Dmitri Cherniak

Dmitri Cherniak is a Canadian artist and coder who lives and works in New York. He trained as an engineer and worked as a full-stack developer, and he treats automation as his medium: he writes the rules and lets the code make the image. His first code-based work, Taylor Swift ASCII Art, began as an AI game for a university course in 2009 and grew into a solo show in 2015.

He minted early pieces on SuperRare, among them the generative Self Portrait #1 (2020), but wanted collectors to own the outputs of live code. After Snowfro showed him Art Blocks, he released Ringers there in 2021: 1,000 works, each a string looped around a set of pegs. It minted out in 18 minutes. One output that resembles a goose, Ringers #879, is known as "The Goose" and sold at Sotheby's in 2023. The Eternal Pump (2021), 50 works, came next. Its holders then kept The Wrapture at 50 works out of a possible 666 by not selling or listing theirs for a year.

In January 2022, Dead Ringers sent one new output a day to a random address. Light Years (2022), made with the Estate of László Moholy-Nagy and released with Fellowship, pairs 100 generative works with silver gelatin prints developed from film negatives. It was previewed at Paris Photo. He also made gen2GAN (2020) with the AI artist Helena Sarin.

LACMA holds Ringers #962, a gift received in 2023. ZKM Karlsruhe holds Ringers #182 and a Light Years print, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum holds a print of Light Years #051. Artnet named him to its NFT 30 in 2021.