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Live From Marfa: In Conversation With Harvey Rayner

Harvey Rayner
Live From Marfa: In Conversation With Harvey RaynerLive From Marfa: In Conversation With Harvey Rayner

Features

Live From Marfa: In Conversation With Harvey Rayner

Harvey Rayner
Features
Live From Marfa: In Conversation With Harvey Rayner
Harvey Rayner

It's rare to meet an artist who’s been working with generative code for over 25 years, but that’s exactly who Harvey Rayner is. An OG in the generative art world, Rayner’s work is both bold and ethereal. His pieces feature blocky geometrics and sharp contrasts, balanced with softer pastel jewel tones. This combination makes his art feel airy and strong, sort of like a film negative that’s caught between light and dark. 

Rayner’s “Fontana” collection, first generated on Art Blocks in 2022, uses generative code to abstractly capture the flowing motion of a water fountain as represented by static elements. Each output results in a generated combination of colors from a carefully curated palette. Rayner says in the collection’s description that the hues were inspired by early 20th-century art and design. Taking a glimpse at the influences of the era and seeing movements like Fauvism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, it’s easy to spot those threads.

Meanwhile, Rayner’s “Velum” experiments with later influences — and perhaps even more explicitly. He describes the collection as “stealing” from mid-20th-century artistic movements to see what happens when they are plugged into the algorithms of today. Doing so decontextualizes the works, stripping away their meaning and leaving us with only the visual legacy to interpret.

We sat down with Rayner at the Thunderbird Marfa during Marfa Art Blocks Weekend, where we talked about his journey into generative art (which began in the 1990s), the creative process behind his collections, and how he keeps his footing in a fast-moving digital space. 

‍Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

OpenSea: What initially drew you to the world of generative art?

Harvey Rayner: I was obviously drawn to the space because it was a place for me to sell the work I’d been making for so long without a market. So, my first project I launched was “Photon’s Dream” with Art Blocks, and then “Fontana.”

That was kind of a big springboard for the rest of my career. My first real exploration with generative art was actually building work with geometry. I called it "geometric media" for about 15 years, and it got so complex that it was taking too long for me to make manually.

So, I started writing software to explore these geometric ideas in new ways and investigate the complexity I wanted to investigate. But the only way to do it was with code. At the time, I didn’t even have a name for it — we didn’t call it generative art, that term didn’t really exist. I just thought I was doing this weird thing. I wasn’t trying to sell it. I didn’t think there was a market for it. It was just my own deep exploration of geometry. And, yeah, I was actually investigating this class of objects called quasi-crystals.

OpenSea: Can you tell us about what tools or platforms you use?

Harvey Rayner: I don’t use external libraries. I code in JavaScript. I’m one of the few artists who uses SVG, I’ve been involved with it from the very beginning, back when the technology wasn’t even compatible with most mainstream browsers. I’ve built a lot of my own libraries. I didn’t use p5js or anything like that. Now, this has all evolved over the past 15 years. I’ve slowly found a way to work and build my own tools. I also use CorelDRAW to flesh things out — I've always liked that.

In terms of platforms, I first dropped with Art Blocks, then Bright Moments, and I’ve sold on places like Sotheby’s and Christie's. I’ve done several collabs along the way, but now, I’m focusing on doing things more independently so I’m not relying on platforms and their limitations anymore. I work with a few people who help me with things like promotions, but I really enjoy being independent. I like doing my own thing. I don’t like being told what to do.

Fontana #346

OpenSea: What exercises or practices help you get into your creative flow state?

Harvey Rayner: Meditation. I’ve spent a lot of time on retreats and have a personal practice, and I think that influences my work — especially my earlier pieces from about 20 years ago. It’s hard to say exactly how meditation affects my art. I don’t use the art as a direct exploration of it, but it does reveal itself in some way. If I spend a few months looking inward, some of those insights might show up in my work later on. But my work isn’t particularly conceptual. First and foremost, I’m a picture maker. 

OpenSea: What’s your usual starting point when approaching a new work. Is it an idea, an algorithm, a visual concept?

Harvey Rayner: I’ve always liked building things, working with my hands. So, I take a very compositional approach to my art. I don’t get too caught up in concepts. I do write essays about my work and try to connect it to the past, especially to the canon of 20th-century art, but I wouldn’t classify myself as a conceptual artist. The way these influences appear in my work is more intuitive and visual. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how it comes through. 

