(Credit: René Ramos; Erik Jensen; Benne Ochs / fStop via Getty Images)
In March 2019, eight months after Erik Jensen quit his job as a high school art teacher and took a leap of faith to become a full-time artist, he was excited to present his work to the wider world. So he balanced himself on a step stool while leaning over a "rickety ping-pong table" in his Utah art studio to get just the right angle for a social media post about his new piece: a take on Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" made of 3,250 dyed keys culled from used computer keyboards.
Happy with what he'd captured, he posted the video to Instagram with the caption "I did it! First portrait!" The response was nothing out of the ordinary at first—a few supportive comments—but the next day, Jensen noticed an odd increase in visitors to his website. "It was this major traffic spike, from maybe 10 people a day to 500," he says. "And it all was coming from Reddit. So then I clicked on Reddit." What he found was profoundly humiliating.
Someone had re-posted his video to the site, and thousands of commenters rolled in to make fun of the way Jensen is audibly breathing off-camera. Jensen, who was born deaf, was not wearing his cochlear implant when he shot or posted the video, so he was unaware of the noises he was making.
Horrified, he combed through the snarky remarks. "Is someone having sex in the background? Is somebody dying in the background?" Jensen remembers reading. The post held a top spot on r/TrendingReddits for at least a day. (It has since been taken down.)
(Credit: Erik Jensen)Jensen went back and listened to his video with his implant in and agreed the breathing sounded "horrible." (In reality, it's not so bad.) "I was like, 'Oh crap, did I just ruin my business?'" he recalls. "I really became depressed. My business was already so small, and I felt like I was making cool things, but no one was validating it. It was a hard place to be, and [the Reddit thread] made it worse."
A few days later, another unexpected event occurred: Jensen's inbox started filling up with email after email from galleries, companies, and individuals interested in his art. All those negative comments had backfired on the trolls. "It's how I got my name recognized really fast," he says. The post started to spread across the internet courtesy of content creators who re-posted the video with music over it, so the sound was no longer an issue.
(Credit: Erik Jensen)Today, some of the biggest businesses in the world—including Amazon, Delta, Google, Microsoft, State Street, and Verizon—display Jensen's work in their offices. His keyboard art hangs across the US and in Israel, and he "sells a lot" to Europeans as well. One of his biggest collectors is a founding member of Microsoft, though Jensen can't name him due to a non-disclosure agreement.
Jensen, now 34, doesn't reveal how much money he's made, but likes to say, "I'm a thriving artist, not a starving one." He adds, "I feel like I'm in a dream, and now a lot of people are reaching out to me, asking me to speak or asking for advice. It's finally caught on so that people are like, 'No, wait, you're actually legit.'"
'Steve Jobs Is My Marilyn Monroe'
Jensen put his first paychecks toward upgrading his studio, so the step stool and ping-pong table are long gone. He now has two employees and a network of contractors who help him manage clients, break down keyboards, and glue keys once he's set them in place.
I first discovered Jensen's work at a gallery in Park City, Utah, where his pieces cost around $15,000. (He lives nearby in Salt Lake City with his wife and kids.) Commissioned works typically run anywhere from $5,000 to $80,000.
(Credit: Erik Jensen)
(Credit: Erik Jensen)He's turned nearly 1.2 million keys from about 14,000 keyboards into art that plays with the concept of pixilation; the images may take a few seconds for the brain to piece together.
Jensen spent a year inventing a technique to dye the keys, which is much harder than you might think. He uses a chemical process to lightly burn the plastic, but not ruin it, making it more receptive to colors. "That's my little trade secret," he says. "People are like, 'How do you do that? I didn't know plastic could dye.'"
Apple keyboards are Jensen's favorite to work with. Jensen's personal favorites are ones from the early 2000s with the clear back. The modern, white ones are particularly valuable for his work. Those keys are hard to find, he says, and best for dying cool colors like blue and purple. Old, beige keys work well for dying warm colors, such as greens and oranges.
Much of Jensen's work is tech-themed. He did a portrait series featuring figures like Bill Gates, Grace Hopper, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Each piece is constructed from 1,024 keys, meant to represent a kilobyte (1,024 bytes) and reflect the massive amount of information in the digital world.
"Steve Jobs is my Marilyn Monroe," he says, referring to Andy Warhol's famed series portraying the blonde actress. "I've probably done 10 portraits of him." (Jensen has done his own Monroes as well.) He describes Jobs as his idol: "He was techie, but I think he was more of a designer. I can relate to him taking the risk to start a business, to do something that you're passionate about."
Expanding Beyond Keyboards
When he first started out, Jensen posted requests for used keyboards on Facebook. Today, he has contracts with six of the biggest recyclers in the country, which ship 800-pound pallets for him and his team to break down.
(Credit: Erik Jensen)
(Credit: Erik Jensen)Now he's starting to expand beyond keyboards. He's currently working on his first public installation, which opens in January at his alma mater, Utah Valley University, where he began his keyboard art journey. It's a collection of six pieces with 45,000 keys, hanging in one building. UVU asked Jensen to incorporate waste materials relevant to each field of study. For the civil engineering piece, for example, Jensen's working with cement, wood, and screws.
So, was the pain of the Reddit thread worth it since it got his name out there? Jensen thinks so. He's now working on a side business to help fellow artists through challenges they may face themselves.
"I hope I can inspire people to be creative, to think outside the box and do things in a different way," Jensen says. "Sometimes, you're gonna feel like a broken keyboard. If you look at one key, sometimes it's really ugly, but if you take a step back, you realize the whole picture is going to look amazing."