Dmitri Cherniak

Artist

Dmitri Cherniak · official links ↗

Based

Born 1988, Toronto, Canada. Lives and works in New York City

Practice

Generative systems, automation, code, prints, photography, sculpture, and blockchain-based social experiments

In the set

Ringers ↗ · 1,000 editions
The Eternal Pump ↗ · 50 editions
The Wrapture ↗ · 50 minted editions

AB[500]

3 projects · 1,100 minted editions

Raster

raster.art/artist/dmitri-cherniak ↗

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Dmitri Cherniak calls automation his artistic medium. The phrase is more exact than calling his medium code. Code is the material by which he constructs an automated process, but the artwork begins when that process is allowed to act: quickly, repeatedly, and without asking the artist to approve each result. Born in Toronto in 1988, Cherniak studied physiology and computer science at McGill University, worked as an engineer, and brought the creativity of solving technical problems into an art practice based in New York.¹

The route was neither a conventional studio education nor a sudden conversion during the NFT boom. In a university artificial-intelligence course in 2010, Cherniak wrote a Go-playing program that generated Taylor Swift portraits in ASCII for its defeated opponents. When he posted one of the images in 2015, friends immediately asked to buy it. A San Francisco exhibition followed, and a print purchased with Bitcoin connected his automated images to cryptocurrency years before Art Blocks existed.²

His first NFT was minted in 2019. The more decisive encounter was with Larva Labs' Autoglyphs, whose on-chain system suggested that a collector could receive an output from the algorithm itself rather than a file the artist had selected in advance. Cherniak wanted a comparable structure in JavaScript. He experimented with a Raspberry Pi that would generate works and eventually destroy itself, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade an existing marketplace to support live code. When Erick Calderon introduced the early Art Blocks platform, Cherniak recognised the distribution mechanism he had been seeking.³

Automation is not the absence of authorship. It is authorship exercised through permissions, probabilities, and the decision to let a system finish the work.

Ringers: one rule, a thousand consequences

The premise of Ringers is immediately graspable. Place circular pegs on a grid and wind a string around some of them. The apparent simplicity makes the results legible, but it conceals the geometry needed to produce them. The algorithm samples peg positions, sorts them by angle around their centroid so paths do not cross arbitrarily, calculates tangent lines between circles, then draws the arcs that carry the string around each peg. Peg count, scale, arrangement, wrap direction, recursion, body colour, background, and occasional extra colour open that system into a large field of variation.⁴

Cherniak developed the form for roughly three years before its release. This duration matters because the finished algorithm is not merely a competent diagram of wrapped string. It has been tuned so that sparse and dense compositions, monochrome and coloured bodies, orderly grids and displaced structures all remain recognisably part of the same family.⁵

The AB5D treasury does not hold Ringers · live on Art Blocks ↗

Art Blocks released the 1,000-edition Curated project on 31 January 2021. Each buyer and the artist saw the generated work at the same moment. No later selection converted favourable seeds into the official series; all 1,000 outcomes constituted it.⁶ Cherniak has argued that the complete set is more compelling than any one Ringer because the distribution of traits is the artwork's larger structure. The code determines the probability of a property, but chance determines how often it actually appears and beside which other properties.⁷

This makes a wall of Ringers qualitatively different from a row of unrelated images. Repetition teaches the system. A viewer begins to infer the variables by comparing peg layouts, colour relationships, and wrap behaviours. Curated's close reading of the series connects that formal clarity to precedents in geometric and systematic art, while emphasising how the public mint exposed the entire output space rather than a portfolio chosen after generation.⁸

The Goose and the image inside the system

Ringers #879 is the series' most famous edge case. Its yellow body, black loops, and arrangement of pegs happen to suggest a bird with an outstretched neck. The Goose was not drawn into the algorithm as a figurative result. It emerged from the same abstract permissions that produced every other Ringer, then acquired its name and status through collective recognition.

