published:
November, 2016
The Swedish artist Jonas Lund combines media art deconstruction strategies with contemporary art practices. This results in works that are often participatory, conceptual, or performance-based. In his work Lund easily moves between online and offline systems, and between technological and socio-cultural constructs, all the while working the analogies that bind them. He first got international recognition in 2013 with his first solo exhibition the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), at the Rotterdam art initiative MAMA. For this show Lund created an elaborate analytical software system that told him how to construct each piece in the exhibition, with title and all, based on work by the top-selling artists of the time.

Jonas Lund - Selfportrait
Software and network are basic properties of Jonas Lund’s praxis, both materially and conceptually. Some examples: in 2011 Lund made Blue Crush, a typical net art work in which blue pop up windows take over and crash the browser, and In Search of Lost Time, a Twitter version of the book by Proust, in which the book is broken down in 140 character sections tweeted over the course of 6,5 years. In 2012 he made The Paintshop.biz, a combination of interactive website, paintshop and website, in which people could design, print and sell their own paintings. The same year Lund also wrote an algorithm for a performance on Facebook called 1,164,041 Or How I Failed In Getting The Guinness World Book Of Record Of Most Comments On A Facebook Post. In the pivotal year 2013 Lund went from creating works like Paint Your Own Pizza (for Eyebeam), a work that was very similar to The Paintshop.biz, to almost completely dedicating himself to handling the art world as a system after his graduation. Lund commented on the art market already in 2011 with the spam inspired work Collection Enlargement and with several other works since. With his first solo show Jonas Lund however moved from the commentator position to that of the hacker, engineer, or systems architect.