Jörn Bielewski, who works as Shortcut, is a German artist working in glitch art, channel-shift manipulation, GAN-generated imagery and lineart animation. He trained as a cameraman and editor in the broadcast industry during the last years of analogue video production before moving into digital editing. He began minting NFT art on Ethereum in 2018, releasing work through platforms including SuperRare, KnownOrigin and MakersPlace.
Bielewski discovered Bitcoin in 2014 and began writing about art and the blockchain on Steemit, a blockchain-based blogging platform, from 2016, adopting the online handle Shortcut. In 2017 he sold his first physical artworks for the cryptocurrency Steem. In April 2018 he wrote about collecting an edition of XCOPY's Jesus Mob, one of the artist's early works minted on Ascribe, a platform that has since shut down. Feedback from XCOPY and fellow artist Matt Kane encouraged Bielewski toward the bold lineart and flat, saturated color he arrived at on 4 July 2020, after rediscovering an analogue work he had made three years earlier. In 2021 he sold an early XCOPY piece from his collection and voluntarily paid the artist a ten percent royalty from the proceeds. He then reinvested the majority into work by emerging and underrepresented artists across Ethereum, Tezos and Polygon. His collection has grown to an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 NFTs across multiple blockchains. In 2022 Bielewski was one of 24 artists honored as “seeders” — pioneering figures in crypto art — in the exhibition “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich, alongside XCOPY, Matt Kane and Botto.