When I was in art school, I would spend two hours each morning just flipping through art books, spending all my money on them. This was in the 1990s. I’d be looking at timeless things, like composition. I didn’t need to understand what the artist was thinking at the time; I was drawn to the fundamental qualities that are timeless, in a sense.

For instance, with “Fontana,” my project with Art Blocks, there were parts of it that kind of felt like they were expressing some sort of movement through very static elements. It reminded me of what the futurists were doing in the last century. So I started to revisit that movement, and that fed back into my own visual language. That’s often how I work. I’ll start a project, and then it reminds me of something. Like “Vellum” had these very gestural components, and I was looking at Abstract Expressionism, but I combined it with a Pop Art aesthetic — very bold outlines that flattened the image. It was kind of like plunking two visual languages from different movements together. Not the concepts behind those movements, just the pure visual language. I squashed it all together and explored what came out using a very algorithmic approach.

Photon's Dream #83

OpenSea: Do you find yourself continuously revising or tweaking your work, or do you reach a clear stopping point?

Harvey Rayner: I revisit code because I build in a very modular way. I often re-explore algorithms, but after doing this for so long, I’ve developed a sense of when something is done. You can overwork something, and I’ve learned to recognize when I’ve reached that point over the years. But I will work on stuff.

I might work on a project for three months, but I always keep a few in development at once. This way, I can step away, come back, and realize if I’m starting to overwork it. But honestly, I usually just know when it’s finished. It’s hard to explain, but I get this feeling when I’ve fully expressed the core ideas in the algorithm. After that, pushing it further feels like diminishing returns. You can actually ruin a piece by overworking it. It’s similar to painting — you can overpaint and lose the vitality. The piece becomes labored and tired. But when I look at the screen, and almost every output is a surprise, I know I’m in the right place. The excitement is still there.

Photon's Dream #118

OpenSea: As someone working with evolving technologies, what’s your perspective on the future of generative art? Are you feeling positive or foreboding?

Harvey Rayner: Now is a very exciting time for me. I think it’s important to make art because we’re in one of those rare moments in history where the space of what I call “conceivable art” is rapidly expanding. If you go back just 10 years, you could look at art being made and say that it could have been conceived 50 years earlier — especially in painting and conceptual art. We had ready-mades in 1916 with Duchamp, for example. But now, looking at what generative art and AI art are doing, it's hard to even imagine what the future holds. I don’t know where we are on the curve, or if we’ve already peaked in terms of how big this space has become. But the fact that I personally can’t predict where we’ll be in three years is what makes it so exciting. 

If I could predict what’s going to happen in the next year, I’d feel like I’m in the wrong space, using the wrong medium and the wrong tools. That uncertainty is what keeps things exciting.

However, one trend I see is generative art becoming much more personalized, responsive to things like biometric data and the environment. We could also see the rise of these “blue-chip” type pieces. Not just “blue-chip,” but art that’s more meaningful to culture as a whole, not just one individual. Because it could aggregate lots of data from all these personal pieces and say, “Okay, this is what many people enjoy,” or “This is the behavior these pieces are feeding off.” Then it could crystallize that into these one-of-ones or epic pieces that say something about human behavior at a moment in time.

You know, I want to make a one-of-one, like last year when I did my marfaMESH project. It was event-driven generative art where people interacted with lanyards using their phones. We created an app, recorded interactions, and captured data like geolocation and pictures people took. All of that fed into this personalized artwork, which served as a kind of memento of people's experiences while they were there.

People really got attached to them and still hold onto them. But you could take all that data and create a one-of-one artwork that represents everyone’s experience through the app at the event. I think that piece could have value as more of a blue-chip type piece of art.

So yeah, there are kind of two trends there, related trends.. But other than that, I like the fact that I can’t tell what’s going to happen next.

Fontana #43

OpenSea: Where can people find you and your work?

Harvey Rayner: You can find me on X at @Harvey_Rayner. My personal website is under construction but will soon be live at rayner.art. You can also connect with me on my Discord server, and that’s just harveyrayner.

OpenSea: Thank you so much for your time today. 

Harvey Rayner: Yes, thank you!

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