Melissa Wiederrecht — Orbs and shader-based generative practice

2022

Artists: Melissa Wiederrecht · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative art — shader-rendered fields with textile-pattern lineage · Substrate: p5.js + WebGL fragment shader (single-pass full-frame rendering rather than iterative drawing); Tezos via fx(hash) · Place: Saudi Arabia (American-born) · Institution: fx(hash); Art Blocks (Playground) Melissa Wiederrecht is a generative artist with an MS in Computer Science and a long pre-NFT career in surface-pattern design — she sold seamless-pattern collections for textile and product printing for years before generative art became commercially viable on its own terms. That dual lineage — engineer and pattern-designer — is consistently legible in her output, which reads simultaneously as algorithmic system and as the kind of design surface you might encounter on a fabric, a tile, or a wallpaper run. Orbs, released on fx(hash) in June 2022, is one of the works in which her shader-based approach is most clearly articulated. Where most p5.js generative work draws iteratively — the canvas is built up stroke by stroke or shape by shape — Wiederrecht's pieces are computed in a single full-frame pass by a WebGL fragment shader. The technique is closer to a synthesizer than to a brush: noise functions, blending modes, color ramps, and warps are composed mathematically and then evaluated for every pixel at once. The aesthetic consequence is the soft, pneumatic, vapor-and-cloth quality that her work is recognized for. Her wider catalogue — Zbageti, Solitude, Take Wing on fx(hash), Sandaliya on Art Blocks Playground, Cosmic Vortex video work for Unit London's Liminal Space exhibition — develops the same shader vocabulary across different palettes and pattern systems. Wiederrecht has spoken openly about her debts to Jared Tarbell's early algorithmic work, to Tyler Hobbs's flow-field practice, and to Islamic geometric tradition; the latter has become more visible in her recent work since her relocation to Saudi Arabia. She is also a substantial educator in the field, with Skillshare courses on generative practice that have introduced p5.js and shader techniques to a sizable audience outside of the on-chain market. Lore Wiederrecht has said she only began describing herself as an artist publicly after Orbs released — before that she introduced herself as a software engineer who made pattern designs on the side, even after several successful Art Blocks and fx(hash) projects. She develops most of her shaders by sketching the math on paper first and translating it into GLSL afterward, which is the inverse of the way most creative coders work; the discipline is closer to a textile draftsman's practice than to a programmer's. Sources • Wiederrecht, Melissa — melissawiederrecht.com (artist site). • Art Blocks — In Conversation with Melissa Wiederrecht (Medium). • Art Blocks — artist page (artblocks.io/artists/melissa-wiederrecht). • Unit London — Liminal Space exhibition. • fx(hash) — Orbs project page.