Brady Walker: Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Jake Andrew: GM! I’m Jake Andrew, a multidisciplinary artist and experimental musician with synaesthesia. My practice sits at the intersection of physical and digital art, and my work focuses on the way the mind can perceive audio or emotional stimuli as color, texture, shape, and movement.
BW: Tell me about the piece you’re bringing to Miami with MakersPlace & Transient Labs.
JA: Full Circle is a physical painting, and an audio-visual digital journey for the audience, housed in the ERC-721 contract as a digital Certificate of Authenticity (COA). The piece originates from a large-scale physical painting which is then scanned, extracting the textures and colour-grading and manually built into a visual score using digitally native software.
Digitally placing these extracts together, the fragments are animated and manipulated to bring the painting to life in synchrony with the sound score. The intention is that the physical painting can be displayed with the digital entity projected onto it, to catch the physical textures and create an immersive installation in any setting, but for the Miami show it will exist solely as a physical presence.
Constructed under the same methodology as my recent work, A Study in E-Major, this new work explores a piano suite I’ve written, audibly manipulated, and then painted synesthetically in the studio to celebrate the convergence of the physical and digital art worlds.
BW: Is there anything special about this piece in the context of your body of work?
JA: Yes. With work I’ve created before in this context, there has always been an underlying brief, befitting a certain exhibition aesthetic and narrative.
This work exists as a personal expression and exploration into the realm of physical and digital abstraction; an immersive way of experiencing what painting can be in the digital renaissance. There are so many questions I’m asking within the context of this work — working back from my old abstract expressionist physical paintings and understanding them as Euclidean geometry to find form in the intangible but digitizing and manipulating the forms into a three-dimensional aspect open out the more esoteric philosophy behind what I’m trying to say with this new visual language.
BW: Can you share any specific rituals or practices that help you maintain your creative momentum?
JA: Honestly? Probably just the pursuit of knowledge — even outside of the artistic spectrum. What I’m finding out is that there is perpetual motion and a bond to so many seemingly unrelated elements of how we understand the world. This, coupled with meditation, occasional mushroom microdosing, and the exploration of audio frequencies always keeps me motivated and striving to further my practice and ideas.
BW: How much planning or preliminary thought goes into each painting?
JA: This field of enquiry has been going on since I finished my Masters Degree in 2016; it’s taken on about 7 billion different tangents and lines of enquiry, but the end goal remains the same. Each piece like this takes a few months to fully consider, to plan and then to actually build and render. My painting work is faster, more intuitive but even this can take weeks.
BW: How would you describe how your work is currently evolving?
JA: My work is definitely maturing. Instead of purely intuitive movements, my work is becoming more considered and more intentional.
BW: What do you hope people feel when they look at your art?
JA: I want viewers to stop and breathe, to let go and allow themselves to feel whatever it is they need to feel. We exist in a world (and space) where everything is so fast paced; I would love for my work to exist as a welcome break from that, a sanctuary and immersion within color and sound.
BW: What role does physical art play in the broader web3 art ecosystem?
JA: Physical art is incredibly important in my practice and I’ve been trying to bring physical work to the digital space for the last three years. Digital art now has the provenance and recognition that physical work does in the traditional space so it’s time for physical entities to be able to live on the blockchain as digital artifacts. In order to grow the space, the bridge to physical art is key.
BW: Who or what else excites you in the art world (web3 or trad) right now?
JA: So many things! Obviously there are artists like Jack Kaido who have pushed the boundaries for what digital abstraction is and how it’s viewed historically (massive shout out for the inspiration from day one Jack!) but then I see so many people on my timeline pushing themselves and their contextual narratives (alongside their skillset) every single day. I think what excites me most is the potential for what this could and will become.
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