2022
bitforms presents Up The Ghost, our third solo exhibition with New York-based artist Siebren Versteeg. Further elucidating a playful interrogation of image and form, subject and object, life and studio, Up The Ghost introduces interdisciplinary works in sculpture, painting, and photography as an arrangement of digital apparitions that develop continuously throughout the course of the exhibition. Exhibited works in Up The Ghost contend with apprehension and loss, as inspired by developments in the artist’s personal life as well as with the recent public engagements regarding digital ephemera and commodification. Arranged on a single, screen-like plane that bisects a light-sealed gallery space, Versteeg’s exhibition radically abandons the conventions of artifact exhibition, instead presenting an open ontology of past, present, and hypothetical future works of art.
In a series of varied, new compositions presented both in printed form and on protean screens, the artist places precedence on ultra-high-resolution rendering rather than quickly advancing, evolutionary procedures. “Here,” Versteeg said, “image data is generated at a level of detail that surpasses the limitations of display technology as it currently stands.” Static works from this ongoing body of exploration exhibit agency: aglow from edge-to-edge, they participate as fixed counterpoints to the continuous renderings of nearby screens.
Hell is Other People presents a vast collection of collaged portraits culled at the instruction of an algorithm to indiscriminately search out faces. The resultant cultural artifacts pile atop one another, commingling with the iconic flame emoji. An overwhelming onslaught of recontextualized identities encourages viewers to navigate and zoom in on the composition’s fine detail through a touch screen.
Random Image Machines (horizontal and vertical) enact image democratization to its furthest, and perhaps most extreme, conclusion. Each work performs instructions guided by an algorithm to glean a random high-resolution image to display on screen. This digital intervention adds an element of chance into the exhibition’s fold, creating variable foils for aggregated meaning and reflection.
People in The News in 3D and Love Live x Five subject sculptural forms to temporal conditions through largely differing yet complementary approaches. In People in the News in 3D, CGI nesting dolls are algorithmically re-skinned with the likenesses of “newsworthy” figures continuously downloaded from popular websites. The resulting apparitions, trapped in corporeal frames, nod and rotate in an artificial breeze of current events before turning to disappear into collective digital memory.
Comparably, Love Live x Five posits a more personal immediacy for Versteeg. A live webcam feed broadcasts the conservation of a Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture from a family-run art fabrication studio, which Versteeg and his sister inherited from their recently deceased father, Peter. Versteeg references LOVE as an early influence on his creative aspirations. In kismet, the sculpture’s conservation at the time of this exhibition poses a unique opportunity for the expression of Versteeg’s newly-led dual life as an artist and attendant to legacy. Link
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2020
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Siebren Versteeg. In%20Memory is an email; a checklist of speculative objects, a series of links, and a PDF; together creating a daisy-chain as exhibition. Versteeg presents this new body of works virtually as a multifaceted study of the flatness of screen-space, communicating reflection in a moment of polarization and uncertainty. In In%20Memory, playful references to painting, readymades, and installation inquire toward the experience of isolation within our technological present. In effort to participate yet emancipate from the expectation of an artist to create “things,” In%20Memory advances viewing room culture with deep zoom technology while challenging visitors to engage in a meaningful temporal experience. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Katie Geha. Link
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2019
Possibly Living People 2019
Digital image printed on vinyl |
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Siebren Versteeg’s banner Possibly Living People, commissioned by the Dodd Galleries and produced by Fastsigns in Athens, GA, is a provisional memorial commemorating approximately 5,661 people who may or may not be alive today. Versteeg culled the information from a Wikipedia Category page that lists the full names of people whom according to the site,“It is not definitively known whether the people in this category are currently living or not.” Mimicking the effects of etched names on stone found on memorials and grave sites, Versteeg interrogates the limits of the internet via a factual database of uncertainty. Or as he describes it, “The more you know, the more you don’t know.” The artist often writes digital algorithms to manipulate and present data to create his works of art. “As someone who works with software and live data feeds, my medium is ultimately in continuous flux and difficult to contain,” Versteeg explains, “I am interested in the voracious appetite for inclusion and affirmation that life online exposes. The need to expose, publish, and bear witness to ourselves can be seen as analogous to the need for object or artifact that we all too often understand as a prerequisite of art.” As such, his concern is mirrored in this presentation; a relatively flimsy vinyl banner printed at a company called Fastsigns; an ephemeral memorializing of an indeterminate and contemporary history.
