Matt Kane is an artist who explores historical aesthetics with code, doing with geometry what the great painters did with oils. He left the art world for a decade to work as a web developer in the Pacific Northwest. It was there that he taught himself programming, gained life experience, and made career choices centered around creating the work that he is currently devoted to. Kane began as a painter of oils to become a painter of code.

Jeff Davis: Hi Matt! It’s great to have an opportunity to get to know you better. When would you say you first started making art?

Matt Kane: As a child I always loved drawing. In elementary school we had no formal art classes, but I gained the reputation of being “the artist” every year. I was always drawing in the margins of all my papers. Other kids would sometimes challenge me to drawing contests—basically things like who could draw Homer Simpson better. Honestly, there were a couple times I wasn’t the best and my title of “the artist” was put in jeopardy! Later in high school I had what I think are the world’s greatest art teachers. They really brought me under their wings and opened me up to what art was and got me thinking about what art could become. That’s where the most important part of my formal education in art happened and where I learned how to present myself professionally. I entered high school wanting to become a cartoonist or an animator, maybe an illustrator when I grew up. But far from these commercial careers, I graduated with Willem de Kooning as my art hero. Those teachers supporting and nourishing my passion had me convinced by the time I graduated that art was where I could dedicate the rest of my life.

JD: And then when did you start pursuing generative art?

MK: Funny story. When I was about ten years old, I played Nintendo games. Do you know Ninja Gaiden? It had the best, most realistic cut-scene graphics of any 8-bit game back then. For a kid, it was like looking at photos or pages from a comic book. I got to thinking about how all these graphics were made up of pixels. That got me thinking about how if different colors were reordered randomly, you could make a computer program that generated every picture that could ever be possible. Most images would be static garbage, but once in a while you’d land on something really profound! I didn’t own a computer then—I was only ten. But fast forward about seventeen years to 2008. I was in web development for probably about a year or two at that point and learned about Processing.org.

So that became my first conceptual, generative project. I went to work making a random pixel generator. I based the thought experiment on the infinite monkey theorem where if you have a monkey hitting keys on a typewriter into infinity, you’d eventually create the complete works of William Shakespeare. So the same idea except pixels and images instead of letters and words. So that’s how Pixel Monkeys got created. And then recently I found out that Mario Klingemann, probably in the 1980s, entered into generative art with pretty much the same “every image” thought experiment. It’s interesting how many people stumbled on this website and emailed me over the years telling me about how they thought about this same thing. I’ve always seen neural networks and GANs as being the next step in that evolution toward the “every image.” It’s very different from where I am now with my work, but an important step along the way. So I messed with Processing a little bit on and off the next six years before seriously beginning an everyday ritual of making a generative sketch and building the Digital Art Studio Software I began in early 2014.

JD: So you’re plugging away with generative dailies, how did you end up discovering NFTs and crypto art?

MK: In the summer of 2017, I was reading someone’s answer to a question on the website Quora and they got into explaining about the provenance that art on blockchain could provide. And how royalties could be built into sales contracts. I instantly understood this was the way forward for my work. I could stop thinking about gold-gilded, diamond-encrusted USB drives in cedar boxes with paper certificates of authenticity. The first thing I did was Google more, trying to find an online art gallery on blockchain. But this was the week before CryptoPunks was even launched. So there was nothing I found that I was looking for. But I kept an eye on it, and so when RareArt.io, Dada, SuperRare, and KnownOrigin got started a year later, I was there for it. And being on the #generativeart hashtags in Twitter, I caught all of Jason Bailey’s early reporting on the movement. I already had collectors of my physical oil paintings, who had paid thousands for my work. So I was being really cautious out of respect to my past collectors about joining a market that hadn’t matured past $50 sales yet. But by the end of 2018, I really had made up my mind that I needed to just take a risk, bring my work into this and contribute to building what I wanted this to be. That’s the biggest lesson in all of this for me: never wait for someone else for what you’re perfectly capable of.

JD: How would you say your creative practice has changed over time?

MK: Well, what hasn’t changed is my tendency toward exploring creative innovation, always searching for what meets my vision more crisply. Twenty years ago, I was making oil paintings after little color sketches I’d make on paper with acrylics, gel pens and crayons. For a short time, I made the same images using fabric, buttons, and embroidery. Then I began layering resin between my paint layers building massive stereoscopic paintings. This was the early-2000s before this was a popular fad. And then I returned to traditional painting, really making an effort to understand about glazing techniques. At the same time, I’m exploring creating generative tools to help me automate some of the time-consuming aspects of my physical studio practice. Every generative painting I make, I find one or two features that I could build for next time. So it’s constantly moving forward stacking one more small step on top of the previous. What I really want to get back to is where my software speaks directly to my plotters and I’m able to collaborate on physical work. That’s where I was right before cryptoart and NFTs began occupying all my time.

JD: Any recent accomplishments you’d like to share?

MK: Yeah, in October I was really excited and honored to be the first artist on SuperRare to release their own custom series contract with The Door. As I look into the future, we’re going to see artists owning their own smart contracts more and more. And contextualizing and creating ecosystems around their work in these ways. So that was really cool for me to play a part in making sure artists could assign traits on these contracts and help kick that feature off with SuperRare.

