Installation view of Jason Salavon’s Little Infinity, 2020. (Photo by Richard Barnes, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston opens the 237,000-square-foot Nancy and Rich Kinder Building on Saturday. (Photo by Richard Barnes, Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will celebrate a milestone this weekend with the opening on Saturday of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, a salute to the museum’s modern and contemporary collections, an addition that designates the city’s cultural landmark, measuring 14 acres, as the fourth largest museum campus in the country.

Whether traveling on Bissonnet or Main Street, one cannot miss the eye-catching trapezoidal design of the 237,000-square-foot building. Clad in translucent vertical glass tubes, the Kinder engages the imagination by day and emits a soft glow at night. Beyond the architecture, the site includes five rectangular courtyard pools that are inset along the perimeter, emphasizing the building’s openness to its surroundings.

Visitors will discover a transfixing world of modern and contemporary art across three floors in the expansive, light-filled galleries created by Steven Holl Architects. Amid the vast collections on display are treasured works by Alexander Calder, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein and more from the late Caroline Wiess Law collection. Commissioned works by El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ólafur Elíasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias, Jason Salavon and Ai Weiwei are site-specific additions to the museum collection. Spotlighted are the works of Latin American modernist artists, the MFAH collection considered the most extensive in North America.

The collections on view include photography; prints and drawings; decorative arts, craft, and design; and modern and contemporary art.As many will recall, the Kinder building was named for philanthropists Nancy and Rich Kinder, who along with Susan and Fayez Sarofim, for whom the museum campus is named, contributed $150 million to the overall project.

“As proud as I am to be able to welcome you today,” Rich Kinder, MFAH board chair, said at the media opening on Monday, “I know I stand on the shoulders of many who came before me. We certainly can’t forget Peter Marzio, our long-term director who initially envisioned this project and also Caroline Wiess Law whose historic bequest in 2004 I think made clear to all of us who love this institution that we needed to think larger in both accessions and in physical space.”

In his assessment of the completion of the project, museum director Gary Tinterow noted, “In the dynamic spaces that Steven Holl Architects has designed for the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, our distinctive holdings of modern and contemporary art now have the showcase they deserve. This area of our collection continues to grow rapidly, thanks to the exceptional endowment for acquisitions provided by our donors, with the late Caroline Wiess Law at the forefront.”

MFAH’s World

There are three entrances to the Kinder Building including a street side drop-off on Main Street and an entrance at Bissonnet and Main and then entrance via a lower level arrivals court. From the Beck building, visitors arrive underground via the Cruz-Diez tunnel and from the Glassell School garage via the Olafur Eliasson tunnel, both providing mind-bending color and light installations. Access is also possible from either level of the Kinder Garage.

Also, on the lower level, the Lynn Wyatt Theater shares space with the arrival hall.Somewhat as important as the new Kinder building is the connectivity between the three MFAH exhibition buildings which are linked by a landscape pattern emphasizing green spaces, designed by Deborah Nevins & Associates, in collaboration with Mario Benito. The Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed by Isamu Nagouchi in 1986, verdantly links the northern frontier of the Susan and Fayez Sarofim Campus just as the only-recently added oaks along the Bissonnet median extend the green conversation to the Caroline Wiess Law building. Add the massive oaks on Main Street that connect the Law building to the Audrey Jones Beck building across the street as a continuation of the nature esthetic.

In celebration of the Kinder opening, the museum will be open free to the public (timed reservations and masks required) November 21 to 25.

The title of Jason Salavon’s recent exhibition, “Annex and Catalogue,” directly and elegantly signaled his interests and concerns.  The sale annex, with its promise of discounted plenty, and the catalogue, bringing consumer temptations to our mailboxes, provided the raw material that the artists transformed into impassive grids of colored rectangles and glacially paced video installations.