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2016
Middle Ages 2016
exhibition at Michael Jon & Alan, Miami FL. 9/10/2016 - 10/6/2016 |
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L to R: 'The Secret', 'Cousin It's Cousins', 'Hands in head in Hands', 'Permanent Vacation'
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Hands in head in Hands 2016
steel, concrete |
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Small IS beautiful is a public artwork situated on the exterior of the InterContinental hotel in Miami. Versteeg will broadcast the entire text of the book “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered” by E.F. Schumacher word for word. For six evenings, large letters will scroll down the sides of the hotel at a pace that is comfortable to read, offering a complete public reading visible for miles on Miami’s skyline. This renowned book has been a resource for economists, business strategists and politicians alike to promote environmentalism and balance between economic growth and the costs of globalism on society.
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2013
| IDEAS ARE EXECUTIONS 2013
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Emerson Dorsch is pleased to present IDEAS ARE EXECUTIONS, a two-person exhibition of Siebren Versteeg and Dave Hardy. Collaborators for nearly ten years, this will be the first exhibition to present their individual practices side by side. IDEAS ARE EXECUTIONS reveals unlikely commonalities in what appear on the surface to be strikingly different bodies of work. Hardy's gnarled sculptural c/Users/brook/Downloadsonstructs and Versteeg's algorithmically generated digital canvases are each the result of complex processes that contend with the increasingly conflating stratum of information and material.
Siebren Versteeg's digital prints on canvas are indicative of shifting margins in painting. He manipulates code to generate a series of works designed to mimic a painter's practice. In an interest to reveal the evolutionary constitution of his algorithmic programs, IDEAS ARE EXECUTIONS features an extracted linear sequence of nearly 20 digitally printed canvases, each standing over 6 feet tall. Wrapping the perimeter of the space like frames in a filmstrip, the works envelop the viewer in a haptic gradient of pattern. Across the room the process is laid bare, as a computer and LED screen conjure infinite permutations in real-time.
Dave Hardy's sculptures draw on the earnest language of provisional architecture and self-assured gestures of modernist sculpture. Thriving on the tension built from internal oppositions, the resulting set of contradictions speaks to the human condition. Hardy employs faded, tonal layers of polyurethane foam as an oblique reference to the body. The flesh is petrified, and interstitially cleaved by panes of glass, and various detritus including pencils, a marker, penny and a pretzel. "I am making Gemini sculptures that deal with the prospect of a body doing its best to resist the attrition of time." IDEAS ARE EXECUTIONS will include a selection of sculptures constructed of found tabletops, shower doors, and other vestiges left for dead, transformed and presented in confounding arrangements of weightlessness and precarity.
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2012
Michael Jon Gallery is pleased to announce A FEEL OF THINKING, an exhibition of new work by Siebren Versteeg. The show will run from September 8 through October 20, 2012; an opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 8 from 7:00 until 10:00pm. A FEEL OF THINKING continues Versteeg’s mediations of painterly abstraction through code and chance, spirit and circuitry.
In recent years, Versteeg has been authoring an archive of behavioral functions by manipulating computer language to generate images of paintings that exist exclusively in data space. The code writing itself is praxis, manifesting an ever-evolving algorithm to mathmatically render every visual aspect of a painting; from texture of substrate, to thickness of brush, to viscocity of pigment binder. The result however is not autopilot, but a study of how artists might use today’s ancillary technologies while maintaining expressive autonomy. Versteeg’s work lays claim to the uncanny valley, a place where things are neither completely biological nor artificial. This limbo attests to the shifting borders of the human body and its potential.
