Artist statement 2022

Coming from the roots of photography as the first source of image automation and transforming my work through the digital revolution to arrive at the hexadecimal colour code as the fundamental building block of contemporary images, I found an excess of this code mined and circulated by the blockchain servers, ready to be up-cycled into art work. Moreover, the principles of crypto production and its multi-source legitimised through code contribution, maintained by blockchain and connected by the Internet (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, aka DAO) are remarkably reminiscent in their structure of “Organisation for Direct Democracy by Referendum” described by Joseph Beuys.

What Beuys had envisioned as the ideal human society is currently taking place on the Internet and it can produce artwork from the available data with the help of automated continuously running algorithms, the image machines created by me. Regularly supplied with data by the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, those machines produce its visual representation, but are also themselves a part of the non-narrative art production process. In our reality, this process becomes the art work, inalienably connected to the informational and financial online exchange, forming a closed digital Circuit.

Quotes about Ostarhild’s work

„The algorithm used to be called God.“
Prof. Dr. Marcus Steinweg 2019

“This work shows how mathematical information can be conserved and nevertheless produce a qualitatively different perceptible impression, if the information 'feeds’ not in a modality-specific way”.
Matthias Hofer (MIT) 2019

„On request is a new way of reading, able to oscillate between abstract characters of algorithmic hieroglyps and the spezific aesthetic of complex character strings.“
Dr. Ursula Stöbele UdK, Berlin 2014

“The spiritual in art today is the code.”
Bazon Brock 2012

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Jurgen Ostarhild
Torstrasse 96, 10117 Berlin
studio(ät)jurgenostarhild.eu

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