About Pikaly

Pikaly is a one-person generative-art studio. I make tools that let anyone design and own real generative art — the kind built from rules and systems, in the tradition of the Bauhaus, Sol LeWitt, Josef Albers and Vera Molnár.

I’m Joris Pikaly. I build every generator here by hand, in code.

Why I make this

Generative art is more than sixty years old. In the 1960s Vera Molnár was already making drawings with a computer; Sol LeWitt was writing instructions for wall drawings that anyone could execute; the Bauhaus had spent decades reducing design to pure color and geometry. The art was never in the hand that drew it — it was in the system behind it.

That idea has always thrilled me: that you can design a set of rules, hand them to a machine, and get something beautiful and surprising back. Pikaly is my attempt to put that power in everyone’s hands. No design degree, no expensive software, no subscription. Pick a system, make a few choices, and the artwork is yours.

What Pikaly is — and isn’t

Every generator on Pikaly is a small, hand-built system in a recognized algorithmic-art tradition. You choose the palette, the density, the composition; the algorithm renders one specific result from a near-infinite space of possibilities.

It is not an AI image generator. Nothing here is trained on other artists’ work or guessed from a text prompt. Each piece is produced by deterministic code I wrote — the same way a Sol LeWitt wall drawing follows an instruction. (More on that distinction on the How it’s made page.)

A studio of one

Pikaly is independent and self-funded. I’d rather build something honest and small than something venture-scale and hollow. If you make something you love with it, that’s the whole point.

Have a question, a request, or just want to show me what you made? I read every message.