KAPREKAR
KAPREKAR
KAPREKAR
KAPREKAR
ROB MOIR
CC
JÆN
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SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
SOON
Welcome to the Timechain. I'm Jæn, an artist from the XXIst century, carving a career in art for more than two decades. Through drawing and painting, making music and then exploring most of what is available as a tool today (street art, academic research, 3D printing, animation, code, generative AI, and more), my focus has always been on what makes us humans, individually and collectively. My art has explored symbolism, surrealism, emotions and dreams while cementing a strong psychedelic aesthetic born of childhood influences such as Moebius, Dali or Miyazaki. In the recent years, I began to take on a more conceptual path, interrogating art itself, and especially what it is to be an artist and live in the Digital Renaissance and crypto+AI zeitgeist.
Over all this time, I exhibited in museums, art galleries such as Saatchi in London or Urban Spree in Berlin, public spaces and more all over the world—all continents besides Antarctica, curated shows, spoke at conferences, took part in residencies, and eventually directed the first NFT project to be exhibited inside the International Space Station (literal space).
My work is in the collection of the most prominent tokenised art collectors (XCOPY, Basileus, Kaprekar, 6529, Giannis Sourdis, Batsoupyum, etc.), and I've had work commissioned by the likes of Disney (Mickey's anniversary), PayPal, Diesel, and more.
Now, I'm offering you a singular, deep series, through one of the oldest fascinations of mine: masks. These masks emerged a long time ago, and yet they are really born now. I tend to hide behind my art often, so it feels as leaning in that tendency because of their inherent nature. And yet, the foundational recreation of them, giving them a newborn identity and purpose through technology, my personal sense of colour and artistry, an obsession of art as an ongoing legacy and my/our posthumous legacy, and quite fundamentally giving them a name—it's all very personal. Perhaps art can only ever hide one half of myself. By laying a foundation that is bigger than myself and extending beyond my own mortality, I'm making myself smaller, and maybe the bittersweet feeling of making the series then more deserving. Hide & seek? What games do you play with masks? In any case, doing so, I hope that we can share something tangible, and quite intensely timeless. The choices I'm making, the choices collectors make, they already have consequences in the future. Our present and our future are simultaneous, two faces of a coin that lives beyond the linearity of time.
The past
A timeless bridge between 2 artists from the 16th Century and Jæn from the 21st. Frans Huys, a Belgian illustrator (1522-1562), made splendid illustrations of grotesque masks from Flemish sculptor Cornelis Floris de Vriendt (1514-1575), printed to provide stone carvers and others with interesting faces to adorn buildings. The tradition of mascarons date back to Ancient Greece, surviving until the Renaissance through the Roman Empire's vestige. Through the printing press, and then digitisation, I could find and restore them carefully, to then add my surreal magic. Give them a name, and found a new legacy. The result was uploaded straight to contemporary tokenised art - here it stands, floating in the digital void, outside of time. This collaboration of 3 Artists over 5 centuries is an invitation to ponder about time, culture & tools. Collectors become Patrons of the III Renaissances - the old one, the Digital and the future one, in a movement rooted thousands of years in the past.
All the historical research, processes of creation, technical details and exhibitions are inscribed permanently onchain within each digital artwork —
the pieces of art are their own museums and catalogues.
Click on a piece and explore its Creations & Inscriptions here
ART reborn
As Autumn 2020 shook its warm-coloured leaves, I serendipitously discovered the mascarons. As one familiar with my signature art, I'm not usually interested in anything but creating my very own world. Yet, in these purest incarnations of the grotesque, I found something wild, magic, deep, ridiculous, ugly, threatening—and paradoxically for dead art, full of life. I immediately knew I wanted to make them my own and give them a new life in the digital realm. That first came through laying a foundation: a name, colours, renovating the linework and adding more volume through lighting. It would extend later with glitch and video work, AI generation, composing a melodic loop for each (watch the making of here).
In May 2021, the release of the first 6 masks as tokens was done on SuperRare, made it to and editorial and front page feature, and fully sold out.
Yet, something was missing—sovereignty, depth, a door to infinity, and sowing the seeds of digital art conservation.
The Lost mask
The Last mask
In 2023, the last 6 mascarons were completed. The original prints have one missing folio, which turned out to be only text. Nevertheless, I honoured the tradition by adding my own mascaron design as the 18th and last one, drawing by hand and staying close to Huys' technique.
It became a necessary rite of passage to earn my place in the Timechain. As De Vriendt added elements of his contemporary medieval European architecture to the designs, I added the first widespread historical avatar oh humans in the digital space - the pixelated mouse pointer - and the Moon, both as a sort of personal signature and as one of the biggest achievements of humankind today.
iterating forever
Among the first expansions were echoes of the past:
Aphex Twin-inspired audio encoding of the scans for each piece, combined with Philip Glass-inspired micromelodies composed for the Mellotron, a relevant oddity as it was the first instrument using tapes for each note, pushing further the idea of translating art data with ensuing entropy.
A sound-based pentimento, or palimpsest.
The release of masks 7 to 12 in 2022 saw the addition of AI appearing through glitches, digital hallucinations reminiscent of the ancient Greek masks used by comedians, lost to time as well—all the more fuel for a conversation on conservation. I began to understood this project more: it would bear the mantle of a time capsule, allowing an endless exploration of art forms in the present, and allowing people of the future to understand art and culture of our times through these multifaceted faces. Perhaps giving way to a form of compulsive "bonnardisation" (keeping on working on artworks after one would normally consider them finished, unable to let go).
