Jack Kaido: Blending the Digital and the Physical in Modern Abstraction

AOTM: Can you describe the moment or experience that first drew you towards digital abstraction? 

Jack Kaido: In late 2015, I was heading home from one of my former jobs to paint, and whilst walking home, read about a glitch app, which I downloaded. I thought very briefly about putting a photograph of the physical abstract paintings I was making in my bedroom into it, and playing about. But I was too cognitively wrapped up in physical painting and learning how to paint oils etc, I wanted to focus intently on learning oil painting, learning about colour and composition, and didn’t want to be sidetracked with anything else, so never did. 

Several years later, I was browsing for abstract art online and discovered some digital art including the art of an artist who made digital abstractions made in Photoshop then turned into physical art through printing the artworks on giant boards and hanging them like canvas. That got my interest — abstract digital painting that looked amazing, digital and physical mediums blurred, crossing over, existing in different forms. I gave much thought to my favourite painters and how they played with mediums. It sat in the back of my mind percolating then I downloaded Photoshop and Procreate and made my first digital abstracts. I made them for around 18 months to 2 years, then found out about digital art NFTs, and minted some of what I made from that time.

AOTM: Exploring your artworks feels like deciphering a digital language. Can you talk about how you develop this visual language and what you aim for it to communicate

Jack Kaido: I’m heavily drawn to things that are not conventionally placed together but somehow still work, that are collage-like in nature in how different strange components can form a whole: Animal Collective’s music, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, Cubism, Willem de Kooning’s newspaper, Attic-era and Women paintings, Cecily Brown’s figurative abstractions, and very recently, things like Laura Owen’s art and Richie Culver’s text-based paintings.

For my own art, the aim is to have many components present at once, interacting with each other and complimenting each other, that form a whole abstract image. A large part of that is digital language — computer UI, web tabs and browsers, apps, phone UI, crypto, pixelation, text etc — because that’s what I live with and use, and for want of a better summation, I consider that aspect as ‘tabstraction’. Ripcache’s art resonated instantly because it shared elements with what I’d been making, albeit in a completely different path towards it, different genre and different reasons for why.

My art also takes influence from traditional art, prehistoric art, other digital art or contemporary art, literature, music, adverts, design, and all in between. I don’t feel bound by any particular purist way and feel free to explore. So, in any pieces or series that don’t feature the internet etc, they will still have many mashed up components, and there’s both thought-out processes and spontaneity in the constructed arrival of each painting. Even though I’m an ‘experienced’ artist in the context of having made art for a long time, I’m still at the beginning stage of the exploration, experimentation and strangeness that will come across the coming years and decades.

AOTM: As someone deeply entrenched in the digital realm, how do you see the relationship between technology and creativity evolving in the next decade?

Jack Kaido: Digital art and crypto-art will take over imo. Us younger generations own crypto; the idea of owning things that do not exist physically is not foreign; as the internet grows, the art native to it will grow in adoption, reception and acceptance. Digital art has long been in museums, but many of the types of art within crypto-art, have not. That is changing.

Yet I don’t believe it’s the absolute death knell for physical art, rather a sort of new beginning. CDs, MP3s and streaming took over, but vinyl sales are now higher than they’ve been in decades. Physical book sales are affected by eBooks, but have returned to pre-2011 levels. So digital art will take over, but there will always be some people who like tactile things. And the lines between digital and physical will continue to blur more: digital art turned into physical art, physical art made digital, digital art turned into physical art then made digital again. 3D printing, laser cutting, all of that.

Also, AI. Back in 2022, I shared some of my thoughts around when AI art takes over in the Traces synopsis, and whilst I understood the advancement would develop exponentially, it’s safe to say it’s happening quicker than most of us expected. AI-prompted art, AI video creation, 3D video recreation of people long since dead or events long since passed, recreated from old photographs. DeepFakes everywhere, artists who are AI making AI-prompted art en masse, some of which is sold to AI-bot collectors. It will soon be difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not anymore, and the provenance of immutable wallets will take on a whole new significance imo. There will likely be art us mortal humans can’t even understand or imagine. We’re all in the same boat, learning and adjusting as we go.

AOTM: You’ve exhibited from New York to Valencia. How do different cultural and physical contexts influence the reception of your work?

Jack Kaido: It’s a hard one to answer because as an anonymous artist, I haven’t been to almost all of the exhibitions where my art’s been, to see a reaction in person or speak about that. The only reference point I have is how many of my collectors are from all over the world, and it’s a huge mix, from America, Britain, Germany and France to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Brazil. The largest percentile is American, I assume that’s largely because of the percentage of Americans within NFTs, but also perhaps as my art has been greatly influenced by American art, and abstraction is huge in America due of AbEx. But it’s a big global mix tbh.

AOTM: What drives you to create, and how do you decide what message or emotion you want your work to convey?

Jack Kaido: I’m driven to create by the need to, it’s inherent and I’m restless, misplaced and not myself if I don’t. I wouldn’t change that for the world though.

As for deciding what to convey, this can be directed by a thought, emotion or mood, what I’ve been thinking on, what I’ve been read or seen or been inspired by, or what I want to communicate. It’s a mix. I stopped putting contextual information in descriptions after my second series. In most cases, I want to leave the interpretation as wide open as possible, for viewers to easier form their own interpretation, rather than me telling them. It’s wider that way. But I’m not too hung up on if any given artwork’s message should be obvious or not, some of the most memorable and iconic artworks in history wear obvious meanings. Art’s about communicating in all ways possible.

In my own case, sometimes I’ll leave hints in the paintings, or sometimes a title could hint at it, or a palette, or sometimes it just might be fully obvious. And sometimes, even when it seems obvious what it’s conveying, that’s maybe not what it’s conveying, and that’s part of the process. Visual artists — like writers and lyricists — can be unreliable narrators too.

AOTM: Can you describe a moment when you felt truly connected to your art, and what impact did it have on your creative process?

Jack Kaido: I feel strongly connected to it every single time I’m in the flow state when making it. The feeling, vibe or thought for most artworks I’ve made is remembered; artworks are like visual aide-mémoire’s for me, all I need to do is look at one of my paintings and that particular connection, be it a thought or feeling, comes back.

As for impact upon the creative process, well I guess a big turning point was when I made the first Errors. Everything I’ve minted has been made digitally, they are all digital paintings, but before Errors, I wanted my work to have a resemblance to ‘irl’ paintings. Then I thought, what are you doing, I want to make digital abstractions which reflect the medium, that have many weird digital elements in it, abstraction that looks and feels like it belongs in a digital world, and to one, and that has a weird process too. I saw the art of AERTIME too and fell in love with it. That few months was like an irreversible turning point, and everything has been different since — my art, process and whole outlook.

AOTM: Digital art often blurs the lines between artist and viewer, especially through interactive elements. Do you see your audience as co-creators, and how do you engage them in your digital canvas?

Jack Kaido: No, tbh I don’t, because I make art alone, and my audience don’t have a hand in it. But I have given what you speak of much thought and tried to get a project off the ground recently which had that very thing in mind. I learned that what I wanted to achieve wasn’t technically possible, and have gone back to the drawing board on that, but I do like the interactive aspect and think it has been done really well by some artists here.

AOTM: Looking at the future, what are the new frontiers or challenges that you are excited to explore in your art? Are there particular technologies or scientific developments that you are keen to integrate into your work?

Jack Kaido: There’s lots I’m excited about and am exploring right now, and will explore in the future, but now I generally prefer to keep things under wraps until it’s time to release them.