Independent publisher Vetro Editions releases Pixel Rugs, the first full monograph by Rhode Island-based artist Travess Smalley, printed in fluorescent Quadrifluox inks that glow under UV light, with essays by Casey Reas and Anika Meier situating the work within generative art history.
Travess Smalley’s studio is, by his own description, a place arranged for chance combinations.
“Electronics, servers, motors, and processors crowd the space, where ethernet cables hang like vines and power cords spread like roots,” he writes. “Game consoles play themselves, cameras and sensors capture everything, and columns of prints and drawings hold up the ceiling while plants spill into any open space. Machines call and respond: printers shooting pages to scanners, loops of sound and colour compression passing through screens, each device waiting to interpret the other. Small motors trigger pens that trace bitmap paths across muted ivory cardstock, building pixel grids that shift between woven rugs and computer chips.”
From that environment comes Pixel Rugs: thousands of coloured pixels subjected to layering, tiling and compression until familiar patterns break down into something luminous and hypnotic, compositions that sit between the optical warp and weft of woven carpets and the distortion of glitch aesthetics. The work draws on early pixel art, the procedural maps of roguelike games and the optical dynamism of Op Art, as well as the generative pieces Smalley began releasing on the Tezos platform hic et nunc during spring 2021. The monograph follows the project’s evolution through studio sketches, code snippets and critical essays that place the practice alongside Harold Cohen’s plotter drawings and the wider history of generative image-making.
Essays by Casey Reas, artist and Processing co-creator, and Anika Meier, curator and writer, provide the critical frame. The production is as considered as the content. Pixel Rugs is printed using Quadrifluox, an experimental fluorescent-ink technique that gives each page vivid luminosity and chromatic depth, with pages that are reactive under UV light. The book is Smalley’s first full monograph.
Travess Smalley works in Rhode Island across algorithmic drawing, scanner-based collage and generative publishing. His work is held in the collections of MoMA Library, the High Museum of Art and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou. Vetro Editions is an independent publishing house founded by Luca Bendandi, focused on artists’ books, experimental image-making and the relationship between analogue and digital production.
Website: vetroeditions.com Instagram: @vetroeditions
Pixel Rugs, 2025. Monograph by Travess Smalley. Essays by Casey Reas and Anika Meier. Printed in Quadrifluox fluorescent inks, UV reactive. Published by Vetro Editions.
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