PERRY CHEN
Perry Chen’s practice reveals the ability to think across art and science to embrace the worlds of human and non human ecologies within the rubric of the universal. His promotion of Kickstarter, the arts crowd funding platform in 2009 signalled his intent, to allow art to flourish and garner support outside capitalist centres. The same intent expands in his art practice into a rhizomatic interplay of art, politics and science, even as he allows his own position to remain undefined. The outcome can be confounding as past histories loop into present news fragments, glitches of global scale are revisited and the distinction between hoax and catastrophe is laid bare.
Gayatri Sinha, December 2020
Art Critic and Curator
Perpetual Novelty - Conversations
Six conversations will be recorded for Perpetual Novelty in 2021. One conversation for each of the six works. In the first episode, "We ain’t seen nothing yet", the artist is joined by Walter Isaacson to explore how we navigate a time of immense technological change. Walter Isaacson is the author of Steve Jobs, and the forthcoming The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.
Perry Chen is an artist and the founder of Kickstarter. He approaches his work with an openness to form and context, having used art to explore technology, and technology to help democratize the funding of creative work.
Principally, Chen’s work revolves around systems. His studio practice often explores how we negotiate a world of growing complexity and uncertainty, using research and archival material as entry points for engagement. Drawing on his interest in systems, his work also focuses on the creation -- and possibilities -- of new formats for generative social exchange and collaboration. In 2009, Chen created the website Kickstarter as a way for fellow artists and musicians to raise money for their creative work. Since then, over 190,000 creative projects have been funded through Kickstarter.
Chen is also known for his engagement around the problems of profit-centric systems; specifically the need for better structures, tools, and institutions to enable a more generative and less extractive society. In 2015, he spearheaded Kickstarter’s conversion to a Public Benefit Corporation, legally formalizing the company’s long held commitment to its mission -- to help creative projects come to life -- over optimizing for profit. A long-time critic of the attention economy, Chen served on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy from 2017-18 to examine and make recommendations in response to the collapse in trust in U.S. democratic institutions, media, journalism, and the information ecosystem. In 2018, he was honored with the Digital Visionary Award from The Center for Democracy & Technology for his commitment “to shaping a world where the internet and technology improve lives and propel human creativity.”
Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013.
