Cubist Guitars in Digital Color Space revisits Nick Fudge’s early digital works through the lens of contemporary Gen-AI, creating recursive feedback loops between past and future—where each cycle of reanimation generates unexpected, new outcomes.

Originally based on a 2010s animation featuring nine stylised cubist guitars, the series draws on multiple layers of reference: Picasso’s early modernist guitar constructions, Jasper Johns’s 1960s investigations into the syntax of painting, Warhol’s Pop embrace of mechanical reproduction, and Fudge’s own long-standing engagement with the materiality of digital tools.

Rather than simple updates, these new works operate as re-performances of a digital medium in flux—where AI serves not just as a generator, but as a means of probing how images, styles, and software histories repeat, distort, and evolve across time. Fudge’s broader practice—spanning painting, print, installation, and digital media—consistently engages art historical themes, using contemporary technologies such as AI not simply as tools, but as conceptual instruments for examining the memory, instability, and transformation of visual culture itself.

The collection unfolds across five works—Pure_Data_Breve_1, Pure_Data_Breve_IKB_2, Pure_Data_Breve_3, Pure_Data_Breve_4, and Pure_Data_Breve_5—each exploring a distinct facet of digital cubism. From hypnotic recursive patterns to Yves Klein Blue dreamscapes, glitch-inflected geometries, quantum spaces of rhythm and light, and vibrant fields of fractured guitars, together they form a multifaceted exploration of how digital memory and modernist traditions intersect in the age of AI.

RGB Calibration (after Jasper Johns) by Nick Fudge presents a stunning visual exploration of a singular still digital image (and its iterations) that is constantly unfolding and transforming. This animation is based on a photograph of an editioned sculpture (of a light bulb) by the American artist Jasper Johns, which represents a reproduction of a reproduction.

This work draws a connection between Jasper Johns and Duchamp, specifically Duchamp's skeptical assertion that everything happens 'in the dark' and that most ideas are in fact mere tautologies. Johns' light bulb sculpture interprets Duchamp's concept by symbolizing the 'eureka!' moment of an idea, but he intentionally leaves the bulb unplugged and unlit, symbolizing the darkness and ignorance that surrounds everything. In contrast, Fudge's work illuminates Johns' light bulb, symbolizing the electrifying potential of the digital medium. Through multicolored and prismatic iterative imaging, this animation celebrates the limitless possibilities of creating versions and reproductions.