d0n.xyz: Multi-role  Artist from Brooklyn, New York

Brief intro about yourself

I'm an Internet artist, electronic musician and a visual designer currently living in Brooklyn, NY, previously in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work is often in the form of experimental websites, audiovisual art and software prototypes which sometimes end up as tools for digital artists. My current major project New Art City is an online virtual art space and full toolkit for exhibiting digital works, started in 2020. So far we’ve had over 140 public exhibitions and displayed works of over 3,800 individual artists. I also maintain a database for new media art called foundyou.online, and ran an electronic music label called Gridwalk for 10 years. As an artist I use my domain name, d0n.xyz interchangeably with my real name everywhere that will allow me to.

Your inspiration or driving force

With my work I am focused on pushing the edges of digital culture to expand what's possible, or reveal possibilities that previously went unnoticed. I see my artwork as fundamental research into aesthetics and technology, attempting to combine them in ways that unlock new paths for composition, expression and excellence in how digital media is presented. I try to solve these problems for myself first as a practicing artist, and then formalize them into tools that provide a path for others. In general I try to create things that have never been done before on the Internet.



What does your creative process usually look like? 

Every artwork I make intersects with at least one of three focus areas: Aesthetic, Technical, and Conceptual, and my favorite and most successful works engage all three. Each one of these focus areas has a process that reinforces the others.

Aesthetic work starts as broad, open-ended experimentation, usually with only a rough idea of a composition, or a small compositional element I want to try out, followed by experimentation and refinement. This type of work includes the generative art I've been making lately, abstract expressionist paintings, live visuals and music recordings. The result isn't meant to have meaning, and I think it's counter-productive to assign meaning to purely aesthetic work. Creating aesthetic work is fundamental research into creating beauty and builds my bank of aesthetic techniques that I can use for projects that include a concept.

Technical work is spending time to practice and deeply understand the technology that I use, and sharpening my ability to execute on ideas. This part of my practice is usually developed in order to meet an aesthetic or conceptual idea, but occasionally I focus on a purely technical project such as my open source tool, code-keyframes, a timeline editor for setting JavaScript code to any music track. A technical project will start much like a client-driven design project, where goals and requirements are defined from the start... very different from open-ended aesthetic exploration but it creates more precise results.

Conceptual work is the most challenging for me but the most rewarding. A conceptual project will start with an idea, an emotion or phenomenon that I want to communicate and something that I think will resonate with viewers. Then I choose an aesthetic to convey this idea and figure out the technical process to execute it. It's challenging because a good concept should be easily communicated in a sentence or two and simplified to its core idea. Most ideas are too complicated to express this way, and the best art should convey the idea without the viewer having to read the statement. Some examples of this kind of work are my browser extension More Plants, and my net art piece Remember Me.




Is there a series in your previous works that you would like to highlight? 

I keep coming back to video synthesis as an aesthetic technique. At this point I have created around five different approaches to video synthesis, including one unreleased project that creates images using only CSS gradients. I love it because each approach to video synthesis will have its own personality and flavor, and they all have emergent aesthetics that result from combining controls. Each new control that gets added to the system will have a compounding effect on the number of possible images that can be created based on how it interacts with the previously added controls.

There are some elements appearing coherently in your work, such as glitch, geometric transformation and flow. Can you talk a little bit about them? Is there a reason for these?

I can't say there is a meaning or reason for these elements beyond what I find aesthetically/compositionally beautiful. My work tends to have a consistent style, but it's not a planned outcome. It's more like the result of many curated accidents. My aesthetic choices come from a subconscious and intuitive place, and sometimes I only realize what I was visually influenced by much later after a work is created.

Your musical compositions are also very attractive. You also have many works on your website that combine music and visual art. What is your approach to combining visuals and music?

Shortly after starting my music label Gridwalk I learned how to generate visuals with code, which took me in the direction of becoming a professional VJ writing and performing with my own software (gifSlap), which I also used to create music videos for the artists on the label. Since then, audiovisual experimentation using the web browser has been a thread in my work, and I try to find new ways of performing with the browser beyond the basics of video playback. Using the browser as a real-time rendering engine for live performance is the most exciting because you get high-quality resolution, high frame rate and the interactivity of software without requiring any download. This idea applies to interactive music videos such as this one for EMINA and this one for Mangangs, as well as tools for performing live such as the one I'm developing now. This push for something real-time and shareable also led to the philosophy around New Art City, which is to present digital artworks online in a format that can remain visible to a broad audience for a long time and be shown in real-time high quality.



Whether it's a website, a virtual art platform, animation or music, your work seems to be dedicated to creating a third space that is different from the real world and immersive, and I feel surrounded by it as a viewer. Do you have any thoughts on the concept of “space” as related to your works?

I've spent perhaps too much time online, but I really enjoy the world wide web as a place to hang out on the edges of culture beyond the big platforms. I enjoy these spaces as asynchronous meeting points for virtual explorers and builders who took the time to set up their own corners of the net. My work exists because of the promise of the web as a free and open space where everyone can create without permission from anyone else. It's the ultimate place to show digital art; because of that I want to explore every aspect of what is possible and unlock new ways of working with it.


Could you tell us more about your ongoing generative series?

The generative series has around ten works in it so far created in the span of a year, and each builds upon the aesthetic and codebase established in the previous. They are all about the basic operations of drawing colors to the screen, then moving those pixels around using copy/paste functions. Each one has a random seed every time the page loads which determines the properties of the edition, which is a requirement for the works to be sold on fx(hash). The series started initially as a way for me to experiment with digital editions on web3. However, the work has led to creation of other artifacts like physical prints and my current live code performance tool which I'm calling another video synthesizer.





What made you think of building a virtual art platform? Does it have any features or differences?

New Art City was created from my ongoing research on how to exhibit digital art online and uplift Internet art to the exhibition standards of fine art. I was working on an MFA degree at San Jose State University when the pandemic started, and the first prototype was created immediately after classes were moved to an online model. The students and teachers were looking for a way to continue to exhibit their digital work and they served as the first set of beta testers. The widespread need for a better digital exhibition tool made New Art City grow quickly and it gained popularity in the digital art scene because it was created from within the community and addressed the specific needs of digital artists. The team is currently five individuals including me, and in addition to providing the toolkit we also run the yearly New Art City Festival and an ongoing residency program. We've always tried to position ourselves not as a platform, but as a toolkit and a gallery, which means we are culture and community first. We cultivate a space for artists to work together and adapt to their feedback. We don't look or behave like a normal startup company which sets us apart from every other virtual art gallery tool.


Any other hobbies besides art?

Art is life! But also lately I'm interested in learning about fashion, meeting new people and listening to music (as always).