Paweł Dudko

Artist

Paweł Dudko · pdudko.com/chroma-theory ↗

Practice

Generative and interactive art, spatial installation, photography, multimedia, and 3D printing

In the set

Ingress ↗ · 256 editions
Chroma Theory ↗ · 106 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Paweł Dudko approaches computation with an architect’s sensitivity to orientation, enclosure, scale, and passage. Born in 1987, he studied architecture at Białystok University of Technology and completed a doctorate in art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2018.¹ His practice has developed across spatial installations, photography, scenography, digital fabrication, and generative systems, with virtual and physical experience treated as adjoining conditions.²

That continuity is important. A City of Białystok account records installations, performances, photography, public-space projects, and workshops, including an electroluminescent intervention in the Biała River.³ In the 2021 solo exhibition Ex Machina, a purpose-built machine produced distinct objects, making automated creation and machine agency explicit subjects.⁴ Code, in this trajectory, is not merely a tool for producing images. It organizes relations among material, viewer, environment, and duration.

Color becomes a place

Released by Art Blocks on October 28, 2021, Chroma Theory comprises 106 unique artworks.⁵ The series established Dudko’s concern with luminous abstraction, but its significance lies in how color behaves. Chromatic fields overlap, recede, pulse, and open uncertain depths. The image functions almost like a shallow room whose dimensions remain unstable.

Dudko has described photography as an early route into art and digital manipulation as a bridge toward later computational work.⁶ This history helps explain why illumination in Chroma Theory feels both optical and constructed. Light is simultaneously subject, medium, and spatial cue. The project does not imitate a physical installation, yet it asks viewers to read a flat display through habits formed by embodied perception.

Live on Art Blocks: chroma-theory-by-pawel-dudko ↗

The image crossed as architecture

Ingress, released through Art Blocks on November 23, 2022, extends these concerns into an edition of 256 unique artworks.⁷ Dudko traces its origin to a shader experiment made while developing Chroma Theory. The subsequent work introduced three-dimensional rendering, moving lights, desktop navigation, and device-orientation controls.⁸ These mechanics support a precise conceptual turn: color is no longer only perceived as depth, but encountered as an environment that can be surveyed.

The generated spaces offer few stable measures. Pulsating lights can suggest walls, thresholds, chambers, or unbounded darkness, while the viewer remains attached to a central position. Desktop controls encourage deliberate exploration, while a mobile device can become a movable window into the scene. Interaction therefore changes the act of looking without turning the work into a conventional game with objectives or progression.

Live on Art Blocks: ingress-by-pawel-dudko ↗

Between screen and situation

Dudko’s broader work confirms that this concern with situated perception is not confined to blockchain projects. For the Rothko Museum’s 2022 exhibition New Spirituality, he created a virtual Totem conceived as a reflection on the values, relationships, virtues, or beliefs that people revere.⁹ Across these projects, abstraction is not a retreat from context. It is a framework through which context becomes newly perceptible.

Seen together, Chroma Theory and Ingress mark a shift from image as luminous field to image as traversable proposition. Their algorithms generate variation, but variation is only the starting condition. Dudko’s central subject is the encounter that follows: how a viewer locates the body before light, navigates ambiguity, and assigns scale or meaning to synthetic space.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Paweł Dudko links page ↗.