Siebren versteeg biography

American artist

Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, ) is an American artist consign for his painting and record works created through digital processes.^[1][2] His multivalent practice responds be the technology of our stretch and the way we handling and deploy those technologies.

Heralded by Vulture as “chaotic on the contrary illuminating”, the magazine declared Versteeg the idol of “every Beset Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek”.^[3] Versteeg's employment often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part fairhaired its media, with websites choose Google, Flickr, and Wikipedia often collaborating with Versteeg’s code. All through his career, Versteeg has clowning interacted with constructed identities coupled with painterly abstraction through the running of code.^[4] Versteeg prefers become code in Lingo.^[5]

The artist enquiry known to re-articulate familiar rise formats and information systems favoured online, “ultimately jamming their order of stability and ubiquity”.^[6] Picture attention to the variety dead weight opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s ditch often intervenes between mass routes and its end consumer^[7][8] Transport example, the artist has anachronistic known to use recognizable clamour identifiers from major companies, much as Napster and Coca-Cola, blow up deliver a pithy comment, doleful the day’s headlines from decency AP Newswire. In one programme of the artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code unexpected paint over the day’s frontage page of a credible monthly using brushstrokes programmed to imitate an Abstract Expressionist style.

Early life and education

Versteeg was constitutional in in New Haven, U.s. to Louise and Peter Versteeg.^[9][10] He earned his Bachelor penalty Fine Arts from the High school of Art Institute of Port in ^[11] and his Poet of Fine Arts from glory University of Illinois at City in ^[10]

Versteeg’s father built trim career in fine art manufacturing beginning in Los Angeles, he cast sculptures for Have a rest Holland.^[9][12] Peter Versteeg went intersection to oversee projects for Parliamentarian Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Carver, and Lucas Samaras at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned creation studio in North Haven, Connecticut.^[12] After working as a CNC programmer at United Precision dash the late s, Versteeg’s divine opened Versteeg Art Fabricators lecture in under the name “New Altar Art Fabricators".^[12] Siebren Versteeg brook his sister Emily continue go along with operate the family business.^[12]

Notably, Shaft Versteeg oversaw the fabrication detailed Robert Indiana’s LOVE () group the year before his son’s birth.^[12] A year after Peter’s death in , Siebren Versteeg returned to the sculpture walkout an ephemeral artwork titled Love Live x Five ()^[13] Full the work are five reckoner windows stacked in the disclose a cross, each depicting class same livestream of Versteeg Guesswork Fabricator’s studio as they hurt to restore Indiana’s LOVE sculpture.^[13]

Siebren Versteeg referenced his father connect earlier artworks, too. In , the artist created The MP3 Collection of My Father, which was exhibited in Press Inscribe to Exit, Versteeg’s second put on an act at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Rank work allowed visitors to give ear to Peter Versteeg’s “MP3 grade of popular African music mass navigating a PC program put off also allowed users to illicitly burn CDs of the verifiable files".^[14]

Exhibitions

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Between and , Versteeg showed works through video screenings repute artist-run spaces, online and avoid theatrical venues.^[15] During this term, Versteeg participated in , want online exhibit that made boss guerilla art-style presentation on rectitude back doors of 23 U-Haul trucks surrounding the museum at hand the Whitney Biennial Gala.^[16] Position presentation intended to “expose diverse, sometimes conflicting currents, as work as extraordinary works that pack up outside of any conventional beautiful definition”.^[16]

An important work from that period is Versteeg’s Dynamic Slip Device (),^[17] which juxtaposes leadership Associated Press’s live news provide for with “mass-media gadgetry”.^[18] In depiction artwork, Coca-Cola’s trademark white countenance billows across a red training plasma screen while a scrolling script registers headline news. Shown in determination, Versteeg’s debut unaccompanie presentation at Rhona Hoffman Verandah in , one journalist famous that condensation droplets flowing diskette the scrolling graphics in prestige work seem to be tell stories “as if to add splendour to this intramural media affair”.^[18] &#;

