Jeremy Schoenherr

I think it primarily influences my approach to experience. Most of my time as a designer and engineer was spent building apps – usually social media apps, but sometimes a game or other experiments. What connects my engineering and artistic work is the focus on how people interact with the end result. In engineering, the goal is to build a relationship between the user and the app. That clearly maps to the artwork and viewer relationship, even more so with generative art, which shares DNA with apps in terms of the hardware they live on.

Sometimes there's more interaction with a generative piece, sometimes less, but there's usually a collaborative moment where the collector mints a new piece or finds an existing work they love. Unlike a painting, which limits interaction to physically approaching it and spending time with it, generative art can feel more active in the process.

With the pieces I made for Layer, since many will be generated only once, it creates an intimate experience. It's fleeting. You can have other experiences with the same algorithm, but that particular expression will never be presented exactly the same way again. Ultimately, you want that expression to connect with the viewer.

Most of my work comes from exploring and experimenting, seeing what emerges and how it makes me feel. A lot of it is very interactive: you work on a piece of code, look at the outputs, and see if it makes you feel anything and what it makes you think about.

This collection of four pieces branches off another algorithm. Most of my projects end up being these branches that grow naturally from three or four different algorithmic forms I play with. The one that birthed this series also played with elements of truth and how we view reality, which connected to the idea of "Disinformation".

The last year has been kind of wild with politics, the news, and social media. You try to process it all and wonder: what is real? What is not? Can I trust anything? When I was working on these algorithms, especially with these slow, spreading animations, I visualized information being transmitted and taking over culture in that same way. An idea spreads like a meme or a virus. When I looked at these different forms, starting with what I call Source – with its slow spread and layers of color broken up in certain ways – the way it took over the screen felt like how information disseminates into us and culture at large.

With the concept of misinformation or disinformation, depending on your source, it comes in different flavors. I think of it like guitar pedals: how do we distort or amplify certain signals and filter out others, or have some delay or repeat to reinforce them?

That's what I was feeling in my real life: what are we consuming? What is truth and does it exist? What is my reality and how did it come to be this way?

I think they play together. All narrative is an abstraction anyway. Language is an abstraction of ideas; every word is. Even something very literal and representational has symbolic forms. If we jump into Jungian psychology, all the images we might dream of represent other ideas in different ways.

When working with visual abstractions, it's about what they evoke and what they trigger. I think abstraction and narrative play really well together.

I feel like generative algorithms, software at large, or these large language models are just mirrors or maps or echoes of humanity in many ways. If we think about generative algorithms, they're supposed to be deterministic – with a certain seed, you can always reproduce the same output. It's really just creating a context, even though there is pseudo-randomness inside it.

I think that echoes life. Many folks believe the entire universe is deterministic, and as such, so are we, and that free will doesn't exist. I picture these algorithms as little forms that echo our experience. As a human, given this context right now, I'll give this one answer, but if you ask me two days from now, I might say something else because the context has changed.

While there's precision in these structured algorithms, there's also mystery because there's no way we can explore all of that parametric space. If an algorithm is very strict and defined, that's not a very big parametric space. But if you add gradients, waves, and lines that aren't straight, there's no way to experience every aspect of an algorithm. That's the magic of it, and it echoes how our lives are. Every decision we make cuts out a whole future.

I feel like when I'm approaching writing these algorithms, part of it is curiosity: what's going to come out if I do this? Does this fit with what is now my intention? That intention can shift too. You start a project with one idea, and halfway through, something else reveals itself and you change direction. You just follow the work. It seems to echo humanity. If I could rewind time and had the same inputs, maybe it would play out exactly the same way, but there's no way to know.

It's both. You definitely set up bounds for it to operate within. But even if you try to set limits, there will be moments where you miss something or there's a bug or something happens you didn't anticipate, and you get a unique piece that breaks out of the bounds you set.

That's really more about technical implementation than vision. Unless you're very strict and making just a basic grid, life finds a way. I like that there is that breadth in how someone can approach these algorithms. You can have it very closed if you want, or leave it open for magic to happen.

I think that's why folks are excited about it – the idea of emergence in these systems. Take, for example, Ringers #879, “The Goose.” That wasn't planned. But I'm sure through development, there were moments when Dmitri was like, “This wild thing came out of it that I never expected.” It was supposed to be an abstraction of wheels and pulleys and strings, but suddenly it's clearly a goose.

I love that possibility for spontaneous creation outside of intention. It's like setting up a dinner party – you don't know what the conversations will be, but you put out bottles of wine and snacks and play a certain playlist. Maybe it turns into a dance party or maybe it's a debate about determinism.

There's one that's really abstract – it's not a moment so much as something I unlearned. And then there's also the discovery of this art form being available.

When I got into this, I had just quit a job and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was exploring lots of things: do I want to become a food blogger? Do I want to write? I just didn't want to go back to corporate life. Then I stumbled into NFTs and generative art. A friend introduced me to Art Blocks, and I was like, "Wait, you can just do this? You can just write code and make art?" And there was a community built around it.

Given my background in art history and computer engineering, I had always worked on creative side projects, whether it be with bands or photography or building weird social experiments on phones. But realizing I could just write code to make artistic outputs was revelatory.

Even then, I didn't really consider myself an artist. This leads to the longer moment, which is more an erosion of my idealistic view of what an artist is. I never really considered myself an artist and wouldn't put myself on that pedestal. I always kind of worshipped the idea of an artist as some sort of blessed character in our society, and how dare I think of myself as that? I still don't like calling myself an artist.

I like to think I'm someone who doesn't get in my own way of making things. The shift from seeing an artist as the source or creator to really being a vessel, and eroding the mystique or worship of that role – that's been important. Just make stuff, explore things, see what comes through, don't get in the way of it.

For someone like me with social anxiety, the idea of putting things out there is scary. But if you can remove yourself from that and just implement ideas without getting in the way, it gives you distance that removes the ego and helps you feel more comfortable in your skin.

I'm reading a book called The Work of Art by Adam Moss. It's a collection of 50 artist stories about where creativity comes from. The concept of talent comes up, but not often. Talent could be reduced to someone who's curious, isn't afraid to experiment, and can actually work on it. But really, it's about not giving up, doing the work, and not being afraid of making bad art.

It's helped me to think: I'm going to make bad art, but hopefully, through that, I make a lot of good art, and then I can curate on the way out. It's not an "aha" moment, but an erosion of ego and insecurity, which has helped in many ways.