Digital artist Siebren Versteeg debuts a collection of time-based generative NFTs that critique … NFTs

NFTs

The series will be on Arsnl Art on March 13.

As an artist who operates at the forefront of new media, Siebren Versteeg is not blind to the shortcomings of technology. Indeed, his works, dating back to the 2000s, have utilized digital tools themselves – generative algorithms, live data feeds, web scraping techniques, programming languages ​​– to critique the role of technology in contemporary culture, while centering art production as a gesture in itself.

The emergence of NFTs should therefore have piqued the interest of the man interested in technology. But Versteeg told Artnet News that the crypto art space, with its emphasis on commodity over the creative process, “is in many ways antithetical to the kind of ethics and aspirations of my work.”

So, in response to the NFT phenomenon, Versteeg releases its first NFTs. But of course these won’t be your usual PFPs: Entitled “For a limited time,” the collection is billed as a year-long “artistic experiment” that invites collectors to decide when and what to stamp.

Quite simply, over the next 12 months the project will generate a new image every 10 to 15 minutes (750 in total), capturing trending events and stories of the moment, scraped from the internet, in computer-generated yet painterly collages. Each piece will be made available for only a limited time, where collectors can choose to claim the artwork, each priced at $300 (or roughly 0.18 ETH), for their crypto wallet.

To build out the project, Versteeg used what he called “code libraries that have become a staple in my toolbox over the past two decades,” programming solo as opposed to relying on a tech team. The one-year time period was chosen, he said, “for viewers to experience the full breadth of the algorithm’s potential.”

Following its physical exhibition at Frieze LA, presented by Bitforms Gallery, “For a Limited Time” will launch its pre-sale on March 13 and public sale on March 15 at Arsnl Art, The Web3 arm of the Artists Rights Society who was responsible for last year’s Frank Stella release.

Fittingly for an artist who worked “in the dotcom industry in the late ’90s,” the collection taps directly into Versteeg’s long-standing interest in media saturation and information overload. He has addressed these issues in a prolific series of multimedia and multivalent works, which he began exhibiting at the turn of the millennium, some of which have been collected by institutions including Whitney Museum and Yale University Art Gallery.

Most relevant here are his pieces such as Dynamic band unit (2003), Daily Times (performer) (2012), and Today’s paper (with flies) (2019). Variously running news headlines through algorithms to generate animations and abstractions, these internet-connected and video-based works reflect not only the fleeting nature of current events, but also the subjective experience of media consumption.

In example images generated by “For a limited time”, this abundance of information is also represented in chaotic collections that stitch together images as diverse as the Pope, street protests, fashion editorials, Princess Diana and Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime performance.

Harnessing immediacy and real-time data, Versteeg said, “felt to me a more accurate way to explore my interest in mediating the experience of art as an evolutionary and often unpredictable act of production over confrontation with an unchanging artifact.”

Such shifting interactions between viewer and art are built directly into “For a Limited Time,” in its call to collectors to capture and engage in moments that are fleeting at best. By doing so, the project acts as a collaborative channel for creative production, putting the collector in charge of what gets encoded into their wallet and the blockchain’s memory, Versteeg said. In short, it is the collectors who determine the value of the NFTs.

“For me,” he added, “the most rewarding part of the work is its ability to shed light on the small and special interactions with technology.”

The collection launches at a time when generative art is having quite the moment. Refik Anadol’s AI-assisted work is currently installed at the Museum of Modern Artwhile such as Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak keep looking persistently, if not swelling, market interest in their generative creations. The growing popularity of text-to-image platforms has also made generative art all the more accessible to the public.

While Versteeg’s own use of digital technology has tended more towards the conceptual, he professed joy at the increased popularity of such tools in art production. After all, these encounters between man and machine have been productive, if not necessarily in his observations, then in his experience.

“It had always seemed inevitable to me,” Versteeg said, “that humanity’s use of this technology would eventually produce and celebrate creative coding as a legitimate and important way of making art in our time.”

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