Matt Kane writes generative art in code, building digital works structured around natural and personal cycles of time. His 2021 series Gazers synchronizes each work with the real phases of the moon, tying its recurring motifs to twelve major moments from Kane's own life.
Kane made art for nearly a decade before the NFT market existed, without bringing it to market at all. In November 2020 he contributed one of twenty-two layers to First Supper, a collaborative piece minted on Async Art with twelve other artists, among them XCOPY, Hackatao, Coldie and Alotta Money. In June 2021 his Meules after Claude Monet was included in Sotheby's first NFT sale, “Natively Digital”. He built the token as an archive of context for the work, bundling in every layer of the file, including a low-resolution video. Kane has argued that an NFT should be more than a single image, that the artwork includes every layer of text and process behind it, and pointed to Sparrow Read's cooperative platform The Platform as a model for what NFTs could become. Later that year he released Gazers, whose recurring lunar motif marks an annual “Celebration Period” lasting between 24 and 144 hours and, every 33 lunar cycles, expands into a “Blue Moon”.
