Generative art James Merrill, known for his Wimmelbilder-style landscapes that blend the mechanical precision of code with the warmth of hand-drawn illustrations, has pushed the limits of on-chain art with the latest version of his acclaimed project Busy, which debuts as part of the Art Blocks Curated series.
Inspired by the intricate systems of city life, Busy draws out a sprawling simulated city using a pen plotter, a machine that can draw each piece line by line in incredible detail.
Ahead of Art Blocks Curated’s Busy exhibition and the release of Busiest , we caught up with Merrill to talk pen drawing, the technological breakthroughs that made Busy possible, and why the concept of “timelessness” is at the core of his practice.
From building a custom machine to encoding 85 hand-drawn illustrations directly into the blockchain, Merrill’s creative process is a masterclass in the fusion of code, craft, and concept.
OpenSea: Let’s dig a little deeper and ask, how has your relationship with code as a creative tool evolved over time?
James Merrill: My initial interest in pen drawing came from a small corner of the internet, the#pendrawinghashtag on Twitter, and I was fascinated by the fact that these machines could draw whatever they wanted, and they could create endlessly, which got me interested in generative art.
I was so fascinated by the ability to create on the fly with code that I eventually bought a pen plotter in 2019 and taught myself generative art with it. I had been making digital art for ten years prior to this, so the next natural part of my art practice was to embrace code and start experimenting with pen drawing.
OpenSea: What system or rule set inspired Busy? How did you design one that could support this level of complexity?
James Merrill: This system was created in 2019 when I created a work called (A Series of Pipes). (Busy) is an extreme version of it. It creates a series of systems that constitute a world in which there are buildings, roads and various abstract elements. They interact and echo each other. They do not interfere with each other - they coexist and continue to build on the original basis and add new elements.
What’s interesting about (Busy) is that a lot of it was actually drawn by me, not all of it was drawn by the algorithm, and there are also parts that are generated by the algorithm and react to what was drawn, and all of this comes together into a whole - an extremely dense, detailed work of art that would be difficult to do by hand, but was systematically constructed by a computer and then drawn by a machine.
OpenSea: In (Busy), there is a clear tension between chaos and control, density and legibility. How do you balance this tension? How do you judge whether the composition is what you want?
James Merrill: Yeah… For a while, I was trying to keep myself busy because a lot of the art was about myself and my experience coming out of COVID, where I was living in Vermont and traveling to New York and feeling a bit anxious there.
There was so much going on around me, I felt like an ant, almost getting distracted by all these systems working - but then I found solace in it, realising that everything was going according to plan, and that missing a metro station or something like that wasn't really a big deal, and accepted that reality and started appreciating it.
The idea behind this work is to give you this feeling at the beginning: it feels chaotic, there are so many things happening that you can't keep track of any details, but when you look closer you realize that it contains many systems, yet it is all very orderly. I hope that everyone who sees this work can experience this different perception.
OpenSea: This was very much influenced by your experience in New York, where you can really feel a sense of chaos and control, and I appreciate that you incorporate this metaphor into your art. So, you describe (Busy) as creating highly detailed worlds using computation. How do you define the world in the context of your art?
James Merrill: To me, the world is a series of cities connected by roads and things like that, so there's a nostalgic element to (Busy) that brings back memories of playing (SimCity) on the computer twenty years ago, and I loved those games and how detailed the world was and how everything was connected and how there were systems and order and simulations, so a lot of that inspired this work and that's the perspective I wanted to aim for.
You can see skyscrapers and buildings, but looking all the way down you see cars and parks and trees, however, when you draw really small things and have to draw with a pen, you start to run into this physical limitation, so in order to really do this, I had to figure out, "How small can I make things and still have them be legible?" and then work back from there.
The smallest elements were cars on the road, they were barely recognizable, I started there and worked my way up to very large buildings, car parks, etc. I wanted to see how much I could draw before they became blurry, and since this piece was drawn with a pen there were physical limitations.
OpenSea: There are a lot of different shapes and movements in the artwork, how much of that is inspired by organic life and real architecture, and how much of that is purely algorithmic?
James Merrill: There are 85 illustrations in this set of artwork, and they are all drawings of various buildings and other things that I have drawn. They are not inspired by any specific real-world place or building - it is more of a style that I developed while working on the algorithm, and the real fun of feeding the illustrations into the algorithm is that I can create new illustrations for specific places.
You saw it firsthand when we were in Marfa, there were no skyscrapers or anything, because Marfa doesn’t look like it, it’s just a small town on a desert plateau, so in the months leading up to the event I was able to basically walk around and drive around taking pictures with Google Street View and document my favorite buildings and places and stuff like that – and then draw them.
So I would walk around and try to find some interesting architectural forms there, and those are what I drew inspiration from for the illustrations for [The Busyness of Marfa].
That project was very different from what I created for the final piece (Busy), but it really proved that this is more than just a piece of art, it’s a framework that I intend to try again around the world, I mean, how fun would it be if we could do one (Busy) in Tokyo or Istanbul? All these ideas are in play, and I can use it as a framework and continue to refine it through the process that I’ve built.
OpenSea: I love Busy in Marfa. It has the shapes of a water tower and a barn. These elements fit in seamlessly with the city we live in. I like its conceptual framework. It is more like a framework than a single entity. From a technical perspective, what was the biggest breakthrough or the most difficult problem you encountered in the process of building this project? Were there any very significant technical challenges you had to overcome?
James Merrill: There are several, these are all on-chain, and I'm a firm believer in generative art on-chain, and there are 85 illustrations in the code, and this starts to raise a real problem in terms of file size, when gas fees are high, it can be very expensive to upload code to the Ethereum blockchain, and in the past, artists have paid tens of thousands of dollars for this, and their projects are actually much smaller than Busy, especially when the original source material for Busy was only about 1.5MB.
