A Quick Intro: What a Difference a Continent Makes…
This autumn, artist Bård Ionson is pulling off a fascinating double-act, presenting work in two wildly different exhibitions that perfectly capture the sublime and the wonderfully ridiculous poles of the digital art world. In one corner, we have a pioneering, interactive experience in the high desert of Texas. In the other, a Parisian gallery dives headfirst into the bizarre, spam-filled muck of the AI-driven internet. Buckle up for a quick tour of digital art’s high-minded aspirations and its hilariously low-brow reality.
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1. High-Tech Tango in the High Desert: The Marfa Premiere
Set against the starkly beautiful backdrop of West Texas, the Art Blocks Marfa Weekend (October 16-19, 2025) is more than just an art fair; it’s a “milestone gathering” for the global generative art scene. This year’s event is particularly momentous, serving as the “final major community celebration” for the platform’s foundational ‘Art Blocks 500’ era. Into this high-stakes, high-desert environment, Bård Ionson is premiering a groundbreaking installation that is part tech-demo, part performance, and all parts magic.
The experience is built as a collaborative act. A visitor doesn’t just look at the art—they become an active partner in its creation. As Ionson puts it, the work is a “tango between human imagination and machine generation,” and with this piece, “the viewer steps onto the dance floor.” You interact directly with a real-time Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a form of artificial intelligence, and through your engagement, you co-create a unique, ephemeral artwork that will never exist again.
The true innovation, however, is the elegant bridge Ionson builds between the fleeting digital moment and the permanent physical world. Once your interaction is complete, you receive a signed, archival-quality physical print of your one-of-a-kind creation. This isn’t just a souvenir; it’s a “Proof of Experience.” More importantly, the print itself is the key. Embedded within it is a unique URL that allows you, and only you, to mint your personal artwork as a permanent NFT. This clever process forces a fascinating question: where does the art “truly lives—in the code, on the wall, or on the chain?”
This is the beautiful, pioneering side of generative art—a thoughtful, singular experience that creates a permanent artifact from a momentary collaboration between human and machine.
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2. Meanwhile, in Paris: An Ode to Spam and Slop
A sharp pivot from the curated elegance of Marfa, the group exhibition “From Spam to Slop” (Paris, Oct 9 – Nov 16, 2025) celebrates the gloriously chaotic, unfiltered, and often deeply weird visual culture spawned by artificial intelligence. Featuring Bård Ionson among a roster of digital artists, the show dissects the two dominant strains of internet absurdity that clog our feeds.
SPAM ART: The Art of Controlled Trolling
Born from the crypto-art communities of Discord and Twitter, this movement is a gleeful mix of “Dada and trolling.” The aesthetic is instantly recognizable: humor, loud colors (couleurs criardes), and delirious typography, often featuring the iconic SPAM tin. Their goal is simple: “laugh and spam!” In practice, this means flooding the Centre Pompidou’s NFT collection with unsolicited works or completely saturating hashtags on X, turning the internet back into a playground where they can infiltrate anywhere they aren’t invited.
SLOP: The Glorious Bizarro-World of AI
If SPAM ART is a deliberate prank, “Slop” is the industrial-grade runoff. The exhibition defines it as the “deluge of low-cost and mediocre AI content that floods the web.” This is the truly bizarre stuff that feels both repulsive and hypnotic: think “Jesus as a shrimp” (Jesus en crevette), “Trump rebuilding Gaza,” or giant, insatiable babies. This content, often related to the phenomenon of “brainrot,” is churned out by veritable content factories that exploit our shared cultural references to produce viral images for profit and manipulation.
Ultimately, the exhibition reveals the sprawling “network of bots, humans, and platforms” that allows this visual strangeness to thrive. It holds up a mirror to the absurd, often profitable, and deeply weird content that now fills our screens and asks a simple, provocative question: at what point does this industrial-scale absurdity become art?
Ionson’s presence in this show forces a compelling question: is the artist who crafts a bespoke dance with AI in the desert also an anthropologist of the digital swamp, reminding us that both the sublime and the slop spring from the same algorithmic source?
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The Takeaway: An Artist for All Seasons
Ultimately, Bård Ionson’s work this fall isn’t a double-act; it’s a unified thesis. He seems to argue that to truly understand the digital age, one must engage with its entire ecosystem—from the profound, one-on-one dance with an AI in Marfa to the industrial-grade absurdity of the Paris slop. By operating at both extremes, Ionson provides a rare and vital perspective, proving himself not just an artist for all seasons, but a crucial cartographer of our strange new algorithmic world.
