Press

Short Bio
Jonathan Chomko (b. 1988, Canada) is an artist working with and against technology. His works examine the seam between physical and digital worlds, exploring how digital forces translate into and act upon the physical world, and how physical phenomena and expression are modulated as they enter the digital. 

Chomko’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of 21st Century Arts (Italy, 2013), Sydney Opera House (Australia, 2014), Media Ambition Tokyo (Japan, 2016), and London Design Museum (UK, 2015), Cube Design Museum (Netherlands, 2020) and Theatre du Chatelet (France, 2020).  His public work has been shown in Bristol (UK, 2014), London (UK 2016), Tokyo (Japan 2016), Austin (USA 2019), and Paris (France, 2020). His work is held in public and private collections in the UK, Canada and Japan.


Long Bio
Jonathan Chomko (born 1988) is an artist, technologist and writer.

Chomko was born in rural Ontario. As a child he created small sculptures from found objects, and wanted to be ‘a person’ when he grew up. He spent his teenage years lurking on forums and exploring the music libraries of strangers via p2p filesharing applications.

Chomko studied Swedish for University Studies in 2008 at Gothenburg University, and graduating with a Bachelors of Science in Interaction Design from Malmo University in 2012 with an exchange term at the International Institute for Information Technology in Bangalore, India.

In 2013 Chomko attended Fabrica, a year-long residency program in Italy near Venice. At Fabrica Chomko created a series of interactive installations and explorations, notably the News Machine, which sent tweets through a rube goldberg-esque series of machine translations. The News Machine was first presented at the Perugia Journalism Festival, and was later shown at the Sydney Opera House as part of the 2013 Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

After Fabrica, Chomko worked as a creative technologist at the Brooklyn Guild, a fabrication shop based in Gowanus. At the Guild, Chomko designed and implemented installations for Nike, Tiffany & Co, and Bell Labs.

While working at Guild, Chomko won the 2014 Playable City Award together with Matthew Rosier with Shadowing. The work was installed for two months across eight locations in Bristol, and continues to tour to London, Tokyo, York, Tel Aviv, Austin, and Paris among other cities.

In 2015, Shadowing was nominated by the London Design Museum as a Design of the Year. This nomination spurred Chomko and Rosier to formalise their collaboration as shared studio. Operating primarily between 2015 and 2018, the studio was commissioned by cultural instutions such as Historic Royal Palaces and the UK Space Agency to create visitor experiences and public artworks.

In 2017 Chomko returned to Montreal to focus on independent practice. His practice focuses on themes of agency, collectivity and materiality, and manifests as printed objects, delegated performance, installations and websites. This work has been performed with Yo-Yo Ma, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, and is held in private collections in Canada, the UK and Japan.