Imagtek is an artist and software developer working in Richmond, VA. See and purchase his vibrant digital art in his studio at Art Works!

About the Artist:

After briefly attending the Rhode Island School of Design, Imagtek abandoned Academic Art to study the PsychoPhysics of visual perception. During these early academic years ‘vision experiments’ were created in the hard-edge airbrush style on canvas and cardboard. Critical Acclaim consisted of unknown nocturnal connoisseurs rescuing discarded experiments before public sanitation crews arrived.

After completing a scholarship funded STEM graduate degree in Computer Science, Imagtek branched into software engineering. Dissatisfied with the conceptual ‘stovepipe’ of commercial graphics software, Imagtek began creating computer Software as an artistic medium. Over 25 years under development, the ‘Discovery Engine’ now consists of over 65,000 lines of C++ code. This complex system is NOT an ‘AI’, but an artistic medium for revealing invisible structures in Information. Some of its deeper algorithms are logical poetry written in terse, Haiku-like computer code. Art creating Art.

By nature a Painter, Imagtek views experimental computation as a logical extension of Painting. Although still working paint-on-canvas, Digital genres now dominate. In one genre, Imagtek’s palette consists of raw astronomical data in High Dynamic Range (HDR) scientific formats. These are acquired from giant ground based telescopes as well as from orbiting observatories. Art is discovered in datasets of our local galactic neighborhood, and in profoundly distant systems revealed by ‘Ultra-Deep-Field’ sky surveys. The conceptual mind reels into its own inner mysteries and complexes when confronted by works that distill the inconceivably vast elemental Abyss that we inhabit.

In another genre, the artist uses information as a first principle in works created by unleashing the Engine upon random number fields. These are generated using high level encryption [AES/256] because it was discovered that only deep Encryption yields artifact-free results. Yet other works are simply idle doodles that morphed into something unexpected, then followed to a logical conclusion.

Imagtek still paints to escape the mindless, gigahertz jackhammer of computers. Something about the smell of paint, the texture of canvas and the elemental resistance of dead matter to human Will transcends technology. Millennia from now, human Artists will still paint what machines cannot.

Imagtek’s art is not without controversy. It has has been argued that absence of human convention in visual media is not Art. But Einstein once said “The Physical universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.” Imagtek’s experimental computation is an artistic exploration of the Unimaginable discovered in the Invisible.

Imagtek is also a writer in the ‘hard science fiction’ genre. His novels ‘I Quetzalcoatl’, and ‘Bury My Heart On Kepler-452B’, are available on Amazon.com under author J S Powers.

Click here to see the artist’s website.