SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Matt Kane

Matt Kane designs algorithms that, through custom software and human input, manifest ideas into artworks that feel rooted deeper in human emotion than in 1s and 0s. His paintings are a melding of order, chaos, geometric shapes and delicate color pallets, like a sort of boolean poetry made by a transhuman impressionist. 

An early adopter of NFT art, Matt, like most of the CryptOGs, felt like an outsider before finding the CryptoArt community. Today he is seen as one of its leading pioneers. Over the last week and a half, we spoke via phone and email about his process, his history in space and M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9, the artwork to be auctioned in the SuperRare x Bonhams collaboration.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

Water Lilies after Claude Monet (left), Surfacing Water Lilies V (right)

MK: I’m originally from the Chicago suburbs. My family pretty much lived during the weekends at the city’s science and natural history museums.  I think because Chicago has such great cultural institutions, those broad interests in art, science, & technology naturally became ingrained in me. During Summers, we’d travel all around North America, pursuing my mother’s passion for tracing the family genealogy. I’d end up tip toeing through graveyards, scanning microfiche in archives, and rummaging through old photos in attics of century old homes. These were the sorts of childhood experiences that made the biggest influence on the sort of artist I became.

MK: My bachelors degree is in education. At 18 I was full of passion to dedicate my life to become an artist, but I was convinced by the adults in my life that I had to choose a major that would lead to a career. People telling me “there’s no way to make money as an artist” still echos in my mind from that time. My major was heavy with education courses, light on art. The high school I came from had tremendous art teachers, so I found the classes at university to largely be unfulfilling and a step backwards from the more rigorous critiques I’d become accustomed to as a teenager. The lack of intellectual challenge caused me to move my bed into the living room and turn my bedroom into my first art studio. This is where I spent all my free time throughout those years. If the classwork wasn’t going to turn out an artist, I’d do that for myself. And if there was something I wanted to learn, this was the early 2000’s- the internet was becoming everyone’s prefered classroom.

I graduated university in 2003. I taught art & design at a high school nearby for a year. All the while, I’d taken up an art studio in my sister’s basement where I was producing lifesize colorful oil paintings of my ancestors. The Summer of 2004, I sent off a portfolio, unsolicited, to what was in my opinion the best art gallery in Chicago, Ann Nathan Gallery. My plan was to start at the top and work my way down. I put a sticker of my painting “The Funeral of Peter Pan” on the the mailer, figuring they’d either become interested to open the envelope or throw me into the reject pile. To my surprise, Ann called me the same day my portfolio arrived and expressed interest in meeting me. That’s how I found my first gallery representation. And as soon as I brought “The Funeral of Peter Pan” into the gallery, she’d already found a collector to take it off our hands. So that also became my first sale.

Nocturne Blue and Gold Southampton After Whistler

MK: Around 2005, I was working on a layered resin painting, dotting a pattern around a figure. Within my mind’s eye I began seeing the pattern complete in front of my hand. This made me think instantly about having a computer program that could actually do what I instructed it to do. For me, my main objective is to manifest my vision. The materials are a delivery mechanism for what’s in my head. At the time I knew nothing about programming and had no luck finding any photoshop plugin that accomplished what I wanted. I had a friend working in the design business in Seattle, so I moved out there. He helped open doors for me to get my first job at a design agency. From there I began choosing jobs based upon what programming I could teach myself that could help me develop a skillset to create my own custom digital studio software one day. This desire to build my own software also arose out of a promise I made myself when I was 19– that if I were to ever become a digital artist, I’d want to create my own software the same way some painters grind their own pigment or stretch their own canvas. That artisan meets punk, do-it-yourself ethic, were at the heart of the traditions I most wanted to build from.    

Irises After Claude Monet

MK: Yes, I’m completely self-taught in programming. In fact, I only had one math course at university and got a C minus. I’ve only ever been able to learn and get good at something when my interests align and I have real motivation. School never did that for me. At the design agency I began at in 2006, I started as the guy who cut up graphics and prepared all the content for the real programmers to make the websites from. From there, my responsibilities gradually ramped up to where I was learning coding skills on the job, trial by fire. That eventually led into having a career as a full stack web engineer for many years. I was fortunate that I was able to make choices along the way that leaned into all the skills I’d eventually need in order to begin this chapter of my life as a visual artist that works with code.

