Aleksandra Jovanić — Herbarium and Art Basel Hong Kong's first generative live mint

2022

Artists: Aleksandra Jovanić · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative art — botanical and scientific-illustration aesthetic · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Tezos blockchain via fx(hash) live minting · Place: Belgrade, Serbia · Institution: fx(hash); Art Basel Hong Kong (Tezos pavilion) Aleksandra Jovanić is a Belgrade-based artist and computer scientist who teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. Trained both as a programmer (BSc Computer Science) and as an artist (PhD Digital Arts), she has been one of the consistent European voices arguing that creative coding belongs in formal art education — her Processing and p5.js syllabi at Belgrade have been cited as a model for how the discipline can be taught seriously inside a fine-arts faculty rather than outsourced to design schools. Herbarium, released on fx(hash) in 2022, is a long-form generative work whose outputs read as plates from a fictional natural-history archive — botanical specimens drawn with the line discipline of nineteenth-century scientific illustration but composed by algorithm. The piece sits in a specific lineage that runs from Vera Molnár's plotter abstractions through software-art's interest in scientific-image conventions, here re-styled for the on-chain era. Jovanić's two-and-three-color palettes, her insistence on overlapping forms and optical-illusion play, and her preference for restrained ornament are all recognizable across her wider catalogue (Balancium, Chromatlas, plotter and linocut series). The work matters as much for its venue as for its form. Jovanić was one of the artists in the first cohort to live-mint on Tezos at Art Basel Hong Kong 2022 — among the earliest moments at which a tier-one international art fair gave generative-art live minting an on-site infrastructure rather than treating it as a side activity. The combination of fx(hash)'s low-friction Tezos minting and Art Basel's institutional weight made the cohort visible to a collector audience that the long-form-generative scene had not previously reached. Jovanić has continued to exhibit through Unit London, Feral File, Kate Vass, the Spalter Digital Art Collection and the Generative Art Summit Berlin, and she remains active as both a practitioner and a teacher. Lore Jovanić has spoken in interviews about working primarily in 2-3 color palettes because Belgrade's print and risograph studios where she develops her hand-printed editions are themselves limited to a small number of inks per pass — the constraint moved into the digital practice rather than the other way around. Her Herbarium plates are often paired with linocut and plotter editions that re-render the same algorithmic systems in physical media; she treats the digital and analogue outputs as siblings rather than master and copy. Sources • Jovanić, Aleksandra — aleksandrajovanic.com (artist site, bio). • Gorilla Sun — In Conversation with Aleksandra Jovanić. • Unit London — Breathing Life into Generative Art with Aleksandra Jovanić (2023). • fx(hash) — Herbarium project page (FX0-746766). • Behind the Art — Aleksandra Jovanić interview (2021).