That emergence explains the work better than its auction record does. The image shows how human interpretation can attach itself to a system without being specified by the artist or discovered by the computer. The algorithm produces geometry. Viewers produce the goose. Ownership, memes, repeated circulation, and the story of its rarity then produce an icon.

On 15 June 2023 the Goose sold at Sotheby's for USD 6,215,100, a record for Cherniak and, at the time, the second-highest auction result for a work of generative art. The house described the sale as the centre of an USD 11 million Grails auction and noted that the work had already sold privately for 1,800 ETH in 2021.⁹ The price amplified the image, but the accident made it significant. It is a grail because it condenses the relation among authored probability, random output, and public interpretation into one immediately readable form.

From collector culture to museum display

Ringers #962 entered LACMA through the promised gift of the Cozomo de' Medici Collection, a group of 22 blockchain works by 13 artists announced in 2023. LACMA described the gift as the first and largest private collection of blockchain artworks to enter an American art museum at that time.¹⁰ Cherniak then reconfigured the token into The LACMA Iterations, a physical silkscreen whose nine panels sweep one parameter while retaining the work's yellow peg. The edition directs proceeds to the museum and makes the system visible through controlled comparison.

The museum problem is not simply how to put an NFT on a screen. Ringers is a program, a set, and 1,000 individually owned outputs. Toledo Museum of Art's Infinite Images addressed that distributed form by exhibiting 25 prints together. Le Random's review argues that the installation allows viewers to deduce the variables at play, finding pleasure in the legibility of the algorithm and comparing Cherniak's clarity to Sol LeWitt's procedural structures.¹¹

These presentations refuse two reductions. The token is not treated only as a financial instrument, and the code is not treated only as a technical curiosity. A grid of outputs shows how the system thinks. A parameter sweep shows what changes when one variable moves. The work becomes historical not because a museum freezes it into one ideal image, but because the institution learns to display the relations among its images.

The Eternal Pump: speculation becomes a subject

Ringers sold out in eighteen minutes and its secondary market accelerated quickly. Cherniak's next Art Blocks project arrived only three weeks later, after the Curated programme's then-customary invitation to release in Playground. The Eternal Pump, 50 animated works released on 22 February 2021, borrows its title from the crypto injunction to respect the pump.¹²

The AB5D treasury does not hold The Eternal Pump · live on Art Blocks ↗

The title is comic, but the experience of its release was not. Bots, fear of missing out, and immediate speculation made the drop feel to Cherniak as though something had broken. The attention that had legitimised generative art also risked converting the artist into an instrument for other people's profit. In his later account, The Eternal Pump became a way to acknowledge the market's absurdity while gathering a small fellowship of collectors around it.¹³

The work's animation turns pumping into a perpetual condition. Its machines swell, cycle, and return. It is not an external satire pasted onto crypto culture; it is an edition whose scarcity and immediate demand made its buyers participants in the phenomenon it names. Cherniak's response was to use that concentration of collectors as material for a more demanding project.

The Wrapture: ownership under constraint

The Wrapture was released on 15 December 2021 to holders of The Eternal Pump. Its initial 50 works carried a rule. If none was transferred, sold, or listed for one year, the edition would remain at 50. If a holder broke the agreement, hundreds of additional works could become available. The visual system generated each token, but the final scarcity of the series depended on collective behaviour.¹⁴

The AB5D treasury does not hold The Wrapture · live on Art Blocks ↗

The 50 tokens were distributed among 37 holders. They had different levels of wealth, liquidity, and exposure, yet every one had to preserve the agreement. The experiment survived the 2022 collapse of Three Arrows Capital, whose Starry Night fund held four Wraptures. Liquidators transferred hundreds of other NFTs but left those four unmoved until the rule expired. On 17 December 2022 the project closed at 50, with no holder having listed, moved, or sold during the year.¹⁵

This outcome turns the blockchain from a provenance ledger into a stage for observable restraint. Every prohibited action could have been recorded. Not acting therefore became legible. The work asked whether collectors who had benefited from scarcity could collectively choose not to realise it through a sale, even when the market around them deteriorated.

