Matt DesLauriers: Meridian #870 Joins Vera Molnar at the V&A
Meridian #870 by Matt DesLauriers goes on display at the V&A in Degrees of Disruption, a new show tracing generative art back to Vera Molnar.
A work by Matt DesLauriers is now on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Meridian #870 hangs in Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art, a free display at V&A South Kensington that opens on October 16, 2026 and runs until May 30, 2027 in Rooms 88A and 90. The artist shared the news on X the same morning.
Meridian is a set of 1000 generative works released on Art Blocks on September 28, 2021 and distributed as tokens on Ethereum. A 15 KB JavaScript program builds stratified landforms out of hundreds of thousands of small strokes of colour. In the artist's description, the hash of each token describes a coordinate in a multidimensional generative space, locating a unique composition along one of many possible longitudes. All 1000 sold through a Dutch auction that came down to a resting price of 0.25 ETH.
The display brings together more than 50 works to show how Molnar used algorithms, executed by hand or by machine, to question what art could be, and how her thinking still runs through generative art today. Her plotter drawings, among them Interruptions from 1969 and (Des)Ordres from 1974, sit beside works by later artists including Casey Reas, Harm van den Dorpel and Licia He.
Curator Melanie Lenz will introduce the display in an online talk for V&A Members on October 20, and the museum will screen a special cut of the documentary Generative later in the season.
Sources
- Matt DesLauriers on X: Meridian #870 at the V&A
- V&A: Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art
- South Ken Culture Quarter: opening date and hours
- V&A: Online Curator Talk: Vera Molnar and Generative Art
- V&A: Generative: A Computer Art Documentary
- Art Blocks: Meridian by Matt DesLauriers
- Matt DesLauriers: Notes on Meridian