Tim Richardson + Sean Zellmer

Raster

raster.art/artist/tim-richardson-sean-zellmer ↗

Practice

Collaborative generative art joining figurative image making, animation, code, and controlled visual distortion

In the set

Contrast Agent ↗ · 14 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Tim Richardson and Sean Zellmer approach the generative image from complementary positions. Richardson has worked across photography, film, installation, and digitally constructed imagery. In a 2015 interview, he described scanning, motion capture, CGI, and 3D imaging as tools that shift image making toward sculpture, freeing the virtual camera from the physical limits of conventional photography.¹ Zellmer’s published record is associated with generative animation, interactive work, and screen-based experiments. His Lava King appeared in the FILE São Paulo 2018 catalogue, which describes a WebGL work using ray marching to depict the formation and erosion of volcanic fractal structures.²

Their collaboration is therefore less a meeting of separate media than a convergence around the programmable image. Richardson brings an established concern with transformed bodies and synthetic environments. Zellmer contributes a practice grounded in mathematical systems and procedural motion. Contrast Agent condenses those interests into outputs poised between portrait, simulation, and signal.

From camera to system

Richardson’s earlier work provides context for the collaboration. Dazed identified him as a photographer and filmmaker in 2010, when he discussed combining still and moving images, augmented reality, and visual choreography.³ For the short film Crossing, he described photography and film as a symbolic passage between real and imaginary space.⁴ These statements establish a sustained interest in images that exceed straightforward photographic description.

That interest continued across editorial and commissioned production. Models.com records assignments for publications including Dazed & Confused, Interview, Numéro Art, and V Magazine, as well as work for major fashion and cosmetics brands.⁵ Richardson’s studio biography likewise surveys commissions, installations, visual effects, screenings, and exhibitions.⁶ Artsy characterizes his practice through motion capture, 3D scanning, 3D imaging, cinema, and photography.⁷ This breadth matters because Contrast Agent does not treat code as a rejection of the camera. Instead, it carries photography’s attention to the body into a generative environment where surface, color, and spatial coherence can be reorganized.

Zellmer’s contribution can be understood through the circulation of his computational work. The FILE catalogue identifies mathematics and philosophy as foundations for his exploration of deterministic chaos.² In 2022, he was also credited in StandardVision’s Future Stages, an immersive and interactive program examining relationships between bodies and emerging technologies.⁸ That context aligns with the collection’s central tension: the body remains legible, but the system surrounding it refuses stability.

Live on Art Blocks: contrast-agent-by-tim-richardson-sean-zellmer ↗

Controlled interference

Art Blocks records Contrast Agent as an Art Blocks Presents release dated 10 March 2023 and comprising exactly 14 unique artworks.⁹ Its small edition count gives the series the character of a concentrated suite rather than a broad survey of parameter space. Across the outputs, recognizable anatomy and staged figuration encounter chromatic interruption, displacement, and competing layers of visual information. The title is apt: a contrast agent makes structures more visible, yet heightened contrast here also complicates recognition.

The collection can be read as an inquiry into how digital systems mediate bodies. Richardson has explained that a scanned figure may be viewed from positions unavailable to a physical camera, altering the maker’s relationship with both subject and image.¹ Zellmer’s association with interactive performance extends that question from viewpoint to behavior.⁸ In Contrast Agent, the figure becomes material for an image system, but never disappears into abstraction. Its persistence creates the work’s friction. Viewers repeatedly attempt to reconstruct a body from surfaces that behave like data.

Contrast Agent makes visibility unstable: every disclosure is also an interference.

The project also belongs to a longer trajectory in Richardson’s work. His 2009 Dazed editorial Rotation joined photography and film within a single presentation.¹⁰ The collaborative Art Blocks release translates this recurring movement among stillness, motion, body, and fabrication into an on-chain generative format. Its 14 editions form a precise record of two artists using computation not simply to multiply images, but to test how much alteration an image can sustain while continuing to signify a figure.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Tim Richardson + Sean Zellmer links page ↗.