The title holds several meanings at once: wrap as form, rapture as belief, and rupture as the consequence of defection. A holder owned an individual image, but the project's decisive property was shared and indivisible. No collector could preserve the final supply alone. The Wrapture automated neither loyalty nor trust. It designed conditions under which both could be tested in public.

Scarcity, abundance, and the artist as instrument

Art Blocks Playground was established so Curated artists could extend and test ideas beyond their accepted project. Cherniak used that freedom less to repeat Ringers than to interrogate the culture that had formed around it.¹⁶ The Eternal Pump names speculative momentum. The Wrapture converts market conduct into an enforceable narrative. Together they make the social consequences of a successful algorithm part of the practice.

Other Cherniak projects push the same question from the opposite direction. The Rinkeby Sessions preserves nearly 1,000 Ringers minted while testing on Ethereum's valueless Rinkeby network, then presents them as grouped physical prints. The images are genuine outputs from the project's development, but they lack mainnet provenance. The work asks whether the value lies in the visual system, the chain on which it ran, or the ownership history attached to the result.¹⁷

In January 2022, Dead Ringers generated a work each day and sent it to a random Ethereum address, most likely one for which no private key would ever be found. A final open edition reversed that radical scarcity, allowing 23,469 mints and raising funds for Food Bank for New York City. Cherniak described the work as a response to the intensity of hype around rare digital objects and to the uncomfortable way financial success turned artists into instruments.¹⁸

Across these projects, scarcity is never accepted as a neutral fact. It is made, withheld, multiplied, threatened, or assigned to an inaccessible address. The code does not merely generate an image. It arranges a situation in which collectors must decide what they believe gives the image value.

Light Years: automation meets photographic time

Light Years (2022) brought Cherniak's practice into conversation with László Moholy-Nagy and the history of experimental photography. Made with the artist's estate, the project comprises 100 generative works, each paired with a physical silver gelatin print. Cherniak travelled to research Moholy-Nagy's archives, generated the compositions in code, prepared them by hand, transferred them to film negatives, and used those negatives to produce the prints.¹⁹

The algorithm draws track-like structures that can also read as telephone poles and wires, linking Cherniak's automated system to the modern technologies represented in Moholy-Nagy's work. The path from digital output to negative, print, scan, and token is intentionally circular. No medium serves as the unquestioned original. Code, light-sensitive paper, physical negative, and blockchain record each contribute a different form of reproducibility and evidence.²⁰

Light Years #051 entered the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as a gift from Fellowship in 2023.²¹ The acquisition extends the institutional story beyond Ringers and demonstrates that automation, for Cherniak, is not confined to a browser. It can organise a photographic process, a print edition, and the movement among historical and contemporary technologies.

Why he belongs in the AB[500]

Cherniak belongs in the AB[500] because his three projects show the platform operating at three different scales. Ringers is an algorithmic system whose full set exceeds any individual output. The Eternal Pump is a compact animated response to the speculative demand that system generated. The Wrapture is a coordination mechanism in which ownership itself becomes the medium of a year-long performance.

The Goose is the iconic image, but it should not eclipse that sequence. Its accidental bird demonstrates emergence inside a visual system. The Wrapture demonstrates emergence inside a group: a collective result no participant could guarantee. In one, the artist authors probabilities and the public discovers an image. In the other, the artist authors rules and the public produces an outcome.

Cherniak's later physical works strengthen this reading. At Art Basel Miami Beach's Zero 10 in 2025, AOTM presented Floor Ringer, prints from Ringers, and the new Polygon Etcetera as a multimedia installation about how digital art occupies physical space.²² The translation does not abandon the algorithm. It reveals the many objects and behaviours an automated system can organise.

The claim that automation is a medium is therefore neither a slogan nor a denial of human agency. It identifies where Cherniak places artistic judgment: in the construction of a process, the deliberate surrender of control, and the social consequences that follow. Ringers, The Eternal Pump, and The Wrapture belong in the canon because they make those consequences visible as form.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete 55-source ledger, see the Dmitri Cherniak bibliography ↗.