About Rodd

Rodd Halstead: Data Scientist and Generative Artist

Born in Texas, Raised in Thailand and Hawaii

Lives & works in Boston, MA

Photography

My interest in photography started in high school, where I shot BW photos for the school newspaper and year book. There were no computers and we did all our own darkroom work (developing film and printing images). My camera then and for many years after was a 1960s vintage Nikkormat SLR.

Generative and Fractal Art

I think of my mathematical and computer graphic work as primarily photographic in nature. In particular, images of the Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) are like windows looking in on fantastic island worlds, which have real and fixed (although infinitely deep and repeating) geographies.

MidJourney AI Generated Images

My journey into generative art has recently expanded into the fascinating realm of AI text-to-image generation. There are many AI image generators. Midjourney is an amazing standout. This new medium feels like a natural extension of my photographic and fractal explorations, allowing me to use language as a prompt to unveil new visual dimensions and sculpt entirely new images from the digital ether of the Internet.

This process is both a collaboration and an experiment, pushing the boundaries of what I can "see" and "create," often yielding dreamlike qualities and merging disparate elements with unexpected beauty, much like discovering a new, impossible landscape through a lens or an algorithm.

_____________________________________________________________________

Long Form Artist Statement

Rodd Halstead is a computer graphics artist and programmer known for his technical and creative contributions to digital imaging and visualization. His work bridges software engineering and artistic production, emphasizing the practical implementation of computer graphics in scientific, design, and entertainment contexts. Halstead’s career highlights the cross-disciplinary role of graphics programming in modern media. Active since the early era of personal computing, Halstead has worked with computers for more than five decades, using code both as a technical medium and as a primary artistic instrument.

Key Facts

Profession: Computer graphics artist and programmer
Specialization: Generative Art, Data Science and Statistics
Base: Waltham, Massachusetts, United States
Online presence: Active on creative platforms such as Flickr since 2005 at https://www.flickr.com/photos/roddh/

Career in computing

Halstead began programming in the 1970s, working directly at the machine level with early microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 and MOS 6502. His early work involved assembly language and bare-metal programming, predating modern development environments.

In the 1980s, he became involved in artificial intelligence and symbolic programming, learning and working extensively in Lisp during his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Symbolics, a pioneering Lisp machine company. Over the following decades, he worked across the personal computing, enterprise software, and data science sectors, including roles as a software engineer, consultant, and AI/ML scientist.

Artistic practice

Parallel to his technical career, Halstead developed a sustained artistic practice centered on computer-generated and algorithmic art. Since the late 1990s, Halstead has maintained a significant online presence under the Internet handle RODDH, hosting portfolios of generative art, fractals, photography, and experimental visual projects. His work has circulated widely on early photo-sharing and generative art platforms and remains part of long-running online archives.

As a computer graphics artist, Halstead’s work typically explores both the expressive and structural aspects of visual data. His approach reflects a deep understanding of how digital light, texture, and geometry interact through computation. His generative artworks are typically produced through custom code, mathematical transformations, and procedural rules rather than manual drawing. Halstead has described code as “procedural expression,” treating algorithms as a form of creative authorship.

In addition to generative art, he is an accomplished photographer, with decades of work spanning documentary, landscape, and experimental imagery. His photographic practice informed his sense of composition, color, and structure in his computational art.

Themes and style

Common themes in Halstead’s work include:

Emergence and complexity from simple rules
Mathematical structures as aesthetic objects
Recursion, symmetry, and infinite detail
The relationship between human perception and algorithmic systems

His visual style often emphasizes vivid spectral color palettes, geometric rigor, and a balance between strict formalism and organic variation.

Influence and legacy

Halstead is part of a generation of artists and technologists who witnessed—and participated in—the emergence of personal computing, computer graphics, and generative art from their earliest stages. His work reflects a continuity between early computational experimentation and contemporary AI-assisted creative practices, positioning him as both a technologist-artist and a historical witness to the evolution of digital culture.