Everydays: The First 5000 Days

Title: Everydays: The First 5000 Days
Artist / Creator: Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)
Date: 2021

Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a huge digital image made of 5,000 smaller square images put together in an even grid (Winkelmann 2021). Each square tells a different scene or figure created in a uniform digital illustration style. Given the nature of these grids, their spacing communicates a sense of order—a neat and even series of rows and columns run uninterrupted over the entire surface. The overall format is rectangular and horizontally oriented.
To describe the color palette in general terms, it refers to a wide range of very different ideas. Some squares display bright, saturated colors—red, yellow, neon green—while others are based on more muted ones, such as gray, brown, and dark blue. Across the grid, strong contrasts are apparent between lights and darks. Lines in each image vary from sharp and well-defined to smooth and blended, depending on the subject of the square.
Because of this, each image is on a significantly reduced scale, with viewing needing to be very close indeed to appreciate the finer points. No one image has concerns with proportions to the exclusion of others, but their apparent visual density fluctuates because of their different values of color intensity, brightness, and variance in complexity. Texture has been digitally simulated, apparent generally in the smoothness of gradients, sharpness of edges, and layered surfaces apparent in many of the squares.
The composition contains no single, clearly defined focal point; rather, as the eye scans over the repeated units of the grid, attention shifts across the surface. The rhythm of vision built up by the square frames reaffirms this visual structure. The medium here is a digital image, one that has been put together and presented in a virtual space meant for high-resolution viewing.

Everydays: The First 5000 Days can be conceived as a visual journal of unceasing digital production over time. The grid of 5,000 images suggests accumulation and repetition, emphasizing quantity as the defining feature of the work (Paul 2016). Given that each image occupies the same amount of space, the setup here suggests that all moments are equally important, independent of complexity or subject matter. Such a setup can well articulate ideas about time, regularity, and the daily practice of creation.
What results from this is a condition where the viewer cannot rest on one point of focus but is urged to scan across the image-a mode of viewing that has been associated with scrolling and surfing, but which, in this context, acknowledges an embodied experience of moving across an image. The grid-seeming contradictory of uniformity-is marked by changes, necessarily, again, in subject matter or more aesthetic development over time, as may be indicated by the varied color palette, density of adjacency of marks to one another, and degrees of detail within a given square.
This virtual-digital space is decisive in forming the meaning of the artwork: as a high-digital image, it represents an online viewing mode according to which images are confronted today in screens and not in their individual tangible instantiations (Bishop, 2012). This conditioned view allows only part of the piece to be viewed at a time, therefore providing an experience radically different from zooming in on a piece. A first impression allows one to experience either the part or the whole of a grid. Immediately, this seems to make in evidence what one can only experience: on the one hand, a collection of individual images; on the other, one single image.
From one point of view, this work could be seen by different digital literacies to mean different things. For some, it is a matter of scale, and one sees it as evidence of labor and discipline. The more professional eye recognizes shifts in visual style and reads it as a chronology of artistic development.

Everydays: The First 5000 Days exists mostly in digital and virtual space—this shapes who may meet the work and who may not. Actual access is allowed mainly to those with a robust internet connection, a digital device, and a degree of knowledge concerning the online platforms of circulation (Quaranta 2013). In this way, the audience is excluded from potentially experiencing the work in its proper form if they do not have a sense of technology or digital literacies to carry such experiences.
The control over the space where the work is seen is shared by the artist and the platforms that host/display the work. While the artist creates the images, the visibility depends on digital marketplaces, websites, and institutions that govern circulation, reproduction, and ownership. Access within NFT platforms or online exhibitions is often restricted via paywalls, accounts, or ownership structures.
Typically, access to the work is intentional rather than serendipitous. Mostly, a person would make the active decision to find the work through an online search, press coverage, or a specific digital exhibition. Time and visibility are malleable, contingent first, on continued hosting and relevance but unyielding to the work’s survival.

References
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media. New York: Artforum.
Paul, Christiane. 2016. Digital Art. 3rd ed. London: Thames & Hudson.
Quaranta, Domenico. 2013. Beyond New Media Art. Brescia: LINK Editions.
Winkelmann, Mike (Beeple). 2021. Everydays: The First 5000 Days. Digital image (NFT).