Goethe-Institut presents "Complex", the first retrospective of Kim Asendorf, one of the most prominent artists in a renaissance of code-based digital art, on Saturday and Sunday from 6pm to 10pm.
On display across various spaces including the garden will be some of his seminal works created during the past four years.
With roots in Net Art, Asendorf's practice sits at the intersection of conceptual visual systems, algorithms and data manipulation. Writing his own code and contracts, his work merges generative art, glitch aesthetics and conceptual approaches to digital media.
Widely recognised for pioneering the pixel-sorting algorithm he first shared on GitHub in 2010, he has consistently evolved the boundaries of digital art. For him, the pixel is the atomic unit of digital art.
He draws on the legacies of modern and contemporary artists who worked with systems, processes and emergent visual forms, including pioneers of generative and algorithmic art.
His approach echoes minimal and conceptual art practices, including instruction-based art, chance operations and open processes; as well as abstract and Op Art, exploring geometry, seriality and patterned compositions.
Provoking critical reflection on software, networks and online culture, Asendorf continues the work of early internet practitioners. Merging chance and randomness, errors and glitches, repetition and seriality, and signal and noise, his practice exposes the digital medium's foundations and probes the conditions of contemporary digital media.
Since 2021, he has predominantly worked with moving visual systems which are complex, absorbing, pulsing and mesmerising.
The upcoming show will see Monogrid (2021), one of his first blockchain-based works featuring shifting grids and pixelated black-and-white patterns, while Sabotage (2022) visualises the interplay between order and chaos. Alternate (2023) shows a growing complexity in compositional layering and colour interplay, while PXL DEX (January 2025) extends his abstract animations into architectonic, dense and object-like 3D systems.
There is no admission fee. Visit goethe.de/thailand.