To ensure a long-lasting digital object that could countain this growing sum of art and self-museum ambition, original NFTs were burned and replaced with an artist-owned sovereign contract (ERC-7160 TL), that allows for multiple version of the art to exist within the canvas (the official face being selected by the collector), and add history, exhibitions, conceptual frameworks, WIPs and other musings onchain, forever, which can also be contributed to by the collectors of the pieces, now as well as centuries from now.
The token is the art, and everything around and about the art.
Spectrograms of the soundtracks
So far, each token includes 6 iterations collectors can choose from at any time: still images, animated glitchy versions with their soundtrack, still AI hallucination of ancient masks, black & white animated GIFs of AI hallucinations of stone versions, minimalist fully onchain pixel art and a dynamic fully onchain conceptual piece.
In 2024, another personal milestone was reached for this project — carving a version of each mask in the blockchain, forever.
As of today, the most reliable storage options for large art files are Arweave and IPFS, both used in these tokens. However, there exists an alternative that some purists consider the ultimate solution available today: 100% onchain art. This approach encodes all art and NFT data directly into the blockchain itself, ensuring that as long as the blockchain exists, so does the art—eliminating the need for external systems like Arweave or IPFS. The resilience of this approach speaks for itself.
With this series’ emphasis on digital art preservation, it felt essential to pursue the onchain route as well. The main drawback is the high cost of storing data onchain, which necessitates making every byte count. This constraint has given rise to an art movement known as compressionism. Pixel art, being one of the earliest unapologetically digital aesthetics, was a natural choice for these minimalist incarnations. It also serves as an unplanned homage to CryptoPunks, arguably the most influential NFT collectibles to date, with which these pieces share the PFP (profile picture) aspect. Fitting within a 42x42 pixel frame and using approximately 12 colours each (save for the multicolour "Bouquet Final", which required 20 shades to capture its complexity), these artworks are stored as stripped-down GIFs, each weighing between 400 and 800 bytes.
Upon release, 1st Patrons will be gifted a unique edition luxury pin from the pixel art iteration and
a museum-grade print of their mask made after the pixel art iterations.
The second fully onchain iteration ("timestamps") is a conceptual commitment to the Future Renaissance: each piece displays one more pixel every week since their inception in 2020, fully displaying
the 29th of June 2517.
exhibiting in
the digital renaissance
In May 2021, the first release was celebrated with 3 virtual solo shows with Sarah Moosvi (Tara Digital Collective): on Artsy, in Decentraland, and in Voxels, thanks to Giannis Sourdis' Museum 0f NFT Art (M0NA). The design of the virtual exhibition spaces was the result of a reflection on the current skeuomorphism in virtual architecture.
With the second release in 2022, the exhibitions shifted to people's faces, as masks should do. Find AR filters on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook Messenger by typing "timechain" or "cornaelhuys", and join the grotesque Renaissance carnival.
Grotesque being somehow the opposite of going back to platonic ideals during the Renaissance, this more feral, fun and punk energy makes also a lot of sense as being exhibited in the very vernacular contemporary medium that is GIFs through Giphy, compatible with social media and the latest smartphone keyboards. From the Flemish Renaissance grotesque to today's memes, the grotesque spirit changes shape yet surely prevails.
Exhibiting as an immersive show in NFC Lisbon 2024 and in Times Square with Artcrush in 2023
The future
When asked how I imagine art of the Future Renaissance could shape up, I often answer that I don't necessarily believe in a more digital work than what we have today, at least not in a "screens everywhere virtual everything" kind of way. Instead, I envision that with growing understanding of lifeforms and genetics, artists of a plausible future might use a combination of intelligent systems and a precise engineering of life to make organic art. Which would raise serious ethics considerations, of course.
In early 2026, the Rijksmuseum, Artcrush and Google partnered to offer selected artists working with the museum's collection and Google AI tools a presentation at the museum. I took the opportunity to create a new iteration for the series, an AI approximation of how these Arcimboldo-esque (another Renaissance inspiration!) organic mascarons of the future might look like, and was selected by curator Edouard to exhibit "Satyre Floral (organique)" at the museum. The soundtracks evolved as well, adapting to a more strange and moving energy.
Future plans:
- Gather Patrons of the III Renaissances
- Exhibiting Cornælhuys next to the originals in more museums
on the route from Greece to the Netherlands
- Develop new iterations of the designs (3D, street art, generative art?)
- Push digital art conservation forward
To create a long-lasting lineage of artists, working together over centuries, and embrace a meaningful part of the decentralisation ethos of the cryptoart movement, Cornælhuys pieces are released under a permissionless license CC-BY SA 4.0, which is like CC0 (public domain) with 3 conditions:
- you have to credit all the artists:
Cornelis Floris de Vriendt,
Frans Huys,
Jæn
- you must do it in a way that doesn't suggest the licensor endorses you or your use
- resulting works must be released with a CC-BY SA license as well
Under these simple conditions, you are free to use the art even commercially, and modify it as you please, while protecting the Timechain and provenance.
Create your own fork/sidechain/branch and see
what grows from it.
To you, artist of the future, you will know the time has come
for another block on this time chain, when something as groundbreaking as blockchains has emerged. If I am still alive, come forth and claim the mantle. If I am dead, take this torch, light it again with your own fire.
Own it.
And pave the way for those who will come after you.
Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, Frans Huys and Jæn salute you.