Addie Wagenknecht
Selected Works Overview

Addie Wagenknecht's artistic practice blends conceptual art with forms of hacking and gestural abstraction. 

Wagenknecht is known for pioneering the use of drones in painting and other mechanized forms of art in the early 2000s while based in New York. 

Her works are often recognized for their experimental co-creative aspects, exploring the relationship between technology and the vulnerabilities of being alive. Previous exhibitions and works held in permanent collections include the Centre Pompidou, Istanbul Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum in New York, among others. She has collaborated with CERN, Chanel, Coinbase, and Google's Art Machine Intelligence (AMI) Group. Her work has been featured in publications such as TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Art in America, and The New York Times. Wagenknecht has held fellowships at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City, Culture Lab UK, Institute HyperWerk for Postindustrial Design in Basel (CH), and The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Believe Me, 2017- Believe me was originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. The work references the familiar sight of a mobile phone's broken screen by overlaying the visual effect of cracks on a series of images that can be manipulated by the viewer and loaded successively by refreshing the browser. Using the seemingly damaged screen as a central metaphor, Believe me evokes the distortions that digital technologies impose on our experience of the world and each other. Failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project's imagery which is politically charged in some cases, and in others captures the vernacular of the online environment through familiar interface elements or Internet folklore. The slightly glitched, broken, readable yet abstracted imagery of Believe me — the most often used two words by Donald Trump according to sociolinguistics Jennifer Sclafani's analysis for CNN — questions the status of reality as it is mediated through our screens in a fake news and post-truth environment. This work was done in collaboration with Leander Herzog.