variables, treating collection as a limited form of collaboration.⁴ An account of Genuary 2022 credits Kaufman with prompts concerning Sol LeWitt wall drawings and deliberately incorrect machine learning, indicating an interest in instruction-based art and critical play with computation.⁵ Kaufman’s work is also discussed in academic research on remixing within the OpenProcessing community, where iterations of one of his sketches illustrate how creative coders tune and extend shared code.⁶

Under the Kaufman name, this inquiry enters exhibition settings. PHOTO IS:RAEL lists Kaufman among the artists in the group exhibition Changing Rooms.⁷ The later re:creation exhibition placed Kaufman’s Portrait Robot in dialogue with Maria Kling’s Original Simulation, using algorithmic collage, physical prints, and virtual presentation to examine originality and authorship.⁸ The Finnish National Gallery subsequently named Portrait Robot among ten works shortlisted for Combine24, a competition based on its copyright-free collection data.⁹ The work was also included in Remix the Archive, presented in Helsinki and New York.¹⁰

Kaufman’s participation in the re|thread collective broadens the practice into audiovisual installation and research. The program for the 2023 Sound and Music Computing Conference credits Kaufman as part of the team behind sys|calls, in which routine software activity generated system calls translated into projected visuals and synchronized sound.¹¹ The later Myriad People paper, co-authored by Kaufman, documents a Stockholm exhibition of nine artworks and a dataset encompassing 124 open-source projects used by those works.¹²

The collective’s un|fold offers another institutional context. Its project record credits Kaufman as a designer and developer of the multidimensional light and sound sculpture and records support from KTH, Nobel Week Lights, and WASP.¹³ More recently, Stockholm’s National Museum of Science and Technology listed Maria Kling and Kaufman in the gallery program for Dome Dreaming, its international fulldome festival.¹⁴ Seen in this wider context, Machine Comics is a compact statement of recurring concerns. Rules become images, systems become stages, and viewers complete meanings that code can organize but cannot fully determine.

Bibliography

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