Peng1, also known as Michael Maag, is a multidisciplinary artist who works across code, obsolete technology, blockchain structures, and physical fabrication. He began treating systems themselves as expressive material after entering coding and web development during the late 1990s internet boom, and has exhibited work in Paris, London, Seoul, Lisbon, Toronto, New York City, San Francisco, and Marfa.
Broadcast Wars is one major body of work within the wider practice, made up of three chapters — STATIX, BRKRs, and 1NF3KT3D — that trace a society infected by attention, where signal overwhelms meaning and distortion becomes the dominant cultural language. Its first installment, Broadcast Wars: Issue 001, presents itself as a recovered transmission archive in which people who start questioning the signal are branded saboteurs, extremists, and traitors, and become known as BRKRs. Describing his own work, Peng1 has called himself a “Builder–artist working where art breaks and technology leaks”, and said he uses blockchain, code, and imagery to explore disruption, control, and collapse.
