Kyle McDonald is an American artist who works in the open with code, building tools and sharing his methods so other artists can use new algorithms in creative and subversive ways.Based in Los Angeles,he has served as an adjunct professor at NYU's ITP and as a community manager for the open source toolkit openFrameworks, and was a member of F.A.T. Lab, the Free Art and Technology Lab.
His work explores glitch, surveillance and systemic bias in computing, often turning networked communication and identity inside out.Early in his career he was part of the F.A.T. Lab network alongside artists including Theo Watson, Aram Bartholl and Golan Levin.His online work Exhausting a Crowd takes filmed footage of a public square and invites viewers to caption the passers-by, an ironic commentary on pervasive surveillance.The work was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which exhibited it in 2015.,It was also shown at Madrid's VI Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2016 and at Birmingham Open Media in 2017.
McDonald has also researched the environmental cost of blockchain platforms.His calculations of Ethereum's energy and carbon footprint, discussed on the Interdependence podcast,found its total energy use on the scale of Netflix and Google combined, and about three times that of Facebook.He raised early concerns, along with Memo Akten and Joanie Lemercier, about the environmental impact of proof-of-work Ethereum mining.In 2022 his project Amends calculated the historical carbon footprint of NFT marketplaces including OpenSea, Rarible and Foundation and offered that debt for sale, valuing OpenSea's past emissions at roughly $22 million. The aim was to push platforms and collectors to take responsibility for emissions incurred before Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake.
With the artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, McDonald created the performance Voice In My Head, generating text with custom software the two built using ChatGPT. McCarthy later drew on those texts for her own project Seeing Voices.The pair also made Unlearning Language, 2022, in collaboration with the Yamaguchi Center for the Arts.McDonald's work has appeared internationally, including at FILE São Paulo's 2025 “SYNTHETIKA” festival, a large-scale digital art and technology exhibition.
