Vamoss

Artist

Vamoss · vamoss.com.br ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/vamoss ↗

Based

Lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, interactive media, open-source systems, and participatory installation

In memoriam

Carlos de Oliveira Junior died in January 2025¹¹¹²

In the set

We ↗ · 1,024 editions
Patterns of Life ↗ · 512 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Vamoss was the working name of Carlos de Oliveira Junior, a Brazilian artist-programmer whose practice joined generative image-making to a sustained interest in interaction, collaboration, and technological literacy. Art Blocks records him as an artist-programmer and designer with a master's degree in Creative Economy, for whom code was the raw material of a daily experimental practice developed over more than a decade.¹ Institutional accounts add a longer professional history: he studied design, began working with interactive media in 2004, and combined content, hardware, software, architecture, and interface design in projects for physical and digital environments.² He died in January 2025, and his official site is now preserved in memoriam.¹¹¹²

This background matters because Vamoss did not approach generative art as the production of isolated compositions. His works are better understood as systems of encounter. A program establishes a field of possibilities, but the artwork takes form through execution, variation, display, collection, and, in his open-source projects, intervention by other people. His images often resemble organisms, woven structures, diagrams, or territories seen from an indeterminate scale. The visual order is legible, yet never fully settled.

The two Art Blocks projects considered here establish this approach with particular clarity. Patterns of Life, released through Art Blocks Factory on July 17, 2021, comprises exactly 512 artworks.³ We, released through Factory on October 1, 2021, comprises exactly 1,024.⁴ Together they move from cellular rule systems toward an explicit meditation on plurality and mutual dependence. Their titles locate computation within lived experience: not pattern in the abstract, but patterns of life; not an autonomous object, but we.

Rules that behave like organisms

In Patterns of Life, Vamoss used cellular automata to develop a field of colored relations. Each work cycles through three eight-bit rules selected from 256 possibilities per rule, producing more than 16 million possible rule combinations. Each three-cell neighborhood maps to one of eight colors, and the evolving field is mirrored into four quadrants; clicking advances the rule.³⁵ The significant point is not numerical abundance alone. Cellular automata begin with discrete states and local instructions, then allow repeated operations to produce formations that appear unexpectedly biological, architectural, or textile-like.

The official collection text relates the resulting geometries to old paintings and patterns produced by weaving machines.³ Bands, cells, knots, and enclosures gather into structures that can also evoke ancestral ornament, microscopic tissue, tiled surfaces, or computational maps. Because no single interpretation dominates, the images expose a productive ambiguity in algorithmic abstraction. A viewer recognizes organization before knowing what has been organized.

The series also reveals how Vamoss used color as information rather than decoration. Binary states continue to drive the automaton, but assigning a distinct color to each of the eight neighborhood configurations makes their local relationships visible.³⁵ Color therefore records differences within the program's behavior. It gives perceptual form to distinctions generated by the underlying rules.

Live on Art Blocks: patterns-of-life-by-vamoss ↗

From multiplicity to the collective

We extends Vamoss's interest in rule-based variation while shifting the conceptual emphasis toward coexistence. Its 1,024 artworks form a population twice the size of Patterns of Life. The generator selects among eight shape modes, random, stars, hexagons, triangles, arrows, trapezoids, diamonds, and flags, then arranges them through random flow, rotation, or orientation toward the center. Size, spacing, and color vary, while palettes correspond to edition groups.⁴ Every output is individual, yet its visual logic depends on relations among parts.

The official description likens this complex web to a beehive, whose survival depends on communal behavior.⁴ The title supplies a compact ethical frame. “We” can mean a community, a temporary gathering, or humanity understood as an interdependent system. It can also describe the relationship between artist and machine, program and output, collector and network. The work avoids illustrating any single community. Instead, it gives collectivity a procedural form: identity emerges through adjacency, difference, and repetition.

