The Future Imaginary

A packed room at the opening of Beeple’s first museum show, “Tales of a Synthetic Future,” is watching him make a new work in real time. On a screen, a livestream of his computer monitor, which he’s operating from a DJ-like booth within the exhibition at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, reveals every drag and click of his cursor. As we observe, the artist sets about creating the 6406th addition to his “Everyday” series, an expansive body of work that he began on May 1, 2007, defined by the ritual of making a new digital artwork daily as a simple creative exercise.

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Now, he’s dragging a 3-D rendering of his own disembodied head from a drop-down menu. He positions it at the center of his canvas. Suddenly, a cheeseburger appears. He chuckles to himself, shrugs, and then drags it so that it’s perched atop the head. Moments later, the single cheeseburger turns into two, and he moves each one over either eye. It goes on like this for about an hour. On completion, the cheeseburger-eyed self-portrait has an old-school computer monitor balanced on top of its head while characters and memes gather on a grassy knoll at the base of its neck—including the viral baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng; Pikachu; a Gameboy; Pepe the Frog; and the clown-head emoji. A lone human figure, diminutive next to the chaotic, looming effigy, approaches it, staring upwards, as if discovering an ancient edifice in some unexplored world.

In action, Beeple has a considered way of compiling such characters against his typical enigmatic backdrop, ambiguous as to place and point in time. I wonder if he’s telling himself a story in his head as he builds out compositions such as #6406. “Definitely,” says the artist, 43. “The concept of this piece was reflecting the exhibition itself: a giant Beeple head, surrounded by a bunch of influences and pieces.” He compares the process of assembling the “Everydays” to painting. “Move this around here. Move this and place the light here. Change the stature,” he describes a train of thought. “Those are choices versus you making an algorithm, that’s just a different kind of process.” The “hamburger eyes” in #6406, he adds, began as a joke, “then everybody around me was like ‘Yeah!’” Previous “Everdays” have also arisen from a participatory element, inspired by input from live audiences.

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The origin of Beeple’s fame, after all, was crowd-sourced. The artist, born in Wisconsin as Mike Winkelmann and now based out of Charleston, North Carolina, majored in computer science at Purdue University before getting into graphic design and ultimately embarking on his current career arc. He grew a sizable online following from sharing each one of the “Everyday” series for more than a decade. But he remained under the radar of the art world establishment until early 2021, when, amid the first wave of Web3 craze, an NFT of the first 5,000 “Everydays” sold at Christie’s for a staggering $69.3 million. Only then did art world heavyweights swoop in, eager to imbue the work with intellectual and academic heft. To wit, Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist served as the show’s curator. In an opening-day panel, former Documenta curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev described reaching out to Beeple after getting wind of the sale. In turn, the two developed a friendship, with him offering insight as to the dynamics of the digital art community, and her shedding light as to the art historical lineage relevant to his oeuvre. Beeple admitted that, until recently, he had actively avoided art historical knowledge out of apprehension that it would “taint” his artistic process—but his attitude has since changed. “I think the irony of not wanting to learn art history is that of course I was affected by art history, whether I wanted to explicitly learn it or not,” he says. “Now, I want to understand art history because I don’t want to repeat that. The role of an artist is to make something that you’ve never seen before…If I don’t know history, then I might inadvertently be recreating something that I think is new and novel, but was actually done 40 years ago.”

In the museum, thousands of “Everydays” are projected nearly 360-degrees across the walls of one room, scrolling upward toward a mirrored ceiling that makes the whole spectacle feel that much more infinite. Among the predominant themes are monumental medleys of pop-culture imagery (corporate logos are a common sight, as is Jabba the Hutt), as well as the narrative trope of a small figure appearing to stumble across it in a strange landscape; the blending of digital and natural objects (in one, a green apple floats in front of a QR-code box; in another, a giant robotic horse transverses a tree-studded landscape below a shimmering cosmic body); and a rotation of memes-of-the-moment (see, Moo-Deng, and the Hawk-Tuah girl).

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Before encountering the “Everydays” blitz, guests are introduced to a brief survey of Beeple’s artistic exploits as a recent grad, including an Office Space-reminiscent short starring his friends and abstract videos derived from brightly colored, cartoonish hand-rendered drawings. This early experimentation captures the artist's oddball sense of humor and vibrant aesthetic choices as translated into emerging technologies—now the defining traits of his mature work.

In the past few years, Beeple has also engineered a number of hypnotic sculpture-videos dubbed kinetic sculptures, three of which are on view in “Tales of a Synthetic Future.” All of these take shape as large-scale rectangular prisms that rotate as digital animations on each side seamlessly blend into each other, creating the illusion of a 3-D scene playing out within it. With these, Beeple can periodically update the videos so that a single work can change over time, usually with each new instance that it’s exhibited. This feels especially apt for the likes of S.2122, 2023, which depicts sort of a post-climate change apartment complex in the year 2122, flanked by fleets of drones and several feet of water at its base. Beeple sees this as one potential manifestation of humans’ adaptations to the warming planet. “The idea that technology and nature is some zero sum game, where one has to be hurt for the other to [thrive], is a very un-nuanced way of looking at the relationship between those two things that I don’t think is indicative of reality,” he says, adding that he believes that technology will “eventually” solve the climate change crisis. Or, in the array of less ideal scenarios than that, at least help to significantly mitigate its effects.

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Still, a second kinetic sculpture, Human One, 2021, with its fifth iteration debuting at the Deji Museum, seems to envision the future as a rather grim place. Here, an explorer protagonist, donning a space suit, marches through a succession of disturbing scenes: landscapes of deteriorating buildings and tattered flags; angry crowds protesting AI. (Granted, earlier versions of Human One portrayed at least a few more idyllic-looking scenarios.) In subsequent updates, more and more of the explorer’s appendages have been replaced by robotic ones. This latest version sees them without most of a leg and frayed wires dangling where their forearm should be.

I wonder what Beeple’s thoughts are on dystopia—and whether we’re in one, or veering toward it—with many believing that our technology is accelerating at a pace faster than individuals and societies can adapt to it. “I wouldn’t say I’m an optimist or a pessimist,” he says. “I think that the future will be kind of how things are now. There are good things happening in the world, but there’s also bad things, obviously, and I think that will continue.” But his ultimate prediction, like his artwork, is all the more reason to let our human imaginations run wild. “What will happen in the future, I think, will be very weird. As technologies continue to cross-pollinate and commingle, weird things will happen that we can’t possibly predict. That’s the thing I’m trying to convey.”

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‍“Beeple: “Tales of a Synthetic Future” is on view through late 2025 at the Deji Art Museum in Deji Plaza, 18 Zhongshan Road, Phase II, 8th Floor, Xuanwu District, Nanjing, China.

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