Espen Kluge (Norwegian, b. 1983) is a composer, visual artist and creative coder whose generative portrait series, Alternatives, applies custom JavaScript algorithms to photographs of human faces.,Kluge composes scores for Norwegian film and television alongside his code-based visual work, and describes himself as “a composer by trade and education, but a visual artist by hobby-turned-profession.”
Kluge trained first in fine arts before completing a master's degree in music composition for film and television, and has scored Norwegian productions including Who Killed Birgitte? and Mullaen & Meling.,He has said his fascination with warping the human face on a digital canvas is linked, in part, to his own experience of bipolar disorder before successful treatment.He taught himself to code at 27 while trying to build an improvised lighting keyboard, and it was during breaks from that project that he first wrote, in 2013, the JavaScript code that would become Alternatives.,
The code loops through an image's pixels, selects some at semi-random, and connects them with lines, producing angular, vector-based portraits from photographs chosen for their expressive features and strong lighting. Kluge titles each portrait with text fragments drawn from the captions of its source image rather than composing titles directly.Alternatives comprises 100 portraits made over 100 days in 2019, first shown that year in a solo exhibition at Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich curated by Jason Bailey of Artnome, one of the early gallery shows to present NFTs alongside physical prints.,Bailey pitched minting Kluge's work as NFTs during that show, producing Kluge's first NFT in 2019.
In 2022 Kluge returned to the same Alternatives dataset with a new algorithm to create Lyrical Convergence, a more abstract body of work first shown at the group exhibition “Dear Machine, Paint for Me” in Zurich alongside Alexander Mordvintsev, Ganbrood and Herbert W. Franke.,Selected Alternatives works have entered the collection of the Museum of Crypto Art.