Excessive Force – Cat Devouring Bird after Picasso

MK: In the Summer of  2013, I had just left Seattle after living there for 7 years. A long term relationship I’d been in had broken up, which led me to also end things with my web development clients. My plan was to go back to the Chicago area and rekindle some business with the gallery that represented me. I was going to make what I called “a final go” at being a full time artist. I’d saved money all those years to essentially fund myself to concentrate on art making. Before leaving Seattle, I had just found a really sweet spot with my acrylic and mixed media paintings. I was really happy and excited for starting my new life. After leaving Seattle, I backpacked, taking a train, across Canada and was supposed to be on my way to visit my friend the following week when I got the news she had passed, taking her own life. This is the black hole I entered.

My instinct was to use art as therapy. But there was so much darkness that would bubble up. I felt tremendous regret that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time to help her. She was one of my very best friends and close confidants. I kept wishing I’d left a week sooner or made one more phone call. The regret, self-loathing, and grief that loss survivors feel is very real and heavy. Because I had just uprooted my whole life, I was all the more lost. I could feel myself becoming physically unwell, on my way to an ulcer, whenever I painted. Within my life, I began making self-destructive choices. I finally hit a bottom and paused in March of 2014 to have an intervention with myself. I told myself: “Alright. You can’t make art and express yourself right now. But you’ve had this idea for creating this art software for nearly a decade. You have the skills now. And you clearly are going to be useless in life for a few years while you sort all of this out. So take this time and make a tool of self expression for when it’s safe to express yourself again.” And that’s what I’ve done. I like to think some of the positive choices I’ve made since that time as honoring the way she lived her life to be of service to others.    

Your question is interesting because I do want to turn myself around and introduce what I’ve become and created with some of those original goals I left Seattle with in 2013. I really emerged from that personal black hole in 2019, but then the global pandemic hit us and we all had to find new ways of addressing what our goals were for 2020 and beyond. I’m super grateful for all the good fortune that’s come my way, but I’m still waiting to really rejoin the world in the ways that I wanted to. I think we all are.  

8 minutes 46 seconds – In Memoriam George Floyd

MK: My work is peculiar in that it didn’t really fit into the generative art community. And it didn’t really fit into the painting community. My work is a bit of a hybrid and so finding an audience, especially within the old social media paradigm, was challenging. But then along came CryptoArt. This is where I finally began finding an audience and finding people who shared some important values with me. My friend Sarah Zucker put it best– “This is an art movement. But it’s not a unity of style. It’s a unity of spirit.” I think that unity of spirit is what’s responsible for me and probably many of us first finding our people.  

CRYPTOART MONETIZATION GENERATION

MK: Thank you for saying so! I have a very strong mind’s eye. I describe what I do as “tuning” into color. It’s something I remember doing as a young child with our black & white TV and later rediscovered when I was a young man developing into an artist. I focus and tune my mind to see colors that aren’t actually there. It’s most effective while I’m in a flow state and I look at something absent of color, like a black & white photo. I’ll see colors in my mind’s eye and lay one down. And sometimes I inject my own intellectual ideas about color which rival what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye. The process is a bit like jazz music’s call and response. As I lay a color down, the colors I see around it change and I’ll then respond to that. This process began 20 years ago with acrylics and gel pens over photos printed on paper. But it really extends itself so naturally into my software, where I can rapidly integrate my “tuning” into my creative production.

“One of Us” Variation 1

MK: In those early years of 2014 – 2017, I was contemplating how on earth I was eventually going to bring any of my work to a market. I didn’t necessarily want to feel forced into creating physical prints just in order to satisfy a market’s demand for physical goods. A paper certificate of authenticity felt weak and incorrect. The next best thing was a diamond encrusted, gold gilded USB drive held in a cedar box. None of these things appealed to me and so probably delayed me even trying to bring my digital art to a traditional brick and mortar gallery. And of course I was struggling financially. I had run through my life savings during the time that I built my digital art studio software. I was fortunate to be in position that I could take on occasional web development projects again to make ends meet.  

