Etienne Jacob, who works online as Bleuje, is a French software engineer and generative artist based in Paris who has coded animations since 2017.,His work sits at the intersection of art and mathematics, taking the form of looping GIFs, almost always in black and white, in which sinusoidal curves, spheres, and cubes twirl around a central axis, coil into black holes, or disperse into scattered points.,
Each loop is built so that its final frame matches its first, keeping every animation under the 5-megabyte size limit of the GIF format, a constraint he sets for himself.Jacob has said he begins by naming a new piece after the idea he plans to explore. The finished loop, he has found, tends to match that original name and idea despite whatever experimentation and unplanned features arise along the way.In a tutorial, he documented his own implementation of Physarum simulations, using compute shaders in openFrameworks to drive millions of particles at 60 frames per second, and open-sourced the code. The tutorial introduced a fifteenth sensing parameter, layered color gradients comparing a particle's current and delayed trails, added particle inertia, and included an interactive pen tool that blends parameter sets under the cursor.
He publishes tutorials and shares much of his work on his Tumblr blog Necessary Disorder, active since 2017.,Hideki Tsukamoto has named him, alongside GMUNK, as a visual influence on his Art Blocks series Singularity.He has also been grouped with Julien Gachadoat and loackme among generative artists who work exclusively in black and white, producing animations described elsewhere as feeling both organic and mechanical.,