In the two videos, Still Life II (Glassware) and Catalogue to the Sun and Moon (all works 2007), tumblers and goblets and living-room furnishings go through countless variations in the course of more than an hour: the metal coffee table becomes wood; the lamp changes shape, subtly at first, then radically; the large window solidifies into a wall; the sofa darkens and shifts position.  None of the tableaux ever existed in reality.  Salavon, who is a research fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, realized the two videos through state-of-the-art digital rendering software.  The compositions offer virtual placeholders for the generic commodities of Ikea, Crate and Barrel, and Pottery Barn; these rooms and their furnishings, as well as the glassware, represent either the undifferentiated taste of that culture or its Platonic ideal, depending on your view.

Salavon creates his ink-jet color grids with software that averages digital values, in the case blending the colors on defined portions of page spreads of an Ikea catalogue to create contentless fields. Catalogue (20-21) presents a sequence of earth-toned rectangles.  The composition is remarkably balanced, given the somewhat random nature (one might think) of the source material, ranging from a brownish green parcel at the upper right, running through umbers and taupe and large medium brown field, to a dark brick box at the lower right.  But perhaps the balance in these grids, like the basic sameness of the morphing furnishings, manifests the uniformity that underlies our consumer culture’s promises of distinction.

“I’m performing a heartless mathematical operation, but it has a relationship with [early abstractionists] who took the reality of the situation and brought something to it that made it bigger than the individual moment.”

-Jason Salavon

Jason Salavon selects as source material groups of images from popular culture—real-estate listing photographs, Playboy centerfolds, high-school yearbook portraits—and blends them into generalized images characteristics of types existing in everyday life.  For the above photograph, Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1980’s, Salavon chose to blend pictures of not-so-average women in a series entitled Every Playboy Centerfold.  By fusing 120 centerfolds from each decade in the 1960s-90s, Salavon created blurred compositions emphasizing predominant characteristics of the typical Playboy model: long hair, light skin, thin body, and radiant against a bluish background.  Presented as a series, the pictures reveal the thinning, lightening, and increased frontality of the playmates over the years.  All of Salavon’s amalgam series depend on the digital capacity to treat every pixel individually and operate the mathematical formula for averages on minuscule color elements.  Yet the technological precision used to produce his pictures is counterbalanced by their hazy, impressionistic form.  The final compositions, significantly abstract, reveal culture generalities as they hint at the glut of information, manipulated and generated by the digital mediums, that has become a powerful reality of contemporary life.

The son of an artist, Salavon (b. 1970) received his education at the University of Texas at Austin (BA, 1993) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1997).  His exhibitions include shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; f a projects, London; and The Project, LA.  Salavon’s works are also held in many private and public collections, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Playboy Enterprises, Chicago.  He is currently a part-time faculty member in the Art and Technology Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

What if you wanted to create an image that could stand as the epitome of an artistic movement such as Impressionism or a painting style such as Baroque?  Where would you begin?  By examining the colors used by the artists associated with them?  Or by looking at their subject matter?  Jason Salavon, whose show Arrows and Dice can be seen at Eight Modern, has one solution that, on casual inspection, looks like a reduction of these painting styles into simple color components presented as a series of geometric, mandala-like forms.  On the surface, that is exactly what they are, but it gets a little more complicated.  The artist uses an algorithmic process that takes computer data from a series of uploaded images and interprets the data as a successive, rectangular bands of color arranged in gradations from least saturated at the center to most saturated at the extremities.  Take Salavon’s digital C-print called Impressionist Painting; the image was created by digitally amalgamating 100 paintings by Claude Monet and then reinterpreting the data. Salavon used the same process to make another image, based on the 100 works by Peter Paul Rubens, called Baroque Painting.  You can see how reliance on certain colors changed over the centuries by comparing the two images; the colors in the Baroque painting are darker shades of brown and reddish-orange, and the effect is more stately than the lighter feeling of the pastel hues in Impressionist Painting.

Portrait (van Dyck) and Portrait (Velazquez), amalgamations based on portraits done by 17^th-century painters Anthony vn Dyck and Diego Velazquez, are ghostly images that, rather than appearing as a phantasmagorical fusion of a multitude of faces—as one might expect—look instead like faint impressions rendered so lightly that facial features are barely visible.  But the portrait images still maintain a certain consistency in terms of the suggested presence of human form, even if the features cannot be discerned.

