By Cansu Waldron

Cubist Heart Laboratories is a global collective of scientists, artists, and shamans “found wherever electrons move,” founded by Creative Director John See Landry. Based in Boston, Landry is a visual artist with a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, whose work explores the intersections of art, technology, and time. With projects like BorrowedTime — a daily clock built with React that remixes found internet imagery — the collective creates experimental works that blur the boundaries between design, computation, and poetic expression.

At its core, Cubist Heart Laboratories treats images, typefaces, code, and even electrons as raw materials for alchemy. Their manifesto speaks to remixing the infinite scroll, embracing open-source tools, and using new technologies (including AI) as playful, fearless instruments for discovery. By weaving together nature, culture, and technology, they transform the intangible into experiences that are both critical and whimsical.

We asked John about the spirit behind Cubist Heart, his creative process, and how art can reshape our sense of time.

What first inspired you to create BorrowedTime?

I think a couple things came together.

I've been making paintings and drawings and collages since I was in high school. It's a hassle to find places to store work. It piles up and so few people get to see it. This is a perennial problem.

I've always been interested in how different media combine and collide, so I've always wanted to translate into something electronic. It seemed like a natural step. I had worked in HTML doing web design, but never really found a way to think of it as “canvas” before.

I've also been interested in mental models and computers for a long time. I tried to study programming but made a little progress until the last couple of years (YouTube!).

Programming makes me think more abstractly. You have to organize things in your brain that don’t exist outside your brain. It changed my ideas about how to make art.

I've crossed over into another medium and/or more efficient delivery method. BorrowedTime is a solution to problems of distribution and storage.

How do you interpret clocks as artistic objects, beyond their practical function?

The clocks that I'm making are not physical objects. They exist as JavaScript programs that become a very long sequence of zeros and ones that get turned into light. They couldn't be more abstract.

Whatever you're looking at right now probably has a little clock in one of the corners of the screen anyway, but I never discount the practical function. You can still tell what time it is from any of my clocks if you look hard enough, so you can just leave it on all day like a screensaver.

Time is wide open. Everything is affected by time so really just about anything can act as a clock. I think it operates more as a container, or a lens than subject matter for me. I do explore concepts of time, but often the clocks are just an excuse for me to make pictures.

What does “borrowing time” mean to you in this context?

In this instance “borrowed” means that I've taken almost everything from someplace else. I find all of the images, graphics, typefaces and code already existing online. I edit and assemble them into something new. They are collages made from found objects.

I love images that loop seamlessly. I use them a lot. They freeze time, but they're also moving. They feel a little bit surreal and contemplative and hypnotic. I don't use anything unless I think it's pretty.

Can you walk us through how one of these clocks comes to life — how do found images, code, and design converge in your process?

A lot of the ideas are the same iconography that I've been working with for years. I keep sketchbooks and I have lists on my phone, like a grocery list. I only need one idea per day; that’s never the problem.

From the list, they move to a folder on my laptop and I find possible images and type faces. I keep folders of images, typefaces and vector graphics that either trigger an idea or look like they will be useful. I have about thirty clocks in all different phases of construction at any time.

Even once they're up and running, they’re never really finished. I go back and change things up if I change my mind about something or notice something off.

How do you use AI in the project?

I use AI for research, to find resources and to explore new ideas and new avenues. It's good at pointing at things you might be interested in but it doesn't know why you would be, or why it’s pointing.

I use Grok to write code at the start of a project. I have a boilerplate description about how I want to structure the program and handle the files. It's good in the early stages at setting up basic structures.

I sometimes use AI for more complicated things in the building process, but I know I’ll always have to change most of the code. It’s usually faster to cannibalize existing code from somewhere else and plug it in.

AI is very good at commenting code. I can tell it that I need an explanation for each line in the program and it will do this concisely.

I use ChatGPT to debug my code. It spots problems way faster than I can. It's good for simple fixes in simple programs.

Beyond this it wants to fix everything that isn’t broken. It can't do something without affecting other parts of a program or messing something else up.

When styling pages, it's funny to see what it comes up with and how it interprets language. It has some very kitschy ideas about how things should look.

It's always trying to officiously clean up my pages to make them look more standardized. My code may appear to be needlessly computationally intensive, but it is needlessly computationally intensive for a reason.

If you imagine someone stumbling upon one of your clocks years from now, what do you hope they’ll feel or think?

I want people to feel something positive. I take a lot of inspiration from early Modernism and from Pop Art, when people were excited and deeply optimistic (mostly wrongly) about emerging technologies. They had an extreme faith in their theoretical future. Time looked good.

Maybe people will think about time a little differently. There are millions and millions of ways of measuring it and conceptualizing it and attaching value to it. You can always change your perspective.