So, I had to develop a proprietary technology to compress all these buildings and elements into the smallest possible form, which was a big challenge, and I was able to reduce the file size by about 90% so that I could put it on the Ethereum blockchain.
On top of that, just creating graphic art with depth was incredibly difficult, I had to implement a solution called "geometry occlusion", which basically means I can put one thing in front of another - but this doesn't always work, with graphic art, normally you get two overlapping shapes and you can see both of them.
You have no depth, so being able to figure that out was another breakthrough moment for me, and once I was able to figure that out, I felt like it was going to open up a ton of opportunities for this artwork—and for all of my future art.
OpenSea: Very interesting, how did you eventually solve this problem?
James Merrill: So, that’s interesting… AI couldn’t solve this problem at all, and I could ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, but they didn’t have a viable solution, and if you wanted to use a library that could do this, there weren’t a lot of options out there - especially if you wanted to put it on-chain, so I had to create my own solution.
I don’t have a math or computer science background, but I could basically create some scenarios that I could debug visually, and I could start to figure out what looked like it would work, using a lot of logic and JavaScript to determine when overlap occurred and what to show and what to hide when overlap occurred.
Once I had that done, I could basically see it in action, do this thousands of times for each piece of art, find all the rough edge cases that were there, and then patch them up and keep going, and it was definitely a month-long process just to get it to work.
OpenSea: Art Blocks Curated has a unique heritage and expectations. How did the background of releasing Busy under this brand influence your creative approach? Or, is that really the case?
James Merrill: It is true, in November 2022 I worked on a project with Art Blocks Curated called ORI, it was a great experience, they are a very responsive and awesome team and I knew I wanted to work with them again, they have since moved on to publishing work that includes a physical element, so what better way to do that than with drawing art?
When I saw that happening and some really interesting projects coming out like Bokeh by mpkoz, I knew Busy would be a great choice, it’s all about digital art and generative art, right?
In the 1960s, people were interested in creating artwork on computers and outputting it to pen plotters, so that wasn’t really new, but putting it on a blockchain was new, and for me it felt like a very natural fit to be able to combine the two, and considering Art Blocks was the first to put code on the blockchain at scale and get artists involved, it made sense to work with them on Busy.
OpenSea: Why is on-chain art important to you?
James Merrill: This is really important to me because I’ve been doing this for decades, and a lot of times in the past, artwork and artists get lost in time, and the people I made art with as a teenager - I can hardly find their work online now, servers shut down, companies transition, everything disappears in the hustle and bustle, and it just disappears.
But I’m almost certain that what happens on the Ethereum blockchain will be immune to these effects and will be permanent, which is crucial to me because I want the art I create now to still be visible in 20 or 30 years, and I feel like this might be the best way to achieve that — besides putting it on paper.
We put these works on the blockchain, and I personally draw each work, which gives each of my artworks a double permanence. In the past, uploading JPEG files to the website felt very lossy, but now, uploading to the blockchain feels very permanent.
OpenSea: Are you committed to working with Ethereum as a chain, or are you trying other chains?
James Merrill: I'm certainly interested, I think what's happening with Ordinals is very interesting, and I think as long as you can commit something to a blockchain and it feels like the blockchain will last for decades, it makes sense to me, and I'm open to all possible opportunities and avenues.
OpenSea: That makes sense. Are there any hidden easter eggs or rare goodies in your latest issue (Busy) that players should pay attention to?
James Merrill: There are all kinds of things to discover here! This work is designed to make people stare for a long time and keep coming back to it to discover new things. One of the more difficult things I challenge people to do is to have them look at multiple works and start to discern the differences. [Busy] has a lot of characteristics, but there are definitely some characteristics that I haven’t revealed.
Some elements appear only in one of the works, some elements, among the thousands on the canvas, are unique to only one work and it is up to the viewer to discover it. This is actually inspired by the "Wimmelbilder", an art form that strives to condense all complexity into a specific image. On a very relevant level, think: Where's Waldo?
OpenSea: Generative art has obviously undergone a lot of technological advancements and changes since its inception, especially in recent years since its combination with blockchain technology. What developments do you hope to see in it in the next few years?
James Merrill: I think that as computing power increases, technological breakthroughs emerge, and shaders become available, we will see new levels of realism in generative art, and there are some artists really at the forefront of that, but personally, it's not an area that I practice in, I'm more interested in converting it into a format that a pen plotter can read, and I think what's really interesting in this area is that there are people developing new pen plotters with new capabilities.
There’s a company called Bantam Tools in Peekskill, NY, and they’re innovating and making new machines that can use different mediums, and we’re going to see plotter artwork that uses mostly charcoal, paint, or acrylics, which to me is very interesting – and is only possible with some of the new machines they’re currently producing, like the Art Frame.
OpenSea: Yeah, I always thought it was incredible how draftsmen could create work in a medium like watercolor that feels so uncontrollable, and it was really interesting to work in this highly controlled mechanism, so what does the future look like for you? As you said, you see Busy as a framework.
James Merrill: One of the interesting things about Busy is that we were able to build a 72" x 24" prototype at the last minute, which is a one-of-a-kind machine, and it's going to be a game changer for any artist who owns it, and I'm going to buy it and incorporate it into my art, so from now on I can create art on a truly cinematic scale, which is going to be a huge game changer.
Beyond that, I’d like to take Busy on a world tour, which I’m currently working on. I’ll be taking it to new cities, incorporating local landmarks into local artworks, and sharing my joy for the project, and generative and episodic art, with new audiences.
Beyond that, all these technological innovations that I built for this project—I plan to use them in the future and incorporate this illustration practice into this generative practice because I think something really interesting emerges when you combine them.
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