Michael Jacobs is a visual artist based in Rochester, Minnesota whose practice bridges traditional drawing media and contemporary computational image systems. After a 40-year career in engineering, he returned to fine art with a focus on structured, process-driven image construction.His...
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Michael Jacobs is a visual artist based in Rochester, Minnesota whose practice bridges traditional drawing media and contemporary computational image systems. After a 40-year career in engineering, he returned to fine art with a focus on structured, process-driven image construction.
His work spans charcoal, watercolor, ink, and pastel alongside the development of Diamojism, a computational visual system that reconstructs canonical artworks through symbolic encoding. In this system, images are reassembled from discrete pictographic units arranged through a hierarchical, diamond-based grid structure, exploring how meaning emerges through aggregation, scale, and perceptual synthesis.
Across both his traditional and digital practices, Jacobs is concerned with the relationship between observation and interpretation, and how images shift when translated across different material and symbolic systems. His recent work re-examines key works from art history through contemporary visual languages shaped by digital communication and compression.
He is an exhibiting member of the SEMVA Art Gallery in Rochester, Minnesota, where he also serves on the executive board.