Sadık Aksu | xnmtrc

Artist

Sadık Aksu / xnmtrc · sadikaksu.com/about ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/xnmtrc ↗

Practice

Generative art joining architectural drawing, computational systems, spatial research, and artificial intelligence

In the set

Freeplan ↗ · 128 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Sadık Aksu approaches generative art from within architecture. His practice connects architectural knowledge with computational systems, artificial intelligence, and experimental design research. Under the name xnmtrc, he uses architectural logic as a generative medium, translating spatial relationships and representational conventions into programmable structures.¹ His images do not simply imitate technical drawings. They investigate how plans, partitions, grids, annotations, and other architectural elements can become the rules of an artwork.

That inquiry is concentrated in Freeplan, released through Art Blocks Factory on January 20, 2022 as a collection of 128 editions.² The project places the conventions of the architectural plan inside a generative system. Its vocabulary of lines, fields, symbols, and labels recalls professional drafting, yet each composition is evidence of an algorithm making spatial decisions rather than documentation of a predetermined building.

From plan to process

Freeplan draws on the early twentieth-century open-plan tradition, in which conventional rooms and rigid visual boundaries give way to more freely arranged spatial elements. Aksu explains that partitions, floors, structures, and related components establish the sensation of space without returning to a closed architectural box.³ The transaction hash determines the overall composition, context, selection of components, and representation style. Each iteration is also scaled, oriented, and numbered like an architectural project.³

This procedure produces a tension between discipline and contingency. The drawings appear regulated because they retain the authority of plans, measured notation, and organized sheets. At the same time, their spaces have no client, fixed program, or completed building to validate them. The algorithm acts as a speculative designer, distributing recognizable architectural components without resolving them into a conventional commission.

The series consequently asks viewers to read as well as look. Walls suggest enclosure but may not complete it. Paths imply approach, while structural and landscape marks indicate possible conditions of occupation. The drawings remain recognizable as architecture while withholding the certainty expected from construction documents. Across 128 editions, repetition establishes a stable visual grammar, but variation prevents that grammar from settling into a single ideal plan.

Live on Art Blocks: freeplan-by-xnmtrc ↗

Architecture as a generative medium

Projects beyond Freeplan clarify the continuity of Aksu's method. ODA, created with Víctor Doval, begins with the room and develops contrasts such as inside and outside, transparency and opacity, visibility and concealment.⁴ Archi Doodles transfers the spontaneity of architectural sketching into a generative process, including extended intersection lines, marker-like colors, and human-scale figures.⁵ Junkspace likewise uses plan representation, partitions, flooring, paper types, and palettes to interpret the spatial residue associated with modernization.⁶

These works show that architecture is not merely a graphic style for Aksu. It supplies concepts, constraints, compositional relationships, and methods of representation. His writing similarly compares architecture and software through their shared dependence on systems and constraints, arguing that both translate rules into organized structures.⁷ A separate instructional essay recommends small visual coding experiments, including patterns, simple plans, and randomized variations, as an entry point for architects learning programming.⁸

Within this broader practice, Freeplan offers a concise statement about authorship. Aksu establishes the grammar, probabilities, and field of possible decisions, while the final plan is resolved through the generative process. The collection is neither a proposal for 128 buildings nor a set of arbitrary graphic variations. Its editions record a designed system repeatedly negotiating freedom and order. Architecture becomes the work's subject, its representational vocabulary, and its operational logic.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Sadık Aksu | xnmtrc links page ↗.