Visionary Founder – Jesse Powell

MK: I first read about art on blockchain in the Summer of 2017, a week before the release of CryptoPunks. I looked around immediately for places like SuperRare but I couldn’t find anything yet. I knew blockchain was a better technology than flimsy paper certificates of authenticity were for provenance. And I knew smart contracts could solve lots of problems, like secondary sale royalties, that have existed in the traditional art market. My hesitancy to join was in looking out for the interests of my previous collectors. If I minted NFTs, they’d be representative of artworks that I held as high, if not higher, than my oil paintings which had sold for thousands. I took time to watch the market and be sure I was willing to take that risk. Eventually, I came to terms that I should jump in and contribute to building this market by joining it. Most of us were willing to sell work for far less than we valued the work in USD, understanding we’d eventually make up the value by HODLing.

TAKO

MK: The wise ones in this space realized we weren’t building markets or careers for ourselves, but for future artists. That’s still the case. Digital tools are likely the present and future of popular expression. The foundations we set by our choices would have and will continue to have a loud echo. As I felt embraced by the community, it was like a warm hug. And I increasingly wanted to squeeze back. I felt like I was finally in the right place at the right time and it seemed like I was uniquely equipped with certain life experiences that would be of benefit here. That’s what I needed. I still wonder sometimes if I am locked in a coma having an elaborate dream, because it seems so unlikely to have been a part of all that I have been. 

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #1

MK: As a child, I learned about black holes by visiting planetariums and I became obsessed for a brief time at the age of 5 with the 1979 sci-fi Disney film, “The Black Hole.” I was fascinated by the black hole’s invisibility, gravity, size, and the concept of transporting to unknown location and maybe even time travel. I’d sometimes lay in bed with my eyes closed and imagine what it would be like to travel through one and come out the other end. 

For many years I internalized 2013 as being this period of time that I entered a personal black hole after the loss of my friend that year. There are these lost years with flattened memories between then and when I rejoined society in 2019. I’m not sure that those years were as much about my dedication to coding and creating my software as they were dedicated to avoiding feeling anything real. If I spent the day thinking about geometry and algorithms, then I wasn’t bothered by feeling my emotions. But at the same time, I was building something. And I knew I’d be able to create with what I was building one day. I’d come out the other end of my personal black hole and be at a destination I couldn’t have imagined. I’d be transported and transformed.

April 10th, 2019, the first image of a black hole was revealed to myself and all of humanity. I immediately set on painting it. Before seeing that image created by the Event Horizon Telescope, the metaphor I’d been using for my life was faceless. So now to finally see this thing, which had captured my imagination for so long.  Everything happened that single day. I created the black hole painting and a rudimentary way of capturing a dataset representing my grief. And then I’d expose the painting to that dataset, skewing the locations of all the components that made up that painting. It all took place that single day. The series intended to investigate the aesthetics that result from diverged paths, where all that goes wrong is sometimes made right. I wanted to transform what had been such a dark chapter in my life into a more beautiful, purposeful one. This is right before joining cryptoart and minting my first NFTs.

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9

MK: The nature of deconstructions, in literary terms, is that a text does not have a fixed meaning. Reading a book 20 years ago compared to today  takes on a different meaning. This is the first M87 Black Hole Deconstruction I’ve minted since May, 2019. There are only 9 of these deconstruction artworks that I made. We know what the work, at it’s conception is about; the transformation of paths gone askew. So how can we read this work differently from the previous, which were my very first NFTs? Have my contributions the last 2+ years to CryptoArt culture, NFT technology, and the future of art become part of what this work now represents? I like to think so. And then it’s also exciting that viewers come to this work with their own experiences and can enter it from their own perspectives about black holes and transformation. I love that art is open to interpretation– and although I provide some clues to my own personal meaning, this is not the only reading to make!  

MK: Broadly I love fractals and recursion. My custom software was designed for the algorithms to be interoperable and work recursively. When I actually implement things from this feature, I get really unexpected visual results and oftentimes a violation of memory or a system crash! These are really interesting concepts to work with though.   

This particular work provides a clue about my work’s transformational aspects, as this is not a still image, but has been animated. These animations I make of my paintings are all seamlessly looped to create an infinity of experience. Part of my larger concepts is about using the passage of time, evolution of technology to transform and reinterpret my past work. All my digital paintings are made to be future proof where they’re able to be adapted to future technology. There are 3 deconstructions I haven’t minted. I don’t know if I ever will. But if I do, the timing and treatment will be a tell-tale sign of how to read that work and perhaps the whole series differently.