Arsnl Art has announced its latest project, For a Limited Time by the pioneering generative artist Siebren Versteeg, which will launch this month. A physical exhibition of the project was presented by bitforms gallery at the opening of the Santa Monica Art Museum during Frieze LA.
Versteeg (b. 1971) is a pioneer of algorithmic generative art and has been described by Vulture as “chaotic but illuminating,” and the idol of “every Harry Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek.” His works have been included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many others.
His critically acclaimed works mine our digital consciousness to create something new and unsettling in the form of paintings and sculptures. Versteeg’s algorithms generate painterly collages that transform images of current events into works that are erotic, prophetic, and both terrifying and humorous.
For one year, Versteeg will generate a new work every 10 to 15 minutes, using trending stories scraped from the internet as source material. Using the scraped images, Versteeg’s program will obscure, layer, and manipulate the found imagery with brushstrokes trained in Versteeg’s signature gestural style. A real-time view of the program constructing the latest composition will reveal various insights into the algorithm’s process and methodology, allowing viewers to witness new paint strokes, drips, and images as they stream into a quasi-newsroom/painter’s studio.
A slideshow view will continuously cycle through these latest nine images and viewers will be able to adjust the time between slide transitions, which will update as new compositions are created.
By choosing which work to save, the collector will become a “curator of time,” because by choosing a work, one will choose which moments to save and which to let slip away. In this way, collectors will not only shape the narrative but also become part of it, as their identities will be embedded into the metadata of each work as the curator of each saved moment.
“I am extremely delighted for the opportunity to bring my art to the NFT community with ARSNL. Our hybrid approach in For A Limited Time effectively synthesizes my interest in presenting current events and generative algorithms in real-time as well as asserting the idea that value be declared collaboratively,” said Versteeg.
“I look forward to witnessing this seedling grow into a unique and collectively memorialized collection that documents our upcoming year.”
