The Rubicon Crossing GIF, 30 Frames 725 × 725 px 2026

Play: Current Version is a collaboration from Yuran Yakon and Coneheadsquid, focused on textures, playfulness and videogame aesthetics. After a one piece collaboration for Stream 123: The Guardian in 2025, this release marks an expansion of their work together.

Key to this collection is a sense of playfulness experienced in a digital collaboration of two artists nearly unknown to each other. The playfulness translates into rich textures and a simple humour incorporated by every single GIF. Each artwork has a layered compositional density, like a geological process of shared thought and is defined by a simple scene in which running streams and little video-game sequences entangle with each other. The interplay of different artistic approaches creates an even denser sense of screen-based aesthetics and textures expressing digital creativity.

The series leads to the essential question: Isn’t every artwork, at its core, an expression of human relations? Which means, isn’t digital art at its best an expression of new, exciting, and meaningful forms of relation? Following this path, the digital world is becoming something great and wonderful when we manage to encounter the other through the technology, and digital art can be the key to enable such forms of relation.