The writings and artworks of algorithmic visual artist James Merrill.
Wavelet Dance is an exploration of tidal dynamics within minimalist systems of threads. Exhibited as both works of motion and a series of 30 individual 8”x10” drawings, Wavelet Dance exposes the undulating nature of currents that ebb and flow. Featured at SequenceFest in 2026 as a multimodal series.
Busy: An Algorithmic Sketchbook is a limited series of 20 sketchbooks, each containing 35 meticulously drawn illustrations made with the same robotic processes as the BUSY body of work. This process, which uses fountain pens with custom fabricated precision guides, allowed the series of 20 books to exhibit the common imperfections of ink drawings, thus turning it from a printed book to a…
A common source of confusion that I experience when posting my artwork on social media is: _why?_ Why use a plotter when you could use a printer? It's slower. Less exact. More expensive. It fails, far too often. Inkjet printers became ubiquitous in the 1980s because they solved nearly all of these problems. So why are artists obsessed with pen plotters?
A full accounting for the process of creating the BUSY art project over the course of a year. BUSY began as a challenge to create highly detailed artwork with the power of computation.
**BUSY** seeks to explore the overwhelming interaction of systems within our world. It may feel as if we're pulled in a million directions, always somewhere to be, something to see, a notification that needs attention. At a distance, this would appear as noise to an observer. Upon closer look, every little detail of our lives are worlds upon themselves of infinite detail. It was released in March…
The technique I used to for compressing SVG data by 93% for use in generative art systems by reducing markup into a series of basic instructions.
In the twenty years I've been practicing it, I've witnessed numerous communities grow and shudder, services shut down, databases corrupted, and businesses pivot to new models. When these things happen, user-submitted content often ceases to exist online. The collective contributions of the community are unrecoverable, lost into the ether.
In an experiment of “hyperlocal” generative art, James Merrill has adapted his upcoming work, BUSY, to incorporate the sights and scenes of Marfa, TX, and will live plot them publicly.
A study on rectangular subdivision and system disruption.
First, I fell in love with code. Then came pen plotters because I could use code to instruct them to draw things that I found beautiful. After that, I fell in love with inks because my drawings needed spectrums of color. Finally, I stumbled upon the world of fountain pens.
Building an interactive art installation requires careful planning and application architecture. In this post, I will explain my decisions and how I arrived at them.
Breakpoint attempts to demonstrate the joy of disruption. Finding an ordered system, perfect in its composition, and obliterating it. New forms arise as structures are decomposed. A single playful line is to blame here, as it wanders across the canvas and smashes everything in its path.
RUNAWAY is an ambitious attempt to create infinitely unique visuals at scale. In generative art, certain norms have emerged when building long-form projects. RUNAWAY is my attempt to escape these rules and make a vastly divergent system. The artwork engine uses a unique generative layering technique to let each edition run away from formulaic outcomes. These layers compound each other, adding…
The Algorithmic Art Studio is an interactive art installation demonstrating how generative code can produce physical pen drawings. Participants interact with various custom generative algorithms by tweaking the program's parameters. The experience is tactile, and hardware featuring knobs, dials, and sliders is blindly mapped to different characteristics of the visual output.
Pixel Clouds is a generative plotter drawing which uses pixels to mimic the shape of clouds.
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ORI is a long-form generative art project I released on Artblocks in November 2022. Making 450 unique mints involved carefully balancing variability and consistency to achieve my vision of unique and high-quality outputs. Along the way, I worked through a few challenges that I didn’t anticipate, and in the interest of helping other artists, I’ve published my experience.
ORI is a generative art project that combines themes that have deeply inspired my artistic pursuits, so in a way, it's a biography of my evolution in art.
This series explores the code that powers generative art in the metaverse. The goal is to break down different approaches to making art with code and understand how different artists are adding unique style to their work.
“Chaos Blocks” drawings explore the tension between order and chaos. Each drawing in the series is reminiscent of a geological drawing, and we see them created on the screen as each layer draws on top of the next. After the layers are created, each is filled with an unexpected, vibrant pattern. James is reacting against the inhuman perfection that often characterizes visual art created through…
While running a plot job my electricity was cut off by a thunderstorm. This left my drawing incomplete, but I liked the result so much that I left it as-is!
Wanna know how my brain works? This is a stream of consciousness of what I'm doing when I make 3D artwork like the animations featured in my short film WAVEFORMS.
Ochre is an exploration in to the unique color palette found in classical paintings. Using fluid simulations, these paintings are re-imagined in to abstract shapes and forms that resemble liquids and gases.
LinkedIn is where professionals go to socialize. Built on the promise of new opportunity, LinkedIn is the Facebook of the corporate world. It’s the cheesy recruiter emails, profile view notifications, and odd business memes that keep me coming back for more. LinkedIn also has a great Javascript application running their UI. If you can look past the dark patterns, you’ll notice a robust single page…