Beeple (American, b. 1981), the online name of Mike Winkelmann, makes digital images, animation and kinetic sculpture whose satirical, often political imagery also engages with technology and celebrity culture.,,Since May 1, 2007 he has created and posted a new digital image nearly every day as part of an ongoing series called Everydays.
Winkelmann has a computer science background rather than formal art training, and began making art in 1999 while working for over a decade in commercial 3D animation. The daily Everydays practice began with drawing exercises, then moved through years of Cinema 4D image-making, and has since incorporated AI-generation tools, tracking his shifting technique over time.On 11 March 2021 Christie's sold his work EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, a digital collage compiling 5,000 of these daily images, for $69.3 million in what the auction house called its first sale of a purely digital artwork.,,,He had built an audience of millions of social media followers before that sale, without institutional validation from the traditional art world.
Since 2021, Winkelmann has looked at his own work through the framework of art history, a subject he had known little about after studying computer science rather than attending art school.His kinetic sculpture Human One (2021) depicts a figure on an ever-evolving journey.In 2022 Jack Hanley Gallery in New York gave him his first solo gallery exhibition.In 2024 the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing presented “Tales from a Synthetic Future”, his first solo museum exhibition, which included S.2122 (2023), a sculpture combining elements of Everydays and Human One whose imagery is updated every five years.
In 2025 he unveiled Diffuse Control, a kinetic sculpture that blends six curator-selected images through AI models to generate new versions of the work in real time as viewers interact with it.That November the sculpture was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.The same year at Art Basel Miami Beach's Zero 10 digital art section, his installation REGULAR ANIMALS used robotic dogs wearing hyper-realistic masks of tech and art figures that moved autonomously, captured their surroundings and printed AI-reinterpreted images bearing NFT claim codes.,In spring 2026 the installation traveled to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where it was shown alongside Nam June Paik's 1994 video sculpture Andy Warhol Robot.He runs a studio in Charleston, South Carolina, which hosts recurring public digital art events for the local community.
