Azulejos
A Processing sketch that rebuilds any image as a generative mosaic of azulejos, the blue-and-white tiles of Lisbon. A personal creative-coding project, made from photos I took there.
YEAR
2025
ROLE
Concept, photography, and code
SERVICES
Creative coding, generative art
↓↓ Better with sound on
About the project
What it is
A Processing sketch I wrote that turns any image into a mosaic of azulejos. It reads the picture and rebuilds it from tiles, with generative variation so no two runs are quite the same.
Collected in Lisbon
The tiles are real, photographed across Lisbon, where I got a little obsessed with how the whole city is dressed in them. There's a darker side to that love: tourists and vendors strip tiles off buildings, and the city fights to stop it. Photographing them was a way to collect the beauty without taking anything.
Beautiful and complicated
An Adriana Varejão exhibition showed me another side: azulejos as a symbol of colonialism, beauty laid over violence. It almost stopped me. In the end I chose to hold both, the tiles are still beautiful and still here, and the point is to keep looking and learning, not to reduce them to only decoration or only guilt.
Why creative coding
I made it as my diploma project in a creative coding course. Creative coding is free and welcoming, and also critically engaged, a space that questions the ideas, culture, and history behind what it makes, not just how it looks. That's why it felt like the right home for this.
Azulejos
OVERVIEW
A Processing sketch that rebuilds any image as a generative mosaic of azulejos, the blue-and-white tiles of Lisbon. A personal creative-coding project, made from photos I took there.
YEAR
2025
ROLE
Concept, photography, and code
SERVICES
Creative coding, generative art
↓↓ Better with sound on
About the project
What it is
A Processing sketch I wrote that turns any image into a mosaic of azulejos. It reads the picture and rebuilds it from tiles, with generative variation so no two runs are quite the same.
Collected in Lisbon
The tiles are real, photographed across Lisbon, where I got a little obsessed with how the whole city is dressed in them. There's a darker side to that love: tourists and vendors strip tiles off buildings, and the city fights to stop it. Photographing them was a way to collect the beauty without taking anything.
Beautiful and complicated
An Adriana Varejão exhibition showed me another side: azulejos as a symbol of colonialism, beauty laid over violence. It almost stopped me. In the end I chose to hold both, the tiles are still beautiful and still here, and the point is to keep looking and learning, not to reduce them to only decoration or only guilt.
Why creative coding
I made it as my diploma project in a creative coding course. Creative coding is free and welcoming, and also critically engaged, a space that questions the ideas, culture, and history behind what it makes, not just how it looks. That's why it felt like the right home for this.
Azulejos
OVERVIEW
A Processing sketch that rebuilds any image as a generative mosaic of azulejos, the blue-and-white tiles of Lisbon. A personal creative-coding project, made from photos I took there.
YEAR
2025
ROLE
Concept, photography, and code
SERVICES
Creative coding, generative art
↓↓ Better with sound on
About the project
What it is
A Processing sketch I wrote that turns any image into a mosaic of azulejos. It reads the picture and rebuilds it from tiles, with generative variation so no two runs are quite the same.
Collected in Lisbon
The tiles are real, photographed across Lisbon, where I got a little obsessed with how the whole city is dressed in them. There's a darker side to that love: tourists and vendors strip tiles off buildings, and the city fights to stop it. Photographing them was a way to collect the beauty without taking anything.
Beautiful and complicated
An Adriana Varejão exhibition showed me another side: azulejos as a symbol of colonialism, beauty laid over violence. It almost stopped me. In the end I chose to hold both, the tiles are still beautiful and still here, and the point is to keep looking and learning, not to reduce them to only decoration or only guilt.
Why creative coding
I made it as my diploma project in a creative coding course. Creative coding is free and welcoming, and also critically engaged, a space that questions the ideas, culture, and history behind what it makes, not just how it looks. That's why it felt like the right home for this.