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Jonathan Chomko
Zancan
DEC 2022
Landscape with Carbon Capture
Zancan
Landscape with Carbon Capture
11401 artworks
By placing our trust in any of the "future techs" to solve today’s environmental problems, we run the risk of postponing the actions that mattered. Carbon capture is one of those technologies we’ve engaged in to give us an impression of action; perhaps, unconsciously, in order to cover up our anguish, our helplessness or our guilt. Yet we need to keep moving forward. Art has this kind of energy, charismatic and unifying. If I believe little in technology to save humanity, I keep hope in humanity, in its conscience, in the universality of its love. If only one power is given to artists, it is that of being able to touch, sometimes, the hearts of men. "Landscape with Carbon Capture" is a critique of my own environmental consciousness as an artist working with technology around natural themes. Although I do not know any solution, although I am helpless just like you, I want to fight with what I’ve got. I want to acknowledge the great hypocrisy of our times. Carbon emissions are here to stay, they'll stain my canvas, no matter how green the colours on my palette. For the final weekend, 20% of sales from this artwork will go to The Good Society, a non profit that harnesses the power of NFTs to fund global initatives working to improve the environment, human rights, and our collective health and wellbeing. Learn more here. — Generative Art Made with Javascript code Right click to save a 3240x3240 PNG file Pass up \&pixelSize=5000 in the URL for a 5000x5000 image or more. Maximum is 16384 on a powerful computer. Video instructions.
View series
NOV 2022
Landscape with Carbon Offset
Zancan
Landscape with Carbon Offset
Unique
I was a very young boy when I was stunned by a machine in a store: a typewriter with an LCD segment display. It was tangible proof of a dream future, then called "the year 2000", which would bring us flying cars and helpful humanoid robots. I grew up and organized my professional and creative life inhabited by this childhood fascination for the marvels of technology. You have to mature enough to understand when adhering to these promises of a benevolent and playful future makes you a devoted consumer. I broke later with this utopia of abundance, ease and technological comfort, not without difficulty; Having become a critic of my own desires, I now live with this torment: our energy to build carries our own demise. There are those gurus whom we love to revere, those makers of jewels, pleasures and riches, who chant the promise of our individual happiness in technological progress. These make solutions up that stir up the very problem. "Always control your speed," said the driving instructor; today no one knows how to brake. Everything I create today is inhabited by this doubt and this guilt, in the realization that my innocent pleasure of creating depens on what fuels our race towards disaster. Yet energy is the engine of men. Art has this kind of energy, charismatic and unifying. If I believe little in technology to save humanity, I keep hope in humanity, in its conscience, in the universality of its love. If only one power is given to artists, it is that of being able to touch, sometimes, the hearts of men, and in this sense, I have this duty to continue to try. “Landscape with carbon offset” is an honest critique of my own consciousness as an artist working with technology. The canvas where the desire to explore new forms of art is expressed, will always remain stained with the hydrocarbons that I participated in burning ; the technological solutions that we place our faith in are barely more than ways to wash away our guilt. For these reasons, through the hard times, more than ever, we need beauty in our lives.
View series
SEP 2022
Colour Time Generative
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Generative
63 artworks
Colour Time Generative draws the spectrum of Colour Time Sync into a gradient, and invites the audience to divide the spectrum into individual works. The decisive moment of the generative mint is spread across the duration of the sale, each new purchase shifting the works until the sale closes. The work exists as an IPFS-hosted html file, using token ID and number of pieces sold to generate each image.
View series
Colour Time Terlingua
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Terlingua
Twelve animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles. Working within the constraints of blockchain, the graphical information of each work is stored and rendered on-chain. Named after the locations which they were created, the works attempt to capture a day of sense impressions received on the road through colour and rhythm.
View series
Colour Time Portal
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Portal
Twelve animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles. Working within the constraints of blockchain, the graphical information of each work is stored and rendered on-chain. Named after the locations which they were created, the works attempt to capture a day of sense impressions received on the road through colour and rhythm.
