Expanded.art

🟦 THIS IS ME TRYING is an early version of TALE AS OLD AS TIME by Anika Meier.

"This is what I remember growing up to be like."

– Anika Meier

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn about Anika Meier and to collect THIS IS ME TRYING.

🟦 16:9 by Danilo Xhema. Everything starts and revolves around 16:9; everything revolves around the screens positioned in a physical and tangible space for existing works that can only be seen through those screens themselves.

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🟦 L’AVVENTURA by Vikki Bardot is an allegorical collection of 40 AI-created artworks that depicts a narrative of lost essence through ethereal landscapes and ghostly female forms on the verge of vanishing from sight. With intertextual references to Antonioni and Tarkovsky films, L’AVVENTURA echoes the void within our spirits, evoking feelings of disorientation in a vast landscape. It mourns the way society has let the essence of femininity and spirituality slip away, like a song once known, now fading and forgotten.

"The woman is lost and forgotten. Spirituality too. In today’s modern world, we have lost the connection with our essence. In my latest work, L’avventura, I continue to experiment with ambiguity and lack of clarity as a narrational technique. The stylistic form itself is the commentary here. The intentionally out-of-focus style, faded hues, and aged analog film textures serve as a mirror to the vanishing presence of spirituality and femininity. These sacred elements, once central to our identity, now seem distant and out of reach."

– Vikki Bardot

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🟦 OPTIONAL PLAQUES is a series of works by artist Peter Burr that play with virtual architecture, unstable capital, and the public commons of the digital age.

Drawing inspiration from constructivist art, utopian architecture, and early computer graphics techniques, Burr depicts monumental human limbs framed within rigid white-on-black scaffolds, blithely admired by a small crowd.

Known for his innovative digital art practice, Burr has recently expanded his body of work with high-profile commissions and collaborations. These include web-based projects currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA.

🟦 PIXEL CARTOGRAPHY by Element Lee. Element Lee explores the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. He creates pixel drawings with mobile phones and expands them to physical media like laser, robotic drawing, and 3D printing.

🔴 SOLD OUT

"My aesthetic foundation draws from two primary sources. One is classical Chinese drawings depicting gardens and architecture. The other is pixel art from retro computer games. I was exposed to both growing up in China: one represents tradition and the past, while the other symbolizes digital innovation and the future. This blend evokes feelings of nostalgia while also sparking thoughts about future possibilities."

– Element Lee

🟦 SEED THEORY by Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung is a series seeded from human movement, glacial textures, and the Earth as seen from above.

SEED THEORY draws inspiration from the research of the late microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Her pioneering theory of planetary symbiosis—and the Earth as a co-creative and co-regulatory system—challenges conventional views of human beings and technology as separate from nature. In her work, the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system.

In SEED THEORY, the components of Margulis’ Gaian system—the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere—are collated into a training model of views of satellites from the Earth’s exosphere. They are recomposed as terrains. Each work in the SEED THEORY series is composed of a terrain and an organism. The foregrounded sculptural, organic lines wind through the images, referencing a sensuous cybernetic organism in form and texture. The organism is a construction of interweaving human gestural data and textures from the biosphere captured during the artist’s recent field research in the Arctic. The organism and the terrain collapse vantage points of geographic scales, their contours unbound, oscillating perspectives of figure and ground. The work speculates on a possible future in which technology is not extractive of nature but an integrated, regenerative component of it.

The themes in SEED THEORY continue the artist’s research in alternative constructions of human, machine, and ecology. The work integrates gestures from the artist’s Meridian dataset—part of the training data for the next generation of the collaborative drawing system D.O.U.G.

The SEED THEORY series was incubated during the Ignota Books residency, focused on Lynn Margulis and Gaian Systems, and further explored during a research seminar hosted by The Gaia Art Foundation in 2022.

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Sougwen Chung and to collect SEED THEORY.

🟦 In the series I CHOOSE YOU!, Skye Nicolas continues his exploration of liminal spaces (defined as transitional or transformative zones of existence), leveraging ubiquitous AI-driven technology through the widely popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go. To create each work, Nicolas conceptually reframes Jannis Kounellis’ UNTITLED (12 HORSES) (1969), a landmark instance of postmodern art in which the presence of live animals was crucial to the finished piece. Here, Nicolas initiates contact with the game’s character models, summoning digitized versions of beloved Pokémon characters to life in an interactive augmented reality environment. The artist’s discerning eye and instinctive hand manipulate Pokémon Go’s AI-driven photo capture engine to carefully place, pose, and document these virtual creatures in settings consistent with Pokémon lore. The images are fed to an AI-powered application, which then recreates and renders them in emojis (a semiotic motif employed by the artist), signifying the final stage of the image-making process.

The digital canvas, engulfed in emojis, discloses the artist’s painterly roots, exuding a palpable rhythmic signature. Its expressive gestural forms and sweeping textures, reminiscent of impressionist brushwork and analog abstract paintings, beckon to be viewed in multiple planes of perception and contemplative states.

▪️ 3 NFTs
▪️ 800 EUR

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Skye Nicolas and to collect.

🟦 TRANSLATION AND ROTATION: VER A-1 X by Hein Gravenhorst

Hein Gravenhorst begins working on his computer-generated images with one or two base models, which are then developed further in various ways. One approach is through translation, where the base models are expanded horizontally or mirrored. Another method involves rotation, transforming the base models into circular patterns. In some works, he combines both techniques, utilizing both translation and rotation.

