Generative artist James Merrill is known for his Wimmelbilder-style landscapes that blend the mechanical precision of code with the hand-drawn warmth of illustration. The latest iteration of his beloved project, Busy, debuts as part of the Art Blocks Curated series and pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in on-chain art. Inspired by the overwhelming systems of urban life, Busy creates sprawling, simulated cities rendered by pen plotters, machines that draw each piece line by line with incredible detail.

We caught up with Merrill ahead of the Art Blocks Curated exhibition of Busy and the release of Busiest to talk about pen plotting, the technical breakthroughs that made Busy possible, and why the concept of permanence is central to his practice. From building custom machines to encoding 85 hand-drawn illustrations directly into the blockchain, Merrill’s process is a masterclass in blending code, craft, and concept.

OpenSea: Let's dive in. How has your relationship to code as a creative tool evolved over time?

James Merrill: To start, my interest really began with pen plotting and discovering this little nook and cranny on the internet, which was the pen plotting hashtag on Twitter. [I was] just fascinated by the fact that you could use these machines to draw whatever you wanted. They could draw indefinitely. That led me to generative art. The ability to create drawings on the fly with code was very intriguing to me, and I ended up buying a pen plotter in 2019 and basically teaching myself how to make generative art because of it. Prior to that, I had done digital art for a decade, so the next natural part of my artistic practice was embracing code and getting into pen plotting.

OpenSea: What kind of systems or rule sets inspired Busy, and how did you go about designing one that could support this level of complexity?

James Merrill: The system is something I developed in 2019 with a previous artwork called A Series of Tubes. Busy is a maximal version of that. It creates a series of systems that generate a world. There are buildings, roads, and all sorts of abstract elements, and they all have an interplay where they react to one another. They don't tread on each other's toes—they coexist and continuously build upon the foundation, adding new elements.

One of the interesting things about Busy is that a lot of it is actually illustrated by me. It's not all algorithmic. Then, there are parts that are algorithmic and react to those illustrations. It all ties together into a final package—an extremely dense, detailed piece of art that would be really difficult to do by hand but is systematically built by a computer and then drawn by a machine.

OpenSea: There's this clear tension in Busy between chaos and control, between density and readability. How do you calibrate that balance? And how do you know when the composition feels right to you?

James Merrill: Yeah… For a while I was just trying to make it as busy as possible because a big part of the artwork is in relation to myself and my experiences just coming out of post-COVID, living in Vermont and traveling to New York, and kind of just feeling this level of anxiety being there. There's all this stuff happening around me, just feeling like an ant, really, getting almost distressed by all these systems that were at play—but then kind of finding solace in it and realizing that there is a plan, everything is running to schedule. Missing a subway stop or whatever is not really that big of a deal, and coming to terms with that and beginning to appreciate it.

The artwork is meant to make you feel that way at first, where it does feel like there's chaos and there's so much happening and you can't keep track of anything. But then, as you get closer and you look, you realize that there are many systems and there's order. I wanted that difference of perception to occur for everyone who sees the art.

OpenSea: This being influenced by your experience being in New York makes a lot of sense. There is a real sense of chaos and control in a city like that. And I love that you took that metaphor and brought it into your art. So, you describe Busy as creating highly detailed worlds with computation. How do you define a world in the context of your art?

James Merrill: A world, for me, is a series of cities that all are connected by roads, that sort of thing. So, there's a nostalgic element to Busy from the days of playing SimCity on computers back 20 years ago or whatever. I loved those games and how detailed you could make the world and connect everything and have systems and order and simulation. So, there are many of those elements that are an inspiration for this work, and that’s really the vantage point I wanted to target.

You could see skyscrapers and buildings, but go all the way down and see little cars and see parks and trees. There's this physical limit, though, that you start to hit when you make things really small that have to be drawn by pen. So in order to actually make this, I had to figure out, “What's the smallest I could make things so they're still legible?” and then work back from there. The smallest elements are cars on roads, and they're almost indecipherable. I started there and worked my way up to really big buildings and parking lots and this sort of thing. I wanted to see how much I could get in there before it turned into a blur. There is a physical limitation to this artwork due to the fact that it's pen-plotted.

