On July 13, 2023, Feral File 2.0 will launch its new platform featuring Aaron Penne’s curated exhibition, N=12, an intentional community experiment, with twelve artists collaborating across seven time zones. This selection of generative artists will work together to create a collaborative body of work, demonstrating the ethos of Feral File 2.0.
Contemporary computer artists typically create their work with machines connected to the internet containing near-infinite information. This affords artists the capacity for infinite possibilities. Of course, it is up to the artist to take inputs and make outputs—to distill their experiences into their artwork. The computer artist’s principal tool for creation is also a means of connection. Independently toiling in geographically isolated studios, these artists are mere clicks away from direct interaction with other artists. This exhibition leans into this inherent proximity by explicitly asking twelve artists to create work while in constant dialogue with one another. In doing so, the show makes audible the “wonderfully silent conversations” between artists that Frieder Nake referred to in his foreword to Casey Reas’s “CENTURY” catalog of 2012.
For N=12, the artists had direct and active conversations with each other. Anna Lucia, Nadieh Bremer, Daniel Catt, Reva Fan, Elsif, Lia Coleman, Piter Pasma, RalenArc, Bart Simons, Nicole Vella, ippsketch, and Melissa Wiederrecht convened and collaborated online over several months, sharing their code and artistic processes while fostering a co-creative microcosm enriched by weekly meetings, aesthetic critiques, code reviews, and vibrant discussion. In doing so, they generated work with a dozen distinct fingerprints.