This social dimension had a material consequence outside the collection. The project designated 25 percent of initial sales for Lanchonete<>Lanchonete, supporting work with children and families near Providência in Rio de Janeiro.⁴ This connection between generative production and shared infrastructure distinguishes the project from a merely symbolic account of togetherness. The collective named by the title enters the conditions through which technical knowledge can circulate.

The images themselves make that circulation imaginable. Some outputs resemble woven grids, others segmented maps or cellular colonies. Voids become as consequential as filled regions, suggesting that a collective is constituted not by seamless uniformity but by intervals, boundaries, and negotiated proximity. Repetition supplies continuity while mutation preserves difference.

Live on Art Blocks: we-by-vamoss ↗

The artwork as an open proposition

Vamoss's later exhibition history clarifies ideas already active in these Art Blocks projects. Arte de Código Aberto, presented at Sesc Tijuca in 2022, invited visitors to alter works through programming. The exhibition included printed and generative pieces, with three interactive works prepared for public intervention.² In this framework, source code does more than generate a finished image. It remains available as a medium of inquiry, revision, and learning.

The project subsequently appeared at Sesc Madureira from June to September 2023 and, from January 9 to May 19, 2024, at Museu do Amanhã. The museum described the exhibition as a journey through the relationship between programming language and artistic expression, with visitors creating generative works while exploring the tension between order and chaos.⁷ Its annual report records 141,677 visitors and identifies tactile and sound works, Brazilian Sign Language video, and research involving blind programmers among its accessibility provisions.⁸

These details reposition participation as more than a novelty of interface. Accessibility and modifiability concern who may enter a technological system, understand it, and transform it. Vamoss argued that open-source art acquires a life through dialogue with people who view, use, share, copy, play with, or change it.² The claim resonates with cellular automata: a work persists through successive states, each conditioned by prior rules and new encounters.

At NFT Rio in 2022, SuperUber included Vamoss in an interactive and immersive exhibition at Parque Lage whose gesture-controlled displays introduced visitors to digital collections.⁶ At Meta Gallery in 2024, another presentation of Arte de Código Aberto allowed visitors to modify colors and forms through QR codes or a keyboard. The exhibition also included digital videos, sculptures, and sequenced groups of pictures, broadening the work beyond screen-based interaction.⁹ Across these settings, the same practice moves between code, image, object, institution, and audience.

Vamoss makes the algorithm visible not as an impersonal authority, but as a structure that people can inspect, experience, and sometimes rewrite.

A poetics of technical literacy

Vamoss's contribution lies in joining formal generative inquiry to a civic understanding of computation. His works make complex behavior sensorially accessible without pretending that technology is neutral or immaterial. A 2023 co-authored article in Revista VIS identifies him as a doctoral researcher in interdisciplinary visual poetics at UFRJ and records his role in building Encontros Digitais, a learning space linking Brazil's artist-programmer community.¹⁰ That combination of research, pedagogy, and production supplies an important context for the Art Blocks works.

Patterns of Life turns elementary operations into structures that exceed immediate prediction. We asks how distinct parts become a shared formation. The open-source exhibitions then allow audiences to intervene in such formations directly. In each case, the program is neither hidden machinery nor spectacle. It is a cultural object whose rules can be examined through their consequences.

This approach gives pattern an ethical weight. Pattern is habit, inheritance, infrastructure, and relation. It can organize difference without erasing it, but it can also constrain what becomes visible. By mapping binary neighborhoods to color, multiplying local decisions across a field, or opening code to alteration, Vamoss insisted that systems are made and therefore can be understood differently.

The two AB[500] collections preserve that proposition in distinct registers. Across exactly 512 artworks, Patterns of Life demonstrates how concise rules proliferate into visual worlds. Across exactly 1,024 artworks, We frames multiplicity as a collective condition. Their enduring interest comes from this movement between precision and openness. The code sets parameters, but the artwork begins where those parameters produce something no single image can exhaust. Vamoss's official site is now preserved in memoriam, carrying selected projects and open sketches forward as a record of a practice built around learning and sharing code.¹²

Bibliography

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