Frederik De Wilde
Further images
HEXfast at Tiffany’s turns trademarked colour into contested territory. Built entirely from proprietary HEX values, including the registered logic of Tiffany Blue, the work treats colour not as a neutral visual field but as a legal, technological, and cultural system. It asks what happens when the visible spectrum is no longer understood as shared nature, but as managed data: owned, coded, and enforced. Inside the work’s generative architecture, non-human agents and algorithmic parasites inhabit a fenced chromatic ecology, mutating restricted hues into unstable matter. These autonomous and emergent systems do not simply follow instructions; they adapt, recombine, and disturb the rules that shape them. In the age of agentic AI, that shift matters. Autonomy is no longer a purely human privilege, but a property of the system itself, capable of exceeding intention and exposing the fragility of the structures it inhabits. The work places this machinic unruliness in direct tension with the logic of trademarked colour, where recognisability, stability, and control are essential. Here, colour becomes less a symbol than a protocol: something to circulate, replicate, deform, and contest. The result is a live conflict between corporate enclosure and computational instability, asking who owns a colour, and who controls the standards through which it can be seen, named, and experienced. In this sense, HEXfast at Tiffany’s extends an art-historical line from Yves Klein’s authored blue to Frederik De Wilde’s nanotechnological black and the Vantablack controversy, while updating that lineage for the screen age. It is both a critique of ownership and a study of how systems make visibility itself. ---- The work is a self-running generative painting that stages a battle between trademarked colours. On screen, a square field is inhabited by hundreds of autonomous "agents" — luminous particles that drift, school, hunt, mate, and decay. They carry registered brand colours (Tiffany Blue, Barbie Pink, John Deere Green, IKEA Blue, McDonald's Gold, and others); sometimes the canvas moves into a grey monochrome, an unbranded substrate. Over time, the branded agents infect their neighbours, spreading their hue like a meme. A dominant colour eventually emerges and floods the canvas, complete with a stamped trademark; copyright then expires, and the hue returns to the commons. Occasional "void agents" appear as colour-thieves; aggressive flashes enforce branding; long, slow phases dissolve everything into monochrome ash and rebuild. The piece is as a meditation on what happens when colour — once a shared phenomenon of light — becomes legal property. Its rhythms (painting, combat, resolution, nullification, dream-state) loop endlessly without repetition, producing a continuously evolving image accompanied by a discreet HUD dashboard panel that reports on the system's internal life. The artwork lives currently entirely in a web browser. The single HTML file can be opened in any modern browser, full-screen, on any screen — from a 4K monitor or projection to a tablet — and it adapts automatically to the available resolution while preserving its currently a 1:1 square format. It can run unattended for hours or days as an installation, or be exhibited as a website, mobile, video projection, looped recording, or interactive piece (the mouse cursor acts as a soft observer field, and a hidden keyboard layer allows the operator to record video, export high-resolution stills, and trigger phase shifts). Other sensors, voice or other biometric interaction, can be added.