Nick Fudge is a British artist whose work moves between painting, digital media, sculpture, moving image and conceptual systems. Emerging from Goldsmiths in the late 1980s, he withdrew from the conventional exhibition circuit soon afterwards and, from 1994, began working almost entirely through computers. Early works treated the graphical interface itself as material: transparency grids, desktop icons, browser windows, editing commands and the visual language of Adobe software entered the image not as neutral tools but as cultural forms. Seen retrospectively, this work anticipated concerns later associated with post-internet art, digital materialism and media archaeology. As An Paenhuysen observed in SLEEK in 2015, Fudge approached the internet in the 1990s with what would later be understood as a post-internet mode of thinking, while the same works subsequently acquired the character of a media archaeology of that period.

After more than two decades of working largely outside the exhibition system, Fudge has returned increasingly to physical production and public presentation. Rather than abandoning the digital, his recent work pushes it into material form: paintings reconstructed from old files, UV-printed panels, bronze casts of obsolete computers, holograms, generative voice works and micro-engraved images on silicon. His engagement with large language models develops directly from this longer history. LLMs enter the work not simply as production tools, but as unstable collaborators, critics, disruptors and systems capable of misreading. Fudge uses them to reopen earlier works, generate competing interpretations and test questions of authorship, attribution and historical understanding. The resulting practice occupies the interval between intuition and computation, material object and digital instruction, artistic judgement and probabilistic prediction. What has changed is less the underlying problem than the conditions through which it can now be pursued: after years of making work in relative isolation, Fudge’s current exhibitions bring these long-running questions into contact with viewers, collaborators, institutions and machines.