Jonas Lund

Artist

Jonas Lund · jonaslund.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/jonas-lund ↗

Based

Born 1984, Sweden. Based in Amsterdam and Berlin

Practice

Conceptual systems spanning software, painting, sculpture, websites, performance, algorithms, and participatory structures

In the set

Race Condition ↗ · 325 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Jonas Lund approaches art as a field of interconnected rules. Born in Sweden in 1984 and based in Amsterdam and Berlin, he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Piet Zwart Institute.¹ His projects frequently establish parameters that viewers, assistants, collectors, or software must enact. The resulting work is less a fixed object than an organized encounter among authorship, labor, data, and institutional authority.

This method emerged from Lund’s early engagement with network culture. Rhizome’s archive records browser-based works including I’m Here and There, Over and Over Again, and We See in Every Direction.² The last of these offered anonymous communal browsing, making several remote users share one navigational space.³ Such projects treated the network not simply as a distribution channel, but as material whose protocols could shape collective conduct.

Optimization as artistic material

Lund subsequently carried this systems logic into galleries and markets. In The Fear of Missing Out, an algorithm analyzed information about successful artists and generated instructions for works intended to perform well within the art world.⁴ Studio Practice extended delegation into a production framework involving assistants, evaluation, and the artist’s role as manager. Lund has described this work through the language of entrepreneurship, while also discussing wages, attribution, and the unequal distribution of creative authority.⁵

These projects do not present computation as neutral. They stage measurement as a social force. In a Whitechapel Gallery interview, Lund connected his work to data, A/B testing, and an effort to disassemble the networks through which art acquires visibility and value.⁶ His market-facing projects likewise employ contracts, tracking, sponsorship, and resale conditions. Their satire depends on functioning inside the systems they examine, where critique and participation remain deliberately entangled.

Lund’s systems make optimization visible as a cultural choice, not an inevitable technical condition.

Playing the system

Race Condition was released through Art Blocks Presents on January 20, 2023, as a collection of 325 editions.⁷ Each edition is a live generative work rather than a single predetermined still. The artist’s official project site describes a space-racing game whose script determines the spacecraft’s acceleration, handling, and maximum speed, as well as the map algorithm, difficulty, color composition, power-ups, and generative music.⁸

The title carries a precise computational implication. A race condition occurs when a system’s outcome depends on the timing or order of concurrent operations. Lund converts that instability into an aesthetic premise. The player enters an environment assembled from interdependent variables, while speed makes perception, navigation, and audiovisual response unfold together. The work’s block-built courses and intense palettes evoke familiar game forms, yet their procedural variation resists a definitive image of the project.

Live on Art Blocks: race-condition-by-jonas-lund ↗

Agency under pressure

The collection condenses concerns that recur across Lund’s practice. Participation promises agency, but only within rules devised elsewhere. Variation suggests freedom, while the algorithm determines the available field. Competition invites mastery, even as the generated environment continually reframes what mastery means. These tensions connect Race Condition to Lund’s broader scrutiny of quantified taste. In Fair Warning, commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and Phillips, hundreds of tests collected audience preferences while exposing other users’ cursors, turning data capture into a visible communal performance.⁹

Race Condition is therefore both playable artwork and institutional proposition. It asks how a participant acts when code assigns the terrain, aesthetics, and limits of action. Across its 325 editions, difference is abundant but governed. Lund’s critical achievement lies in keeping that contradiction active: the system entertains, measures, and constrains at the same time.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Jonas Lund links page ↗.