The Interview | Bjørn Staal

Since he launched himself into the public consciousness with a beguiling expression of quantum entanglement, Bjørn Staal has gained renown for feats of technical virtuosity that push the envelope of generative art while uniting the blockchain community. From his work for the experiential art and design studio Void to his exploration of synthetic biology, Immaterial, to his acclaimed experiment in web-based interactivity, Entangled, Staal has brought industrial precision to the art of algorithms.

His new work, Losing Oneself, continues his long-standing association with generative art platform fx(hash) through a series of psychogeographic maps inspired by scientific diagrams, urban plans, and neuronal mappings. Set for release as part of the digital section of Cure³ — which brings together prominent contemporary artists to raise money for Cure Parkinson’s — Staal’s project is a powerful study of the ways the mind comes to terms with chance, disorder, and degeneration. In this conversation with Alex Estorick, he discusses how generative art entangles new technology with community.

‍Alex Estorick: Your creative practice stretches beyond digital art. What can you tell us about your background?‍

Bjørn Staal: I come from design originally. Growing up in a small working-class town in Norway, a career in art wasn’t exactly on the menu. You had to figure out what you were going to do pretty quickly. I studied art at high school and I’ve always drawn, but as soon as I got a computer, I started using it to create. I got into programming in the early 2000s when Flash was booming and I was exposed to generative art through people like Joshua Davis, Jared Tarbell, Robert Hodgin, Zach Lieberman, and Marius Watz, who is one of my Norwegian heroes and has become a dear friend. Karsten Schmidt (Toxi) is also a huge favorite of mine who I connected with back in those days.

It was while I was working in more traditional interaction design and programming that I grew interested in the use of code as well as computer vision, robotics, and DMX lighting, inspired by the early days of the openFrameworks community. Over time I started integrating more of these approaches into my projects at different design agencies and gradually I was regarded more as a creative coder than as a designer.

Then, in 2015, I met up with an architect and some other friends and we all decided to quit our jobs to start what would ultimately become Void, a design studio focused on the intersection of architecture, art, and technology. It was a commercial enterprise because that was the only model we knew, but we did several projects where we tried to cross over into the art world. Some of our projects were pure art, others involved installation art as part of architectural commissions and urban developments. I fell into the Web3 world in 2021 when Art Blocks was beginning to reveal the true potential of generative art deployed on-chain. 

At first I didn’t consider the work as art but rather a hybrid of creative coding, design, and collectibles. When I released my first project on Art Blocks in August 2021 I regarded it more as an experiment to get to know the technology. 

Over the following couple of years, the world of digital art and blockchain technology matured in a way that was increasingly attractive to me. At the same time, I felt an increasing need to work on projects without a specific client in mind. In 2023, I decided to leave Void to pursue an artistic career.

‍AE: I feel that there is an artificial separation made between contemporary art and design as well as other creative modalities that involve digital media within hybrid approaches.‍

BS: I totally agree that there’s been an artificial separation, although I’m starting to see why that separation still has merit. What I do from day to day is not that different from what I used to do in terms of the tools and the process, but my approach, and how much of myself I put into the work, is different. 

My background in large-scale interactive installations informed my recent exhibition at Wintercircus in Ghent that was connected to my NFT release, Entangled. The series itself is like net art insofar as it lives inside the browser. At first, I was a bit skeptical as to how we would present the work in a physical context but when we came up with the idea of utilising a robotic arm to move the screens around, I felt it might add an interesting dimension to the work, especially when presented to people who aren’t in the Web3 world. 

Screens themselves don’t really catch people’s attention that much anymore — we’re used to seeing gigantic LED screens everywhere at airports and sports arenas. But adding that extra dimension of movement made people more curious about the work.

‍AE: Your works carry the precision of industrial design, while your Art Blocks project, Immaterial, calls to mind the Futurist painter Tullio Crali. How do you explain your aesthetics?‍

BS: I’m interested in using my practice as a platform for continuous research and personal development, and I don’t want to be typecast into a certain style that I repeat for the rest of my career. However, people have told me that they can see a thread running through everything I do. I’m obsessed with precision, which is a part of my process. I love working with subtleties and in order to make subtleties work, you really have to be precise. 

I’m inspired by minimal German design philosophy as well as Scandinavian design culture. But I also love to break those systems and work with organic elements. I’m very interested in that dichotomy.

I belong to a school of thought known as metamodernism which tries to integrate modernism and postmodernism while asking: “how do we move beyond both?” 

‍AE: One of the things about speculative design that I find interesting is its calculated uncoupling of design from function or the need to produce anything more than a speculative gesture. Do you sense that design is dematerializing in the way that art has been dematerializing since the 1960s?‍

BS: I think that there’s a reason I’ve moved from design into art because I feel that art allows for greater speculation. I might even consider speculative design to be more of an art practice than a design practice, or perhaps something in between. 

You can use the skills of design and a design methodology to make art, and that’s definitely what I do. 

Sometimes I find it to be enriching, but at other times I find it to be limiting because I’m obviously anchored in certain aesthetic principles that are hard to break out of. I’ve found peace with the idea that maybe that’s my strength and a big part of who I am.

