Ayumu Nagamatsu (b. 1989) is a Tokyo-based digital artist, creative coder, VJ and educator working in generative art and visual music. His practice develops procedural modeling techniques, graphics algorithms and data representation, spanning video production, live performance direction and collaborative coding projects.
He holds a B.A. in aesthetics and art history from Keio University, where he researched the iconography of German Romantic landscape painting, and an M.A. in media arts and science from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, completed in 2018.His graduation project, Leaves, is a three-screen video installation simulating statistics on causes of death as a generative data visualization, shown at the Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition “Made in Linz” in Post City, Linz, in 2017.In essays on his own site he explores computer-graphics constraints, such as gravity, shadow and the interaction of light and material, through simple primitive forms, using minimalist sculptors including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt as teaching references.
In 2022 he designed MOMENT, a generative NFT series on Ethereum themed on cherry blossom petals, in which each token's color and form are generated from its own parameters, paired with an annual gallery installation at NEORT++ in Tokyo.That year he also began 3D Generativemasks, translating Shunsuke Takawo's generative code into ten thousand unique, full-color 3D-printed physical masks planned for each NFT holder.
In 2024 he took part in “dialog() Asian Generative Art Exhibition”, a group show organized by NEORT and VolumeDAO that toured Tokyo, Taipei and Seoul, exhibiting a work titled Cast Objects.The following year the same curators paired him with the Taiwanese generative artist Chih-Yu Chen for “Silver Trail”, a show built around a shared codebase the two took turns editing every one to three days, exchanging intent through code comments and a README rather than working toward a single fixed image.,The exhibition presented their GitHub commit history itself as the artwork, extending the show's premise of process over spectacle.
