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Marius Watz
Oslo, Norway
 Marius Watz is an artist concerned with generative systems for creating visual form, still, animated or realtime. His signature is a brand of visual hedonism, marked by colourful organic shapes and a maximalist attitude. Most of his works deal with drawing machines implemented in software, live visuals for music or large-scale projections of plastic visual systems.
Watz discovered the computer at age 11 and immediately found his direction in life. At age 20 he defected from Computer Science studies to do graphics for raves, using his programming to create organic shapes in 2D and 3D. In parallel to creating his own work, Watz worked as a graphic designer for many years, probing the limits of design. He ran the studio Products of Play with Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen before deciding to focus on his art practice.
As curator and organizer, Marius Watz initiated the Generator.x project - a conference, blog, travelling exhibition and concert tour about generative art and design. The Generator.x conference took place at Atelier Nord in Oslo, September 2005, and was attended by 100 artists and designers, half of whom came from outside Norway. The exhibition premiered at the National Museum in Oslo, and featured leading figures who have made generative strategies their mode of working. It is currently touring until 2007. A concert tour will take place in April 2006, organized by the National Touring Concerts.
In 2005 Watz received an honorary mention for his project Universal Digest Machine. He had previously received an honorary mention for Sense:less (Pendry / Mork / Stenslie / Watz) in 1996. In 2003 he premiered the public art commission Drawing Machine 1-12, a work that was shown for two years on the home page of the Norwegian Government and Ministries of State. In recent years he has created several animated works for projection on building facades such as Neon Organic, which is currently being projected on the Vattenfall headquarters in Berlin.
Watz currently lives in Berlin. His tools of choice are Java, Processing, VVVV and Flash. He continues to edit the Generator.x blog and prepare future Generator.x events, as well as teach workshops in computational design and generative art.
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