These computer-generated images are now being released as NFTs and represent a genuine continuation of his artistic output since the analog masterpieces.

In 1968, Gravenhorst, Kilian Breier, Pierre Cordier, and Gottfried Jäger presented the exhibition Generative Photography at the Kunsthaus Bielefeld. They consciously avoided depicting reality and instead developed a constructive, non-representational visual language through chemical and photographic experiments like chemigrams and luminograms. Their work bridged the gap to the computational art of their time, with rationality and systematic methods at its core.

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more and to collect Hein Gravenhorst‘s work.

🟦 Aaron Huey’s series GASOLINE GARDENS addresses the topic of climate change through decorative wallpaper. The artwork, created with AI trained on his photographic archive, invites viewers to engage with transformed images of environmental crises in their everyday spaces.

Inspired by 18th-century tapestries, GASOLINE GARDENS references a past era of global transformation by depicting historical wallpaper patterns such as chinoiserie, with its idealized exotic landscapes, and Toile de Jouy, with its pastoral scenes. In 2024, Huey incorporates these decorative formats as text prompts in a model trained on his climate change photography archive. Colorful florals intermingle with spirals of smoke, industrial refineries, and diminishing forests, blurring the lines between aesthetic appreciation and ecological awareness.

GASOLINE GARDENS is based on Huey’s project, WALLPAPER FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, which he made available as free downloads at crisiscurated.com. This integration of such imagery into domestic and public environments—from boardrooms to bedrooms—creates a persistent, if veiled, reminder of our environmental challenges.

"By using my archive as a new lens, I can untether myself from the act of capturing a singular decisive moment. I can engage in an ongoing process of exploration and creation from those seeds of the past. What emerges is a hybrid reality where what is and was converges with what is not (or cannot be), as well as what could be in some future world—a multiversal viewfinder looking through another kind of lens."

– Aaron Huey

▪️ 50 NFTs
▪️ 250 EUR

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Aaron Huey and to collect GASOLINE GARDENS.

🟦 Gottfried Jäger: PHOTO 111110.4, 2011

WHAT IS IT: This is the second NFT by Gottfried Jäger. It is the first to be minted through the artist’s wallet and released with a print: 40 x 40 cm, Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl 285, hand-signed.

WHY IT‘S WORTH COLLECTING: Under the influence of Max Bense and Herbert W. Franke, Gottfried Jäger devised a radicalised form of the image, which he first called GENERATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY in 1968 at a joint exhibition with Kilian Breier, Pierre Cordier and Hein Gravenhorst at the Kunsthaus Bielefeld.

WHAT THE ARTIST SAYS: "The term GENERATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY was introduced in 1968 with the intention of conceiving and establishing the photographic process as an image-generating 'generative system.'"

HOW IT WAS CREATED: "The PHOTO series is based on the application of the computer program Adobe Photoshop®. However, unlike usual, it does not start with a photo as the source motif; instead, the program produces its own images. It essentially plays with itself. Original formal potentials emerge without being 'disturbed' by an external image motif. What is visible is solely the syntax of the program: brightness, contrast, colors, textures, etc. Neither images (icons) nor symbols are created, but rather pure form images (indices, symptoms) formalism." – Gottfried Jäger

CURATOR: Anika Meier
COLLABORATOR: Photo Edition Berlin

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Gottfried Jäger and PHOTO.

✨ EXPANDED BEST OF 2024: NFTs

COGNITIVE CHAOS by the Japanese artist Emi Kusano is a series of 33 AI-generated images that venture into the nostalgia of a future once imagined, where brains are directly connected to devices—a concept familiar from science fiction but now echoing with new significance.

COGNITIVE CHAOS juxtaposes Japan’s 1970s obsession with the supernatural—UFOs, ghosts, and psychics—with today’s AI and brain-tech impacts. It questions how these advances blur truth and heighten distraction, urging a reevaluation of our senses in a tech-saturated world.

Kusano encourages introspection on the interplay between our changing perceptions and the evolving digital landscape, advocating for a mindful engagement with the world around us.

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Emi Kusano and her sold out collection.

✨ EXPANDED BEST OF 2024: NFTs

IN UTERO by Kevin Esherick

What is it like to be an AI? How might it see the world? What would it mean for it to be conscious? With IN UTERO, the American artist Kevin Esherick explores these questions through a series of 53 of what he calls „latent paintings“: images captured from inside the „mind“ of an AI image model. 

Society is at a point where AI attaining consciousness is a possibility in the future. This development will shape the future of humanity. What is not discussed enough in the conversation around AI is that AI beings could feel pain and suffer and experience happiness and joy, just as humans do. What might this look like?

IN UTERO provides a peek into the inner workings of an AI model’s cognitive processes and how they appear. It also serves as a metaphor for the progression of AI systems towards potential consciousness. The images were generated using „single-step diffusion,“ a technique Esherick developed to halt the AI model’s creation of images as they are just starting to take shape. Exploring the inner workings of AI models can show how such consciousness might develop and what it might look like when it arises. Trained on immeasurable quantities of data, these models contain the sum of human knowledge—not just facts, but also the myths, stories, and experiences that define human lives.

Examining the way AI models see the world can not only tell us more about humankind but also paint a portrait of the human story that captures the shared beauty of universal experiences

🟦 Visit EXPANDED.ART to learn more about Kevin Esherick and his sold out collection IN UTERO.