Algorithmic Landscapes is a series of works employing expanded photography, printmaking, and sculptural disciplines. Hartje’s practice focuses on the impact of our expanding cities, and contemporary urban spaces on our lives and on country. They began experimenting with pattern through materials such as tape, string, projections, and shadow play before creating large works on paper from composited photographs.
In this series Hartje uses their images as a method of reduction, a collapsing of space into code. Through adopting the logic of algorithmic processes, they built a conceptual mapping system. Infinite pattern endlessly enacted to form a desirable image. In this reduction of space to aesthetic value, the uniformity, the hypnotic quality, the suggestion of endless production, and the exclusion of difference or imperfection echo ideals which have taken hold today.

The constraints and constructs of gender, sexuality, race, and class are often amplified in those slippery spaces between real and virtual, Hartje creates these patterns as a method for reminding us of the systems which influence, administer and delegate our physical and virtual environs.

Biography

Jac Hartje is a multi-disciplinary artist based on Djaara Country in central Victoria. Hartje is an art-worker and artist whose practice is a combination of independent studio work and collaborative arts engagement projects.

Instagram: @jac_hartje

Lichen 2025