A twist on the theme of amalgamation comes in the form of a digital animation on an LCD screen that cycles through a series of change over the course of four hours.  The work is called Still Life (Vanitas)because it mimics the vanitas tradition, in which objects that referenced the transient nature of life are chosen as subject matter.  Still Life (Vanitas)shows a melting candle beside a skull that slowly morphs from human to baboon and other mammals.  The title of the show, Arrows and Dice, is most relevant here; evolution as much a game of chance as a toss of the dice, is suggested by the digital animation and vanitas painting.

Another video work, titled Spigot (Babbling Self-Portrait), is presented as two projections on adjoining walls.  One projection shows a live feed of a succession of Google search terms on a grid of colored rectangles.  Inside each rectangle, you can see the search terms, which are words such as “Salavon” and “archetypal” and phrases like “Chicago zip codes.”  The second projection shows the same data reinterpreted in much the same manner as Impressionist Painting and Baroque Painting, as a successive series of colored squares.  In Spigot, the colored squares undulate with a hypnotic movement, growing larger and smaller.  The two projections are mirror images of one another.  They both contain the same data but present it in different forms.  An audio component to the piece is a babbling cacophony of computer-generated voices reading the search terms.

One potential problem with a show like this is that background knowledge of the artist’s creative process is almost essential to fully appreciate the work.  In the videos, the process can be inferred with a little patience—you don’t need to watch Still Life (Vanitas)for the entire four hours to get a sense of it—but not so much with Baroque Painting, Impressionist Painting, or the portrait series.  These digital C-prints evince a sense of their subject matter but not necessarily of the actual complexity of their design.  The notion of amalgamations of pre-existing works by old masters seem so crucial to what these works are about.

Overall, the references to older art traditions using up-to-date technology make for a compelling show that suggest that, even in the digital age, the art of the past is still relevant and still speaks to us as though through an evolutionary chain, now become a sound “byte.”

Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material in an effort to present new perspectives on the familiar. His projects unearth unexpected pattern while exploring the relationship between the part and the whole or the individual and the group. Reflecting a natural attraction to popular culture and the day-to-day, his work regularly incorporates the use of common references and source material. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context.

Born in Indiana, raised in Texas, and based in Chicago, Salavon earned his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from The University of Texas at Austin.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition with Jason Salavon. This will be the artist’s first show at Eight Modern.

One of the leading practitioners of computer-based art, Salavon uses software of his own design to capture and transfigure data and images drawn from popular culture, art history and contemporary lived experience. The resulting videos and photographic prints often obscure the distinctiveness of their sources while revealing the visual architecture and conventions that unite them.

“I’m just performing a pretty heartless mathematical operation on a series of data, where I set up a rule system,” Salavon explains. “But it has a relationship with [early abstractionists] who were taking the reality of a situation and bringing something into it that made it bigger than the individual moment.”

Spigot (Babbling Self-Portrait) is an abstract self-revealing digital portrait based on the artist’s 11,000 (and counting) Google searches over the past two years. Feeding live from the internet, Spigot randomly selects and re-runs previous searches in real time. One video stream displays the text and dates of the original queries, transformed by an algorithm into a grid of colored boxes. The other video projection pushes even further into abstraction, transmuting the raw data into a pattern of pulsating, rainbow-hued concentric squares. A bevy of robotic voices reads aloud the various search terms represented, providing a pervasive but indecipherable audio counterpart to the visual diptych.

In Still Life (Vanitas), Salavon has used production-level 3D animation to create a photo-realistic, yet completely synthetic, tableau of a mammal skull and candlestick in the style of 17th century Dutch painting. Over the course of four hours, these objects are constantly, but imperceptibly, changing in form, position, and material. In the artist’s words, “the infra-perception pacing aims to explore evolutionary phenomena through a lens of historical painting.”

