Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) currently has two ongoing interactive video sculptures on public view simultaneously — The Tree of Knowledge (2024) at SXSW London, running this month in Shoreditch, and Diffuse Control (2025) at The Shed in New York — both built around the same underlying idea: artwork that keeps changing after it’s installed, rather than a fixed, finished object.
Two different inputs, one shared premise
The Tree of Knowledge pulls real-time data — news sites, social media, weather patterns — to drive visible changes in a video image of a tree, letting it visibly thrive or decay based on what’s actually happening in the world at any given moment. It’s showing as part of the first-ever SXSW London festival, whose exhibition program this year has deliberately emphasized art-and-technology work alongside artists from London’s Caribbean diaspora.
Diffuse Control, at The Shed, works differently but toward a similar end: a kinetic sculpture — twelve video screens set in a polished aluminum exterior with an internal mahogany wood frame — continuously generating new 48K video that curators can redirect by feeding in new source images, and that visitors can influence directly through a phone app. Rather than a single audience input driving the piece (as with the Tree’s ambient world-data feed), Diffuse Control opens the input channel to both institutional curation and individual visitors at once.
Why two pieces at once, on two continents, matters
Both works share Beeple’s stated intent that they’re built to keep developing for the rest of his creative life, in collaboration with their owners — these aren’t static commissions delivered and forgotten, but pieces designed with an explicit, ongoing maintenance relationship between artist and collector. Having two such works on simultaneous public view, responding to different input channels (ambient world data versus direct human interaction) on different continents, is a useful data point on how a “generative art that never stops” practice actually scales once an artist has produced more than one long-lived interactive piece — it stops being a single novelty and starts looking like a genuine, ongoing body of work with its own maintenance demands.
For an artist most widely known for a single record-setting NFT auction, both pieces are a clearer signal of where his actual studio practice has moved: toward physical, durable, continuously-live sculptural objects rather than a single static digital file.