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.

–
qubibi

“That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing.” — Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina), 8th–9th century CE

“Time is no longer the measure of movement but the substance in which all change takes place. It is pure becoming.” — Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

“Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. The world is a knot of relations.” — Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)

In 2010, Japanese artist Kazumasa Teshigawara, known as qubibi, was testing how colors might establish and dissolve boundaries when his code revealed something unexpected. What emerged was a system that would generate dozens of unique images every second, forms that would never repeat. He named this discovery hello world, borrowing the modest phrase programmers use to test if a machine is listening. What began as a technical experiment became something else — a threshold, a signal, a breath. Here, the phrase becomes less a greeting than a persistent conversation — one that has continued for sixteen years.

Sometimes it feels like we are living at the edge of an abyss, disconnected from each other and from the living world. Through technology, we have become efficient at extraction and destruction. Yet art holds the power to reveal these systems and provoke resistance, or to show us new paths to coexist.

hello world is one of those rare artworks that allows us to touch something essential — not through representation, but through relation. Experiencing it is like reawakening dormant ancient wisdom we didn’t know existed within us. In a world hungry for balance and harmony, the work offers more than meditation: it holds an ability for genuine healing — not as cure, but as a re-synchronization of perception and presence. 

By inviting us to glimpse the pulsating energy that structures life and universe, hello world aligns us with the old philosophers and alchemists who looked at the world and marveled. Who felt connectedness. Who understood the vital interdependency of all things.

Qubibi calls hello world “my first and last generative art,” and the claim reads as both challenge and pledge. This is not restlessness but devotion. The algorithm’s grammar is deceptively simple: boundaries form through color, and from this single rule, intricate organic patterns emerge, accumulate, fracture, and dissolve. The screen fades to black — a kind of death — and then, as if by excavation, new forms are born from darkness. It is a cycle that mirrors life itself, encoded in software yet deeply alive.

What qubibi encountered without seeking it were patterns that resembled what mathematician Alan Turing described in his theory of morphogenesis — the self-organizing systems that produce spots on leopards, stripes on zebras, the spiral of a shell. But crucially, qubibi insists on the importance of the accident: “If I had known about them before I encountered them myself, I don’t think I would have been able to create hello world.” This is not art derived from theory but art that discovers theory through doing, through listening to what the material wants to become.

hello world is not the product of the artist alone, nor of the algorithm alone. The work exists in a dance between the artist’s initial conditions and the algorithm’s emergent behavior, between human intention and machinic agency, between constraint and surprise. Qubibi describes his role with striking humility: “art should take the lead, and the artist should be passive.” He becomes steward, witness, collaborator — not master but partner in an unfolding process.

This is algorithmic art as a way of engaging with the same generative principles that shape the natural world. By encoding rules and letting them unfold, artists touch the deep mathematical order that structures everything from galaxies to growth patterns in plants. It is both an act of creation and of discovery — an aesthetic parallel to scientific insight, a way of feeling the fundamental patterns that organize matter, energy, time. The algorithm does not imitate nature; it participates in the same creative processes that nature itself uses.

The exhibition at Galerie Met in Berlin presents hello world in three distinct yet interconnected forms, each exploring a different relationship to time and transformation:

hello world: Echoes presents fifty stills in print form – as well as other forty still images minted as NFTs – each drawn from the infinite stream. Qubibi describes the challenge: “hello world only comes alive when it’s in motion. So when I turn it into still images, something feels missing.” To compensate, he has carried out several iterations of processing after freezing each frame. Through this work, noise and new forms emerge — echoes reverberating from the past, traces of movement held in suspension. These images ask us to see duration collapsed into a single moment, to feel the ghost of animation in the still.

hello world: Rooms presents four video works of approximately ten minutes each. If hello world is defined by constant transformation, Rooms explores the opposite: sustained states, enduring conditions. Qubibi conceived them as chambers where we can dwell within a particular configuration of forms, experiencing not change but persistence, not becoming but being.

hello world has the generative work itself projected in real time in an intimate room. Here, time becomes, as Deleuze wrote, “the substance in which all change takes place.” Twenty-six frames per second of moments that will never be seen again, never be repeated, never return. Watching it is to attend to pure process, to surrender to an algorithmic temporality that moves at its own pace. Many viewers report an experience close to meditation — not because the work is slow, but because it operates according to a logic outside our frantic human rhythms.

As you keep watching ‘hello world’, you realize that time has somehow been quietly absorbed. I think I’ve personally been saved by that experience — by having time absorbed away from me. That’s the deepest core of ‘hello world’, and that part has never changed.

– qubibi

We can place hello world within a broader lineage of abstract animation. Pioneers like Norman McLaren experimented with scratching directly onto film, creating music and image simultaneously and revealing cinema’s material substrate. Like McLaren’s films — Dots, Loops, Blinkity Blank — hello world strips away narrative to expose something more fundamental: rhythm, pattern, the play of light and darkness.

But where McLaren worked frame by painstaking frame, qubibi has created a system that generates its own infinite variations. hello world is not random, yet it cannot be fully predicted. It is not chaotic, yet it is never static. It exists in that liminal space where complex systems live — on the edge between pattern and surprise, structure and flux, in a balance between order and chaos.

What makes this work so moving, so necessary in our current moment, is precisely this balance. In an age of algorithmic domination, where code increasingly determines our social relations, our information flows, our very perceptions, hello world offers us a different vision of what algorithms can be. Not tools of surveillance and control, but instruments for touching the generative principles of the universe itself. Not mechanisms of disconnection, but bridges back to the ancient human impulse to marvel at pattern, to seek harmony, to feel our participation in something larger than ourselves.

There is always a mysterious pull in Teshigawara’s work — one that draws the viewer into an intimate one-to-one relationship with the screen.

– Yugo Nakamura, in the catalogue of a 2012 exhibition of ‘hello world’

hello world asks us to attend to process without demanding resolution, to witness transformation without grasping for permanence. This is not passive viewing but active engagement, a practice of being present with emergence.

There is healing in this. As forms shift and pulse, as boundaries blur and reform, as the work cycles through birth and death, darkness and emergence, we remember that we too are patterns in flux — that our bodies too are self-organizing systems, that we are not separate from nature but expressions of it. The Emerald Tablet’s ancient wisdom — “as above, so below” — finds contemporary form in hello world’s recursive patterns, where micro and macro mirror each other endlessly, where human and machine become-with each other in unexpected ways.

Qubibi speaks of his obsession, his duty, his respect for the work. “Maybe, honestly, it’s just an obsession. Like, ‘I might be the one who can show this in the most compelling way, and I’m not giving that up to anyone else!’” There is something beautiful in this devotion — sixteen years of returning to the same algorithm, not out of limitation but out of the conviction that depth comes not from multiplication but from sustained attention.

hello world does what all great art does: it makes the invisible visible. It shows us that the world is indeed “a knot of relations,” that boundaries are always temporary, that form and formlessness dance together in eternal becoming. It reminds us that we are not standing outside nature looking in, but are ourselves part of its generative unfolding. And in this recognition, in this moment of seeing ourselves reflected in the algorithm’s play, we find not an answer but an invitation — to slow down, to attend, to allow ourselves to be moved by pattern and process, by the simple, profound beauty of forms coming into being.

hello world greets us again and again, and each time we respond, we are different. The work changes, we change — and in that simple exchange, the world says hello once more.

–
Text by Kika Nicolela