Salavon’s photographic prints also draw upon his interest in art history. Baroque Painting and Impressionist Painting isolate and organize the color palettes from the 100 paintings by Rubens and Monet. Portrait (van Dyck) and Portrait (Velazquez) digitally average 80 portraits by these old masters. The impressionistic forms and painterly effect of these works are an intriguing counterpoint to the technical precision of Salavon’s process.
“The information in his statistical works has been reframed as art, much as Warhol and Lichtenstein repurposed prevalent popular culture forms of the 1960s,” notes Butler University art historian Elizabeth K. Mix. “By inserting a perceptual optical phenomenon in place of traditional presentation of information, Salavon creates a visual experience that preferences the aesthetic over the intellectual. Yet, the work remains reflective and dependent on the original concept.”

Born in Indiana in 1970, raised in Fort Worth and now residing in Chicago, Salavon earned his B.A. from the University of Texas and his M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Salavon taught at the Art Institute and worked in the video game industry for many years as an artist and programmer. Currently, he is an assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago, where he is also the only member of the humanities faculty with a dual appointment in the Computation Institute.

Salavon has been written about in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and Contemporary. His work has been shown at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, The Frye Museum in Seattle, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the International Center of Photography and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Many of these institutions have also acquired Salavon’s work for their collections. In 2007, the National Portrait Gallery purchased Salavon’s video triptych The Late Night Triad, making it the first electronic artwork in the museum’s permanent collection.

When an artist works with computers, how does he coose what to use? “I’m pretty agnostic about tools: I use everything from Hollywood-style 3-D software to custom software to output technologies,” Jason Salavon told the Journalin a telephone interview.  “I’m a classical conceptual artist.  I let the idea come first.”

A show of Salavon’s computer-based art opens today at Eight Modern gallery on Delgado Street.  He is an assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago, where he is also the only member of the humanities faculty with a dual appointment in the Computation Institute.

Born in Indiana in 1970, Salavon grew up in Fort Worth.  “I was the first generation that played video games,” he said, “and my dad was a painter.  Those influences combined to give me the idea that computers could be used for art.”  He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Unviersity of Texas and an master’s in fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago.  Salavon taught at the Art Institute and worked in the video game industry for many years as an artist and programmer.

Salavon agreed that his work might have fascinated the Futurists, a European school of artists in the early 20^thcentury.  “I definitely identify with the Futurists’ ideas and their interest in science and technology,” he said.  “Art right now is just dealing with the hyperspace and time, and the new technology that is permeating the culture, and their legacies and relationship to the arc of art history.”

One of the leading practitioners of computer-based art, Salavon uses software of his own design to capture and transfigure data and images drawn from popular culture, art history and his lived experience.  The resulting videos and photographic prints often obscure the distinctiveness of their sources while revealing the visual architecture and conventions that unite them.  “I’m just performing a pretty heartless mathematical operation on a series of data, where I set up a rule system,” Salavon explained.  “But it has a relationship with abstractionists who were taking the reality of a situation and bringing something into it that made it bigger than the individual moment.”

For instance, “Spigot (Babbling Self-Portrait)” is an abstract digital portrait based on Salavon’s 11,000 (and counting) Google searches over the past two years.  Feeding live from the Internet, “Spigot” randomly selects and reruns previous searches in real time.  One video stream displays the text and dates of the original queries, transformed by an algorithm into a grid of colored boxes.  The other video projection transmutes the raw data into a pattern of pulsating, rainbow-hued, concentric squares.  A bevy of robotic voices reads aloud the various search terms represented, providing a pervasive but indecipherable audio counterpart to the visual diptych.

In “Still Life (Vanitas),” Salavon has used production-level 3-D animation to create a photo-realistic, yet completely synthetic, tableau of a mammal skill and candle-stick in the style of 17^th-century Dutch painting.  Over the course of four hours, these objects are constantly, but imperceptibly, changing in form, position, and material.  In the artist’s words, “the infra-perception pacing aims to explore evolutionary phenomena through a lens of historical painting.”

