At Bournemouth University, I majored in 3D animation and studied media production. After graduating from college, my first job was at The Mill London, where I received an amazing unofficial apprenticeship. Within four years, I went from runner to lead Flame Artist. Frank Budgen, Chris Cunningham, and Rupert Sanders, among others, and I collaborated on numerous award-winning music videos and commercials.

In 2003 I moved to The Plant New York. For my work on Michel Gondry’s “Walkie Talkie Man” video, I received an MTV VMA nomination in 2004. I joined Mass Market/Psyop New York in 2006, where I continued to work on award-winning projects like Audi Synchronized (Clio) and Nike Human Chain (Clio, Cannes Lion).

I relocated to Method Studios in Los Angeles in 2012. Since 2013, I’ve been working for myself as a freelancer, which has allowed me to collaborate with a lot of great businesses like MPC and Framestore and given me the freedom to look into other fields besides advertising.

In 2011, I took up time-lapse photography as a hobby. Staff Pick was given to two of my films, Fall and Spring, on Vimeo. My Spring time-lapse was chosen to perform in Times Square as part of their Midnight Moment series in April 2018. It played on 21 screens (one of which is tied for the lead position as the greatest open air screen on the planet) for the period of April. I made time-lapse videos in 2018 for Florence and the Machine, Spotify, and Dell.

Jonathan, tell us how you see art in your own way.

JONATHAN: I consider myself to be a generative artist, particularly when it comes to the application of natural pattern formation theories to design and art. I specialize in the creation of dense landscape works and rich textural morphologies using diffusion equations by legendary British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.

In the middle of the 1980s, I recall becoming extremely interested in computer graphics after reading this Scientific American article about the Mandelbrot set. I decided to study at the ANU Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology as a result of that. After that, I spend about a decade at the ANU Supercomputer Facility. Making art using computer programming seems to have an addictive quality to it, in my opinion.

It’s a bit like betting – I simply continue changing and tweaking the program to witness what don’t direct the development of a specific picture: the program runs beginning to end without input, permitting the product to deliver various outcomes. The trick is to create a system that can independently produce interesting output.