Mitchell F. Chan has long been known for turning complex systems into compelling artworks. His latest project, Overture, is the first installment in The Zantar Triptych, a series of interactive artworks that tell connected stories about a fictional game and its digital economy.

Chan’s past works, including Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility and The Boys of Summer, have explored how digital systems mirror our real-world economic, cultural, and emotional experiences. Overture builds on the same themes Chan’s explored before, but this time with new tech and a sense of play. In the conversation below, he talks about how he thinks about complexity, accessibility, and community, and how software opens up new ways for artists to explore ideas.

OpenSea: What is the core concept behind Overture? How do you see it fitting into the broader evolution of your work in digital art? 

Mitchell F. Chan: In an opera, the overture is the opening number that establishes the themes and motifs that the audience will be encountering throughout the larger piece of work.

This work is, technologically, a continuation of the videogame art that I’ve been doing for the past few years. I’ve added a lot of new technological wrinkles. I think the audio component is something that people probably haven’t encountered before – it’s a generative soundtrack that remixes the soundtrack with every mint, and it’s delivered in spatial audio. Graphically, it’s a natural evolution as well. Thematically, I am continuing to make art about economic systems that exist here in our real world.

Narratively, Overture is a jumping-off point into a whole new phase of work.

‍OpenSea: Looking back at your work on Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility and Boys of Summer, do you see an artistic throughline into Overture, or a departure?

Mitchell F. Chan: Almost all of the works I’ve done since Digital Zones have been works about economic systems. Digital Zones was about the ways that cryptocurrencies were an echo of a system of financialization developed by conceptual artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Boys of Summer was about the ways that we quantify every aspect of our lives in order to transform ourselves into data package commodities. So all these projects have that through line, and this new artwork follows the through line as well.

OpenSea: You often use conceptual constraints as part of your art. What technological choices or constraints shaped Overture?

Mitchell F. Chan: The biggest constraint that I work with these days is my self-imposed requirement that the art be presentable in as many different formats, on as many different devices as possible. This is very annoying! I make all my projects in WebGL, so they can run on pretty much any device that can run a web browser. This has imposed a pretty useful constraint on what kind of graphics I can make, but because I design all my own shaders, that leads me to a simplified, highly stylized aesthetic that I think is quite distinct! So I like that constraint. 

OpenSea: How do you want viewers and collectors to feel when they encounter the artwork for the first time?

Mitchell F. Chan: I would like them to laugh and enjoy themselves! Let their guards down and have fun. I will rip their hearts out later…

OpenSea: Your work frequently references classical art and contemporary media theory. Do these influences show up in Overture?

Mitchell F. Chan: Those will come up later on in the artworks that follow Overture. Eagle-eyed viewers will find some subtle references to Michael Snow, or recognize that my aesthetic is really heavily influenced by the Canadian painters Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt. Some of that gets set up in Overture. 

‍OpenSea: You’ve said in the past that your artworks are “systems more than they are images.” Can you expand on that?

Mitchell F. Chan: Well, I am very proud of the fact that these artworks are 60 pretty pictures generated each second. I love aesthetics, I’ve loved creating the aesthetics. But I think, frankly, that images-as-art is pretty much over. It’s not just that images are cheap in their overabundance, it’s that images are fairly limited in their ability to represent complicated ideas in the year 2025. I guess images are good for communicating the idea that, like, you are sad and brave. Or that butterflies are pretty, or that memes are dank. Okay. The ideas that are, for me, worth exploring are all ideas about systems: what is the system through which money flows between people and corporations? How does that system make some people very rich and others very poor? What is the system that directs a torrent of content-slop toward impressionable people and makes them awful? These are fun questions! And you can’t really ask it, much less answer it, with a picture, no matter how clever you all.

So with software, you can create a system. You can create a system that is analogous to the system that you’re trying to examine. And then you can explain something about that system by taking your viewer’s hand and walking them through it. And that is a very cool and exciting thing to do because it is a thing that has only really been possible for artists to do recently, with the proliferation of digital tools. 

OpenSea: How do you balance accessibility with complexity in your art? Is this something you think about when creating something new?‍

Mitchell F. Chan: I think it all comes down to confidence. When an artist is young, he is desperate for validation, to be seen as profound and clever and smart. And so he pushes all the complexity out to the front of his work, so that even from far away everyone will be able to see that his work is a thick bramble of capital-S-Serious capital-I-Ideas. Usually he does this because he is a moron.

But as an artist becomes more confident, in both herself and the audience that she’s cultivated over many years, she will learn the value of keeping the true complexity of an artwork close to its core. She’ll learn to keep the exterior simple, all the better to draw that audience in and share with them the experience of unravelling the complexity together, over time.

So that’s what I try to do. I think it’s fine if my art looks dumb at first glance, I can handle it. I used to be a moron, though! It took time to learn this trick.

OpenSea: What role does community play in your artwork? Do you actively engage with the community of collectors you’ve built when working on something new?

Mitchell F. Chan: I suck at being an online persona. I just have a hard time maintaining the level of aggrievement that is necessary to engage an audience on CryptoTwitter. I am lucky that over the past few years, I’ve had ample opportunity to meet some of the digital art community IRL and find some of the best, most inquisitive, and fun people I’ll ever know. I have maybe 13 fans but every one of them is awesome.

OpenSea: What conversations are you hoping this collection will spark?

Mitchell F. Chan: I just hope people enjoy it!