Code + Matter: When Algorithmic Artists Refused Screens
Published: 2026-07-29 | Tags: cryptoart, generative art, Code + Matter, William Mapan
In October 2025, during Art Basel Paris week, four algorithmic artists put on a show with one radical constraint: no screens.
The show was called Code + Matter. Self-organized by William Mapan (@williamapan), Alexis André, Julien Espagnon, and Florian Zumbrunn (@florianzumbrunn), it featured oil paintings, laser-cut sculptures, plotter drawings, and pastels on tracing paper — all produced by algorithms, none of them on a screen.
The exhibition statement opens with Merleau-Ponty: “The history of art will fail to grasp the power of images so long as it remains confined to the tyranny of the visible.” Then it makes its case: between the artist’s intention and its physical form lies the work of code — artisanal, exploratory, transforming an aesthetic vision into algorithm until it finds its incarnation in the image again and again.
Four paths from code to matter
Each artist took a different route:
- William Mapan translates painterly gestures into mathematical functions. Morning painting, afternoon coding, every day for 15 years. He calls it “algorithmic mannerism” — code that learns to draw like him, borrowing and amplifying his style.
- Alexis André runs algorithmic layers through laser cutters, building physical depth from digital conflict.
- Julien Espagnon drives plotters and mechanical arms with code, then withdraws entirely to let nested randomness produce the image.
- Florian Zumbrunn generates tree-structured algorithms, prints them, then adds pastel and oil by hand — entering into dialogue with his own output.
The proof it worked
Mapan’s key moment: visitors walked in and asked, “Where is the code?” That was the answer. The medium had disappeared into the intention.
“The medium is not the main thing. It’s the intention which is the main thing and then our medium, which is code and iteration, supports what we want to say rather than being the point of the thing.” — William Mapan
From Paris to Art Basel
Code + Matter was a proof of concept. Nine months later, Mapan showed the same algorithm’s output as a 2.5m oil painting at Art Basel’s Zero 10 — his largest ever — alongside live plotter drawings and on-chain minting. Same algorithm, three materializations: paint, plotter, pixel.
His color process is particular: he paints small studies from holiday photographs, photographs those paintings, extracts the palette digitally, feeds it into the algorithm. “I no longer work with color that I can’t make physically. It is a limitation I imposed myself, because I feel more connected that way.”
The question
The question isn’t screens vs no screens. It’s whether code can have a body. Whether an algorithm can develop a touch. Whether 15 years of daily output — Mapan sees 500 to 1,000 variations a day — can produce something that looks like the result of a hand rather than a function.
The Code + Matter artists aren’t rejecting digital. They’re insisting that code is material — that the algorithm is not a means to an image but a body of knowledge with its own gravity, its own demands, its own resistance.
The title is the argument. Code doesn’t describe matter. Code is matter.
Sources: Code + Matter exhibition statement | Right Click Save: Landscapes of the Mind | William Mapan