Krakow-based graphic designer and creative technologist Mikołaj Pyka uses custom p5.js code to slice photographs into rhythmic, layered fragments, dissolving the familiar into something the eye has to feel rather than read.
The brain is fast. Show it a photograph and it categorises before it truly sees: tree, face, street. The recognition is efficient and, in a sense, blinding. Mikołaj Pyka’s generative art project, the.substratum, is built around a deliberate disruption of that process.
Working from a custom-coded environment in p5.js, Pyka slices photographs into vertical, horizontal and diagonal fragments, reanimating them through complex easing functions and temporal offsets. The result strips an image of its automatic meanings, dissolving the figurative layer of a captured moment to reveal what he calls its “primal matter”: the raw mood, rhythm and energy of colour that usually bypasses conscious attention. The project’s guiding manifesto, “Beyond the edges of recognition,” states the ambition plainly. This is not about making images harder to read. It is about making them possible to feel.
“In a world designed for efficiency, my goal is to slow down the eye,” Pyka says. “By deconstructing the familiar, I want to force a pause, a moment where the brain stops categorising and starts feeling the raw energy of colour and rhythm.”
That intention shapes every technical decision in the work. The easing functions that govern how fragments move are not random but precisely calculated, creating a tension between mathematical rigour and the sensation of entropy. Every looped animation sits at the threshold between digital noise and structured pattern, close enough to each that it refuses to resolve into either.
The tool was designed as a mobile-first web environment, built for both precision and spontaneity, and the resulting compositions are currently shared as ongoing digital iterations through the project’s Instagram. Plans for high-definition Giclée prints are in development, which will allow these fleeting algorithmic moments to exist as fixed, physical objects: a pleasing formal contradiction for work whose whole argument is about the instability of perception.
Mikołaj Pyka is a graphic designer and creative technologist based in Krakow, Poland. His practice develops bespoke digital tools to explore the boundaries of perception, with a focus on the emotional impact of motion and colour.
ARTIST LINKS
@the.substratum
the.substratum, ongoing generative art project. Custom p5.js and Tailwind CSS. Digital iterations; Giclée prints in development.
