Simon Denny (New Zealand, b. 1982) makes installations, sculpture, painting, print, video and web-based media that unpack stories about technology.Based in Berlin, he has used blockchain, patent diagrams,and artificial intelligenceto trace the narratives and business models of the technology industry,treating corporate branding and trade-fair display as material in itself.
Denny studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and has been Professor of Time-Based Media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg since 2018.He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with “Secret Power”, following his inclusion in Massimiliano Gioni's “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.,He became aware of Bitcoin in 2011 and began making installations about blockchain narratives from 2015, including a work for the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale in 2016.That series, Blockchain Visionaries, stages real blockchain companies as a mock trade-fair display, using corporate branding and founder mythology to show that decentralized systems still produce their own centres of power and legitimacy.,In 2018 he initiated “Proof of Work” at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin through what he called decentralized curation, inviting artists and curators, including Distributed Gallery and Harm van den Dorpel, to help select the other participants.,
Document Relief 5 (Amazon Worker Cage patent), dated 2019, is based on an unrealised Amazon patent for a motorised cage designed to move warehouse workers, and was included in “Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI” at San Francisco's de Young Museum.At Schinkel Pavillon he had met the artist Guile Twardowski, designer of CryptoKitties, with whom he later made DotCom Seance, a 2021 project using AI image diffusion to regenerate the logos of collapsed dot-com era companies as NFTs issued through Folia.app.In 2022 he co-curated “Creation Stories” at Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland with the researcher Karamia Müller, tracing family and colonial histories between New Zealand, Samoa and Switzerland through cable-harness sculptures that doubled as genealogical diagrams.For Optimism, a 2023 commission for Auckland Art Gallery, he made two suspended sculptures modelled on rocket-engine patents filed by the New Zealand company Rocket Lab, overlaid with augmented-reality imagery of space-colony visions from the 1960s to the present.For “Rules Based Order”, a 2026 show at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Munich, he fine-tuned the AI tool ComfyUI on Italian Futurist paintings and defense-technology advertising, then rendered the resulting compositions with plotter drawing machines and modified UV printers.
