Current Exhibitions
Deji Art Museum
OPENED ON NOVEMBER 14, 2024
SENIOR ADVISOR: HANS ULRICH OBRIST
TALES FROM A SYNTHETIC FUTURE
Beeple’s first-ever solo museum exhibition, Tales from a Synthetic Future, is now on view at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. This landmark exhibition, presented in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist, explores the evolution of Beeple’s groundbreaking digital work and the rapidly shifting landscape of digital art.
Spanning his entire career, the exhibition features some of Beeple’s most iconic pieces—including Everydays, HUMAN ONE, and S.2122—alongside brand-new works created exclusively for the show. Designed as a fully immersive experience, Tales from a Synthetic Future examines the collision of past, present, and future within Beeple’s practice, showcasing his journey from early hand-drawn sketches to cutting-edge kinetic installations that blend digital video with sculptural elements.
For the first time, visitors can step inside a recreation of Beeple’s Charleston studio, offering an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at his creative process. The exhibition also uncovers a “digital archaeology” of Beeple’s early experiments, shedding light on the projects that shaped his distinctive artistic voice.
FEATURED ARTWORKS
- Everydays: A collection of daily digital creations that Beeple has been producing since 2007, charting his artistic evolution.
- HUMAN ONE: A kinetic sculpture combining digital video and three-dimensional form, featuring an explorer endlessly traversing shifting landscapes.
- S.2122: A dynamic sculpture meditating on climate change and our place in an imagined future, blending digital video with physical elements.
- Exponential Growth: A generative video work exploring the intersection of nature and technology, depicting a vine spiraling skyward in a constant cycle of growth, bloom, and decay.
GIBBES MUSEUM OF ART
OPENED ON DECEMBER 13, 2024 – APRIL 27, 2025
The Beeple exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, will run from December 13, 2024, to April 27, 2025. This exhibition showcases four of Beeple’s latest kinetic sculptures, offering a unique blend of technology, art, and nature. Each piece challenges traditional art forms and invites visitors to engage with the digital world in new ways.
The Tree of Knowledge (2024) is an interactive sculpture that displays live news feeds, stock tickers, and cryptocurrency prices across rotating screens. Visitors can manipulate the flow of information, creating a dynamic experience that reflects on the overwhelming nature of modern media.
S.2122 (2023) combines digital video and sculpture to explore climate change and humanity’s future. The piece features an industrial building overtaken by nature, symbolizing the impact of environmental change and how nature may reclaim what humans have built.
Exponential Growth (2023) is a towering column of ever-changing digital flowers, commissioned by the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. The work explores the themes of growth, decay, and nature’s fleeting beauty, with the flowers constantly evolving in color and form.
B.2124 (2024) envisions an underwater city 100 years from now, blending generative video and sculpture to explore technology’s coexistence with nature. Shifting visuals of robotic fish, glowing coral, and algae-powered turbines create a dynamic, ever-changing scene, offering a hopeful vision of a sustainable future.
LINKS
www.gibbesmuseum.org
www.artnet.com
www.nftnow.com
www.themonentary.org
Past Exhibitions
M+ (Hong Kong)
DECEMBER 9, 2022 – JUNE 11, 2023
CURATOR: SUNNY CHEUNG
HUMAN ONE (2021), installed in the museum’s Focus Gallery, is Beeple’s first sculptural work. It is a four-channel video sculpture that focuses on the journey of a mysterious figure, informally named the ‘traveler’. This figure tirelessly treks forward through a virtual landscape capable of evolving from a dystopian war zone to a benevolent jungle and everything in between.
This seemingly endless digital world is confined within a physical box constructed from four LED panels. The structure is a virtual version of the time-traveling portal known as the TARDIS in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which contains a space much larger than the surrounding confines of the box.
Indeed, HUMAN ONE draws attention to the border between reality and virtuality through two structural devices, one is the rotating mechanical box that allows us only glimpses into the metaverse. The other is the synchronicity of time. Time as a technological tool is so subtle as to almost recede into the background, but the synced subtle color filter applied to the piece linking the time of day between physical and virtual becomes the umbilical cord connecting the two realms—the virtual and the real.
The magic that holds the piece together is the application of the technique of projection mapping, commonly seen as high-power light projected to the side of buildings with perspective correction so as to cause the video played on them to look as if they fit correctly. In HUMAN ONE, the physical aluminum pillars on the outside of the sculpture become replaced as a 3D render inside the virtual realm, creating a trompe l’oeil effect akin to the phenomenological conundrum of staring at a drawing of a transparent-sided box. As a result, the box feels present both inside and out.
LINKS
www.mplus.org.hk
www.mplus.org.hk
news.artnet.com
www.mplus.org.hk
CASTELLO DI RIVOLI
APRIL 24, 2022 – NOVEMBER 27, 2022
CURATOR: CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV
As part of the EXPRESSIONS exhibition program that characterizes the activities of Castello di Rivoli in the years 2021-2022, Castello di Rivoli presents an international museum preview of HUMAN ONE.
A kinetic video sculpture existing in both the physical and digital realms with perpetual dynamic animation of a person resembling an astronaut traversing an ever-changing landscape. Beeple created the artwork in association with new blockchain technologies known as “smart contracts.” In this case, the artist can modify the work remotely over time. Therefore, the viewer will have a unique experience of HUMAN ONE every time he returns to see the work of art.
The person walking in an ever-changing landscape represents the first human in the metaverse. HUMAN ONE will be presented in visual dialogue with one of the most important paintings by Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Study for Portrait IX , 1956-1957, from the Cerruti Collection at Castello di Rivoli. In the unique setting of the Manica Lunga of the Castello di Rivoli, 147 meters long and six meters wide, the dynamism of the character walking in HUMAN ONE contrasts with the staticity of the man portrayed in Bacon’s painting, which reflects the existentialist anxieties of the modern era of after the Second World War, when it was created. With Study for Portrait IX Bacon portrays his subject with no hands and no agency, sitting in a chair against an emerald green background within a white linear geometric structure that Bacon often used to frame his figures.
In contrast, Beeple’s “astronaut” depicted in the artist’s evolving landscape is constantly moving, while the audience stands still. HUMAN ONE represents a new era of digital art. The journey of the “astronaut” invites the viewer to consider the relationship between their digital identity and their physical identity.
LINKS
www.castellodirivoli.org
www.castellodirivoli.org
www.artnews.com
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art
JULY 28, 2023 – MARCH 17, 2024
CURATOR: XUXA RODRIGUEZ
From July 28, 2023, to March 17, 2024, HUMAN ONE made its U.S. museum debut at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. This hybrid digital sculpture combines four 16K resolution screens within a sleek metal frame, displaying an ever-changing digital landscape—a symbol of humanity’s first steps into the metaverse.
Originally sold for $29 million at Christie’s in 2021, HUMAN ONE is never static. Beeple has committed to remotely updating the piece throughout his life, ensuring it evolves with each new exhibition.
Following showings at M+ in Hong Kong and Castello di Rivoli in Italy, this exhibition at Crystal Bridges marked an important moment for digital art in U.S. museums.
“Unlike traditional artworks frozen in time, HUMAN ONE is an ongoing conversation—one that I will continue adding meaning to over time.” – Beeple
LINKS
crystalbridges.org
www.artnews.com
www.forbes.com
www.nftculture.com
