John Vokoun

John Vokoun makes paintings out of data — corrupted files, signal noise, raw information — decomposed to its smallest units and rebuilt by hand, one line at a time, until it settles into color and structure. A child of the personal-computer era, he has treated the machine as an art medium since drawing on an Apple II as a boy, and his work belongs to a quieter lineage than the one usually named: the painters who turned to the computer, among them Frederick Hammersley and his computer drawings. What he takes from them is less a look than a discipline — system, restraint, and something of Agnes Martin's search for essence. Beneath the surface runs a long fascination with the mathematics of complexity and self-similarity, where simple rules unfold into intricate, unresolving pattern. Held at a distance, the paintings vibrate and refuse to resolve — an image the eye keeps assembling and losing.