Themes and Variations, created by Vera Molnár in collaboration with Martin Grasser, is an iconic collection of 500 generative artworks released on the Ethereum blockchain in 2023.

At the time of the release, Vera Molnár—the pioneer of algorithmic art—was 99 years old. The collection was published only six months before her passing, giving it a special place in the history of generative art. After a lifetime spent exploring algorithms, she concluded her extraordinary career by embracing a medium that introduced her work to an entirely new generation of collectors.

I did not mint a random iteration when the collection was released. Instead, after it sold out, I browsed the secondary market until I found the perfect one. First, it was green. More importantly, it prominently featured the letter N, often rotated by 90 degrees, where it could also be read as a Z. It immediately felt like the right piece for me.

Knowing that Vera Molnár had been among the first artists to experiment with pen plotters in the 1960s, I felt it would be a fitting tribute to reinterpret her work as a physical plot.

The original artwork was not directly plottable, as it was composed of rendered shapes rather than vector primitives. I therefore fed the image into one of my own algorithms, which reinterpreted it using hatch patterns and the slightly chaotic single-line aesthetic that characterized much of my own work at the time.

The final drawing was plotted on textured watercolour paper using a green Noodler’s Ink. Its rich transparency and subtle tonal variations gave the drawing a depth that would have been impossible to achieve with a conventional printer.