Tustont

Zak Tustont is a Canadian artist who works across sound, illustration and machine learning video. His father is French and his mother British, he was born in Canada, and he spent his childhood and early twenties on the east coast of the United States before US immigration deported him in 2012, which sent him back to Canada. Music came first. He started at ten and spent roughly twelve years gigging, working in studios and mixing festivals, and only later moved into painting and digital work. He came into NFTs in February 2021 through a collaboration with Jeremy Torman, an artist he met on Instagram: Tustont did the sound design for Torman's StyleGAN pieces and their first joint work, Knock, sold for over four ETH. He had only been in crypto for about six months at that point. In March 2021 the abstract painter Mo Tuncay invited him to Foundation, where he minted French Inhale, which was bought by the collector Mentalist420. He describes himself on SuperRare as an illustrator, deconstructionist and latent space resident. From 2021 he also minted heavily on Tezos, and from 2022 he pulled back toward his vector art roots with Meta-Garbage, a tiered project with editions on KnownOrigin, one of ones on Foundation and wearable collectibles that unlocked physical apparel.

He builds audiovisual pieces by pairing StyleGAN video with his own sound design, then works the other direction into flat vector illustration. Named series include the Contestant Series, Staring Contest, Bloomies, the AudioVisual Chapter series and Meta-Garbage, which he structured across three tiers of editions, one of ones and wearables. His Tezos output from 2021 is largely short looping video with audio, plus a run of still illustrations. He cites Salvador Dali and Alex Pardee among his influences, and credits the collaboration with Jeremy Torman for pulling him into the space.

• Knock, the StyleGAN collaboration with Jeremy Torman that brought him into NFTs in February 2021
• French Inhale, his first mint, on Foundation in March 2021
• Meta-Garbage, a tiered project across KnownOrigin, Foundation and wearable collectibles
• The Contestant Series and its collector appreciation tokens
• Staring Contest and the AudioVisual Chapter series
• Audio work: about twelve years of gigging, studio and festival mixing before he made visual art

On the show