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 intelligence to 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.