View series
Colour Time Lafayette
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Lafayette
Twelve animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles. Working within the constraints of blockchain, the graphical information of each work is stored and rendered on-chain. Named after the locations which they were created, the works attempt to capture a day of sense impressions received on the road through colour and rhythm.
View series
Colour Time Asheville
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Asheville
Twelve animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles. Working within the constraints of blockchain, the graphical information of each work is stored and rendered on-chain. Named after the locations which they were created, the works attempt to capture a day of sense impressions received on the road through colour and rhythm.
View series
AUG 2022
Colour Time Atlanta
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Atlanta
Unique
Colour Time is a series of twelve on-chain animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles in November of 2021. This is the third iteration of the work, which began as a website in the net-art tradition, colour-time.com. The second edition of the work were three video-based NFTs created in March of 2021 and minted on Opensea. The project stems from earlier explorations around colour – I had a collection of digital colour selections remaining from the development of Colour Calendar which I put into a video edition program and set to music. As I played around with the idea of a colour sequence animation, I became curious about slowness, perhaps influenced by my friend Timothy Thomasson’s slow CGI video work. I set out to make colours shift as slowly as the movement of the sun; movement perceptible over time but difficult to observe as it happens. As with all simple goals, this was more difficult to achieve than expected; I had various pieces of desktop software that could create interesting effects on my computer, but trying to record these animations I ran into issues. Video compression would create jumps between colours, breaking the effect by giving the viewer a perceptible moment of change to hold on to. I ended up creating a web-based version of my desktop software using WebGL in order to acheive adequate smoothness. To generate the colour sequence I built a timeline editor tool, which I used to create the 20 minute sequence that lives on colour-time.com. What I found in creating this sequence was that the slowness of the transition creates optical effects in the eye; colours appear that are not onscreen, hard edges blur. The change is slow enough that the eye has time to become saturated with colour, which generates complementary colour afterimages of the on-screen colour. The sequences for colour-time.com were designed with these afterimages in mind; blues slowly shifting to meet the hallucinated red in the eye. Presenting this experience online creates a challenge for the viewer; in the browser where we are used to scrolling through endless content, the viewer must release control and let the work unfold at its own pace. These new on-chain Colour Time works carry this gesture of slowness into the NFT space, resisting quick assessment. Where Proof of Work makes value easily legible, each Colour Time requires durational viewing for its qualities to be perceived. Each animation in the series consists of two planes of colour, which shift between two points of colour. Each shift happens over a varying timeframe, ie 20 seconds for the background, 17 for the foregound. Each plane of colour loops on its own timeframe, allowing new hues of colour to meet and new rhythms to build, the visual equivalent of a Phillip Glass piece. These phasing effects add a generative element to each piece, building complexity over time as loops move in and out of sync. The works reference the colour work of Joseph Albers and the skyspace installations of James Turell, studies of colour and perception within the frame of the on-chain NFT. These twelve pieces represent a selection of those produced. After a day of riding, I would produce a series of studies, letting the colours and rhythms of the day work their way in to the animations. As in Proof of Work, there is a hypothesis that intangible experience can be transmitted visually. I see Colour Time as the completion of a year of exploration into the materiality of the NFT with an offer of pure experience. colourtime.jonathanchomko.com
View series
JUN 2022
Rapture Captured
Zancan
Rapture Captured
294 editions
