[6] Drawing attention to the variety of opinions, sources, conversations, and enterprises that contribute to the internet’s sprawling information landscape, Versteeg’s work often intervenes between mass media and its end consumer[7][8] For example, the artist has been known to use recognizable brand identifiers from major companies, such as Napster and Coca-Cola, to deliver a pithy comment, or the day’s headlines from the AP Newswire.
In one series of the artist’s algorithmically-generated artworks, Versteeg instructs his code to paint over the day’s front page of a credible newspaper using brushstrokes programmed to mimic an Abstract Expressionist style.
[10] Versteeg’s father built a career in fine art fabrication beginning in Los Angeles, where he cast sculptures for Tom Holland.
[9][12] Peter Versteeg went on to oversee projects for Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras at Lippincott, INC, an internationally renowned fabrication studio in North Haven, Connecticut.
In 2005, the artist created The MP3 Collection of My Father, which was exhibited in Press Enter to Exit, Versteeg’s second show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
[15] During this period, Versteeg participated in www.WhitneyBiennial.Com, an online exhibit that made a guerilla art-style presentation on the back doors of 23 U-Haul trucks surrounding the museum during the 2002 Whitney Biennial Gala.
[16] An important work from this period is Versteeg’s Dynamic Ribbon Device (2003),[17] which juxtaposes the Associated Press’s live news feed with “mass-media gadgetry”.
[18] In the artwork, Coca-Cola’s trademark white ribbon billows across a red background plasma screen while a scrolling script registers headline news.
Shown in determination, Versteeg’s debut solo presentation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2005, one journalist noted that condensation droplets flowing down the scrolling graphics in the work seem to be placed “as if to add luster to this intramural media affair”.
Take, for instance, the CNN sign in Atlanta, covered with graffiti by Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this summer; one of the most touching works of art I’ve seen.
The collective was made up of 10 organizing artists who shared a desire to “carve out a context that is not beholden to the social and commercial pressures of the greater art world”.
In 2005, Rhona Hoffman Gallery first exhibited Versteeg’s work in a solo show titled determination, which “ostensibly refers to the artist’s search for logic and order amid the frenzy of a media-saturated, digitized world.
[14] In reviews of determination, the artwork was noted as the ultimate crystallization of Versteeg’s subversive critique of the indeterminacy and uncertainty of contemporary media structures.
[14] Accessioned by The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., Neither There nor There appeared in an important two-part 2008 exhibition titled The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image.
[25] Subversive themes around identity, and an abundance of information continued to build towards a 2007 show at Rhona Hoffman Gallery titled Press Enter to Exit.
Critic James Yood reviewed the show in ArtForum’s March 2008 issue writing that its title insinuates that, “despite the heady promise of a 24/7 global community, the Internet, a proliferating labyrinth always turning in on itself, may isolate as much as it liberates.”[26] Included in the show was Versteeg's 2008 installation OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING, a monumental, thirty-four-foot-long mural with "a cell-phone-sized LCD screen bearing the Napster logo" installed in the center of the work that reads: "OWN NOTHING, HAVE EVERYTHING".
Featured in the show, Something for Everyone (2007) is “a photographic triptych of a F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber patrolling above a sea of three hundred thousand images drawn randomly from the Internet”.
[27] The work suggests that the “daily flood of visual data, no matter how randomly generated,” is nonetheless considered by some visitors as an absolute, militant truth.
[29] “The choice to display the crate as part of the work takes Negative Shadow of a Fake Flame out of the context of the white cube,” Heinz argued in her review of the show.
[32] In 2016, the University of Michigan Museum of Art held a temporary exhibition called Siebren Versteeg: LIKE II, in which "a computer painting program creates a composition using a continuously changing algorithm, and then runs a periodic Google search to find a matching image online.
Being There is… a return to earlier work from 2004, Versteeg updates it with a current stream of CNN Live, interspersed with him seated in a waiting room staring dully at the screen, which sometimes reflects him.
[15] The work sited a virtual protest in support of Black Lives Matter by depicting an endless stream of marching, crowdsourced images of protestors.
[41] Attendants to an installation of Daily Times (Performer) (2012) at the University of Denver report that upon arriving in the gallery, before the museum opens to the public, that “the screen has already been partially painted over”.
Artworks in the show “contend with apprehension and loss", a personal and cultural reference inspired by the death of the artist's father "as well as with the recent public engagements regarding digital ephemera and commodification”.
[46] Exhibited in Up The Ghost, Versteeg's Possibly Living People (2022) demonstrates how the artist works through multiple iterations of a single, complex idea to arrive at a resolute form.
In each iteration, Versteeg's work memorializes names from the Wikipedia Category Page titled Possibly Living People, an aggregation of once-noteworthy "individuals of advanced age (over 90), for whom there has been no new documentation in the last decade".
[50] Using Open AI's Dall-E, Versteeg contributed A Continuous Slideshow of Images Returned from Searches for Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Titles/Instructions (2022) to the gallery's San Francisco show of Artificial Imagination.
[42] Included in Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, Versteeg said that “the (digital pursuit of the) paint stroke, for me, becomes indicative of an impossible quest to encode the infinite.
[46] Speaking to a 2019 work titled Possibly Living People, Versteeg has described his recent practice as an investigation into the "voracious appetite for inclusion and affirmation that life online exposes" which "can be seen as analogous to the need for object or artifact that we all too often understand as a prerequisite of art".