Everest Pipkin
Laceworks, 2020 Digital film
Ellinger, TX, 2018 Generative video artwork
The Library of Free Objects, 2017- ongoing Printed books

Based in New Mexico, USA Pipkin is a drawing and software artist who produces intimate work with large data sets. Working with online archives, big data repositories, and other resources for digital information, Pipkin reworks and reclaims the now corporate internet space back to the personal.

Everest will present three works for Cover Versions, ‘Lacework’ uses artificial neural networks to reinscribe the videos of MIT’s Moments in Time Dataset. Using algorithms that stretch time and add details to images, Pipkin creates a series of hallucinatory slow-motion vignettes from the videos of everyday actions that form the collection. ‘Ellinger, TX’ is a durational generative video artwork, based on a real small town that is situated on the intersection of two major interstate highways between Austin and Houston, Texas. The artwork is a piece of software that runs itself - a simulation of a town removed from the world. As the simulation is run, the ‘characters’ of the town develop habits, preferences, and friendships. ‘The Library of Free Objects’ is a series of printed books and models. These books and objects are encyclopedias of 3D models, sourced from creative commons online repositories. Acting both as printed reference material and as a survey of forms, the free objects books point to underlying assumptions about what a perfect object is.

Writing about working with the huge ‘Moments In Time‘ dataset, “Very slowly, over and over, my body learns the rules and edges of the dataset. I come to understand so much about it; how each source is structured, how the videos are found, the words that are caught in the algorithmic gathering. I see the subjects of the videos, the people living their lives. I meet their dogs, I see their homes. I see wild animals, strange weather, places I’ll never get to visit, video games I haven’t played. I see so much life... I see all these millions of lives, all of this infinite detail, this lacy intricacy that grows ever more granular the closer I get, then grows again, and again.”

Lacework essay
Everest Pipkin website