Dmitri Cherniak

Automation as a medium

Dmitri Cherniak was born in 1988 in Canada and lives and works in New York City. He trained in computer science and came to art through the machine rather than through the studio. He describes automation as his primary medium, and the description is exact: he writes an algorithm, fixes its parameters and then lets the computer complete the composition without further intervention. What he is after, by his own account, is an emotional response from a viewer who knows perfectly well that no hand touched the image.

His acknowledged influences run in two directions. From the twentieth century he takes Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, along with the Swiss graphic designer Armin Hofmann, whose teaching reduced design to point, line and shape. From the generative tradition he takes Vera Molnar and the younger programmer artist Manolo Gamboa Naon. Cherniak has been explicit that he regards the code and its output as two creative products rather than as a tool and a result, which is why the algorithm itself, in his words, carries the artist's recognisable touch, like carving.

Ringers

He minted his first work on the blockchain, a piece titled I am but a vessel, before there was much of a market for such things, and has since built a practice out of series: The Eternal Pump, The Wrapture, Light Years and above all Ringers.

Ringers, released through the Art Blocks platform, asks a deliberately narrow question. In how many ways can a string be wrapped around a set of pegs? The algorithm answers it one thousand times and each output is fixed at the moment it is minted. The variables are the number of pegs, their layout and size, the background, the wrap style and its orientation, the scaling, the body colour, the peg style and an extra colour. Most outputs are tidy and geometric. A few are accidents nobody anticipated, which is precisely the point of the exercise: once the algorithm is committed, no one knows what it will produce.

The Goose and the museum

Two events carried Cherniak out of the digital art world and into the general art press. In February 2023 Ringers #962 became the first work of blockchain art acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, arriving as part of a gift of twenty two works by thirteen artists assembled by the collector who uses the alias Cozomo de' Medici. It was the first and largest private collection of blockchain artworks to enter an American art museum, and LACMA framed the acquisition against its own long history of art and technology programmes.

Four months later Ringers #879 came up at Sotheby's in New York in the dedicated GRAILS sale, at that point the largest live auction of digital art. The algorithm had by chance produced a shape resembling a yellow billed bird, and collectors had long since nicknamed it the Goose. Three bidders traded offers for several minutes and the work sold for 6.2 million dollars, a record for the artist and, at that moment, the second most valuable work of generative art ever sold at auction. His work has also been shown at LACMA, Art Basel, CADAF and ZKM in Karlsruhe.

What actually trades

A buyer should be clear about which object is in front of them, because two very different things carry the Ringers name. The first is the token itself, a unique output from the series held on the Ethereum blockchain, identified by a token number and a smart contract address, and traded in the digital art market.

The second is a physical print. Ringers #962: The LACMA Iterations was issued as a screenprint edition in collaboration with a print publisher at a modest release price, and it is a sheet of paper that hangs on a wall like any other print. For a sheet of this kind the things that matter are the edition number, the signature, the paper stock, the margins and the condition. The fact that the underlying image belongs to a celebrated series does not by itself place a physical print anywhere near the level of the token that shares its name, and the two should never be compared directly.