Sterling Crispin (b. 1985) is a conceptual artist and software engineer who works across smart contracts, generative art, machine intelligence and techno-sculpture. His work moves between the computational beauty of nature and conflicting cultural narratives about the apocalypse, asking whether humanity is merging with machines toward immortality or heading toward climate collapse and extinction.
Crispin was an artist in residence at RedLine in Denver from 2008 to 2011. His research-based work includes Data-Masks, a series of biometric surveillance masks that respond to facial recognition technology.
In 2021 Crispin released Entropy Extropy, a non-fungible token that functioned as a blueprint and provenance record for a physical sculpture pairing a found tree root with a fabricated metal copy. The auction opened at 3 ETH, and the token and finished sculpture were meant to remain tied together, since, in Crispin's words, “the rendering of the NFT itself isn't a full execution of the artwork”.In 2023 he released Flourish on Art Blocks, a generative collection that reimagines architectural ornamentation from the late 1800s and early 1900s using a grammar-like system in which simple shapes combine like words in a sentence. Its fine, flowing linework draws on notebooks of abstract pen drawings Crispin made while studying painting and drawing, and a share of sale proceeds went to the Hawaii Community Foundation's Maui Strong Fund after the 2023 Maui wildfires.
Crispin's work has been shown at ZKM Karlsruhe, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden and the Mexican National Center for the Arts. In 2022 it appeared in “Planet B: Climate Change and the New Sublime” at Palazzo Bollani in Venice, and in 2024 in “Poetics of Encryption” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.His work and writing have been covered in The New York Times, Frieze, Wired, ARTnews, Rhizome and Art in America.,