A FEEL OF THINKING will feature three self illuminating pieces within a dim gallery. A wall-sized HD projection, Making Time, Travel Slow exhibits an algorithmically rendered painting that, every 15 minutes, is virtually de-installed and replaced with a new version that was generated off screen just seconds before. A persistent element of this piece however is the clock, a nod to the diegetic temporality of recent Christian Marclay projects as well as the in situ performative startegies of many contemporary painters such as Josh Smith. On an adjacent wall hangs an electroluminescently backlit duratran sheet displaying one of an infinitude of these possible mechanized gestures. On the floor, readymade stencils spelling out “A FEEL OF THINKING” are haphazardly dropped over an exposed electroluminescent void. A casual arrangement that is deeply mediated by historical and technological references.
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Installation view, Oak Park IL.
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2011
In 2011 Meulensteen presented Flat Screens, an exhibition of new work by Siebren Versteeg; this is the artist’s third show with the gallery. At the core of the exhibition is a series of unique, backlit digital prints on DuraClear. These images, reminiscent of gestural abstract painting, are captured from mutating compositions generated by computer programs that the artist has written. The images are developed in digital space, without the use of physical paint. Through this work, Versteeg continues to develop his interest in the circulation of information in the digital realm and the algorithms that guide their flow. He manipulates this language to create artworks that balance choice and chance. They engage critically with the systems used for the dissemination of images within our culture, as well as with the technology used to create them. Philosopher Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images informs this most recent body of work, furthering the artist’s ongoing exploration of the intersection between algorithmic programming and artistic mark making. Versteeg’s work taps into an interesting parallel: Flusser describes the history of communications in a similar manner to the way Clement Greenberg summarized the history of painting: as a progression towards abstraction. In his seminal text, Flusser meditates on what he saw as the two possible divergent outcomes for humanity’s future: overwhelmed by images, we might witness the birth of the first infinitely creative society, or be trapped by an inescapable and oppressive pattern of sameness. The work in Flat Screens operates on the razor’s edge between these possibilities. Flusser also notes that text has been eclipsed by the image as the prominent form of communication. Versteeg interjects in this discourse by using text, in the form of computer programming code, to create images. As the exhibition’s title suggests, Versteeg plays with the notion of the flat screen. It appears as an illuminated still image (as in the work previously described), and in The Three Lights. In this work a flat screen monitor, hung from the gallery’s ceiling and surrounded by a grid of similarly proportioned ceiling tiles, displays an evolving collage of internet images from real-time searches for the terms “red light,” “green light,” and “blue light.” Two editions of the work will run simultaneously in the exhibition, generating two unique outcomes. In another work, which bridges the language of painting and the technological image, a piece of raw canvas, cut to the 4:3 aspect ratio of a standard definition television monitor, hangs inside a light box constructed to the 16:9 aspect ratio of a flat screen television. The lateral bars (pillarboxing) that appear when an image is displayed within a wider image frame appear in this work as bright bands of light. Here, as he does throughout the exhibition, Versteeg points out the oddity of imposing conventions from one medium onto another.
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Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present INACTION, an exhibition of new work by Siebren Versteeg. This will be our third exhibition with the artist.
Occupying the intersection between algorithmic programming and painterly expression, “Inaction” presents a space that folds the gestures of the hand into the automation of the computer and collapses the moving image into the still. Inspired by Vilem Flusser’s “Into the Universe of Technical Images”, Versteeg focuses simultaneously on the production of new visual information as well as the unique historical conditions that drive artists toward abstraction as creative undertaking.
The exhibition begins with a direct address to the digital screen. In “God made the earth in small circles,” Versteeg blinds the gallery’s glass front with an enlarged backlit image of Gerard Richter’s pixilated Cologne Cathedral that he gleaned from the Internet. Rather than the pigmented color of stained glass, however, this flattened scrim depicts exclusively through the additive values of red, green, and blue; thereby illuminating the mechanics of a computer monitor and it’s affects to perception. In homage to the Chicago fall’s waning sun, a spotlight positioned outside the gallery will provide illumination for the work on opening night.
