Art Basel Miami 2025: XCOPY, Kim Asendorf, and Joe Pease
Nguyen Wahed presents three solo presentations mapping how temporal structures condition digital consciousness. XCOPY, Kim Asendorf, and Joe Pease articulate resonant propositions about how cyclical temporality, algorithmic process, and looped duration reorganize perception, value, and everyday experience.
XCOPY’s Coin Laundry (2025) extends the artist’s long-standing interrogation of digital value and speculative culture. Following Guillaume Bijl’s institutional transformations, the laundromat installation becomes a stage for ritual, initiation, and predetermined loss; a place where immaterial architectures meet material residue. Within this reimagined system, participants enter an ephemeral network, a constellation destined to dissolve. It is a meditation on centralised authority and conditional value, where autonomy persists right up to its enforced disappearance.
Kim Asendorf's Raster und Spectrum (2025) proposes radical simplification as generative condition. Four cardinal directions, two brushes (geometric grid, chromatic mutation), minimal rules yielding maximal complexity. Each instantiation produces unrepeatable configuration: fifteen years of inquiry distilled into how temporal progression inscribes as hue, how constraint enables rather than limits. Direction changes occur deliberately slowly, creating contemplative windows. Three phenomenological modes emerge: dimensional bending (topology as perceptual hallucination), spectrum trajectories (cosmic paths through chromatic space), hybrid synthesis. Pixel-sorting demonstrations and interactive stations enact his open-source ethos - technique multiplying through collective use counter to scarcity economics.
Joe Pease constructs video works where everyday urban environments achieve hypnotic density through temporal manipulation. Parking lots, crosswalks - spaces capitalism renders purely functional - become surreal revelation sites through obsessive post-production layering. People move in impossible synchronization, multiple instances flood frames, objects appear according to inexplicable yet inevitable logic. Loops refuse narrative progression, suspending viewers in perpetual present-tense, generating perceptual oscillation between immersion and critical distance. VHS-textured aesthetics evoke memory's phenomenology. The upcoming commission for the presentation at the fair presents a new video work as expanded fragments of single cosmos, each maintaining hypnotic self-sufficiency while suggesting larger narrative universe.
This triadic investigation maps digital consciousness through temporal architectures: exhaustion of speculative cycles, contemplation of algorithmic emergence, suspension of looped mundanity. Resolution perpetually defers, washing never cleanses, algorithms never exhaust generative capacity, loops never conclude. This proposition suggests digital existence operates through perpetual incompletion or collective illusion, finding meaning not in conclusion but in sustained attention to process itself.
About the artists:
XCOPY is a London-based pseudonymous digital artist whose work defines the visual and philosophical core of crypto art. Among the firsts to release blockchain works in 2018, he developed an aesthetic of digital decay: glitched loops and neon spectres exploring mortality, alienation, and the absurdity of value in the networked age. Operating between technology and satire, XCOPY’s work both critiques and embodies crypto culture, reflecting on speculation, anonymity, and authorship. His influence extends beyond individual pieces, helping shape the conceptual and economic frameworks of the NFT movement, including the principle of on-chain artist royalties.
Kim Asendorf is a German visual artist based in Bremen who employs experimental and conceptual strategies to craft abstract animations, images, and sculptures through automation and algorithms. He holds an MFA from Kunsthochschule Kassel and has exhibited globally at ZKM Karlsruhe, Transmediale Berlin, Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, Edith-Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, HeK Basel, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Kunsthalle Zurich, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, The Photographers' Gallery London, and festivals including LEAP, NCCA Yekaterinburg, Eyebeam, NIMK. He pioneered the pixel-sorting algorithm released open-source in 2012, used by thousands of artists globally. His practice investigates per-pixel construction of screen-based reality as ontological inquiry, creating worlds that mix simplicity with complexity in perpetual generative unfolding.
Joe Pease is an Australian-born, self-taught video artist residing in Southern California. He minted his first crypto artwork on Ethereum in May 2021 and methodically released twenty-two one-of-one video works over three years, establishing reputation for unique ability to capture the frighteningly absurd and oddly familiar reality of human experience. His work employs filmmaking techniques and motion graphics software to create complex digital artworks characterized by meticulous layering and temporal manipulation. In November 2024, Pease completed residency at Glitch Marfa gallery, culminating in Everything vs Nothing exhibition during Art Blocks Weekend. His practice blends Kafka-esque anxiety with skateboard video casualness, proposing patient observation as resistance to attention economy acceleration.
Coin Laundry by XCOPY is presented in partnership with Shape.
Raster und Spektrum by Asendorf is presented with support from AbsenLive, Brompton Technology, Fuse Technical Group, and Superlumenary.
Pease's video work is presented with support from Ventana, MegapixelVR, Fuse Technical Group, and Superlumenary.