The Generative Art Museum (TGAM): Hello Quentin! Thank you very much for joining us today. How are you?

Quentin Hocdé (QH): I’m fine thank you!

TGAM: Let’s make some proper introductions? Who is Quentin Hocdé?

QH: I’m Quentin Hocdé, generative artist and independent creative developer. Since 2013 I create animated websites and I also generate visuals with code.

I’m a generative artist who enjoys capturing and reimagining natural phenomena with a technological twist. I create compositions that reveal the hidden magic of natural elements, such as wind, oceans and mountains, while adding a technological touch with animation and randomness. His goal is to inspire a new appreciation of nature and technology by merging them in artworks created with code.

TGAM: Can you tell us about your journey into generative art?

QH: I studied at Gobelins, the school of image. With my friends Nicolas Daniel and Raphaël Améaume, we used to have fun creating visuals with JavaScript. Initially, on CodePen, we created small interactions, looping animations, and tried to recreate GIFs made by motion designers. Since that time in 2013, I’ve always enjoyed creating visuals with code, whether to make websites more lively and fun, for personal projects, or for other artists.

TGAM: How did you meet NFT’s?

QH: In 2020, with the arrival of Hic et Nunc and the possibility of uploading code, I thought it was cool to be able to collect visuals from other creative developers I followed, like William Mapan, Florian Zumbrunn, MrDoob, and artists like Joanie Lemercier. That’s when NFTs caught my interest, as I discovered a new way of looking at art. What I was creating took on a new dimension, especially with the emergence of fxhash, where the arrival of iterations and the uniqueness of each iteration gave a lot of meaning to generative art.

TGAM: You have embraced animation from the very beginning in a lot of your projects, why did you choose to follow this path?

QH: As a creative web developer, I have always loved elements that move. It has always been important to me to make it fun for the user, but also for myself to code.

TGAM: You are a web developer that has received many awards for your works, do you think designing websites have changed your approach for making art?

QH: For six months in 2021, I stopped making websites to focus 100% on my artistic project. All my experience in creative development greatly fueled my inspiration for creating artwork, and now it works both ways: my generative art projects also give me ideas for animations for websites.

TGAM: As an artist very related to HTML, do you use that in your pieces or prefer other languages or technologies?

QH: I am a big fan of JavaScript; it’s thanks to JavaScript that we can take a website to the next level, with interactivity and complex animations. So, it was obvious for me to use the same language to create artworks.

TGAM: “Parallelism” is the work you’re presenting for Responsive Dreams 2024, an exploration of complex, natural layouts created using simple shapes. The artwork features fluid, dynamic patterns composed of meticulously arranged lines and dots, evoking abstract landscapes and natural elements. Nature seems to be a constant theme in your works, could you elaborate on that?

QH: For several years, I’ve enjoyed trying to recreate natural phenomena, landscapes, and so on. It's a beautiful blend of imperfections that creates magnificent things around us every day, and I find it a great technical challenge to try to create that. Personally, as someone who loves nature and the planet, it’s also important for me to highlight these themes.

TGAM: Your latest works, the same as “Parallelism”, have also the ability to be plottable, turning a digital construction into a physical print. What is your approach to do so?

QH: For the past two years, I’ve been trying to find a way to move beyond screens and create physical objects as well. A project takes on a different meaning with a tangible outcome, in my opinion. To achieve this, I’ve worked a lot on my coding methods to be able to create a project both in canvas (with JavaScript) and in SVG, which allows me to plot the project using a plotter. I have developed functions that enable me to draw in both types of rendering.

Quentin Hocdé is part of TGAM's Responsive Dreams Festival 2024, the first generative art exhibition in Barcelona dedicated entirely to showcasing art created by code.

"Parallelism" will be released September 5th June at fx(hash). Holders of TGAM's brochures are elegible to mint preferentially.

The Generative Art Museum (TGAM) is a non-profit organization based in Barcelona dedicated to explore, promote, and advance the understanding and appreciation of generative art as a unique form of artistic expression.