Feral File started with a simple idea: a gallery that’s open all day, every day, where artworks are available to anyone across the globe with access to a network connection. Each exhibition has an opening, but it never closes. The artworks remain available. You don’t need to collect it to enjoy it, it’s always accessible for you.

These are ideas that date back decades, but 2021 was the first moment when it felt like the world was ready for them. We created Feral File to make more opportunities for artists to exhibit work, and for collectors to support those artists. We built Feral File to show all kinds of digital work, anything that can be exhibited within a web browser: generative art, digital sculpture, video, sound, music, AI images, photography, text, and more.

As this exhibition opens on June 28, 2023, Feral File has released 33 prior exhibitions over the last two years. We’ve worked with 26 curators and 178 artists. Over 7,985 collectors have joined to support those artists, to acquire their work. With this exhibition, we’re celebrating the first version of Feral File (FF 1.0) as we get ready to launch FF 2.0 next month.

Every Feral File exhibition starts with a curator. The curator defines a theme and invites artists to collaborate with them and with each other. We’ve worked with veteran curators from world-renowned institutions, vibrant independent curators, and we’ve also created opportunities for artists to curate their first exhibitions. We’ve run two open calls to invite people to propose exhibitions, and most of the exhibitions in our second year were developed through this invitation. There would be no Feral File without these amazing individuals who brought their energy and passion:

Alice Scope and Barry Threw, Anika Meier, Artnome (aka Jason Bailey), Chris Coleman, Christiane Paul, Claire L. Evans, Domenico Quaranta, Gaia Bobò, Giorgio Vitale, Iris Long, Jesse Damiani, Julia Kaganskiy, Julie Walsh, kerry doran, Linda Dounia Rebeiz, Luba Elliott, Mindy Seu, Pau Waelder, Peggy Schoenegge, Primavera De Filippi, Stina Gustafsson, Alex Estorick, Regina Harsanyi, Rick Silva, symbios.wiki, theVERSEverse, Tina Rivers Ryan

This exhibition, Feral File 1.0, includes one artwork from every Feral File exhibition to date. We start with Social Codes, which opened March 19, 2021 and we end with In/Visible, curated by Linda Dounia Rebeiz and released June 12, 2023. Feral File curators brought all of these artists to us, and for this show, I’ve selected one artwork from each exhibition to show the breadth and depth of what we’ve all created together. I’m thrilled to share the following artists included in the Feral File 1.0 exhibition:

Dmitri Cherniak, Claudia Hart, Andrew Thomas Huang, Cao Shu, Lauren Lee McCarthy, ertdfgcvb (Andreas Gysin), Helena Sarin, Jan St. Werner, Refik Anadol, Tyler Hobbs, Morehshin Allahyari, Sofia Crespo, Sage Jensen, Rafaël Rozendaal, Whistlegraph, 0xDEAFBEEF, VNS Matrix, p1xelfool, Laleh Mehran, Gene Kogan, Zach Blas, John Gerrard, Auriea Harvey XLVIII, LaTurbo Avedon, AES+F, Peter Burr, Lu Yang, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Lee Mullican, Ana Maria Caballero × Nancy Baker Cahill, Rick Silva, Kim Asendorf, Serwah Attafuah

Feral File was founded with group exhibitions — the idea of a curator assembling a set of artists around a theme. Some of my best experiences as an artist have been while creating group shows, getting to know other artists and working with curators. When we launched Feral File during the global pandemic, it was meant to be a way to create opportunities for artists to continue making work and exhibit digitally. The other focus of our group exhibitions is artist-to-artist trading. For each group exhibition on Feral File, each artist trades an artwork with every other artist in the exhibition. This allows each artist to connect through sharing and to collect work of their peers.

Social Codes exhibition announcement. Image courtesy of Feral File.

Later in 2021, we expanded Feral File into solo exhibitions with Jan St. Werner’s Polyarrythmia and Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised, put on in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. Solo exhibitions allowed artists to show the wide range of ideas and work they are engaged with. For example, Auriea Harvey’s solo exhibition Gray Matter featured three physical bronze sculptures, one image in a large edition, and eight digital sculptures released in small editions.

Exhibition by exhibition, we’ve continued to experiment with new exhibition formats to create more options for curators and artists. Over time, we made Feral File more flexible and more robust. We developed custom code to support live performances for On Screen Presence, curated by Regina Harsanyi. For –GRAPH, we worked with artists to create hybrid digital/material artworks and distributed physical plotter drawings made in the artists’ studios to the collectors. For Chris Coleman’s Doppelganger, we collaborated with a 3D fabricator to send physical objects to the collectors of each artwork. We worked with the estate of Lee Mullican to revive digital art created in the 1980s and to make it available to the public and to collectors. Over time, we moved to a group exhibition model where each artist could decide their own pricing and edition sizes.

Through this experimentation, we discovered what we felt was most essential about Feral File, and this has informed our Feral File 2.0 release happening in a few weeks. I am so excited to share that, but for now I don’t want to spoil the surprise. This is the moment to celebrate the curators and artists who have made Feral File 1.0 a vibrant place. I hope you enjoy these selected artworks from the first two years of Feral File. This is the end of the beginning and we’re ready to keep it moving.

— Casey Reas, 9 June 2023