Tour Guide is not a map, but rather a misdirection, an index of detours, false starts, and offbeat exits. Rather than accompanying the portfolios, it escapes them. The texts archived here are errant para-texts, such as footnotes  and appendices to works that may never be made or exhibited. Written intermittently from the 1990s to the present, these writings accumulate in the margins of a long conversation with art.

As the 2016 Malvern Report, subsequently noted in The Times, observed, Fudge had repeatedly engaged in the destruction of his own work. The practice began while he was a student, initially as an attempt to interrupt the institutional question of what might properly qualify as “art.” Whether these actions constituted a coherent programme at the time remains uncertain. Their consequences, however, were unusually consistent: works were removed from circulation before institutions, critics or markets could establish a durable relation to them.

Charles Swann: (01:40)

To what extent do you think that that position, of withdrawal, is suitable to handle the worst crisis in painting that we’ve seen in a century?

Nick Fudge: (01:49)

I think as an artist you have to have a position. Otherwise, you would have nothing without a position. 

"I had the idea of a machine writing a Catalogue Raisonné, and I was in love with the idea."

Nick Fudge (to Michael Craig-Martin) (Goldsmiths: 1987)

On the Road postmodern.

Accelerated allegories.

Resisting the  frameworks of globalized neoliberal circulation.

​Model: Motorelief N°11.

Altermodernity: The culture of production exists as a movement of continuous reformation that circulates beyond borders. 

Model: Kerouac Superior.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

7/15/1606–10/4/1669

I speak of Great American Deserts and of my Paintings which are not Paintings

No products, no auctions.
Infinite panning shots over silicon landscapes,
over freeways, over burnt-out grids.
Pure binary circulation:

Since 1988, my work has occupied a modest space at the convergence of painting, art history, digital culture, and a philosophy of technology. I have not sought immediate acclaim, but to observe the slow unfolding of ideas - a process more akin to careful discovery rather than rapid dissemination.  

I remain indifferent to the fact that my digital work has rarely, if ever, been seen. Mostly unpublished, unexhibited, sequestered in the opaque recesses of the digital ether since 1994 - stored, not for recognition, but as autonomous data relics adrift in a boundless void. This is the reality of digital objects: a realm where pushing the boundaries of art outweighs the quest for recognition.

In 1989, I staked my future on an act of deliberate absence - a quiet withdrawal from the London art scene, a conscious bet cast on the roulette wheel of artistic fate. After Goldsmiths in the summer of 1988, faced with the familiar siren call of the art market and the imminent seduction of the YBA machine, I chose instead to disappear into a self-imposed exile. Not a retreat from art, but a carefully orchestrated suspension, a period in which the relentless pressures of galleries and career paths were transformed into quiet subversion.

Unsupervised Systems — No-thing in Production 

The magic of droids on dirty backroads

Over the past decade, the interplay between art and technology has changed radically. AI, machine learning, and advanced computing no longer merely support art - they threaten to replace it. Digital artifacts now navigate silicon highways, moving with an unsupervised life of their own, untethered from traditional production.