Salavon’s photographic prints also draw upon his interest in art history.  “Baroque Painting” and “Impressionist Painting” isolate and organize the color palettes from the 100 paintings by Rubens and Monet.  “Portrait (van Dyck)” and “Portrait (Velazquez)” digitally average 80 portraits by these old masters.

Salavon has been written about in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Contemporary.  “The information in his statistical works has been reframed as art, much as Warhol and Lichtenstein repurposed prevalent popular culture, forms of the 1960’s,” Butler University art historian Elizabeth K. Mix said.  “By inserting a perceptual optical phenomenon in place of traditional presentation of information, Salavon creates a visual experiences that preferences the aesthetic over the intellectual.  Yet, the work remains reflective and dependent on the original concept.”

His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Lose Angeles County Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the International Center of Photography and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.  Many of these institutions have also acquired Salavon’s work for their collections.  In 2007, the National Portrait Gallery purchased Salavon’s video triptych “The Late Night Triad,” making it the first electronic artwork of the museum’s permanent collection.

A leading innovator in new media art, Salavon uses self-designed software to pull images and data from the internet and mass media and transforms them into digital prints, videos and installations. Salavon’s work reframes our experience of the overwhelming abundance of communal media, while revealing both familiar and unexpected patterns in a seeming chaos of information.

In their most recent issue, Art + Auctionselected Salavon as one of 50 Under 50: The Next Most Collectible Artists. “Salavon’s works illuminate how new technology infiltrates our culture and consciousness. But it’s his talent for conceptual clarity, matched by an affinity for formal beauty, that earned him such a broad-based following,” the magazine’s Eric Bryant writes.

With the exhibition title Chance Animals, Salavon says, “I’m referencing the mix of indeterminacy (chance) and order in my work, and also, ideas of taxonomy and evolution. But more importantly, the poetics of all those features. Are my works the Chance Animals hatched from my art-making vision?”

Chance and order drive Salavon’s process; his programs collect and sort immense amounts of data and manipulate the aggregate into compelling images.

In Wheel, Salavon constructs a 54-inch standard color wheel from thousands of images obtained by searching color terms on the internet. “While the results mostly conform to expectations, e.g., ‘orange’ predominately returns images of orange things, there are some important exceptions: blue [or] violet yields a lot of flesh-tone and is most definitely not safe for work,” Salavon notes. “Here, the interest lies in mapping a ‘semantic gradient’ to a color gradient through the amoral and skewed lens of search engines.”

A similar approach yields Good and Evil ’12, dual 82×130 inch ink-jet prints accompanied by digital video screens. Each print contains approximately 25,000 images acquired through an image search for the 100 most positive and most negative words in the English language.

Chance Animalsalso includes the One Week Skinseries, in which Salavon sourced and abstracted 168 hours of programming from three cable television networks (CNN, ESPN, HBO) at 15 frames per second, then reformatted the results into concentric squares, rectangular bars, and a pixilated image that recalls a VHS tape being played on fast-forward.

In addition to his work as an artist, Salavon teaches at the University of Chicago, where he is an assistant professor of visual arts, as well as a faculty member and fellow of the university’s Computation Institute.

Salavon holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Texas, where he minored in computer science. He previously worked in the video game industry as an artist and programmer. His work is held in numerous public collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the National Portrait Gallery. Salavon has been honored with recent solo exhibitions or installations at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the US Census Bureau.

“Wow, it’s such a tiny screen,” says Jason Salavon, peering at the old Macintosh he used to create his first digital artwork. It was 1993, and he was a studio-art major at the University of Texas at Austin. With that computer—now shelved in his Hyde Park Art Center studio—and a dot-matrix printer, he produced a 300-page book of repeating black-and-white patterns. Photoshop was still in its infancy, and there were “no real tools” to create this sort of artwork, so Salavon, a computer-science minor, designed his own. Intrigued by the idea of “having software autonomously aid and produce work almost infinitely,” he programmed his Mac to generate images while he slept. He’d “wake up in the morning to 30 surprises.”

