What if a piece of art was never finished, never still, never quite the same as the last time you looked at it? That is the question running through Manuel Lariño’s work. The Spanish American artist has built a practice out of systems that keep moving on their own, fed by the pulse of Ethereum blocks, the tides of his home coast, and the passage of time itself. His pieces do not sit quietly on a wall or in a wallet, they drift, evolve, and in one case slowly decay, each one a living process rather than a fixed image. Across five collections, Lariño has quietly become one of generative art’s most thoughtful voices on memory, place, and impermanence. Here is a closer look at the work, and at Gift of Time, the piece that best captures what he is chasing.
Gift of Time
Art Blocks x OpenSea Residency, Marfa
The standout. Gift of Time began during Lariño’s residency in Marfa, Texas, part of the Art Blocks and OpenSea artist residency program, where the slow desert rhythm reshaped how he experienced time itself. The collection of 365 iterations turns that feeling into a system. Time is not the subject of the piece so much as its engine: mechanical cycles, calendars, and lunar phases are translated into rules that continuously transform each work. It does not depict time, it runs on it.
The detail that makes it sing is that the work is tied to blockchain time. It keeps rotating and evolving even when no one is watching, synchronizing to the present moment only when loaded, never resetting to a fixed state. Visually it exposes its own mechanism, with elastic lines linking elements like memories connecting one thought to the next, recalling the interior of a watch. The result is a piece that feels alive and accruing, a generative work that is genuinely never the same twice and never still.
Gift of Time #175, #5, #232, #146, 2025
Broken Dreams
The Generative Art Museum x Art Blocks, Responsive Dreams Festival 2025
A collaboration with The Generative Art Museum and Art Blocks, shown at the Responsive Dreams Festival. Broken Dreams is about the fragility of dreams and their tendency to shift, break, and return in new forms. Like Gift of Time, it taps Ethereum block data directly, so each dream changes almost imperceptibly with every new block, accumulating subtle transformations over time. Technically, the standout is Lariño’s triangular color sampling method, where each triangle samples five points and averages them to derive its tone, generating thousands of harmonious variations from a single palette. It is a clear example of his signature move, infinite variation held together by a common harmony.
Broken Dreams #4, 2025
Toxo (Gorse), 2025
The outlier in the set, and a deliberate one. Toxo is a tribute to the Galician landscape, named after the gorse shrub with its deep green foliage and bright yellow flowers. The algorithm builds an abstract ecosystem that is organic, chaotic, and structured all at once, mirroring the plant’s irregular growth. What makes Toxo different is that it is conceived as physical artwork, with each print unique and individually sized by the artist to suit the composition. It is a landscape born from algorithms yet deeply tied to the land, a frozen moment of an ecosystem that never really stops transforming.
Infinite Tide, 2025
Conceptually the most personal piece, and arguably the most ambitious. Infinite Tide visualizes the real-time tidal flow of A Coruña, the city where Lariño was born. The algorithm autonomously calculates the tides from lunar cycles and harmonic data measured at the Calvo Sotelo dock tide gauge, so the lines thicken at high tide and thin out at low tide, an endless cartography of currents.
The most striking part is its mortality. Lariño updates the tidal data file in his studio at least once a year, and he has written that when he can no longer do so, the work will slowly drift out of sync, losing accuracy like a current without direction. It is a rare example of an artist deliberately building decay into a generative system, which gives the work a conceptual weight that lingers.
Forecast
Art Blocks, November 2023
The earliest of the featured works and the foundation of his on-chain practice. Forecast is a collection of 365 iterations that captures rainfall on a stone-paved road, drawing an analogy between weather and human emotion. It is rooted in Galicia, where Lariño notes the local language has more than 100 words for rain.
The engineering is the draw here: the code recreates a weather forecast, using barometric pressure to control spacing and humidity to set circle sizes in a circle-packing algorithm that behaves like clouds, then applies the National Weather Service Probability of Precipitation equation to distribute rain across each piece. With 16 color palettes drawn from personal memories, Forecast is where Lariño’s method of fusing natural systems, code, and emotion first fully came together.
Forecast #250, #27, 2023
The Bigger Picture
Across all five works, one thread holds: Lariño builds art that keeps moving after the sale, whether driven by block data, tides, or time itself. Gift of Time is the fullest expression of that idea, but it sits on top of a coherent and deepening body of work, an artist using code not to freeze a moment but to keep it alive.