OpenSea: There are so many different shapes and movements within the art. How much of it is inspired by organic life and real architecture, and how much of it is purely algorithmic? 

James Merrill: There are 85 illustrations in the art. They're all different buildings and things that I've drawn that aren’t inspired by any specific real-world locations or buildings—more of just this style that I developed as I worked on the algorithm. And the really fun thing about being able to pipe illustrations into an algorithm is that I can make new ones for specific locations.

When we were in Marfa, you saw this in action. There were no skyscrapers or anything because that’s not what Marfa looks like. It's a small town in high desert. So I was able to basically go around and drive around on Google Street View for a couple of months prior to the event and just document my favorite buildings and locations and that sort of thing—and then illustrate them. So I would go around and just try to find some of the interesting forms of architecture there, and those were the inspiration for the illustrations I did for Busy in Marfa.

That project was very different from what I created for this final project of Busy, but it really proves that this is more of a framework than a single piece of art.  I'm going to attempt to do this again in locations around the world. I mean, how interesting would it be if we could do a Busy in Tokyo or a Busy in Istanbul? All these things are on the table. I can take this as a framework and continue to elaborate on it through this pipeline that I’ve built.

OpenSea: I loved the fact that Busy in Marfa had water towers and barn shapes and these things that really felt organic to the city that we were in. I like the conceptual framing of it as more of a framework than a single piece. Talking from a technical standpoint, what were the most significant breakthroughs or headaches you encountered while building this project? Is there anything that you had to overcome that was a really big technical challenge?

James Merrill: There are couple of them. This is all on-chain. I’m a firm believer in generative art that’s on-chain. And going back to the fact that there are 85 illustrations in the code, that starts to create a real issue with the file size. To upload code to the Ethereum blockchain can be quite expensive when gas is high. In the past, artists have paid tens of thousands of dollars to do this, and their projects were actually much smaller than Busy, especially at first when Busy was around one and a half megabytes of source material. So, I had to develop a proprietary technique to take all these buildings and all these elements and condense them down to their smallest possible form. That was a big one, and I was able to achieve around a 90% file size reduction so that this could be feasibly put on the Ethereum blockchain. 

Beyond that, just having plotter art that has depth is very difficult. I had to implement a solution to this thing called “geometric occlusion,” which basically means that I can have things in front of other things—and that’s not a given. With plotter art, out of the box, you’re going to have two overlapping shapes where you see both. You have no depth. So being able to solve that was another kind of breakthrough moment where, once I was able to solve it, I was like, this is going to open up so many opportunities for this artwork—and all of my art going forward.

OpenSea: Very interesting. And how did you end up solving that?

James Merrill: So, it’s interesting... AI can’t really solve this problem. I could consult ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, and they don’t really give you an answer that is serviceable. And there are not a lot of options out there either if you want to use libraries that can do this—especially not if you want to put it on-chain. So, I had to create my own solution. And I don’t have a background in math or computer science, but I could basically create scenarios that I could visually debug. I could start to figure out what seemed like it was going to work using a lot of logic and JavaScript to determine when things overlapped and, when that occurred, what to show and what to hide. Once I did that, I was able to basically just see it in action, do it thousands of times per piece of art, and discover all the rough edge cases that existed and then patch them up and move forward. It was definitely a month-long process to try to get it to work.

OpenSea: Art Blocks Curated comes with a particular legacy and expectation. How does the context of releasing Busy under that banner shape your approach—or does it?

James Merrill: It does. I did Art Blocks Curated in November of 2022 with a project called ORI, and it was a great experience. They’re a really responsive, awesome team, and I knew that I wanted to work with them again. They pivoted to do releases that have a physical component, so what better way to do that than with plotter art? Once I saw that happening and some really interesting projects coming out like mpkoz’s Bokeh, I knew that Busy could be a great fit. And it all ties back to digital art and generative art, right?

