Kubikino is a collaboration between artist Carolina Melis and creative coder Enrico Penzo, inspired by choreography, modular patterns, and character design.
It generates idiosyncratic faces from a library of circular geometries and primary colours, combining chance and structured rules to create human-like, animal, or mask-like forms. Influenced by Laban’s Movement Analysis and Cunningham’s choreographic methods, the process uses a grid-based structure where each section reflects body, shape, dynamics, and space.
Drawing on avant-garde principles of chance and improvisation, Kubikino builds an identity from animated graphics, motifs, and scores, echoing dance, music, and painting. By referencing the face, it questions notions of identity, persona, and representation, from masks to digital avatars.
Inspired also by Bruno Munari’s Faces, Kubikino celebrates the simplicity, playfulness, and universality of design.
“While it may appear deceptively simple at first glance, the underlying logic behind generating these faces is remarkably intricate, taking into account structure, content, and rules.”
“Carolina Melis introduces an element of chance, to produce an ecosystem rather than one-off pieces of art”
“Carolina Melis could be considered the Picasso of electronic creativity”
I'm Mikino. Nice to meet you :-
In celebration of the anniversary of the first release of the early Mickey Mouse sketch (known as Steamboat Willie) and its entry into the public domain in 2024 after Disney's copyright expiration, I created Mikino.
The collection consists of 100 variations of the character design Mikino and combines some of my greatest passions: traditional cartoons and the Memphis Design Movement.
Following the research on geometries, compositions, and variations started with Kubikino, I extended the work into a collection that deliberately references and quotes popular culture through one of the most symbolic icons of all time.
In this work, the handcrafted meets the digital age, symbolically representing the evolution of popular art culture over 100 years.