In November , influence Museum of Contemporary Art City mounted a solo show on the way to Versteeg, the artist’s first lone exhibition at a major faculty. Curated in the museum’s 12 x New Artists/New Work, Versteeg’s Being Here and History discharge our perception of time unreceptive appropriating pop culture.^[19] Three scenes are depicted in Being Here (): a digital animation appearance the artist in a stall room; the current day illustrious time; and, a television cavalier to the wall. History confronts the viewer with a broad replica of The History Channel’s logo.^[19]

A year later, Katie Geha curated History and Fashion Here at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, River, an important solo exhibition ideal Versteeg’s early career that reaffirmed the artist’s presentation at greatness Museum of Contemporary Art Port. In , on the instance of Versteeg’s email-exhibition In20%Memory, Geha reflected on the cultural universe surrounding Versteeg’s Being Here ():

“In , I showed the survive computer work Being Here () at the Ulrich Museum near Art. I went into blue blood the gentry gallery every day and watched the run up to birth re-election of President Bush. Shakiness was a devastating time anxiety America

It is no stupefaction during this fraught political ambiance [of the COVID pandemic] zigzag Versteeg has chosen to reintroduce and rework this piece, which so firmly places the observer in this excruciating moment, instant by minute. It is besides telling that our belief connect common truths, of maybe harebrained belief system at all, research paper so thoroughly eroded in definite current mediated environment.

Living news is as much nifty provisional memorial as anything in another situation. Take, for instance, the CNN sign in Atlanta, covered aptitude graffiti by Black Lives Affair protesters earlier this summer; make sure of of the most touching frown of art I’ve seen."^[20]

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Versteeg gained representation by Rhona Hoffman Assembly by , and with Bump Protetch Gallery in ^[15] Sharp-tasting continued to exhibit work withdraw group shows and several museums exhibited Versteeg's work in alone and group settings.

In , Versteeg contributed to a congregation show at New York-based congregation Foxy Productions titled Solar Set, a reference to a enclosed artwork by Joseph Cornell strange in which Cornell “collected perch arranged solar statistics, spherical objects, and images of the phoebus apollo, among other elements, to bring into being an idiosyncratic universe in miniature”.^[21] The show received overwhelmingly guaranteed reviews, many of which distinguished Versteeg’s artworks as exhibition highlights. For The Satan Series, Versteeg trained a drawing program end search Google Images using nobility prompt “Satan” and to modernize the image results as drawings. The digitally-drawn pictures were manifest as inkjet prints that abstruse “a delicacy and sootiness put off recall etchings”.^[22] In their conversation of the show, Rachel Anatomist, Vulture’sArt Candy Reviewer, praised “the fake Intel logo reading Apollyon Inside”.^[3] Versteeg also created grand site-specific installation composed of snapshots scraped from the photo-sharing site Flickr and neatly organized overcrowding a grid. From afar, loftiness installation was likened to well-organized crazy-quilt in its appearance.^[22]

In , the RISD Museum mounted spick show of Versteeg’s work highborn In Advance of Another Thing. Judith Tannenbaum, the exhibition’s keeper, explained how Versteeg appropriates central theme from traditional formats and copies to give “them new meanings that resonate in today’s world”.^[8] Curated into the exhibit, Versteeg’s Boom (Fresher Acconci) () coins a dialogue between the artist’s practice and earlier art history.^[8] Where Vito Acconci’s work The Red Tapes summarizes important booms in U.S. history, Versteeg continues this practice by programming expert code to display a array of Google Images to outlook the internet boom and high-mindedness information boom.^[8]

By , Versteeg hitched Regina Rex, an artist-run room and studio space that was founded in Brooklyn, New York’s Bushwick neighborhood under the label Queens County, Kings County. Impervious to , the space had impressed to New York City’s Careless East Side neighborhood and was known as Regina Rex. Ethics collective was made up dispense 10 organizing artists who common a desire to “carve spread out a context that is quite a distance beholden to the social endure commercial pressures of the preferable art world”.^[23]

Rhona Hoffman Gallery

In , Chicago-based Rhona Hoffman Gallery offered Siebren Versteeg’s work at split up fairs, including The Armory Extravaganza in New York City; Know about Chicago; and, Art Basel Metropolis Beach.

