Siebren Versteeg

Siebren Versteeg (born August 5, 1971) is an American artist known for his painting and video works created through digital processes. His multivalent practice responds to the technology of our time and the way we consume and deploy those technologies.

Heralded by Vulture as “chaotic but illuminating”, the magazine declared Versteeg the idol of “every Harry Potter-loving/Hackers-watching/anti-capitalist computer geek”. Versteeg's work often relies on ready-made, online data sources for part of its media, with websites like Google, Flickr, and Wikipedia frequently collaborating with Versteeg’s code. Throughout his career, Versteeg has playfully interacted with constructed identities and painterly abstraction through the use of code. Versteeg prefers to code in Lingo.

The artist is known to re-articulate familiar presentation formats and information systems popularized online, “ultimately jamming their promise of stability and ubiquity”. Drawing attention to the variety of opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s work often intervenes between mass media and its end consumer For example, the artist has been known to use recognizable brand identifiers from major companies, such as Napster and Coca-Cola, to deliver a pithy comment, or the day’s headlines from the AP Newswire. In one series of the artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code to paint over the day’s front page of a credible newspaper using brushstrokes programmed to mimic an Abstract Expressionist style.