About me

 

Hi there, I’m Fabax and I make art with code and robots. 

I’m born in Paris (France) but I now live in the Netherlands. I didn’t go to art school, but instead I learned how to code and became a developer. Art is cool though, and if I didn’t find out about coding, I would have probably tried to be a designer of some sort.

Early on in my career as a developer, I discovered creative coding. Like many others I started with processing and followed the work of people like Daniel Shiffman and many others. I loved the idea of creating “art generators”, where part of the art process could be totally out of my control. For a while I was making little sketches, but it wasn’t anything groundbreaking. To be honest, I would often get lost in the possibilities creative coding can offer. I’d start a project without finishing it and would jump straight into the next one. In a sense, I needed more constraints, so I could have a better vision. 

When I got my first pen plotter everything clicked. I had found a way to both, render my pieces in the physical world, and have enough constraints to focus my work a bit more. With a pen plotter you can make solid lines and maybe dots, but that’s it really. They are charmingly impractical, slow and make weird noises, but they bring a nice organic touch to my designs. Plus, it’s really satisfying to watch them draw.  

My art is often abstract and geometric. It’s inspired by science, but I also pick influences in more traditional art forms. Especially sketching, architecture and map making. I like patterns, organic shapes, and colors. I also have a tendency to fill my canvas up as much as possible. However, I do like to break my own habits once in a while. 

My overall process is simple. I usually start from a very basic idea (or another design as a reference). Preferably, something I’m not quite sure how to achieve yet. I will then iterate on it, over and over until I either get where I wanted to be or until I accidentally make something even better than what I set out to do. Once I’m pleased with it, I fine-tune the possibilities of my generator to make sure (as much as possible) that all possible editions look good. This part takes as much time as making the piece itself. That’s when I set the general vibe of the series.When this is all done, it’s time to generate. In most cases, I produce hundreds of images and pick the ones I like the most to plot. I tried to work with series of several identical drawings in the past, but I’d rather make each of my pieces unique now. That’s what I loosely call a “generative series” where all plots are different yet belong to the same set.