Frederik De Wilde is a Belgian artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology, using materials such as carbon nanotubes, quantum randomness, and electric signals from living fish to explore phenomena that resist direct perception.In 2010, following a research residency at Rice University, he developed a nano-engineered, ultra-black carbon-nanotube material that he used in works such as NASABlck-Crcl #1, produced in collaboration with NASA.
His installation EOD 02, made with the Brussels studio LAb[au], used mirrored fish tanks wired with antennae to translate the electric signals of weakly electric fish into pulses of sound and light. In 2011 he built UMWelt:VIRUtopia with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a swarm-intelligence installation that responded to visitors with sound and light.Around the same period he began the series NRS, generative works he described as “painting with data” to make landscape paintings of the information age.
For “Meta.Morf 2018”, the Trondheim biennale, he built The Council, an artificial-intelligence system modeled on a hyper-connected neural network that took Rodin's sculpture The Thinker as a starting point to ask what it might be thinking about today.In 2022 he presented Hunter & Dogs at the group exhibition “Prométhée, le jour d'après” in Enghien-les-Bains, France, a work inspired by DNA and the possibilities of genome modification.
He entered the NFT space in 2021, minting early work on hic et nunc with help from friends in the Tezos community after growing skeptical of what he saw as mostly illustrative work rather than art in a critical sense. As part of the first cohort of the “objkt labs Residency”, he developed the series Metric Ghosts, Thermal Lovers & Data Drifters, exploring thermal traces, data decay and the emotional afterlives of computational memory.Individual works are held in the permanent collections of the ZKM Center for Art and Media and the Foundation Prince Albert II of Monaco.
