At the age of eleven my parents went through a very violent divorce (escalating with my dad hitting my mother on the head with a hammer). I think this divorce; and more so the aftermath of it; has probably shaped my entire outlook on life. For a very long time I felt like I didn’t belong. A bad family situation, being bullied at school, etc. It made me very strongly revolt against society. At the time it was very black and white for me: society bad – alternative lifestyle good. This made me always look at life in a different light and look for other ways of doing things. I performed in bars with my poetry, did odd jobs, worked on my own projects and mostly traveled whenever I could. Growing older, I realized my travels were a form of escapism and however beautiful they were I wanted to build something lasting. This is when I started to full on focus on my projects, which eventually leads us here to me creating 256ART.
For me art has always been a way to scream very publicly, without being looked at as an insane person. When I started with my poetry way back when, it surprised me how many people felt a connection with my writings. It made me realize a key point, art has to be pure. Someone enjoying any form of art, will nearly always look at what it represents in their own life rather than that of its creator. I think my art often times combines a fairly mathematical / analytical side of me with a darker side that has always been a part of me. Whilst I want to be clear, my life right now is great, at times I feel that darkness coming up and inside I feel the heart and head clash so intensely, I just shut down. I’m in a stage in my life now, where I have a strong internal framework to get myself past these moments. One way to do so is by letting it out in the form of art. From very non-abstract poetry in the past, to more abstract generative art now.
My generative art journey started with the 256ART genesis series. It was me experimenting with the possibilities of generative art and blockchain technology. This was most definitely one of my way more mathematical focused pieces. And you guessed it, the focus lies on the number 256. It’s a number you will stumble upon time and time again in computer science. The underlining cryptographic hash function for Bitcoin is SHA256, for me Bitcoin especially in its inception was a big “fuck you” to the way our society runs. Bitcoin in itself represents what I stand for in multiple ways, freedom and an alternative way of doing things.
This gradual insanity, my latest work (launching soon), is definitely a darker piece. It’s very personal for me, as at times I do feel like I’m descending into insanity. My brain will go in overdrive, I can’t sleep and I question everything. But at a larger scale, it also represents society as a whole for me. Wars in the world, technological addiction, opportunity inequality etc. It’s not something that happened all at once, it’s been very gradual which made it become normalized. It’s a series that I hope can let you question the status quo and see where we can improve or find an alternative way altogether.
Building out 256ART has been incredibly fulfilling for me and I hope it can give other upcoming generative artists a platform to share their story and the art that flowed out of that story. Even right now as I’m writing this in the middle of rebuilding the project, I can easily say it’s been an amazing journey so far. And I can’t wait to see what it will grow into over the years to come.
I want to end on a realistic note, as it may sound like I’ve always been in an upward trajectory ever since my messy childhood, this hasn’t been the case. There have been moments where I felt it was all going to go downhill again. During the last decade of my life, I’ve been at the verge of self-destructing after failed relationships and failed projects. Even when everything was seemingly going perfectly, there have been moments I’ve severely struggled with my mental health. That said, I do believe that if you keep working on yourself and keep improving a bit each day, in the long run, you end up where you want to be. And I’m incredibly blessed to be able to say, that I do feel I’m pretty much exactly where I want to be in life.
