Jeremy Schoenherr (Jeres)

Artist

Jeremy Schoenherr (Jeres) · jeres.xyz ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/jeres ↗

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, digital painting, animation, and physical printmaking

In the set

Torrent ↗ · 300 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Jeremy Schoenherr’s practice joins the procedural logic of software to an interest in experiences that resist stable description. Trained through sustained work in design and software engineering, he approaches an algorithm as a designed encounter between artwork and viewer. Schoenherr has described generative art as sharing important characteristics with applications: both establish rules, accept inputs, and produce experiences mediated by hardware. His studies in computer engineering and art history provide the practice with a dual vocabulary of systems and images.¹

This combination does not lead to an ideal of frictionless computation. Schoenherr instead uses code to expose uncertainty. Gradients, waves, irregular lines, animation, and broad parameter spaces prevent the viewer from exhausting a system’s possible expressions. The algorithm remains bounded by its author, yet bugs, overlooked interactions, and unexpected outputs can exceed those intended limits. For Schoenherr, that tension echoes questions about determinism, context, and the choices through which a life acquires form.¹

A structure altered by time

Released through Art Blocks Curated on September 6, 2023, Torrent comprises 300 unique artworks.² The project begins with a base composition of elementary marks, including circles and lines rendered as pixels. A shader then operates as a lens, selecting, displacing, and transforming that underlying information. Some source material remains visible, while other passages disappear or emerge far from their initial positions.³

The resulting images resemble stained textiles, mineral surfaces, flood deposits, splashed pigment, and landscapes subjected to erosion. Their layered color is not merely an imitation of analog media. It records a computational passage from one state to another. Schoenherr connects this transformation to imperfect memory: an event may persist, but any later account is partial, subjective, and susceptible to revision. Torrent is consequently less concerned with recovering an authoritative truth than with examining the stories through which experience becomes intelligible.³

The work also unfolds in time. Its animation can be started, stopped, accelerated, slowed, or advanced frame by frame. Movement makes the shader’s reinterpretation perceptible, turning each composition into a changing view of an inaccessible substrate. Schoenherr has described the project as an exploration of truth, memory, and experience in which one person’s account, or even the same person’s account, may evolve with time and new information.⁴

Live on Art Blocks: torrent-by-jeres ↗

Systems as emotional instruments

Schoenherr’s broader work clarifies why Torrent feels simultaneously engineered and vulnerable. His algorithms frequently begin through experimentation rather than the execution of a fixed image. An emerging visual or emotional quality becomes a direction to test, revise, or abandon. This process places discovery inside authorship: the artist defines a system, but also responds to what it reveals.¹

That method continued in Repetition and Noise (2024), a shortlisted work in the Finnish National Gallery’s Combine24 competition. Drawing on the museum’s digitized collection, the project recombined archival imagery into wave-like collages. The National Gallery described the work as blurring the boundaries between original collection images and newly generated material, while the Combine24 presentation placed it among projects engaging directly with the museum archive.⁵ Although distinct in source and institutional setting, the project extends a central concern of Torrent: images survive through alteration rather than perfect preservation.

In Schoenherr’s generative systems, distortion is not the loss of meaning. It is the condition through which meaning continues to change.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Jeremy Schoenherr (Jeres) links page ↗.