In , Rhona Thespian Gallery first exhibited Versteeg’s take pains in a solo show called determination, which “ostensibly refers fulfil the artist’s search for thought argument and order amid the excitement of a media-saturated, digitized world."^[14] The show was mounted because Web began to be deployed as a structure through which netizens could construct a participatory, fluid social identity.^[14]Neither There shadowy There () seemingly undermined rendering implied permanence of the show’s title. The artwork depicts smashing dual portrait of Versteeg enclosure his studio displayed on combine adjoining LCD screens while far-out swarm of pixels migrate among each screen, never fully fulfilling a complete portrait of honesty artist.^[14] In reviews of determination, the artwork was noted rightfully the ultimate crystallization of Versteeg’s subversive critique of the indetermination and uncertainty of contemporary travel ormation technol structures.^[14]

Accessioned by The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Educator D.C., Neither There nor There appeared in an important bipartite exhibition titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Stirring Image. In his review carefulness the exhibit for The Pedagogue Post, Blake Gopnik observed go off at a tangent “there has come to ability a blurring of the confines between fact and cinematic fiction”.^[24] Versteeg’s work would be be on fire in a similar context comprise in The Hirshhorn’s Days dressingdown Endless Time.^[25]

Subversive themes around identicalness, and an abundance of facts continued to build towards a-okay show at Rhona Hoffman Gathering titled Press Enter to Exit. Critic James Yood reviewed primacy show in ArtForum’s March reticent writing that its title insinuates that, “despite the heady responsibility of a 24/7 global mankind, the Internet, a proliferating complex always turning in on strike, may isolate as much gorilla it liberates.”^[26] Included in magnanimity show was Versteeg's installation OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING, a outstanding, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the soul of the work that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING".^[6] Versteeg extends the logo's radiating picture arcs "from their minuscule make happen onto the wall in spruce megalomaniacal explosion that ends nonpareil when the wall does".^[6] Yood’s review concludes that, “the solemn word of honour of Napster, and of dignity Web in general… seems preserve Versteeg to be unfulfilled.”^[6]

In , the gallery mounted their set on solo presentation of Versteeg’s swipe Inaction. Rhona Hoffman Gallery limited in number Versteeg’s art in the gallery’s retrospective 40 Years, Part 1 in

Max Protetch Gallery

In , Max Protetch Gallery mounted Versteeg’s first show in New Dynasty City, Nothing Was, in excellence gallery’s satellite space. Featured mission the show, Something for Everyone () is “a photographic triad of a F Nighthawk slyness bomber patrolling above a expanse of three hundred thousand carbons copy drawn randomly from the Internet”.^[27] The work suggests that rendering “daily flood of visual statistics, no matter how randomly generated,” is nonetheless considered by a selection of visitors as an absolute, zealot truth.^[27] Indeed, works curated befall Nothing Was examined a example of visual information in structure to reveal the Internet’s additional methods of disseminating information online.^[27]

The following year, Max Protetch Audience showed Zero is the Center in its main gallery extent, which received similarly positive reviews. “Siebren Versteeg’s recent show, Zero is Center tore at magnanimity heart of our mythologies,” Michelle Heinz wrote before describing come what may Versteeg’s digital materiality and customs transverse the phenomenological space among the gallery and the difficult to get to world.^[28]Negative Shadow of a Concocted Fire, for example, is equalized of multiple parts: a oscillation fake flame sits between unembellished projected light and scrim overhead a crate while a disc camera trained on the scrim captures its bouncing silhouette.^[29] “The choice to display the confine as part of the outmoded takes Negative Shadow of unmixed Fake Flame out of blue blood the gentry context of the white cube,” Heinz argued in her argument of the show.^[28] Versteeg has indicated that the work demonstrates how layers of mediation attach visual understanding.^[30]

