Yazid

Raster

raster.art/artist/yazid ↗

Based

Born 1987, Brunei. Lives and works in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

Practice

Generative art shaped by code, algorithms, minimalism, symbolism, and exchanges between digital systems and material perception

Now

Continues to develop experimental coded works informed by an earlier career in software development

In the set

Automatism ↗ · 426 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Yazid Azahari is a Bruneian artist, technologist, and creative coder whose practice turns the functional language of software toward open-ended visual inquiry. Born in 1987, he began his career developing utilitarian applications before becoming increasingly interested in code, algorithms, systems, and automation as means of artistic expression.¹ His work retains the clarity associated with software design, yet redirects that clarity toward uncertainty. Hard edges, spare compositions, simulated texture, and carefully bounded rules establish the conditions through which unexpected images can emerge.

This balance between control and surprise is central to Yazid’s development. As a teenager, he experimented with Flash, ActionScript, HTML, interactive animation, and website design. He later studied Interactive Media and Human Computer Interaction, fields that continue to inform his attention to how an artwork is encountered as well as how it is generated.² Rather than treating computation as a neutral production tool, Yazid uses it as a structured partner whose behavior can reveal forms beyond the artist’s immediate intention.

A machine with a drawing implement

Automatism translates automatic drawing into a long-form generative system. The project asks what might happen if a machine were given the equivalent of a blank surface and permission to wander. Its virtual drawing agent, called “Sharp-E,” moves through irregular curves, straight segments, and abrupt changes of direction. A classic random-walk procedure guides the movement while preventing new strokes from overlapping those already drawn.³

No recognizable figures are pre-programmed. Nevertheless, viewers may discover symbols, bodies, objects, or fragments of writing within the accumulating paths. This perceptual instability is not a secondary effect but the project’s conceptual center. The algorithm supplies marks and spatial relations, while recognition remains contingent on the viewer. Curated describes the series as an inquiry into how images and meaning can be perceived within the results of a random-walk algorithm.⁴

Issued through Art Blocks Factory in 2022, Automatism comprises exactly 426 editions. The scale allows a single procedure to disclose a broad visual range without losing its identity as one coherent work. Across the series, density, direction, palette, and the intervals between strokes alter the mood of each output. Some appear diagrammatic, others calligraphic or architectural. Each is both a record of deterministic computation and a temporary field for projection.

Live on Art Blocks: automatism-by-yazid ↗

Minimal systems, situated practice

Yazid’s restraint belongs to a wider body of work informed by early computer art, abstraction, and minimalism. An fxhash editorial on Hashed Arcs connects its deliberately reduced structures to a larger practice spanning numerous long-form and curated projects.⁵ Another fxhash survey selects Hashed Cities among notable representational projects released on the platform in November 2021, placing Yazid’s minimalist city imagery within the early history of fxhash.⁶

The practice is also grounded in Brunei. Yazid lives and works in Bandar Seri Begawan, and institutional accounts identify him as a Bruneian technologist, creative coder, and generative artist.⁷ This position complicates any reading of generative art as placeless software. His systems circulate globally through browsers and blockchains, but their visual decisions arise from a specific biography, education, and cultural environment.

Exhibitions have extended that circulation into physical institutions. In 2023, Hong-Gah Museum in Taipei presented five works by Yazid, including Automatism, in “Generative Taipei On-Site: The Archipelago Hashed,” an exhibition placing blockchain-based generative works alongside embroidery, plotting, and interactive processes.⁸ The collaborative project (kinder)Garden, Monuments, made with Zancan, has also appeared through bitforms gallery as a union of Yazid’s hatched aesthetic, block-like structures, and Zancan’s foliage.⁹

Within this broader trajectory, Automatism remains a particularly lucid statement. Its modest premise generates a sustained encounter among rule, accident, and interpretation. Yazid does not ask the machine to imitate human consciousness. He constructs a limited behavioral field, then allows both system and viewer to test what a wandering line can become. That economy of means supports an expansive result, one in which computation remains legible while perception stays unresolved. His participation in Art Blocks’ “Minters & Makers” discussion further situates the project within a community concerned with relationships among artists, algorithms, platforms, and collectors.¹⁰

Bibliography

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