My work begins with a seed: an image, an object, a moment, a committed mark. From it, work expands across media, scale, and time in ways I could not have planned. The expansion follows the internal logic of the seed, so what it produces is discovered rather than designed. In physics, string theory proposes one underlying system with infinite apparent variety. That describes how my work is organized. The same color intelligence runs through drawings, paintings, fractal video, and pour paintings made decades apart. The same charged relationship between positive and negative space recurs from a pocket sketchbook to a twelve-panel installation. The same process logic, commit, release, follow, governs a pen line drawn on an airplane and a mathematical function iterated tens of thousands of times.
The root is the String Series, a drawing practice that began in air transit with a simple kit: a committed pen line, colored pencil, no corrections. More than a dozen sketchbooks over at least a decade have become a source library for large-format charcoal and pastel works, oil paintings, and most recently Algorithmic Bliss No. 1-2, a two-panel acrylic that fuses String Series drawing with fractal imagery. It received an Honorable Mention in the 2026 Artists Magazine annual art competition. Other threads grow from the same seed. They include three-dimensional fractal video generated with open-source software and scored with original music, among them the four-part Meditation Room series and films now in broadcast rotation in southern Connecticut. They also include more than fifty acrylic pour paintings, the gouache comic-strip series Two Men and a Green Box, and Revisit, an album drawn from fifteen years of unfinished music.
Three principles govern the work. The first is productive dissonance: incongruence used as structure, in saturated colored-pencil palettes pressing against harmony, in atonal passages beside melody, in surreal imagery set against documentary footage. The second is the tension between beauty and experiment. Ryuichi Sakamoto showed that the experimental is not the opposite of the beautiful but the most honest path toward it, and I keep that tension unresolved because the work stops being alive if it resolves in either direction.
he third is impermanence. Witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center towers made visible a condition that had always been true: permanence is a fiction, and designing around it is unnecessary. So I paint quickly and gesturally, and I don’t rework. I choose matte acrylic on wood so the image sits on its surface. I let pour paintings flow and leave them be. The Zero Time project began in 1999 to document the last hundred days of the century. It has been suspended for twenty-five years, and its panels, damaged over that time, are kept rather than restored. That suspension is not failure. It is the work’s most powerful formal element. Something is made. It exists for a time. It changes. That is not a failure of the work. It is the work.
My sources are ongoing conversations: John Cage, Andy Warhol, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Brian Eno, and Henry Moore, along with teachers at Kent State and RISD. I show my work as Philip Goetz and as ABTechno.
Philip Goetz, Guilford, Connecticut, October 2026
Recent Recognition and Exhibitions
- January 2026: Honorable Mention, Abstract/Experimental category, Artist Magazine’s 42nd Annual Art Competition.
- October 2026: Maternal Passage accepted into Remember You Must Live: On Life, Loss, and Impermanence at the Guilford Art Center. The exhibition theme is the same one that anchors my work.
- Guilford Porchfest: ABTechno performed, including the first live performances of three new multimedia compositions: Roppongi 3 AM, Cracknet, and Golden Pig.