Ken Wiatrek: STRIPDE
Ken Wiatrek
STRIPDE
Opening: February 21, 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: February 22 – March 08, 2025
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Collaborator: Verse
Spanning works created over the last year, STRIPDE, Ken Wiatrek’s newest exhibition, explores the pervasive influence of technology on our connections to the world. The works in STRIPDE delve into how our perceptions and expectations of media shape our lived experiences. STRIPDE, an abstraction of “stripe,” draws inspiration from the fundamental role of stripes in CRT television image creation—a vision of a technological future and a visual element echoed throughout the exhibition. Here, artist and machine collaborate, capturing a unique form of contemporary chaos and entropy.
This partnership allows the machine a voice, celebrating its own language and solidifying its crucial role in Wiatrek’s creative process. Drawing on a wealth of influences, much like a Large Language Model, the artist offers an abstracted perspective of the world, synthesizing diverse elements into distilled final outputs. Echoes of broken video games, the iconic imagery of Nintendo, and the impressionistic landscapes of Monet resonate within the works. The anxieties of the “Techno Virus,” the experience of travel, and the unique energy of living in Berlin further inform and permeate the collection, creating a complex tapestry of inspiration.
Executed with a pen plotter, the works in STRIPDE further examine Wiatrek’s personal relationship with the impact of media and machines on daily life. His memories become interwoven with the remnants of generative AI images, trained on the mundane alongside the masterpieces of art history, questioning the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Ken Wiatrek:
Ken Wiatrek, aka kenconsumer, lives and works as an artist in Berlin, Germany. His artistic endeavors constitute an ongoing exploration of existence, with emphasis on the essence of Being Anything. Through a combination of hand-drawing, digital techniques, and machine-driven processes, his creations deliberately challenge the distinction between human and mechanized production. Beyond his artistic pursuits, Ken actively engages in various facets of the art world. He serves as a Founding Tender at tender.art, founded and directed SP2 Contemporary in Berlin, and contributed to The Texas Firehouse in New York. Additionally, Ken hosts Arbitrarily Deterministic, a conversational podcast that delves into the practice and concepts of creators operating between art, technology, and popular culture.
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