In technology Salavon had found his muse. Since then he’s used custom-made software to create art from all kinds of material: U.S. shoe-production data, Playboy centerfolds, the IKEA catalog. When Salavon joined Chicago as an assistant professor of visual arts in 2007, he also became the only humanities faculty member with an appointment in the University’s Computation Institute. His visual/technological combinations, exhibited in solo shows for the past 16 years, have earned Salavon audiences beyond the gallery and academic crowds. In February he completed a three-year commission for the U.S. Census Bureau, designing an installation at its headquarters in Suitland, Maryland. Mapping more than two centuries of population data from roughly 6,000 U.S. counties, Salavon sculpted the statistics into a 40-foot-long, 10,000-pound piece—part abstract mural, part video animation. The goal, he says, was to “take this raw material and treat it as a plastic form.”

To realize his visions, Salavon uses C and C++ programming language, 3-D modeling tools, and other self-created software. “Data in its nature has beauty,” he says. Whether the concept involves demographic stats or pop culture, he never neglects aesthetics. “A viewer will often walk in and not know anything about how the piece was made or the backstory,” Salavon says. “So if it can’t stand by itself as a visual object, it probably won’t pass the test for me.” This interplay between art and technology is an ongoing theme in his work: “There’s real meat on those bones as far as the tension between an autonomous mechanical process and the more traditional human creative process.”

Salavon’s amalgamations of everyday images such as yearbook photos or house snapshots in real-estate listings attest to this complex relationship. For these pieces he selects a series of photographs, such as 100-plus single-family homes for sale, and then writes code to overlay the images and gauge the mathematical “average” of the set. The result is an impressionistic composite that reveals the norms of the whole. In averaging Seattle homes, for example, a gray sky emerges, whereas the Los Angeles/Orange County compilation is awash in blue. Many viewers say the images—unedited by Salavon—“look like Monet or Turner.”

Salavon started blending art while road-tripping across Texas in his early 20s. The radio blaring in his VW Bug, he thought about what makes a hit song, trying to merge No. 1 songs in his head. Although the musical analysis led to only one piece—an audio CD blending 27 covers of the Beatles hit “Yesterday”—it launched Salavon into a multiyear, multiproject investigation combining photographs that resonated with him personally. His yearbook series, for example, averages all the photos of his high-school graduating class into two prints—one using the men, another with the women—called The Class of 1988 . He also did a set for his mother’s graduating class, The Class of 1967. His series Emblem began by choosing films—2001: A Space Odyssey , Taxi Driver , and Apocalypse Now—“that my dad showed me when I was probably too young” to understand them.

Raised in an “artistic, hippy household” in Fort Worth, Texas, he grew up watching his father, a “classically trained, ’70s-style surreal artist,” juggle a day job with painting at night. Although the young Salavon sketched and painted, he never wanted to be a professional artist—until he took a college drawing class and “totally got bit by the bug.” His first foray into digital art, the 300-page book of black-and-white patterns, confirmed his new direction. “My consumption with the process,” recalls Salavon, “overwhelmed another part of me that was like, ‘Wow, do you really want to go through what your dad went through?’”

He decided to chance it. Today his digital photography, video, and multimedia projects have been shown around the world at venues such as Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. What Salavon describes as his “technology-informed, pop-culture–informed blend” may even be changing how such institutions think about art. In December 2007 Washington’s National Portrait Gallery acquired Salavon’s The Late Night Triad , a video triptych showing 64 nights of monologues by talk-show hosts Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman. It was the museum’s first electronic artwork in its permanent collection.

With possible solo shows in Chicago, Seattle, and New York on the horizon, Salavon looks forward to growing his diverse portfolio. “Every project can be significantly different,” he says, noting that most of his concepts are easier to describe than to execute. Yet thanks to open-source software—many programmers make their work available for free use—and multiple ways to create his own, he relishes each new project as a problem to be solved. “It’s just a matter of figuring it out,” he says. His computer literacy is also the reason he insists his students learn at least some programming, even if they don’t think they’ll use it. “Just a little knowledge of how things work under the hood,” he says, “can enable you to have a broader sense of what’s possible.”