James Paterson, known online as Presstube, is a Montreal-based artist who has synthesized drawing, animation, and code since the late 1990s.,An avid meditator, his work is informed by a first-person fascination with the workings of the human mind alongside the wonders of nature revealed by contemporary science.
Paterson was an early participant on Hic et Nunc (HEN), the grassroots Tezos NFT platform, where a buggy, hand-annotated minting process gave way to what he has described as a hard-to-reach secret garden of fresh possibility. He recalled a pay-it-forward culture in which strangers gifted new arrivals the roughly 1 tez needed to mint their first piece, and singled out community events like #OBJKT4OBJKT as a communal, zine-like way to discover new artists.On HEN he made After Her CalmWafer™ Installation, his first collaboration with Mario Klingemann, a glitched AI portrait the two artists both described as lobotomized.In 2021 the pair made a second work, Kali's Merkin, this time with music by Stephen Ramsay, known as YoungGalaxy.
In 2022 Paterson minted a batch of one-of-one text pieces on typed.art, a character-based Tezos marketplace.In 2023 he collaborated with K.C. Austin, known as bzor, on Cuneiform, a series of 128 works shown in the group exhibition “Truth” on Feral File, curated by Adam Berninger.With musician Stephen Ramsay, Paterson created KRILLER, a collaborative audiovisual broadcast comprising 6,300 individually fabricated cassettes, divided into 900 for each day of a looping seven-day cycle and coded together with Jacob DeHart and Greg Sadetsky. Ramsay composed 630 musical stems that the piece's engine mixes into 6,300 unique ambient soundtracks, one per cassette.