I can't explain why the sight of a clump of grass growing bravely through the crack of a concrete wall gives me such joy. Or why watching my lawn explode in the spring into a chaotic throng of wild plant species demonstrating their determination to live fascinates me so much. There is something of the order of the unconscious, or of the collective consciousness, which attaches man to nature to the point of affecting his senses in a primal way, whereas I am like many an urban product of modernity and technology. In my works, nature is not the main subject, but it is a means of depicting, among other things, the vital force, the resilience of the living. There is in its multiplicity and its autonomous, chaotic and organized aspect something that traditional painting did not allow me to capture, other than thanks to infinite labor and a gesture that was far too controlled. Algorithmic art opened up this possibility for me to render nature, in its movement, its density, its wild abundance. The mesh is a familiar and basic object for the programmer, the framework of any 3D model, it represents the digital. I used the yellow color for two reasons. First, the color chosen is a pure yellow (#ffff00) in the RGB spectrum, which immediately places it in the digital realm. On the other hand the colors used for the representation of nature are muted, in order to attach it to the physical world. The background color also corresponds to that of a paper that I often use for my physical drawings. Then, the yellow functions here as a representation of the sacred, like the illuminations on ancient religious texts. I am very admiring of certain contemporary painters or illustrators who use gold leaf over their drawings, allowing them to bring a surnatural light into their works, to access a higher stratum of symbolic representation looking towards spirituality. I never took the chance to try out this technique, and working digitally gave me that chance. The holes in the net that can be observed symbolize the impossibility of capturing the true nature, the real feeling that one experiences in its presence. The flowers, twisted to the extreme under netting, are there to evoke the sense of hypocrisy in using technology to create art that evokes nature, as a reminder of the impossible environmental challenges that we are facing while galloping toward the chimeras of technological progress.” - zancan. Full interview here This artwork was nominated on Verse by Tyler Hobbs, and 30% of the initial sale will be donated to the charity Girls Who Code.
View series
JUN 2022
Colour Time Marfa
Jonathan Chomko
Colour Time Marfa
Unique
Colour Time is a series of twelve on-chain animated SVGs created during a motorcycle trip from Montreal to Los Angeles in November of 2021. This is the third iteration of the work, which began as a website in the net-art tradition, www.colour-time.com. The second edition of the work were three video-based NFTs created in March of 2021 and minted on Opensea. The project stems from earlier explorations around colour - I had a collection of digital colour selections remaining from the development of Colour Calendar which I put into a video editing program and set to music. As I played around with the idea of a colour sequence animation, I became curious about slowness, perhaps influenced by my friend Timothy Thomasson’s slow CGI video work. I set out to make colours shift as slowly as the movement of the sun; movement perceptible over time but difficult to observe as it happens. As with all simple goals, this was more difficult to achieve than expected; I had various pieces of desktop software that could create interesting effects on my computer, but trying to record these animations I ran into issues. Video compression would create jumps between colours, breaking the effect by giving the viewer a perceptible moment of change to hold on to. I ended up creating a web-based version of my desktop software using WebGL in order to acheive adequate smoothness. To generate the colour sequence I built a timeline editor tool, which I used to create the 20 minute sequence that lives on www.colour-time.com. What I found in creating this sequence was that the slowness of the transition creates optical effects in the eye; colours appear that are not onscreen, hard edges blur. The change is slow enough that the eye has time to become saturated with colour, which generates complementary colour afterimages of the on-screen colour. The sequences for colour-time.com were designed with these afterimages in mind; blues slowly shifting to meet the hallucinated red in the eye. Presenting this experience online creates a challenge for the viewer; in the browser where we are used to scrolling through endless content, the viewer must release control and let the work unfold at its own pace. These new on-chain Colour Time works carry this gesture of slowness into the NFT space, resisting quick assessment. Where Proof of Work makes value easily legible, each Colour Time requires durational viewing for its qualities to be perceived. Each animation in the series consists of two planes of colour, which shift between two points of colour. Each shift happens over a varying timeframe, ie 20 seconds for the background, 17 for the foregound. Each plane of colour loops on its own timeframe, allowing new hues of colour to meet and new rhythms to build, the visual equivalent of a Phillip Glass piece. These phasing effects add a generative element to each piece, building complexity over time as loops move in and out of sync. The works reference the colour work of Joseph Albers and the skyspace installations of James Turell, studies of colour and perception within the frame of the on-chain NFT. These twelve pieces represent a selection of those produced. After a day of riding, I would produce a series of studies, letting the colours and rhythms of the day work their way in to the animations. As in Proof of Work, there is a hypothesis that intangible experience can be transmitted visually. I see Colour Time as the completion of a year of exploration into the materiality of the NFT with an offer of pure experience.
View series