Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
The record-breaking sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Day, a virtual Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artwork by Beeple was closed at $69,346,250 during an online auction by Christie’s on March 11, 2021. This made Beeple near the summit of the most expensive living artists to date, just below David Hockney and Jeff Koons. Who was Beeple? What was Non-Fungible Token? What changes will be brought to traditional value system, viewing, circulating and collecting means in the art world? These have aroused a lot of interest...The open prospects of artistic creation and dissemination in the foreseeable “metaverse” future seem to be unfolded with an attitude of futuristic enthusiasm and optimism.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Beeple recorded and created his Everyday at Deji Art Museum
In collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Senior Artistic Advisor, Deji Art Museum presents a comprehensive and systematic retrospective of Beeple’s creative career. Titled Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future, the exhibition debuted on 13 November 2024. Audiences are invited to immerse themselves in exploring multiple dimensions of Beeple’s artistic practice, gaining insight into his critical inquiries and profound impact on the development of digital art and contemporary art history. All the three sections of this exhibition are interspersed with a thread that combines both material and virtual display. The first section “Digital Archaeologies” tries to restore the artist’s trajectory when he was not yet “Beeple”.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Beeple is the professional name used by Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist and designer born in 1981 in South Carolina, USA, whose work incorporates references to contemporary politics, pop culture, and science fiction. As an artist who learns and grows synchronously with the constantly iterating technology, Beeple presents the distinctive technical imprints on him in a material way. He built a small museum featuring electronic products at Deji Art Museum, displaying household PCs from various brands and years, handheld video recorders, tape recorders, video players, TVs and computer screens of various sizes, home game consoles, and so on. Some of these electronic machines with retro aesthetics have become masterpieces of contemporary product design.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Beeple’s creative chronology and the developing history of graphic software are detailed and presented on the exhibiting wall of “Digital Archaeologies”, intuitively showing the deep interaction between his digital art exploration and the background of rapid technological development. The exhibition begins with Beeple’s early works with “low-tech” attributes, including hand-painted images, graffiti, video images, poster designs and digitally rendered paintings, indicating the starting point and foundation of his visual language, aesthetic style and thinking interests in his future creations.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Often irreverent and sardonic in tone, Beeple’s artistic production responds to the news and internet culture, metabolizing images and stories in real time. Beeple gained prominence for his ongoing work Everydays: The First 5000 Days, initiated in 2007, wherein the artist creates a unique image and uploads it to his website daily. For this highlight at the second section, Deji Art Museum has constructed a unique gallery composed of a giant screen and mirrors, which is nearly 5 meters high and 20 meters long. For spectators, it feels like a strange venue on the set of some science fiction movie, or in other words, a cyberspace that is imitated in reality.
The project is cumulative in nature, with over 6,000 pieces and counting. Each daily creation is a snapshot, a visual diary capturing the zeitgeist of the moment. The entire process is a challenge to push the boundaries of the artist’s skill and imagination. Beeple’s work often juxtaposes the surreal with the hyperreal, extrapolating current events to bizarre future scenarios, and reflecting the chaotic and often dystopian nature of our digital age.
Beeple, Everydays (part)，©Beeple
Beeple, Everydays (part)，©Beeple
Beeple, Everydays (part)，©Beeple
The recommending mechanisms of social media and big data have played an important role in the practical logic of Everydays. As Beeple talked at the seminar after the opening ceremony, “Sharing every day is the most exciting thing for me. It might be overlooked in previous auction that my works have gradually formed their value through sharing and comments by many followers on the internet. The consensus of the public leads to the further research of this series by the art world. I think this represents a progress.”
Sharing paintings and getting instant feedback do not just mean gaining encouragement and creative motivation, since the ritual and performative characteristics that can only exist in the internet age, which constitute the completely closed loop of Everydays. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Senior Artistic Advisor, pointed out in his speech that, “We now live in the age of communication, everyone has his or her own rituals, and there are new rituals in the digital age. When I saw Everydays series, I realized that it has a performative nature, which was almost performance art.”
The Opening View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Beeple’s Everydays successfully transforms the social media platform into a virtual gallery for effective communication. It continuously gains new meaning in the process of wide dissemination that is difficult to achieve in traditional exhibition venues, and then forms a platform for communication and co-creation in the virtual space. This may also be a manifestation of the trans-media and trans-disciplinary integration characteristics of media art in the Internet age.
The long-term project combined with temporal factors, the creative form adopted by the artist in Everydays, and the attempt of the series to capture and record the instantaneous moments of the era, have jointly created an interesting internal tension, which is also unique to Everydays series, even though spectators’ attention are usually caught by its amazing and rich volume as well as the overwhelming feeling brought by the star-like aggregation.
The Seminar after the Opening Ceremony, Honored Guests (from the left) were: Cao Dan, Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Sunny Cheung, Xuxa Rodríguez.
Beeple talked about his creation at the seminar.
