IMN #4 — Bryan Brinkman

It's Monday Night #4 Let's share thoughts about a crypto-artist work.

Tonight, I want to talk about @bryanbrinkman’s work. Without the slightest hint of exaggeration, I would say that @bryanbrinkman is to NFTs what Steve Reich is to music. Let me elaborate.

Reich’s work was marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. He sought to create a music in which the compositional process was discernible in the music itself. Ask Wikipedia.

Bryan crypto artworks always makes processes perceptible, from their constant repetition: it is only from the looping of a clip that a pattern can emerge.

I would suggest that each of his works embodies something like a micro phase shifting: an image that gradually transforms while remaining identical to itself. Thus, it explores in depth the virtual hypnotic-becoming of internet GIFs.

But, in @bryanbrinkman's work, the gesture of the ready made is inseparable from that of the making off: it plays with the hypnotic effect of the loop and puts it at a distance by showing us how it is constructed.

Two other things caught my attention. On the one hand, a both playful and subtle practice of quotation and references. Indeed, BB’s work is a kind of mischievous encyclopedia of hidden signs of the web: no big words, seeks allegory in the detail, in the simple and anecdotal.

On the other hand, BB’s generative projects are half-way from pure randomness and meticulous control. He has grasped what is at stake, metaphysically, in bored apes or crypto punks: a precarious but non-negotiable balance between absolute singularity and absolute banality.

Therefore, he tells us a lot about the adventures of identity in the age of virtual mass culture - a semi-predictable outcome of machine and algorithmic work.

P.S. : Please listen «Music for 18 musicians» while reading this.