For sixty days,
Herzog takes
over the HEK
(House of
Electronic Arts)
homepage where
it becomes a
site of
continuous
algorithmic
execution. One
work exhibited
each day,
fullscreen,
running in
realtime, which
is to say
perpetually
generating
itself. There is
never a static
frame to
capture, no
single moment
that recurs. The
browser window
is not a
viewport onto
documentation
but the work's
actual
substrate: HTML,
CSS, JavaScript,
SVG rendered
live on any
screen that
encounters it.
This is a daily
takeover of a
museum's online
space,
the
institutional
website
transformed
into
digital
exhibition
surface.
Open
hek.ch
and
encounter
the work
before
anything
else, at
full
scale,
without
mediation,
in its
fully
digitally
native
form.
Leander Herzog has selected sixty works spanning a decade of practice, from 2015 to 2025. What distinguishes this presentation is its refusal of the archive as static repository. These sixty works exist across digital platforms and blockchains. The distributed nature of onchain practice typically fragments viewing into platform-specific encounters. Runtime proposes consolidation: all of it, accessible in sequence, executable in the browser, without navigation between arbitrary ecosystems.
Herzog's approach to computation has always resisted spectacle. There is no apparatus beyond the browser, no blockchain mechanic foregrounded as conceptual alibi. The constraint is deliberate: complex results from simple rules, the brutalist position Herzog has maintained throughout his practice. Code operates as medium in the same sense that oil or marble might, with specific material properties, resistances, affordances. These works respond to viewport dimensions, readjusting composition when the display window changes. They respond to temporal conditions, shifting with diurnal cycles or evolving over days, they exist as systems rather than files, each execution a singular instantiation of underlying logic.
Each work carries provenance inscribed on its respective chain. The selection is populated by familiar collector addresses, 0xfff, Andreas Gysin, Kim Asendorf, Kevin Abosch, HEK, ZKM, LeRandom, Snowfro, Marius Watz, Celadoor, alongside anonymous wallets. This is not incidental. The network of collectors maps a decade of relationships within generative art: early supporters, collaborators, peers whose practices intersect with Herzog's. Ownership here functions less as possession than as participation in a sustained conversation and an emerging movement.
The selection of works shown is not chronological but relational, tracing how ideas migrate between bodies of work, how formal challenges resurface and resolve across years of iteration and refinement. Agglo as individual generative outputs leading to synchronised Agglo on a skyscraper in the UK; 1000 True Fans anticipates participatory Infinite Garden in New York; the DOM trilogy, a collaboration with Milian Mori that was conceived as commission for HEK Basel, shares material sensibility with Heatsink; Downloads establishes the conditions for smart-contract-based Abo; Microwave was the study and Fract its conclusion. Watched in sequenced survey, what emerges is not a retrospective but a map of recursive investigation. Some works demanded inclusion by virtue of their position in the practice: Time (2018) could not be absent; Shipping marked Herzog's first interactive mint; Returns, his first longform series. Others appear because of formal resonances that reveal themselves only in proximity, like the trajectory from Berg through Fitness to Igel.
– Dr. Mimi Nguyen
- Leander Herzog] (b. 1984) artist based in Switzerland, creating images with code since 2006. His practice explores the tension between algorithmic simplicity and emergent complexity. Works have been acquired by ZKM Karlsruhe, HEK Basel, and Francisco Carolinum Linz.
- HEK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) is dedicated to digital culture and new art forms at the interface of art and media technology.
Please touch and click, most works are interactive.