This echoes Beeple’s change in creative consciousness in recent years. He said that the auction was a sudden turning point in his career, which opened up a new world for him who originally did not pay much attention to art history and art collection. He communicated with the public by inspiration and love. He completed the change of thinking and began to pay more attention to the influence of art history on him. He hopes that his works could make people slow down in the fast-paced world and generate further thinking. Therefore, a display in art museum became his first choice for holding a solo exhibition as he realized that “the status and value of art museum will continue to increase, and it will become a place where people gather and have a common experience about digital art.”
Interestingly, in the third section “Welcome to 2122”, Beeple built a ladder from “online” to “offline” for the Everydays series. A selection of ten works from Everydays, including Garfield, Block Zero, Tomorrow, Journey Starts, Regenerate, Simple Pleasures, Garybee, Jabbas Coming from Every Hole and Adaptation. The contrasting presentation of “oil painting + screen” allows the paintings that exist in the virtual world to move to the material world based on traditional way. This series of paintings with the temperament of pop culture, scientific fantasy and satire contain the artist’s bold imagination and thinking on issues such as technology, ecology, and the future survival form of mankind.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Beeple’s sculptured work evokes distinctive realms that find echo in worlds from the Hellenistic to the cybernated. By paying homage to the rich history of digital art and reflecting on the future of humanity and media, he challenges the fantasies surrounding emerging technologies, expanding the blurred boundaries between digital and physical existence.
Three dynamic sculptures, Exponential Growth, Human One and S.2122, are distributed in different locations throughout the exhibition. These dynamic sculptures, composed of videos and sculptures, with their dazzling three-dimensional rotation, demonstrate the visual charm of new media art that blurs reality and virtuality, attracting viewers to stop while inspiring their infinite imagination about the future forms of artworks.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
Exponential Growth is a work created by Beeple specifically for this exhibition in Nanjing. In September 2023, Beeple came to visit the exhibition “Nothing Still About Still Lifes: Three Centuries of Floral Compositions”, the inaugural edition of the “World of Flowers” series at Deji Art Museum. Inspired by the works he saw, Beeple created the dynamic sculpture Exponential Growth in 2024. It interweaves the beauty of machinery with the vitality of nature, with winding vines and countless gorgeous flowers continuing to complete the natural cycle of growth, climbing, blooming, and withering in the rotation of the sculpture. Its rich details rely on the superb expressiveness of the latest graphic technology: Beeple randomly mixes 5 core layers through programming, and the transparency of each layer is between 0 and 100, and changes are randomly generated every 0 to 30 seconds. It is reported that a total of more than 2 billion plant landscapes can be generated in real time, achieving a visual complexity that is difficult to construct by human power. Relying on his consistent technological optimism, Beeple takes artificial intelligence as an extension of creation by nature, and an inevitable result of natural evolution.
S.2122, By Beeple, 2023
kinetic sculpture with four video screens, 16K resolution, polished aluminum metal exterior, internal sapele wood frame.
video + sound, accompanied by a non-fungible token (ERC-721). 87 × 48 × 48 inches (221 × 121.9 × 121.9 cm)
Edition of 1, +1AP ©Beeple
S.2122 is Beeple’s concept of humanity’s future in the year 2122. Set within a rotating rectangular sculpture over two meters tall, it depicts a multi-unit high-rise structure standing in a futuristic ocean environment. This is the first time Beeple has integrated key elements from his previous works into a single physical sculpture, incorporating iconic visuals from his Everydays series along with the astronaut figure from Human One. The piece is also dynamic and evolving in nature, with its content continuously updating—the ocean’s water level will rise, and people inside the building will adapt accordingly. Through S.2122, Beeple conveys his enduring fascination with the future and the role of technology in shaping the world. The work highlights not only the severity of climate issues but also the resilience and strength of humanity in the face of these challenges.
Human One, By BEEPLE, 2021
kinetic sculpture with four video screens, 16K resolution, polished aluminum metal exterior, internal sapele wood frame.
Dynamic video, accompanied by a dynamically changing non-fungible token. 87 × 48 × 48 inches (221 × 121.9 × 121.9 cm)
Edition of 1, Ryan Zurrer Collection
The updating potential is also reflected in the DIGIVERSE project derived from the exhibition. In 2023, Beeple Studio launched a open call for works from digital artists around the world. The collected works will be exhibited in Beeple’s studio in Charleston, and a special unit is set up in this exhibition for public display, providing a platform for students from many art schools including the Central Academy of Fine Arts and emerging digital artists to incubate creativity, communicate and showcase themselves.
Exhibition View of Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future at Deji Art Museum, 2024
For Beeple, digital art seems to have once again regained its ambition to occupy wider public space such as art museums and commercial galleries. Especially after the NFT art collection, the power of digital art to blur the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds has been concentrated, discussions around its contribution to visual exploration, and the creative characteristics formed in its strong interaction with technology, have therefore been returned to digital art itself.
Text (CN) by Mengxi, edited (EN) by Sue/CAFA ART INFO
About the Exhibition
Beeple: Tales from a Synthetic Future
Organizer: Deji Art Museum
Senior Artistic Advisor: Hans Ulrich Obrist
Opening date: November 14, 2024
Venue: Deji Art Museum
Address: 8F, Phase II, Deji Plaza, No.18 Zhongshan Road, Nanjing, China
Image Courtesy of the Artist and Deji Art Museum.
