Tyler Prahm
Founder / artist · San Francisco Bay Area
Tyler Prahm builds systems that turn images, rules and changing information into physical works. His practice grew out of financial systems, where useful edges compress as they spread; Clickbrick explores the opposite idea: a medium that becomes more valuable as more work passes through it.
In Tyler's words
I spent my early twenties building systems for financial markets.
Markets taught me something strange about useful ideas: once enough people understand them, the advantage tends to disappear. Capital finds the edge, infrastructure catches up, and the premium compresses.
I became interested in systems with the opposite property.
Clickbrick began with a photograph I made in Istanbul, around the time the city stopped feeling temporary to me. I wanted to make the image physical, but a flat mosaic felt like a copy of the photograph rather than a new object.
What interested me instead were the constraints of the material: the colours that actually exist, the parts that can connect, what can rise from the surface, what casts a shadow, what will hold.
So I built a system around those constraints.
The rules stay fixed. What passes through them can keep changing.
A photograph can become a work. A weather system can become a work. Another artist can bring an image I never would have made, and the medium has to find a way to hold it.
That is the part I care about most.
In markets, a useful mechanism often becomes less valuable as more people use it. A medium can become more valuable. Each new work can expand what the previous ones mean without replacing them.
Clickbrick is the first system I've built where I want that to happen.