HERITAGE AND CODE: STUDYING HOW SYSTEMS RECORD HUMAN MEANING

Randy Kart’s work examines how technological systems capture, distort, and preserve human culture over time.

For more than 25 years, his practice has moved between craftsmanship and computation, using tactile materials, machine learning, and decentralized infrastructure to ask what survives when meaning is translated between physical and digital worlds. His work grows from a lineage of craft and material fluency that treats technology not just as a tool, but as a medium for documenting human experience.

Working as designer, engineer, and data scientist inside his own practice, he builds hybrid artifacts that also function as research instruments. These pieces test ideas about permanence, provenance, and cultural encoding. Distributed systems, computational modeling, and data visualization become ways of studying how societies archive themselves, and where those archives fail.

This studio research directly informs his thinking about contemporary AI systems. He is interested in how automated processes direct attention, how they encode taste and culture, and how they reshape ideas of authorship and memory. The artifact practice is not separate from this inquiry; it is a laboratory for understanding how large‑scale technical systems handle culture, and what is lost or preserved in the process.

Core Research Areas

Cultural Encoding in Systems

Attention and Direction

Provenance and Authorship

Meaning Under Translation

Memory and Permanence

Human Judgment Alongside Machines

 Disposable Materialism reimagines discarded objects as delicate, thought-provoking sculptures that ask viewers to reconsider the beauty hidden within the throwaway. Blending tactile textures with digital refinement, the project fuses physical materials including acrylic-painted canvas, textiles, wood, cardboard, and handmade papers with machine learning to give new form to what was once ignored.

Collected and preserved over more than 25 years, these textures form an archive of human touch. Through digital transformation, they are recontextualized as artifacts of memory rather than waste. In this hybrid process, Randy Kart challenges conventional ideas of worth, permanence, and consumption, offering a quiet critique of contemporary material culture.

More than a collection, Disposable Materialism is a meditation on transience, environmental consequence, and the narratives embedded in everyday objects. It asks what we discard, why we discard it, and what becomes visible when attention slows and perception deepens.

The work invites viewers to encounter the fragile beauty of the disposable, where material memory meets computational interpretation and the ephemeral is granted a new form of endurance.

METROPOLIS is an intriguing series of 108 unique Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that intertwines digital artistry with geo-spatial exploration, created by Randy Kart. This project delves into the subjective human valuation of land, urging us to reconsider our perspectives on seemingly uniform terrains across the globe. 

Each NFT represents a distinct piece of the project and contains exclusive unlockable content. This content includes comprehensive narratives that provide deeper insights into the depicted terrain, enhancing the connection between the token holder and the artwork.

Through METROPOLIS, Randy Kart invites individuals to explore the diverse dimensions of human subjectivity and cultural background that shape our understanding and valuation of the physical world.

 Randy Kart’s Freedom of Information offers a journey into the essence of humanity, returning to the vivid landscape of childhood where imagination defined the limits of exploration. Using humble materials such as newspapers and bills, we once built airplanes and kites, each object a small act of invention and an expression of the unfettered spirit of youth, allowing raw, innocent information to catch the wind.

In contrast, today’s digital environment invites a deeper question. What does freedom mean when personal data, the marker of identity itself, exists in a state of constant exposure? The work draws a quiet line between playful creation and contemporary vulnerability, asking viewers to reconsider how information moves, who controls it, and what is lost when the boundary between expression and surveillance dissolves.