Kim Asendorf: Complex

Asendorf is one of the most prominent artists in a renaissance of code-based digital art. With roots in net art, his practice sits at the intersection of conceptual visual systems, algorithms, and data manipulation. Writing his own code and contracts, his work merges generative art, glitch aesthetics, and conceptual approaches to digital media. Widely recognized for pioneering the pixel-sorting algorithm he first shared on GitHub in 2010, he has consistently evolved the boundaries of digital art.

For Asendorf, the pixel is the atomic unit of digital art. He draws on the legacies of modern and contemporary artists who worked with systems, processes, and emergent visual forms, including pioneers of generative and algorithmic art such as Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, Lillian Schwartz, Herbert W. Franke and Frieder Nake. His approach echoes minimal and conceptual art practices, including instruction-based art, chance operations, and open processes, as well as abstract and op art, exploring geometry, seriality, and patterned compositions. Provoking critical reflection on software, networks, and online culture, he continues the work of early internet practitioners such as JODI. Merging chance and randomness, errors and glitches, repetition and seriality, signal and noise, his practice exposes the digital medium’s foundations and probes the conditions of contemporary digital media. Since 2021 he predominantly works with moving visual systems which are complex, absorbing, pulsing and mesmerizing.

The solo exhibition Complex at the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok is his first retrospective, covering the years from 2021 until the beginning of 2025. Unfolding across various spaces within the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok, including its garden, the show encompasses some of Asendorf’s seminal works.

Among the series on display are: Monogrid (2021), one of his first blockchain-based works, establishes a minimal yet mesmerizing aesthetic, with shifting grids and pixelated black-and-white patterns that evoke the language of early computer art. The series will be installed at the Goethe-Institut as an audiovisual multi-channel version. Sabotage (2022) visualizes the interplay between order and chaos, with rows shifting and a ‘saboteur ’moving pixels to manipulate patterns of grids, lines, and gradients, producing ever-changing arrangements. Alternate (2023) shows a growing complexity in compositional layering and color interplay with pulsing glitch effects and dynamic distortion. PXL DEX (January 2025) extends his abstract animations into architectonic, dense and object-like 3D systems.

Leading up to the exhibition, Kim Asendorf will be conducting a peer-to-peer workshop on code-based digital art at the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok. The working group’s exhibition will follow later this year.