Tom Cohen

Born and raised in New York City, Tom Cohen is a photographer whose digital practice stems from a love for technology and new media, and whose inspiration lies in everyday life. A graduate of Williams College with a degree in art history, Cohen's career as an entrepreneur has frequently intersected with both the art world and the ever-changing realm of innovative media.

Cohen's practice resides in the ancient tradition of combinatorial art—ars combinatoria—used in the Kabbalah, for example, to reveal infinite combinations of different elements within a single work, whether it be a text or a visual concept. In mathematics, this tradition is called permutation, and refers to objects that are continually shuffled within a contained space or theoretical realm. Since the 1960s, when the computer first entered people's imaginations, artists began using combinatorial art in their artistic production. At the time, Fluxus artists were exploiting the notion of random selections, as were artists like Sol LeWitt, who used endless permutations of color and shapes in his groundbreaking wall drawings. Most notably, the composer John Cage relied on chance operations derived from the ideas of the old Chinese book I Ching, and later from computer programs, to compose music and write texts.

Cohen is as interested in negative space as he is in bricks laid askew in the walls of a building. His recent photographs have focused on images of details of graffiti that he took in cities all over the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Cairo, São Paulo, and Paris. Like a composer, Cohen samples the visual images he collects with his camera, and recombines them digitally to make new visions of the world based primarily on color and form.