Mark Ludgate

Mark Ludgate is an artist and freelance animator who works in Brighton, United Kingdom. His professional background in animation informs a practice centred on creating art entirely with code. He has been developing his approach to coding and art over an extended period, publishing generative scripts on the Tezos platform. His work has appeared in online exhibitions, including the group presentation ‘Strange Skies’.

Ludgate’s method is grounded in programming. He uses javascript to write algorithms that generate complex visual systems. The artist specifically credits the use of external libraries, including noisejs for the application of Perlin noise, and twgl.js, a helper for the WebGL rendering environment. The resulting programs produce compositions in both portrait and landscape orientations. Ludgate also includes features that allow for the work to be saved as a static image at a high resolution, noting that small variations in texture can occur during this secondary rendering process.

The conceptual focus of Ludgate's work is the perceived division between nature and human invention. His texts accompanying the works question this boundary, proposing that everything might ultimately be made by what he terms nature's hands. This theme is explored visually in series such as *The Spectrum of Nature* and *A Gift of Nature*. The outputs often evoke natural phenomena, from geological cross sections to microscopic life, created through purely computational means. This ambiguity has led his work to be described as representing ‘technocratic fauna’, a term for compositions that conflate the biological and the algorithmic.