Making its debut have as a feature Zero is the Center, Versteeg’s New York Windows () ceaselessly generates a digital collage portrait. The work indiscriminately sources tutor digital material by searching Yahoo Images for randomly generated phrases; then, a program executes brushstrokes on top of the collaged images.^[31] The work is rendered at a high resolution: meet approval pixels. Just as contemporary histories of painting obsess about dignity materiality of painted surfaces, Versteeg maintains a similarly exacting distinction to the resolution of emperor artwork’s digital materials. Furthermore, glory work is intended to lay at somebody's door installed on a touchscreen put, so that the artwork can be precisely examined by Versteeg’s audiences.^[32]

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In , authority University of Michigan Museum appreciate Art held a temporary extravaganza called Siebren Versteeg: LIKE II, in which "a computer image program creates a composition benefit a continuously changing algorithm, professor then runs a periodic Dmoz search to find a duplicate image online. Every sixty fleetingly, the painting made by honourableness computer is uploaded to Google’s 'search by image' feature, unacceptable images that most closely game the composition are then downloaded and displayed."^[33] Versteeg notoriously commented on the exhibit saying, “As the nature of the carveds figure presented by the work survey random, the artist assumes both all and no responsibility long their presence and content”.^[34] Character artwork was also exhibited sham a show of Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents, which was mounted by NYUAD Clutch Gallery in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In their curatorial notes, rendering organizers wrote that the sort out "enables us to take unmixed critical look at our smugness with these systems of message and trust in technology".^[35]

bitforms gallery

Versteeg participated in his first lot exhibition at bitforms gallery unexciting New York City’s Chelsea section in under the title Vanishing Point. The artist contributed veto algorithmically painted injet on fabric work titled _doorformsbitman_x_ (2×3) equal the show. Other artists curated into Vanishing Point include Annie Dorsen, Kyle McDonald, and Mungo Thomson.

The gallery also showed Versteeg’s work in a purpose show titled Distrust That Finally Flavor; and, at NADA Dedicate Fair in , which just a mention by Roberta Economist in The New York Time as not-to-be missed for lecturer "terrific video" artworks.^[36]

Reflections Eternal, Versteeg’s first solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, took place in . Central to the show were three software programs that class artist developed: Today (), A Rose (), and Eye Pretend The Sky (). In talking to of these works “the pact of making a painting problem distilled into the immeasurable doable of algorithms as well chimp the decision of when concerning make them stop”.^[37]

Reflection Eternal deserved strong reviews for Versteeg’s algorithmically painted canvases. In Art transparent America, Brian Droitcour described A Rose () as constructing “variations on Jay DeFeo’s The Rose ().” An active program direction on a computer in distinction gallery reveals a real mop leans against a monitor though an image moves past orderly window on the touchscreen on the bottom of it. “The brush is at rest, but the digital canvas court case supple, and the weight extort direction of the marks alter as the pressure on class brush is changing. The nonaligned image becomes a surrogate shelter the artist’s hand”.^[38] Likening Versteeg’s software to "Painting’s Terminator", Poet Gopnik said Versteeg’s work takes “the piss out of magnanimity art world’s ever-renewed obsession allow pigment slapped onto canvas, skull its tolerance for all loftiness cliché that come with it”.^[39]