The surrounding walls will debut a selection from an ongoing body of digital abstractions which navigate the interstices between code-based automation, alchemy, and ritualistic determination. Through mimetic rendering the viscosity, reflections, and transparencies of what we traditionally accept as painterly, Versteeg creates an aesthetic space that foregoes the info-matic in favor of elucidating the balancing parameters of an ever increasing myriad of variables.
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2008
Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition in its main space of the work of Siebren Versteeg. Zero Is The Center includes interactive paintings, digital prints, and sculptures that dissect the interactions media, intention, and indeterminacy. In many of the works, extensive use is made of the internet as a generative source of information and imagery. By developing precise algorithms that guide the flow of information, Versteeg models the movement and content of the ambient digital atmosphere into artworks that balance choice and chance.
Versteeg’s current work can be seen through the lens of mid-twentieth century artistic developments advanced in the work of artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Cage. Some of the pieces on view even borrow their formal language from specific artworks from this period. New York Windows is a diptych of interactive ‘paintings’. On the screen at any given time is an image compiled from a combination of internet sources and digital additions programmed by the artist. However, the image is larger than the frame seen on the screen, and the areas of it that are beyond the frame are constantly being updated and revised with new information culled from the internet; by dragging the image much like one might drag an image on Google maps, the viewer can bring these newly formulated sections into view. Simultaneously, other areas are being redrawn. The artist’s programming ‘hand’ is present as a persistent ghostly presence working just outside of what is visible.
Another real-time video ‘painting’, Flag, takes the canonical Johns Flag paintings as a jumping-off point. Just as Johns incorporated collaged newspapers into his painted objectification of the American flag, Versteeg programs a composite image made up of many images drawn from the internet. While the form of the flag is held constant, the materials (digital images) that compose the flag are constantly changing. A similar approach has been utilized to create Self-Portrait. A flat panel monitor has been balanced on an artist’s easel; on the screen is an image of the artist created from digital brushstrokes that continuously re-paint themselves. The artist’s hand has been re-contextualized, rewritten in a gesture that is at once ironic, melancholic, and comic.
A single channel video, Mortar and Pestle, begins as a single monochromatic field that fills the whole screen. Accompanied by crushing sounds, the image breaks down exponentially into smaller and smaller pixels. But as the pixels get smaller, an image comes into view: the artist using a mortar and pestle, destroying one thing to create another, a process whose analogue can be found in the manipulation of the image itself. After the image has ‘devolved’ into a perfectly clear picture, it begins to replicate itself, filling the screen with smaller and smaller images, until once again a monochromatic field prevails.
A similar concern with atomization can be found in two inkjet prints that mimic sheets of particle board. On closer inspection, the particles are seen to be precisely organized, oriented around a perspectival point at the center. It is also present in Grand Canyon, a lightbox that, when viewed from a distance, seems to show a panoramic view. In fact the iconic American panorama is made up of thousands of red, green, and blue abstracted high-rise buildings, conflating the built and natural environments.
For a series of eight-by-eight-foot algorithmic drawings on canvas, Versteeg collaborated with J. Patrick Walsh III, who created custom, hand-painted frames. The drawings, which resemble networks of highways, wires, or veins are like intricate mandalas. Their sheer complexity suggests the presence of a super-human author, but their juxtaposition with decidedly handmade frames makes their presence as physical objects intensely felt.
Negative Shadow Of A Fake Fire is a sculpture that shows how layers of mediation work on visual understanding. A waving flame lamp sits atop a wooden crate, flanked on one side by a bright light and on the other by a scrim. A video camera is trained on the scrim, capturing the silhouette (black on white) of the fake flame, and transmitting it to a projector. On the wall near the sculpture an image of the flame is projected, but with its values reversed, white on black. There is no real fire, but the object dramatizes the visualization of energy. With implied references to cinema, surveillance, and scientific experimentation, the work suggests that, while perhaps there is no central or originary phenomenon to observe, an endless loop of representations provides a productive system for humor, play, and communication.
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2007
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by New York based artist Siebren Versteeg.
