Melissa Wiederrecht (American, b. 1988) is an algorithmic generative artist who was born in Iowa City, raised in Wyoming, and lives in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. She has made generative art for more than twenty years, long before the medium found a wide audience, and describes her style as a “precise blur”: systems built entirely from code she writes herself that produce paradox and ambiguity.
Wiederrecht taught herself to code with a library book on HTML around age twelve, and later discovered Flash and ActionScript in college.She earned a BS in computer science and mathematics from the University of Wyoming in 2011 and an MS in computer science there in 2014.After graduating she worked in surface pattern design, coding algorithms that generated more than 33,000 seamless patterns for stock image sites, a process that shaped the color palette, textures and variable-blur technique she carried into her generative art.
Wiederrecht moved from the United States to Saudi Arabia in 2015, and cites the generative artists Tyler Hobbs and Jared Tarbell among her influences.Her practice draws on a blend of American, Saudi and Sudanese heritage, reflecting her own family and the country she has made her home.That connection runs through Sandaliya and its 2023 continuation Bakhoor Assandal, an animated JavaScript and GLSL series built around a poem mourning her family's displacement from Sudan after civil war broke out there in April 2023. Bakhoor Assandal was released through reGEN, a charity auction of generative art benefiting Cure Alzheimer's Fund.Proceeds from her generative art sales also funded a school in Sudan.
She has released work across multiple platforms, including Sudfah on Art Blocks Curated in 2022,and Cosmic Rays on verse.works in 2023, whose supply cap shrank by one every minute during the sale.,Her work has been shown in the group exhibitions “FEMGEN” at Right Click Save and VerticalCrypto Art in 2022, “GEN/GEN” at Gazelli Art House in 2023, and “Compositions in Code” at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2025.,,
