Jürg Kobel is a digital artist who publishes GIF animations under the name Tiegenhof and AI-generated photographs under the name Koby. As Tiegenhof, he reworks images and paintings from art history, giving them new colours and placing them in new contexts while developing a recognisable personal style. He worked as an art photographer in the early 2000s before turning to blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in 2020.
In March 2022 Kobel took part in what its host, Kulturmuseum Bern, described as one of the first NFT exhibitions in Switzerland, introducing visitors to NFT platforms and trading.In Albert & Anker (2024), he paired figures from Albert Anker's portrait paintings into new dialogues, erasing their original meaning to create new stories.Adam & Eve (2023) is a series of 24 animated GIFs made from stable-diffusion images, looped and kept in a naive style, showing the pair biking, dancing, and playing football.For The Masks (2021–2022) he animated 99 eighteenth-century Japanese ceremonial and theatre masks held by the Tokyo National Museum and the Kyushu National Museum, releasing each as a single-edition token.
For his Flags project he redesigned the flags of 189 countries as single editions, pricing each according to the Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking. Norway, ranked the press-friendliest country, had the lowest price, while North Korea had the highest. He donated 20 percent of sales to Reporters Without Borders.Gipfelstürmer (2025) revisits photographs he exhibited in 2004 of tourists on mountain viewing platforms, reworking sixteen of the original images with artificial intelligence two decades later.In the ongoing series Dreamer, begun in 2025, he generates minimalist, dreamlike AI images defined by a pink palette that blur the line between reality and imagination.He also collects digital art through his GIF Museum and maintains the online GIF Gallery.
