We’re Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the creative technologists and artists behind projects like CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, and Meebits.
We met while studying computer science in college in the 1990s, and have been working on weird projects together since graduating. Together, we’ve worked on almost every kind of product, from VR games and chat apps to large scale web infrastructure and genomics analysis. In 2005, we made it official as the creative duo Larva Labs.
With code as our medium, Larva Labs projects tend to start with curiosity and a technical challenge. Can a grid of pixels create digital identity? Can art achieve digital permanence by living entirely on-chain? What happens when algorithms try to build not just 2D images, but 3D bodies?
Each project has been a way of asking those questions in public, on the blockchain, in a way that invites others to participate in a collective experiment.
Over time, our projects have found critical recognition within the contemporary art world - and crossed over into art auctions, exhibitions, and permanent museum collections of institutions like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the ZKM Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media in Germany.
We’ve spoken about digital art and the blockchain at MIT Media Lab, Harvard Business School, Stanford Law School, Art Basel Miami, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, The NY Tech Meetup, and Christie's Auction House in London. But most of the time, we’re just two guys working on computers.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
Autoglyph #115 — 2024
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, USA
CryptoPunk #9833 — 2024
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
CryptoPunk #110, Autoglyph #25 — 2023
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA
CryptoPunk #3831 — 2022
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami, USA
CryptoPunk #305 (The Virtual Lady) — 2022
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany
CryptoPunk #2554, CryptoPunk #1286 — 2018