Fudge/AI XOR

Working under the nom de plume Fudge/AI XOR, Nick Fudge continues his long-standing investigation into the conditions of image-making and perception through the evolving logic of the digital medium. His AI-assisted practice revisits and reconfigures earlier works dating from the 1990s, treating software tools as assisted readymades. In this process, the interface becomes both subject and instrument—a transcendental surface through which the digital artwork reappears in a new form.

Drawing from Kantian ideas of mediation and the limits of intuition, Fudge transforms Photoshop's internal operations—its commands, layers, and generative functions—into agents of recomposition. Each re-edit is less a reproduction than a philosophical experiment in re-presentation—a test of how form and meaning arise when an image is reprocessed through successive technological epochs.

Across thirty years of practice, these recursive transformations bridge time, producing a continuum in which the past and present coexist as potential states within the same digital field. The works oscillate between mechanical automation and aesthetic judgment, between the hand and the algorithm. Fudge’s hand-drawn simulacra of digital tools further complicate this terrain by creating a nested architecture of images within images. These analog replicas of virtual instruments blur the line between the hand and the algorithm.

In this shifting space of recursion and reappearance, the readymade is no longer a found object but a found operation: a means through which the digital unconscious reveals its own logic.