John Karborn, a London native, is an artist who works across sculpture, print and moving image, blending traditional, analogue processes with digital and blockchain-based techniques. His work explores themes including technology, overpopulation and the bizarre, drawn toward what he has called the fortunate harmony hidden inside chaos.
Karborn began working with digital tools around 2002, when he started with simple scans of plants and leaves, a project that gained enough attention to set his practice in motion. He has since worked across media and collaborated widely, particularly with other artists in East London, and his work has been covered by Vice Magazine and Lecool Magazine.Recurring collaborators include the artist MOBSTR, with whom he has made anti-gravity sculptures and screenprints, and the musician John Foxx, with whom he made the sculptural piece Sleep in 2019.
In 2023 Karborn released The Seeker, built on Transient Labs' Collectors Choice smart contract, which lets each holder swap the animated GIF displayed on their token as often as they like.,He calls the technique behind the series hypercollage, the simultaneous combination of multiple media within a single piece, and each work is captured as an 8-step stop-frame animation filmed on analogue Trinitron CRT monitors, blending 3D modeling with scans of old books and imagery from 1980s and 1990s video games. The series also carries an element called The Medusa, a mechanism that can permanently freeze, or petrify, an artwork's appearance.
Karborn has drawn on influences ranging from the designer Herbert Bayer and the surrealist Max Ernst to cyberpunk fiction and ancient Greek mythology.He collaborated with the artist Shl0ms on MOON:BEAM, an eclipse-themed drop.He has also spoken about designing a New York Times project called Op-Eds from the Future, which imagined speculative futures for journalism.
