Ryan Koopmans is a Canadian-Dutch lens-based artist, born in Amsterdam in 1986 and raised on Vancouver Island. He studied geography, art history and psychology at the University of British Columbia, then earned an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2012. His early career centered on documentary and fine art photography of surreal architecture, megacities and the collision of built and natural environments, collected in his 2019 monograph Vantage. He is best known for The Wild Within, an ongoing collaboration with Swedish artist Alice Wexell that digitally revives abandoned Soviet era buildings, most famously the ruined sanatoriums of Tskaltubo, Georgia, by animating them and filling them with vegetation and light. The series became one of the most recognized bodies of photographic crypto art, with sales on SuperRare including Devotion, bought by Jim Carrey in 2022. Their dynamic piece The Enchanted Hour changes with the viewer's local time, and The Origin became the first Bitcoin Ordinals artwork auctioned at Christie's. The duo won Genesis Project of the Year at the 2024 Bitcoin Art Awards, and their work has entered institutional collections including the Francisco Carolinum in Linz.
Photography-rooted digital art made with Alice Wexell under The Wild Within: photographs of abandoned Soviet era and historic architecture that are digitally rebuilt, animated and overgrown with vegetation. The work spans dynamic NFTs, Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions, video, archival pigment prints and glass mosaic wall sculptures. Dynamic pieces such as The Enchanted Hour respond to the viewer's local hour, shifting between day and night.
Lens based artist Ryan Koopmans walks MLow through The Wild Within, his time zone aware Enchanted Hour, and how he finds abandoned Soviet grandeur, and MLow answers with his fullest statement of why the show exists.
"Ryan Koopmans," guest profile, The MLow Show archive, compiled by MLow. https://show.mlow.xyz/g/ryan-koopmans.html.
The bio is research compiled for this archive, not the guest's own statement.