In describing the work, Versteeg borrows a quote from filmmaker Ken Burns brought to his attention via his Free Will Astrology Horoscope by Rob Brezsny: "We are experiencing the death of narrative," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." (see Leo, http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/20071115.html)
Through deployment of computer programming, Versteeg's practice exponentially zooms in to consider the condition Burns laments, moving from our perceptual experience of digital telecommunications inward toward the infinitesimal looping routines of code which create them. From these sliding vantage points, timelines fold in on themselves and horizons become infinitely plastic and scaleable to attention. In "Superhighway" 2007, for example, close inspection reveals a tangle of tiny lines as a vast and intricate motorcade. As in all attempts at apprehensive reasoning, forms congeal and collapse in the conjoined hands of distance and time.
Central to the exhibition will be a projected work entitled "Untitled Film IV" which culls an endless stream of images into a structure referencing Chris Marker's 1962 short 'LaJeteé'. Like Marker's original, the effect is a destabilizing meditation on time. Unlike Marker, however, Versteeg's work illustrates experientially, by incorporating the dizzying qualities of real-time internet data transmission to create an ongoing narrative that ends only when we decide to look away.
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The gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Nothing Was, Siebren Versteeg’s first solo exhibition in New York City and a new project exhibition space at 511a W 22nd Street. Siebren Versteeg is known for strategic digital interventions that detangle the omnipresent data stream from contemporary life. Versteeg utilizes real-time data such as Google image searches, live news feeds, and soap opera plot summaries, and condenses the noise into humorous and poetic works that highlight the pervasive and escalating influence media plays on our perception of the world. The multiple new works produced for the exhibition include code-driven images, videos, and audio works that engage the viewer with eternal digital scenarios, contrasting human mortality with the lifespan of data. Something for Everyone (2007) collages hundreds of thousands of downloaded images into an endless, perspectival field, above which a B-2 Stealth Bomber soars. The Higher We Climb, The Further We See (From), 16,777,216 - variation 1 (2007), composites each of the 16,777,216 colors of the RGB digital palette in a random configuration, creating an all-over field of non-information. As The World Turns (2006) transcribes the daily synopsis of the soap opera, which has aired continuously for 50 years, through notes that the artist’s avatar appears to scrawl continuously in front of a webcam. Boom (fresher acconci) (2007) also fixes the artist in a computer-generated lock groove. Taking a visual cue from Vito Acconci’s Red Tapes, the work randomly downloads images from the internet, which the artist slaps onto a table one at a time. DS (Dark Star) (2007) perpetually re-authors the Grateful Dead’s infamous, unending swan song. Versteeg’s work begins with the assumption that the real and the virtual are hopelessly intertwined. Whether applying statistical filters or assigning a subjective, personal frame of reference, his work provides an all-access pass to the field of information, and tells us that one image is no longer significant, rather it is the glut that forces perspective. By taking steps back in time, distance, and resolution, Versteeg establishes elegant filters by which to understand and participate in the contemporary information economy.
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2005
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present Siebren Versteeg, determination, an investigation into the fabricated notion of “Real Time”, the contents of George W. Bush’s I-Shuffle, and the recent surge in identity profiling via the mass construction of terabyte sized consumer databases. On display in this cross-media exhibit of objects about the dangers of control in safety-critical systems you will find an auto-consensus binary-partisan machine, seven different virtual simulation models for contending with the blinding sunrise of the Blue Screen of Death, and a digital portrait of the artist’s father. Versteeg’s efforts to harness the central limit theorem’s connection to Pharmacy Photo Kiosks and Billboard Radio Charts from exactly ten years ago from the moment that you are reading this, has led him to the creation of a poplar time machine that is searching for the precise second America’s heart broke and billions of butterflies flew from the canopic jar. Siebren Versteeg has exhibited his work extensively and reasserts distance by waiting two weeks before responding to international emails. Most recently he was prosecuted, assaulted, and held for three hours in a Prague grocery chain after attempting to steal a milk crate for his installation in the International Biennial there. He currently works and lives in New York. -V.D.
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| University Galleries presents: Siebren Versteeg 2005
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