Siebren Versteeg works with code to create hybrid photo collages and simulated paintings. He pulls photographs in directly from online sources and adds contextual brushstrokes to augment the photos. When I first saw his work installed at the bitforms gallery in New York in 2019, I didn’t know what I was looking at. On the surface, the work reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings from the 1960s that integrated transferred images from newspapers with painted brushstrokes, but Siebren was and is clearly doing his own thing. Siebren has been developing this work for years prior to when I first saw it; the work is refined and focused. The “live” quality is essential to the work, it’s always changing, always painting and bringing in new images to keep the work in the moment. It’s a mirror held up to the media circus. In “For a Limited Time,” released through ARSNL in March 2023, Siebren has created a twist on this prior work. Like the work before, realtime images from the news flow in, the images are cut and collaged, and brushstrokes are added. “For a Limited Time” introduces the idea that although images are being continuously created, only some will be saved. Over one year, around 35,000 images will be created by Versteeg’s algorithms, but only 750 can survive. Multiple times each hour, new images are scraped from trending stories on the internet and are augmented through Siebren’s code. These images are available for a few hours when they can be “claimed.” If they aren’t claimed, they are no longer available. Right now 346 canvases have been claimed and 404 remain. Everything will end in March 2024. It’s a one-year performance and experiment. I think this work raises interesting questions about attention, spectacle, and value. I visit the stream of generated images a few times a week, looking to see how the news is reflected there. Right now, there’s a focus on tennis in New York, cancer screenings, and the coronavirus. Who knows how the work will shift tomorrow, as the world turns? — Casey REAS