Daily Times (Performer: The National) (2020)

Overview

Siebren Versteeg is a multi-media artist who creates interactive installations by processing digital information, generating codes, manipulating algorithms and allowing the computer to create artworks from images it pulls from the internet on subjects specified by the artist. His work touches critically on the vast distribution of digital imagery as well as the tension between creative control and the random stream of internet images. He balances both choice and chance while responding to and altering online content.
 
For Art in the Age of Anxiety, Versteeg created Daily Times (Performer: The National) (2020), a new version of Daily Times (2012), an algorithmically generated composition that downloads a scan of the front page of the New York Times. Daily Times (Performer: The National) is informed by a daily download of the front page of The National, the UAE's leading English-language newspaper. Over the course of 24 hours, on-screen imagery slowly develops, bridging the material world of information (print as well as painting) and the data-driven sphere of online communication. The work can fetch the image at a specific time each day, at which point the composition starts afresh and the 'painting' cycle begins again. Each day the colour palette from the daily newspaper image changes, as does the generative cycle of the 'brushstrokes' that are carried out by the software.