qubibi: hello world

qubibi
hello world

Opening: October 31, 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: November 1 – 15, 2025
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Curated by Kika Nicolela
In collaboration with objkt

Clusters merge into a single labyrinth.

“hello world” is a generative animation created in real time through programming. Life and death, gender, emotion, and matter — various elements revolve around what we call “borders,” continuously exchanging places, eroding, and blending within the flow of time. A scene of endless transformation, shifting without the touch of human hands. What will be drawn, what will be spun? We can only stand by and quietly watch.

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qubibi

In 2010, while experimenting with how colors form and dissolve boundaries, Japanese artist qubibi (Kazumasa Teshigawara) discovered an algorithm that would become a central thread in his artistic practice. He called it hello world — the phrase programmers use to mark a first communication between human and machine. What began as an accidental discovery soon developed into a long conversation: a generative system producing dozens of unique images every second, never repeating the same one twice.

For the past sixteen years, qubibi has continued to work with this same algorithm, describing it as “my first and last generative art” — a piece that, in his words, “has continuously been consuming my time until today.” Originally conceived as an animation, hello world unfolds in real time: organic patterns emerge, fade to black, and reappear in an endless cycle. The work invites a form of attentive contemplation — its slow transformations and quiet rhythms evoke a meditative state in which perception adjusts to duration, and time itself becomes the medium.

Eight years after the algorithm’s inception came MIMIZU (2018), a series that inherits hello world’s procedural DNA while reconfiguring its formal aims. Where hello world foregrounds boundary lines on surfaces, MIMIZU inverts this logic by densely arranging those lines to constitute surfaces themselves. The link between the two projects is not merely technical but genealogical: a single discovery begets a plurality of practices and aesthetic vocabularies.

What makes hello world remarkable is its intuitive origin. Without prior knowledge of scientific models, qubibi independently created a system that behaves like Turing patterns — self-organizing forms first theorized by mathematician Alan Turing to explain how nature generates spots on animals or ripples on shells. In hello world, these patterns unfold digitally rather than chemically, yet the underlying principle is similar: complexity born from simplicity, order emerging from flux.

At Galerie Met, hello world appears in new iterations: hello world: Echoes (still images) and hello world: Rooms (video works). The exhibition traces sixteen years of ongoing dialogue between artist and algorithm — a sustained exploration of color, form, and continuity in the digital age.

hello world greets us once more, still evolving, still alive.

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Text by Kika Nicolela