Matt Kane is a Chicago-born artist and self-taught programmer who has spent more than two decades moving between traditional oil painting and code.
He was a gallery-exhibited painter in his early twenties before stepping away from the art world for nearly a decade in the Pacific Northwest, where he worked as a web developer and taught himself to program.
The same instinct that once led him to stretch his own canvases and mix his own pigments eventually pushed him to build custom software from scratch — a digital easel of his own making, designed to let him shape exactly how his images come to life.
In September 2020, Matt released "Right Place & Right Time" on Async Art — a 24-layer programmable artwork driven by the previous day's Bitcoin price action, with each hour of price movement controlling the rotation, scale, and position of a corresponding layer. The piece became one of the most cited early experiments in programmable, data-driven cryptoart. He closed 2020 as the winner of the Most Innovative NFT Award, and Cointelegraph listed him among the Top 100 Notable People in Blockchain entering 2021.
His broader practice spans projects including VOLATILITY(dot)ART, Infinite Color Theory, and ANONS — work consistently rooted in code, color, and how data and time can shape an image.
Gazers launched as part of Art Blocks Curated in December 2021. It is a 1,000-piece collection that joins the blockchain to one of humanity's oldest visual traditions — tracking the moon. Each piece is anchored to an "Origin Moon," a New Moon date drawn from the past twenty years of Matt's life, and from that point on, every New Moon that arrives accelerates the artwork's animation.
A Gazer with a freshly minted Origin Moon renders closer to 1 frame per second, behaving like a slowly evolving painting, while one with a 20-year-old Origin Moon runs closer to 20 frames per second. The work is designed to scale forward across decades, growing more animated as time and display technology advance.
The inclusion of Gazers in our Flagship Collection recognizes an artist who built his own tools to create work that no off-the-shelf software could produce — and a project that treats time itself as a medium, using the rhythm of the moon and the permanence of the chain to make artworks that unfold across decades rather than moments.
Welcome home, Gazers 🌊