And hey, I mentioned earlier about how I’d draw Simpsons characters when I was a kid. In March, I made the artwork CryptoArt Monetization Generation featuring “Homer Pepington,” my Ethereum co-opted version of Bitcoin Counterparty’s “Homer Pepe.” That just resold to Starry Night Capital for $1.24 Million. Seeing my art sell for over a million dollars wasn’t anything I ever dared imagine before NFTs—it was really nice to experience such a secondary sale royalty. It really hammered home for me how life-changing artists participating in their own success can be. I hadn’t received too many royalties before that. I immediately was able to begin confidently addressing some health challenges I’ve ignored, no longer worried if health insurance refused to pay like I’d had happen in the past. It’s probably strange to hear, but probably partially because of the pandemic, many artists like myself who entered into cryptoart several years ago with very little—we’re just now beginning to live in the present and be able to upgrade our lifestyles from where they were the last couple years. I’m really grateful. Just upgrading to new shoes that don’t hurt my feet has been amazing this week!

JD: That’s really amazing and you deserve all the success that has come your way. Alright, let’s get into your Art Blocks project. What was the inspiration for Gazers?

MK: Gazers was a pure evolution of ideas and drew from many things. This past summer, I’d been creating generative paintings for The Door series, nearly daily. One of them ended up being heavy in moire patterns. Initially I wanted to explore making generative work using these patterns and the door design. And deeply explore color theory! That’s how the work began. But then I noticed having several doors together, they looked like the heads and shoulders of people. And they just needed to be looking at the moon the same way my father and I would. And then the doors had to get out of the way entirely! The work just kept evolving out of that. People on Twitter are often remarking how we’re in the “cave art” period of NFTs. Whenever I’d read that, I kept making an association with these cave-art lunar calendars that dated to the last ice age that I knew about. It felt right for the blockchain to have a moon phase calendar to join in that art historical lineage.

In sorting out a way to calculate moon phases, I realized the Sotheby’s Natively Digital auction I’d just taken part in, and the record sale of Right Place & Right Time last year had literally taken place under New Moons. So using personally significant dates from my career became the way for basing the Origin Moon trait that I count 29.53 days from in order to calculate moon phases. So beneath the surface, there’s this quiet conceptual self-portrait happening, relating the succession of moons with the metaphor of the moon for achieving goals. But these goals always get bigger and bigger. It seems like it’s never enough to just stop dreaming. The work kept telling me what it wanted to become, and I just had to get my initial concepts out of the way for this train that was barreling through my brain! It’s really a pleasure when the process of working becomes this organic sort of evolution of ideas. And where you begin and are aiming for isn’t where you end.

JD: What else should collectors know about your project?

MK: I’d recommend that in addition to generative art, look at Gazers through the lenses of cryptoart, conceptual art, and performance art. And please be patient because the passage of time is such a critical artistic medium here. Every New Moon brings a new moon, so don’t fall in love with your moon or anyone else’s. The moon as a metaphor for goals—our goals must always be ready to change and adapt. That’s something that’s been made very clear to me in life and became important to express within this artwork.

If a collector is looking at the secondary market, my advice would be to look aesthetically. And specifically, look for a framing of the moon that you love. But there’s many other things to consider. There are things we won’t know about Gazers until Gazers reveals it to us. Personally, I’ll be interested in what I’ll want hanging in my house on a digital display. Gazers was designed around that sort of passive enjoyment that a hanging artwork provides. I kept thinking about creating something that is a bit new and different, while also staying the same, for every time a collector happens to pass the work in their hallway.

There’s an intent for the present to collect what the future will appreciate. That’s not to say the present won’t appreciate Gazers in their own way. But Gazers, like these crypto markets, will have cycles, maturation, FUD, FOMO. You can’t look at any of these markets without looking at them with respect to time. I’m the living artist telling you I’ve created a system that’s designed to continue revealing its nature long after I’m dead. That’s fun!

In Gazers, we invest in time and a multitude of evolving experiences. You will mint an NFT and see an artwork. But you will not begin to experience the artwork even after a year. The NFTs speed up their frame rate fractionally over time depending on a couple traits. Give me ten years. twenty years. sixty years. 200 years. 1,000 years. Then you will begin to understand the experience of Gazers. And it’s really appropriate given the 34,000 year history of moon phase calendars in human history meeting this present paradigm shift. In crypto, we talk about the creation of generational wealth in finance and passing on our NFTs and Bitcoin to our descendants. I’m talking about the creation of generational experiences in art. In both cases, growth continues and each new generation takes for granted something that the early generations had to endure or truly believe in for it to be passed on to them.

JD: I love this deep, long-term thinking! Well, it’s been great chatting with you Matt. What’s the best way for people to keep up with your work?

MK: Twitter and Instagram might be the best. Sometimes I post snarky stories about NFTs and CryptoArt on Insta. I’m @MattKaneArtist on both. I’m painfully slow with updating my website, but it gives great context to where I’ve been. Definitely check that too.

First published 02 December 2021: In Conversation with Matt Kane