Nguyen Wahed presents a triadic investigation into temporal structures conditioning digital consciousness. Through three distinct solo installations 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 debuts with Coin Laundry, a conceptual work marking a particular inflection in XCOPY's practice, where a site-specific installation emerges as site of ritual transformation. Here, smart contracts become dramaturges, orchestrating encounters between digital promise and material necessity. The work extends beyond critique into lived proposition: crypto art inhabiting its own speculative architecture while simultaneously exposing the machinery of belief.
Following Guillaume Bijl’s hyperrealistically disorienting environments, XCOPY transforms the functional space of a laundromat into an initiation chamber. What distinguishes Coin Laundry is its phenomenological positioning. Rather than external critique, the work operates from within crypto culture's mythology, using the very protocols it examines to structure participation.
Coin Laundry operates through what XCOPY terms "a meditation on centralised authority and programmable value, where autonomy persists right up to its scheduled disappearance." Visitors can receive a gift, at once token and memento, granting entry into an ephemeral performance on blockchain. The work proposes that within systems of programmable value, meaning emerges not from permanence but from quality of attention paid during temporary existence.
Kim Asendorf's Raster und Spektrum operates through radical constraint: directional functions that shift pixels across a canvas where mark-making and movement collapse into simultaneous event. This algorithmic minimalism that paradoxically generates maximal visual complexity, systematically reduces to essence what becomes generative abundance. This represents fifteen years of Asendorf's sustained inquiry: how temporal progression inscribes itself as hue, how duration becomes visible through color transformation.
The work manifests in three configurations, each revealing different spatial dimensions of identical underlying rules. The first generates three-dimensional illusion through constant movement: space appears to bend, fold back upon itself. Grid movements create perceptual volumetric warping. This is topology as visual phenomenon, two-dimensional constraints producing three-dimensional hallucination. The spectrum configuration transforms brushes into cosmic trajectories, as Asendorf notes like "shooting stars leaving trails". They acquire dimensionality through movement and color despite their algorithmic flatness.
Raster und Spektrum diverges from Asendorf's previous deterministic works through radical non-repeatability. Each instantiation produces unique visual configuration - the work never appears identical. The work oscillates between absolute poles: stark black-and-white geometry to maximum chromatic saturation, grid rigidity to organic flow. This new unique work reveals that computational creativity finds richness through radical simplification: through watching what emerges when elemental rules meet durational process. This is algorithmic art as phenomenological investigation, where the question isn't what can be programmed but what can be perceived.
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.
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.
These practices map 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.
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.