In the ’60s, people were interested in making art with computers and outputting to pen plotters. So this isn’t really a new phenomenon, but putting it on the blockchain is. Being able to marry those two things up, to me, felt like a great fit. And given the fact that Art Blocks really pioneered putting code on-chain for artists in a big way, it made a lot of sense to go to them to release Busy.

OpenSea: And why is on-chain art important to you?

James Merrill: It’s really important to me because I’ve been doing this for a number of decades at this point and so many times in the past, the artwork and the artists get lost in time. The people that I grew up making art with when I was a teenager—I can hardly find their work online anymore. It just gets lost because servers shut down, businesses pivot, things just disappear in the noise. But I believe with near certainty that what goes on the Ethereum blockchain will be resistant to that, and it will be permanent. And that’s critical to me because I want artwork I’ve made now to be viewable in 20, 30 years. And I feel like this is probably the best way to do that—beyond putting it on paper.

The fact that we’re putting it on the blockchain, and I’m drawing every single one of these, gives me two levels of permanence to every piece of art. Whereas in the past, uploading JPEGs to a website felt very lossy, this feels very permanent.

OpenSea: Do you feel dedicated to working with Ethereum as a chain, or are you experimenting with other chains?

James Merrill: I’m definitely interested. I think what’s happening in Ordinals is very intriguing. I think anytime you can basically commit things to a blockchain, and the blockchain feels like it’s going to stick around for decades, it makes sense to me. I’m open to all opportunities and avenues where that’s possible.

OpenSea: Makes sense. Are there any hidden Easter eggs or rare treats that people should keep an eye out for in your newest iteration of Busy?

James Merrill: There are all sorts of things for people to discover! This artwork is meant for people to stare at for long periods of time and continuously be able to come back and notice new aspects of it. One of the harder things that I’m challenging people to do is to look at multiples and start to discern the differences. There are a lot of traits associated with Busy, but there are certainly things I didn’t expose as traits that exist. Elements that only appear on one versus the other; elements where, out of the multitude of sometimes thousands of things that might be on the canvas, there’s just one of a thing, and it’s up to the viewer to try to find that. That really is inspired by Wimmelbilder, which is an art form that seeks to condense all its complexity into one specific image. At a very relatable level, think: Where’s Waldo? 

OpenSea: Generative art obviously has seen a lot of technological advancements and changes since it’s emerged and especially since it’s been married with blockchain technology in more recent years. Is there somewhere you hope to see it going in the next couple of years?

James Merrill: I think with the advent of better computing, with technological breakthroughs, with shaders—we’re going to see another level of realism to generative art. And there are some artists who are really on that bleeding edge. For me personally, that’s not the domain I’m going to take my practice. I’m more interested in converting it to a format that can be read by a pen plotter. And I think in that domain, the really intriguing thing is there are people out there building new pen plotters that have new capabilities.

There’s this company called Bantam Tools in Peekskill, New York. They’re innovating and making new machines that can use different types of media. We’re going to see plotter art that is primarily charcoal or paint or acrylic. And to me, that’s very interesting—and it is only enabled by some of the new machines like the Art Frame that they’re currently producing.

OpenSea: Yeah, I always think it’s incredible to see plotters do things with mediums like watercolor that feel uncontrollable in so many ways. To see it in this highly controlled mechanism is really interesting. So, what’s the future looking like for you? As you said, you see Busy as a framework.

James Merrill: One of the interesting things with Busy is, at the very last minute, we were able to build a prototype machine that is 72" x 24". It’s one of a kind in the world, and it’s a complete game-changer for any artist who has it.  I’m going to acquire that machine and integrate it into my art process. So from here on out, I’ll be able to develop artworks that are really at a massive cinematic scale. That is a huge game-changer. 

Beyond that, I want to take Busy on a world tour. I’m working on plans to do that now. Bringing it to new cities, integrating landmarks from those places into artworks that are made there, and sharing the joy that I have for this project and for generative art and plotter art with a new audience.

Then beyond that, all these technical innovations that I’ve had to build for this project—I plan on using them in the future and weaving in this illustration practice into this generative practice because I think there’s something really interesting there when you combine them.