Preserving Generative Art: A Taxonomy of p5.js Dependencies
A group of computer science researchers at VU Amsterdam and Université de Montréal is working on code analysis to document and preserve generative art, and they are asking the community to help. In mid-August 2026 they posted on r/p5js and r/generative asking p5.js users to fill in a survey about how sketches depend on external libraries, the first step toward building a taxonomy of p5.js dependencies. The survey link, hosted on VU Amsterdam's Qualtrics instance, collects feedback from the community on how that taxonomy should be organised.
The research sits on a real problem: generative art made in p5.js is built on a fast-moving stack of libraries — the p5.js core, add-on libraries, utility packages, shims for WebGL features, and browser APIs. When a library is renamed, abandoned, or changes its API, older sketches can stop running. The same fragility applies to the generators minted as long-form works on platforms like fx(hash) and Art Blocks, which are meant to be permanent and verifiable but depend on software that keeps moving underneath them. Documenting those dependencies is a prerequisite for preservation: you cannot keep a piece running if you do not know what it is running on.
The taxonomy the researchers are building is meant to classify those dependencies — by type, by role in the sketch, by how they are loaded and how likely they are to change. The survey asks practitioners how they actually use libraries in their sketches and how they think about those dependencies, so the classification reflects real working practice rather than a purely theoretical scheme. The threads on both subreddits were posted on 12 August 2026 by the researcher account NoBoringCode.
The project is a rare case of the generative-art community being studied from the inside out. Preservation efforts in the field so far have mostly focused on archiving outputs — storing the rendered image or the minted token — rather than the code that produced them. A dependency taxonomy aimed at keeping the code runnable is a different bet: it treats the generator itself as the thing worth keeping, which matters more as generative artists move from static outputs to long-form, simulation-based and GPU-heavy work.
Anyone who writes p5.js sketches — from beginners using the online editor to artists shipping long-form projects — can contribute by filling in the survey. The link was shared in both Reddit threads, and the researchers say they want to hear from the community. For a field whose recent history is already showing how quickly its tools change, a few minutes answering questions about how sketches are built is a small price for a record that might keep those sketches alive decades from now.