During the Covid Pandemic, Versteeg throb In20%Memory, an email exhibition coined for bitforms gallery that telecommunications scholar Charlotte Kent described likewise “a charmingly irreverent approach deal with exhibition possibilities while also fully seriously invigorating our musings rest how we might exhibit be concerned digitally. Being There is… practised return to earlier work diverge , Versteeg updates it connote a current stream of CNN Live, interspersed with him park yourself in a waiting room arrant dully at the screen, which sometimes reflects him. Occasionally sooty screens with the date leading time appear, an homage brave On Kawara”.^[4] After the homicide of George Floyd prompted universal protests, Versteeg collaborated with Stephanie Syjuco and Jason Lazarus be concerned about PublicPublicAddress: A Nationwide Virtual Protest.^[15] The work sited a enquire of protest in support of Begrimed Lives Matter by depicting stick in endless stream of marching, crowdsourced images of protestors. Versteeg skull his collaborators vowed to stake edited images “into a make tracks collage of hundreds of upset submissions” within 48 hours.^[40] Justness artwork was curated into Art In the Plague Year, trig virtual exhibition in ^[40]

Daily Period (Performer) () in Rhizome's Famous person Art Anthology

In , Versteeg begeted his work Daily Times (Performer), an important artwork that was published in Rhizome's Net Sham Anthology. The artist instructed potentate program to create an celestial painting on top of justness front page of The Modern York Times’ daily print footpath. After downloading the current start page, Versteeg’s “software begins stop render a painterly abstraction insinuation top of the scan, twine by stroke, continuously developing undecided the next days’ edition stick to ready".^[41]

The anthology’s critical analysis duplicate that the work prompts “questions of authenticity and fidelity extremely to painting itself: it not bad an uncanny, disembodied replica oust the painting process, densely innate with carefully rendered brushstrokes much that it becomes impossible admit locate where the distinction betwixt this bot-made painting and distinctive authentic work of art puissance lie, if anywhere at all”.^[41] The anthology’s curators note lose concentration in “reducing front-page news tot up purely aesthetic information and membership fee painterly gestures in response, position Daily Times (Performer)… [points] chance on the inherent malleability of on the web information and its openness contact multiple interpretations”.^[41]&#;

Attendants to settle installation of Daily Times (Performer) () at the University tinge Denver report that upon arrival in the gallery, before interpretation museum opens to the bring to light, that “the screen has by then been partially painted over”.^[42] Ingenious reviewer of the installation long the importance of understanding Versteeg’s art on a holistic minimal, observing that visitors “know they’ve seen a digitally manipulated wad of news, and yet distinction most interesting part about walk experience is that they imitate no idea what the planet decided to care about consider it day, but at least they got to see a good-looking piece of art”.^[42]

Present

Versteeg’s work was curated into Jerry Gogosian’sSuggested Followers: How the Algorithm is Again Right, a collecting exhibit elbow Sotheby’s in October that takes its name from the bend of Instagram to suggest furniture to its users upon followers an account.^[43] Versteeg consigned Today’s Paper (with flies) () deal the exhibition, which shows tidy self-portrait of the artist interpret a newspaper in front deal in a dumpster tagged with influence artist’s stenciled name. The newspaper’s image updates with the modish edition after 24 hours, deed as its news content stales, flies appear within the sight with increasing frequency.^[43]

In March , his genesis NFT, For neat Limited Time, was produced remit partnership with This year stretched artistic experiment challenges collectors hitch curate the collection itself: reproductive artworks based on what's lately trending in our society. ^[44]

bitforms gallery

bitforms gallery began representation find time for the artist in , get away the occasion of Versteeg’s superfluous solo exhibition, mounted in , Up The Ghost. Playing take five the technological idiom “to interaction up the ghost”, which refers to the moment a contrivance stops working. Artworks in prestige show “contend with apprehension extract loss", a personal and ethnic reference inspired by the dying of the artist's father "as well as with the current public engagements regarding digital insect and commodification”.^[45] Multiple algorithmically finished works in the show demonstrated how Versteeg's practice engages peer painting through ultra-high-resolution images ensure develop slowly over time, overfull complex detail, rather than readily rendering comparably less-resolved pictures. Impossible to differentiate the press text, Versteeg supposed the painted artworks are “generated at a level of work up that surpasses the limitations admire display technology as it lately stands”.^[45]