‍AE: With your project, Entangled, you brought together two communities — those of Ethereum and Tezos — by minting NFTs across both blockchains. It feels like a browser-based work of social sculpture. How do you see it?‍

BS: My goal for Entangled was to bring together these two communities without necessarily saying what they’re supposed to do. It could be a fight or a price war. But I also saw a lot of people who were really happy owning one part of the work while being connected to another person. Some of the collectors knew each other already and were proud of being part of a pair, while others felt it was cool that they had met through this interaction. 

I’ve had feedback from some individuals who really wanted to buy the corresponding pair but the other person simply wouldn’t budge. 

That’s maybe why we haven’t seen as many perfect pairs as we might have expected. We also saw some collectors buying a bunch of Ethereum versions without being interested in the Tezos versions at all, which was a bit disappointing and surprising because it seems to me that the real value of the series lies in the connection between the two.

‍AE: It seems to me that the range of responses to Entangled legitimizes the work as a mapping of human behavior. It makes me wonder whether you have thought about developing a project involving AI agents.‍

BS: To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought, although I’ve been aware of AI and machine learning for many years. I understand why people find them interesting but I tend to shy away from things once they become too mainstream. I feel that there is an authoritarian wind blowing through the world at the moment and I’m worried about the degree to which we are giving up our autonomy and data to these systems. But I also really respect artists who use such tools and try to break, misappropriate, and make them their own, such as Ganbrood. That’s certainly the way I would approach AI if I were to ever involve it in my process.

My mindset has always been to figure out how I can use a new technology for something it wasn’t intended for, especially if it was meant for mass consumption or control. That spirit was part of the creative coding scene in the early 2000s where artists would hack off-the-shelf technology. I still have that mentality.

‍AE: It’s very special to have you participating in Cure³, which supports the search for a cure for Parkinson’s disease. What can you say about your project, Losing Oneself, which combines 128 outputs of an algorithm with physical plotter drawings? ‍

BS: I’ve realised that I can’t have a trajectory where I try to one-up myself with every project in terms of virality and technicality. It just wouldn’t be a sustainable practice. It’s nice to know that I have the capacity to work conceptually across different mediums and platforms. But I’ve also decided that I need to avoid “screaming out loud” all the time and instead figure out how I can do something that is more personal and subtle. There’s cowardice in always being technically impressive. I think it’s a lot more courageous to do something simple. 

The format of the Cure³ project, which prescribed a tiny 20x20 cm frame, was perfect because it invited me to try something completely different: to whisper instead of yelling.

Plotter drawing is in some sense the ultimate test of a generative artist. You have nothing but lines to work with and you can’t really rely on anything else. I liked that idea. I also found it to be a meditative experience. I feel that it’s some of the best work I’ve done. I understand that it’s a lot less in your face and engaging in one sense but that makes me like it even more. 

One thing that I’ve probably inherited from design is this idea that the concept you want to communicate comes first and you choose your tools based on what fits well with that concept. The title, Losing Oneself, refers to this practice of getting completely immersed in meditation and letting go of your personal identity. But it also made me think of the ways we lose ourselves in ways that are not so wonderful — we lose ourselves to stress and we get lost in our emotions. 

We tend to draw life out like a map, trying to figure out the grand scheme of where we are going. But then there are all these things that interfere with our plans, including illness. I can’t imagine how horrific it must be to suffer a condition that starts messing with your nervous system and your experience of who you are as a person. I don’t want to claim that I can make any sort of a valid representation of what that must feel like. To me, it’s more of a personal musing on the idea of the future and what it means to lose the ability to work out that future in the way one intends. There is a Buddhist idea of letting go of oneself to the point where everything can flow in harmony with conditions outside of our control; so even if the work is inspired by something quite horrible, there is optimism underneath it. 

‍AE: Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are also participating in Cure³. They are interested in the importance of Zen Buddhism to your practice.‍

BS: I’ve been into meditation for close to 15 years and Zen Buddhism is now an integral part of my life. I spend between ten and 30 days a year on silent retreat and I try to keep a daily practice going. One thing I really like about the philosophy is how it breaks down concepts, words, and ideas and then works with what is left: a direct being in the world. 

I think of aesthetics as the language of those aspects of us that cannot be spoken in words. I’m constantly battling with symbolic or conceptual concerns in my work while also maintaining a level beyond words that is purely experiential. ‍

AE: Critics and commentators often try to establish false unity in an artist’s practice. Your technical virtuosity has become legend thanks in part to the virality of your posts on social media. I know you have an interest in quantum entanglement but, together with the influence of Zen Buddhism, it feels like yours is a highly syncretic practice that seeks to hold very different ontologies in balance. ‍

BS: A number of people over many years, both philosophers and scientists, have tried and failed to unify spiritual frameworks with material physicalism. But then there are also new paradigms that have emerged out of meditation and psychedelic experiences that go beyond the limits of reason. I follow a number of members of the postrationalist movement, some of whom have sought to come up with scientifically falsifiable theories of consciousness, while others have flirted with the idea of quantum mechanics to explain things like autonomy that don’t really map onto physicalism or materialism. 

I’m not a scientist nor a philosopher, and I try to hold such concepts lightly without making any bold claims. I think that quantum and theoretical physics, philosophy, and spirituality all try to grapple with the boundaries of human knowledge, and it’s at those boundaries that I find a lot of inspiration for my art because that’s where there exists open space for speculation as well as poetry.