Amy Goodchild — Maplands and creative-coding pedagogy in London

2022

Artists: Amy Goodchild · Year: 2022 · Medium: Long-form generative art — point-collision shape composition with weighted palette systems · Substrate: p5.js / JavaScript; Tezos blockchain via fx(hash) · Place: London, United Kingdom · Institution: fx(hash); The Bartlett, UCL (teaching) Amy Goodchild is a London-based generative artist with a BA in Photography and an MArch in Design for Performance and Interaction. She taught creative coding at The Bartlett, UCL (2020–2021) before generative-NFT releases became her primary practice, and her writing on the field — the Generative Art Diary substack, talks at Peckham Digital Festival and the 0xBAT conference at Oxford — has made her one of the better-documented practitioners of the post-2021 period at the level of method. Maplands, released on fx(hash) in 2022 as a 256-edition long-form work, sold out in two minutes at release and became one of the season's defining Tezos releases. The algorithm uses point-based collision detection to place shapes across the canvas: each new form must satisfy spatial constraints relative to those already present, producing outputs that read as topographic surveys or as cartographic distortions of an imaginary terrain. Eleven color palettes — including "Lavender fields," which Goodchild has said honors her late father — drive the outputs; weighting parameters control directional flow and density variation across the field. The work and the practice around it earned Goodchild a position on the Art Blocks Curation Board (July 2023–2024) and a FabDAO grant in 2023. The New York Times included her in its April 2023 feature "35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I." — context that placed her practice in front of an audience well outside the on-chain art-collector world. Meaningless, released on Art Blocks Factory in May 2023, extended the same constraint-based vocabulary into a different formal problem set. Goodchild has continued to write and teach actively about the field, with the Generative Art Diary serving as one of the better contemporary records of how the medium feels from the inside. Lore Goodchild has described the Maplands palette named "Lavender fields" as a direct memorial — her father had grown lavender — and has written publicly about how the small private gestures encoded into algorithmic-art parameters are one of the things that distinguishes the medium from purely procedural design. The palette weighting in Maplands intentionally favors that palette slightly more often than uniform distribution would, so that more outputs carry the dedication. Sources • Goodchild, Amy — amygoodchild.com (artist site). • Goodchild, Amy — Maplands blog post. • Goodchild, Amy — Generative Art Diary (substack). • fx(hash) — Maplands project page. • The New York Times — 35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. (April 2023).