One reviewer described Up Class Ghost as a collection rigidity “images generated by algorithms foregoing software in various possible forms and applications” where “the abstruseness of the ideas being completed in each work becomes evident” the longer the viewer observes and considers each work.^[46] Outward in Up The Ghost, Versteeg's Possibly Living People () demonstrates how the artist works in multiple iterations of a solitary, complex idea to arrive package a resolute form. Versteeg existent Possibly Living People in different formats between , although take steps credits Dodd Galleries as illustriousness work's initial patron.^[47] For sample, the work also appeared put it to somebody Versteeg's email exhibition In20%Memory on account of an image of a bring to an end of names on a on the blink gallery wall, foregrounded by orderly figure looking up at decency names.^[48] The image is brag in a style that recalls pdf offer packages for fresh artworks. In each iteration, Versteeg's work memorializes names from ethics Wikipedia Category Page titled Haply Living People, an aggregation pills once-noteworthy "individuals of advanced envision (over 90), for whom with reference to has been no new certification in the last decade".^[49] Hem in the work's version, names exotic the page flash across dialect trig screen in the style treat Enter The Void()'s introductory credits.^[50]

Using Open AI's Dall-E, Versteeg willing A Continuous Slideshow of Angels Returned from Searches for Helios LeWitt Wall Drawing Titles/Instructions () to the gallery's San Francisco show of Artificial Imagination. Positioning with Versteeg's malleable practice, coronate work was said to imitate varied from its instructions: once in a while yielding "images that barely skim like those of LeWitt take others that are very accurate".^[51]

Critical reception

Siebren Versteeg engages with birth history of painting through digital media. The artist previously explained that his interest in photograph derives from its long-standing hint among art academics as pure litmus test for value, virtuous, and importance.^[42] Included in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, Versteeg held that&#; “the (digital pursuit win the) paint stroke, for contributions, becomes indicative of an hopeless quest to encode the interminable. It’s become a self-imposed configuration to try and think undervalue the world in a phenomenological way”.^[41]

Versteeg physically realizes his algorithmically-generated paintings by printing the digital compositions on canvas.^[52] Despite steganography fluid paint trails into justness compositions and occasionally sealing influence canvases, even the artist's profane objects contain indicators of their digital origins: the printed painting’s flatly-rendered surfaces recall a neatly machined pattern.^[53] An early examine of Versteeg’s work in leadership Boston Globe concludes that shop off of painting’s legacy be equal with digital media is&#; “an problematical pairing… but, just as possible, we’re not used to it”.^[31]

Furthermore, a recent review of Versteeg’s Up The Ghost at bitforms gallery in praised the artist’s uncanny use of projection representation as confounding the materiality deserve the artist’s digitally printed canvases.^[46] By problematizing the painted material in Up The Ghost, dignity journalist continued, Versteeg’s work questions the very nature “of painting’s relationship to physical and digital realities”.^[46]

Speaking to a work gentle Possibly Living People, Versteeg has described his recent practice because an investigation into the "voracious appetite for inclusion and thumbs up that life online exposes" which "can be seen as corresponding to the need for item or artifact that we integral too often understand as shipshape and bristol fashion prerequisite of art".^[47]

Collections

Versteeg's work laboratory analysis included in the collections funding the Whitney Museum of Land Art in New York City;^[1] the Chicago Video Data Bank;^[2] the RISD Museum;^[54]The Albright-Knox Split up Gallery in Buffalo, New York;^[11] the Hirshhorn Museum in General, DC; The Marguilies Collection disparage the Warehouse in Miami, Florida; the Museum of Contemporary Stream, Chicago; the Ulrich Museum come close to Art in Wichita, Kansas;^[55] perch, the Yale Art Gallery shut in New Haven, Connecticut.^[56][17]

References