Generative Classic: The Recursive Elegance of Flips
Public archive of Flips on leanderherzog.ch /2022/flips/index/
Very few artists in contemporary generative art scene fuse raw urban energy with refined technological precision as convincingly as Leander Herzog. A Swiss-based generative artist, whose trajectory is marked by a remarkable transformation: from clandestine graffiti nights, spray can in hand, to browser-based abstractions, creating in JavaScript and WebGL. What remains constant is his fascination with marks, multiplicity, and unpredictability.
Herzog rejects skeuomorphism, the imitation of physical styles in digital work. For him, authenticity lies in allowing the medium itself to speak. What had once been pigment and pressure, became recursion and computation. His language has evolved into something instantly recognizable: minimal rules that unfold into maximal possibilities. Flips collection on Tezos, released in 2022, perfectly aligns with his longterm vision.
Since its release, Flips has been widely regarded as one of the defining projects on Tezos, bridging the experimental freedom with the polish expected by seasoned connoisseurs of generative art. The work has attracted a circle of highly discerning collectors with a commitment to generative abstraction.
Flips #51 in Le Random Collection
The Anatomy of Flips
In Flips, a single point begins the sequence, branching into two, then two more, and so on. A recursive tree structure expanding into a complex network of invisible scaffolds. At the end of every branch, Herzog places a dot. Simple as this may sound, the repetition generates breathtaking intricacy. Clouds of color, veils of dots, and sudden arcs of darkness scatter across the canvas like digital echoes of spray paint.
However, Herzog himself insists that this graffiti resemblance was never intentional. The spray-like aesthetic is a side effect of recursion. In this refusal of pretence lies the elegance of Flips, code embracing its own logic until it arrives at beauty. Each of the 300 tokens in the edition bears its own unique seed, an alphanumeric string feeding the algorithm with distinct instructions.
Each high-resolution file, reaching dimensions of 6480 × 11520 pixels, reveals detail upon detail, a constellation of digital pigment that rivals the density of any hand-sprayed wall. The scale invites both sweeping screen views and intimate zooms, allowing the viewer to appreciate the work as a full-bodied composition, while also examining the individual dots that reveal the generative process behind it.
Like the classicists of past, he is committed to systems and structures, yet his Flips are anything but static: they unfold and vibrate, and when you zoom in, an entirely different universe appears. Embracing error, he transforms unexpected outcomes into celebrated features. Herzog frames the work as a dialogue between control through constraint and openness to the paths that the code reveals.
Flips offers collectors a digital abstraction that recalls the artist’s origins in street art yet transcends them, transforming urban chaos into the timeless elegance of recursion.