Vis Plastica — Autonomous Algorithmic Collages

Assembled from Collage Cutouts, Not Diffusion Pixels

Today, most people associate “AI art” with generative diffusion models (like Midjourney or DALL-E) that hallucinate smooth, synthetic pixel grids in seconds. The 3,190+ works in Vis Plastica come from an earlier, quieter, and fundamentally different moment in computational art history.

Since November 2021, a tiny headless NVIDIA Jetson Nano has hummed continuously 24/7 in the corner of the studio running autonomous collage optimization. Instead of generating pixels out of thin air, the system starts with a blank canvas and a finite palette of distinct biological and physical cutouts — animal morphology, insect wings, feathers, shells, and botanical textures.

Drawing on Cubist collage and Dadaist chance (such as Hans Arp’s compositions), it uses Arnheim 3 (Google DeepMind’s CLIP-CLOP algorithm) to iteratively place, scale, rotate, recolor, and layer hundreds of individual patches — adjusting 2D transformations over thousands of optimization steps until a neural vision model (OpenAI CLIP) recognizes the target subject.

The Serendipity of Organic Cut-and-Paste

Because Vis Plastica is strictly constrained to a finite collection of real-world image cutouts, it cannot rely on photographic trickery or pixel blending. Like a human artist working with scissors, glue, and vintage nature plates, the algorithm must find unexpected visual metaphors — using a discarded perforated Nespresso pod as the iconic London 'Gherkin' in an English meadow city skyline, a headphone jack and Covid test strip as the elegant legs of Degas ballet dancers, or a stem of leaves as an ornate necklace or Elizabethan ruff on an early portrait photograph.

Operating day and night without human intervention, the Jetson Nano produces just two or three pieces a day. Because every run begins from randomized patch placements, each completed collage is a genuinely one-of-a-kind mathematical artifact — published to this archive as soon as the final render finishes.