Ben Heim didn’t set out to become a digital artist. His background is in classical music composition, and for years, sound was the center of his creative universe.

But somewhere between performing immersive concerts in underground reservoirs and programming reactive visuals to score the mood, he started pulling on a thread that led straight into the world of generative, real-time art.

Today, Heim works at the edge of what performance can be. His studio practice spans public installations and fine art commissions, but his live project Null is where the boundaries really blur: music, visuals, and software reacting to one another in real time, built to never repeat.

That approach quite literally hit the big stage recently when Heim became the first artist to bring TouchDesigner generative visuals to the Sphere in Las Vegas, supporting Anyma’s audiovisual residency. He also just delivered a massive public commission for the LED bustle ceiling outside Madison Square Garden, bending fluid simulations around the building’s architecture.

Interested in seeing more? Heim will bring his artwork and Null’s live performance to our “Sculpting Time” exhibition with Projekt Blank at Pier 59 Studios on June 26.

Each edition of Next Up showcases a new artist from our curated list of ascendant talents who have been making significant waves throughout digital art. This week, our spotlight turns to Ben Heim.

Matt Medved: How did you first become interested/involved in digital art?

Ben Heim: I came to digital art through music, funnily enough. All my training is in music composition and performance, but about 8 years ago I was part of this immersive music concert series where we would take unique venues (underground reservoirs, cathedrals, old power stations), fill them with surround sound, and have these live instrumental concerts. Often we’d incorporate some kind of projections or visual elements to set the mood, and I kept wanting to have the visuals we added be more and more connected to the music being performed. I wanted them to react in real time.

This led me down the rabbit hole that is generative real-time art, which is a medium that uses algorithms to generate video frames in real time on a computer. Once you’re generating the visuals in real time, you can do lots of interesting things, like have them react to music, make them interactive, incorporate real-time controllers and data sources. I immediately fell in love with the medium and my artistic output branched outwards from music to these real-time interactive installations.

How would you describe your art?

I have two main trajectories in art right now. My studio, which is more focused on fine art and public installations, and my audiovisual performance entity Null.

With my studio I pursue the goal of creating new art with the latest technology. This right now mostly takes the form of generative real-time installations, often in public spaces such as lobbies and hospitals. These installations are endlessly generating new art within sets of rules I define, but currently they require a fairly beefy computer to run, so the most sensical setting for them is on these large-scale public screens.

With my audiovisual performance project Null, I am developing a new paradigm for live concert experiences, an all-encompassing act with real-time generative visuals, audio-reactive instruments, live performance art, and music all commingling to produce a coherent experience never seen before.

What’s your process like? And where do you usually find inspiration?

One of my favorite parts of being a real-time generative artist is the ability to work in a real-time, node-based creative coding environment, which I find very inspiring. I am able to work on the fly, mixing data sources, music, generative visuals, and code all at once to tune a final artwork. I am eternally thankful to the brilliant technological innovation that is the graphics card for allowing this, and the software TouchDesigner for giving us the tool to bring it all together.

I spent a long time in my artistic development working on how to generate intricate and satisfying artworks that flowed well and felt “alive.” For this part of my journey, nature was the primary inspiration: the way trees grow, clouds form, and landscapes shift over time were all the perfect model. Now that I feel capable of generating the aesthetic I like, most of my inspiration comes from feeling, emotions, the depth of human experience occurring all around us. This is the next element I am trying to inject into my art.

What was your breakthrough moment in digital art?

It’s hard to ascribe one breakthrough moment, as I feel like everything is an endless progression. But the moment I really knew I could become a digital artist as a career was back when I was still in school for film scoring at NYU, and Artechouse reached out to me to commission work for a digital installation in the lobby of the Le Meridien Hotel on 57th Street. The installation is still there today. Recently I had a pretty huge breakthrough moment for real-time generative work by being the first artist to implement generative work with TouchDesigner on the Sphere in Vegas for the Anyma residency. I think this was a big moment for the mainstreaming of generative art in such a huge venue.

What’s one piece you’ve created that holds particular significance to you—and why?

For me, the work “Consciousness Stuff” holds particular significance. It’s the first artwork I achieved a long-term goal of creating: a fully generative, complex landscape derived entirely from code that fuses engaging short-term movement with satisfying long-term gradual shifts in the composition. I find this to be a particularly difficult balancing act in the generative art domain. Artworks often seem to be satisfying in the short term, but then look too repetitive over longer timespans; or have satisfying long-term progression, but look stagnant and unengaging when only looking at it for a little while.

“Consciousness Stuff” was also my first NFT collection, which really opened my eyes to the potential blockchain has for assigning value to digital assets. I believe blockchain tech works particularly well for generative work too, as it allows you to experience the generative long-form nature of the piece, while being instantly understandable, digestible, and collectible. For example, when I released “Consciousness Stuff” as a collection, I was able to sell monoprint stills, editioned stills, and videos, which gave collectors an experience of the breadth of different outputs the generative artwork was able to produce.

What are your thoughts on the future of interactive art?

I have a saying that often sticks in my head and guides what I’m doing: “The future runs in real time.” I think the real-time generative paradigm will become extremely widespread and ubiquitous over the coming years. To me, game engines and the rise of VR will lead the charge, and it will develop outwards from there. Just as dialogue trees in video games will seem boring compared to AI-based chatbot-like characters, so the “old way” of making videos or loops that are the same every time will become stale. The ability of generative art to incorporate real-time inputs, APIs, controllers, data sources, and interactivity makes for truly endless possibilities.

“Consciousness Stuff” by Ben Heim. Credit: Courtesy of Ben Heim

What are the biggest challenges facing rising digital artists?

Digital art is still in its infancy, so there are many challenges. I think public education is a big one—people struggle to judge the quality of digital art because they’re so unfamiliar with the tools and techniques that go into its creation. Another is that we still haven’t made a smooth transition into mainstreaming the sale of digital assets. While I believe NFTs and blockchain are the answer to this, there is still a lot more work to be done to make buying and selling digital assets a seamless part of life.

What advice do you have for rising digital artists?

Digital artists have a unique learning process compared to other fine artists, as there are no real fundamentals of digital art creation as there are in mediums like painting and sculpture. The plethora of digital art creation methods means that most digital artists learn through tutorials by practitioners of those individual tools. An issue I see in a lot of rising artists is that their work looks very derivative of said tutorials. So my main advice is to work really hard to develop your own style, and avoid falling into the trap of just tweaking tutorials. There are many ways to develop an individual style in digital mediums, but I believe one of the most important is to engage with art history, see your work as an extension of the entirety of humanity’s fine art tradition, and explore how you can expand on it.

What’s next for you — any upcoming drops or collaborations you’re excited about?

Yes! I’m very happy to announce that in addition to acquiring my artworks for their properties Penn 1, Penn 2, and Penn 11, Vornado has just purchased a series of site-specific artworks for their LED bustle ceiling outside of Madison Square Garden. It’s an amazing LED volume approximately 400 feet long, integrated seamlessly into the architecture of the building. I was able to create some new artworks and adapt some previously created works to the contours of the building. The structure has these really interesting columns that intersect with the LED volume that I was able to use in the artwork as fluid simulation colliders, gradient nodes, and particle sources.