Erick Calderon’s “Chromie Squiggle #9945” is part of his 10,000-work NFT collection featuring colorful inchworm scribbles that amount to an artist’s digital drawing machine. (Museum of Art + Light)
Manhattan’s Museum of Art + Light ‘de-codes’ digital art in adventurous exhibition
If you are curious about the rapidly evolving digital art ecosystem, make the trip to Manhattan, Kansas, to visit “Code & Canvas: Defining Digital in the Age of Blockchain,” guest curated by Kansas City curator Jori Cheville. Part of the Museum of Art + Light’s inaugural season, this comprehensible exhibition features five contemporary “digitally native” artists, who approach the arts from fresh angles: namely the sciences, engineering, manufacturing and entrepreneurship.
Artist, in this context, translates to “creative coder,” one who develops algorithmic platforms to generate images, write poetry or draw. The exhibition demonstrates how artists bridge innovative digital practices with physical artworks by creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) accompanied by fine art prints on handmade paper, or installation-based works, in addition to natively digital displays on screens. Regardless of media, the overall presentation in this spacious exhibition is inviting and educational — as one would hope for a newly opened museum.
Tyler Hobbs calls himself “a practicing generative artist, creative coder and painter.” His practice centers around the collaborative tensions and creative possibilities of “man and machine.” He programs digital equipment and robotic tools like plotters to generate abstract images that he tweaks by hand using traditional painting techniques. In the open-source spirit of creativity and participation, the artist shares his QQL algorithm at a dedicated station where visitors can try their hand at generating art from a few variable shapes. Notably, Hobbs’ acrylic on panel painting “QQL: Analog 4 (QQL#222),” produced algorithmically with the artist’s hand, is the first work to be acquired by the Museum of Art + Light for its permanent collection.
Language artist Sasha Stiles relies on poetry as an “ancient and enduring technology” while embracing the “condition of digital dualism.” Her text-based installation “Completions: Fragments” (2022) co-authors poems with Artificial Intelligence and reimagines the blockchain as a 21st-century printing press. The generated texts are published on a grid of small screens using motion graphics and animation software while performed by an electronically enhanced voice. One marvels at the semi-sentience suggested in the work by AI engorged on poetic Large Language Models.
Eric “Snowfro” Calderon is a creative coder, entrepreneur and tech enthusiast. After experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of 3D printing, Snowfro worked extensively with projection mapping as seen in the work “Flutter,” a digital projection of spectral colors onto a wall-mounted cluster of small pyramids. The work could be a 21st-century cousin of Luis Tomasello’s well known “Chromoplastic Mural” at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In 2020, Snowfro released the 10,000-work NFT collection “Chromie Squiggle,” an algorithm producing colorful inchworm scribbles that amount to an artist’s digital drawing machine. He is also founder of the digital publishing platform Art Blocks. There, collectors can buy or “mint” a unique digital artwork that is also a digital asset stored on the blockchain as an NFT or non-fungible token that permanently records the authenticity and provenance of the artwork.
A lifelong tinkerer with computers and code, Emily Xie also has a passion for art history and traditional art forms such as textiles, collage, even wallpaper. This is evident in her interest in “skeuomorphism,” an industrial design term that emerged in the 1980s with proponents like Steve Jobs who advocated for realistic imagery when designing digital interfaces. Remember when the camera icon on your first smart phone actually resembled a camera lens instead of today’s flat camera shape icon?
Xie applies this to her computational approach to visualizing textiles using the JavaScript programming language. The resulting images do not read as digital works, and instead celebrate the “sensory richness” of fabric and fiber arts. Her body of work “Memories of Qilin” was algorithmically generated with the inputs of East Asian folklore and the analog visual traditions of Chinese brush painting and Japanese woodblock printing. The imagery suggests textured organic abstractions with complex surface designs at play. Some of the digital images are printed on handmade paper while many appear indistinguishable from paper on matte screens.
A self-described “Neo-Precisionist,” who began his digital art making using PowerPoint software no less, Grant Yun presents crisp, linear compositions of lonesome Midwestern landscapes. Born in California, “American Korean” Yun pursued higher education in Wisconsin, where he discovered 20th-century American artists like Charles Sheeler, Grant Wood and Ed Ruscha.
Yun’s wry, sparsely evocative illustrations, collectible as NFTs with visuals created in Adobe Illustrator, embrace and update the distinctly regional, modernist imagery of the American scene. Equally, the visual influence of early video game design is evident. The world-building construction approach of creating with colored geometric vector graphics can be seen in the rural roadside landscape of “Perfectly Normal” or the birds-eye minimalism of “Cow.”
“Code & Canvas: Defining Digital in the Age of Blockchain” continues at the Museum of Art + Light, 316 Pierre St., Manhattan, Kansas, through Aug. 1. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets range from $10 to $25 depending on age, member status and what exhibits viewers choose to see. For more information, 785.775.5444 or artlightmuseum.org.
A New Take on “Light and Space” Art
Sharing the Museum of Art + Light’s second floor dedicated to digital arts is “Exploring Perception: Mads Christensen and the Experience of Color, Form, and Light” on view through June 30, 2025. Christensen is a Danish-born, Los Angeles-based artist, and electrical engineer by training, who explores the optical qualities of light in subtly shifting wall works that simulate liminal twilight. Sleek acrylic panels embedded with software programmed LEDs like “Almost Forever” blend, expand and contract their geometric forms in soft, mesmerizing hues. The work teases our brain’s ability to perceive 2D and 3D imagery and builds meaningfully upon the California “Light and Space” art movement in the vein of Robert Irwin and James Turrell.
