LoVid

Artist

LoVid · lovid.org ↗

Based

Tali Hinkis (born 1974, Jerusalem) and Kyle Lapidus (born 1975, New York). Live and work in New York

Practice

Interdisciplinary collaboration spanning handmade electronics, experimental video, textiles, performance, installation, and generative art

Raster

raster.art/artist/lovid ↗

Now

Presented by Picture Theory at OFFSCREEN Paris, 20-25 October 2026

In the set

Tide Predictor ↗ · 400 editions
Augury ↗ · 126 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

LoVid is the collaborative identity of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, whose practice has developed since the beginning of the twenty-first century through a sustained encounter between electronic signals and handmade form. Hinkis was born in Jerusalem in 1974 and Lapidus in New York in 1975; both live and work in New York.¹² Electronic Arts Intermix describes an approach that combines craft-oriented analog processes, playful engineering, and natural and social science. The resulting works include live performances, participatory projects, immersive installations, videos, and textiles.¹ This breadth is not simply multidisciplinary accumulation. It establishes translation itself as LoVid’s central method: voltage becomes color, color becomes moving image, moving image becomes printed or stitched pattern, and embodied participation becomes data, choreography, or social structure.

That method emerged through direct engagement with the physical infrastructure of electronic media. At the Experimental Television Center in 2003, LoVid worked with historical image-processing equipment including Nam June Paik’s Wobbulator, the Sandin Image Processor, and the Jones Colorizer.¹ The experience encouraged the duo to build instruments of their own, culminating in the Sync Armonica during an Eyebeam residency in 2005.² Their deliberately cumbersome devices refuse the frictionless appearance of consumer electronics. Knobs, wires, unstable synchronization, and saturated raster patterns reveal media as a contingent arrangement of materials and gestures.

For LoVid, noise is not the failure of a signal. It is evidence that a signal has a body, a history, and a route through the world.

The handmade signal

LoVid’s work belongs to an expanded history of video synthesis in which an image is generated rather than recorded. Their oscillators and processors construct color and pattern directly from electronic signals, loosening video from the camera’s descriptive function. An interview with Hinkis and Lapidus situates this practice in a trajectory that began with noise performance and developed into immersive installations, sculptural synthesizers, single-channel videos, textile art, and blockchain works.³ The instrument can therefore be an artwork, a studio tool, a performance partner, and the source of later artifacts.

The tactile character of this process matters. LoVid repeatedly moves between what might conventionally be separated as hard and soft media: circuit boards and fabric, code and stitching, electrical current and bodily movement. In a separately conducted dual interview, the artists describe complementary roles within their collaboration while emphasizing the porous exchange between technological and conceptual thinking.⁴ Their authorship is neither the expression of a single hand nor an anonymous technical pipeline. It is a negotiated system in which different competencies, perceptions, and decisions remain active.

This collaborative structure also shapes how LoVid understands instability. Analog synthesis produces images through continuous voltages whose alignment can drift, buckle, or erupt. Such irregularities are not cosmetic glitch effects added after an image has been stabilized. They arise from the behavior of the apparatus. The Jewish Museum’s account of Retzuot records how handmade hardware, video-generating sculptural synthesizers, knotted patchworks, and live audiovisual performance were joined to examine ritual, abstraction, and technologically mediated spirituality.⁵ Here, electronic media become wearable and ceremonial, testing how inherited symbolic structures can be encountered through unstable contemporary tools.

Predicting a digital tide

Tide Predictor carries this analog sensibility into an on-chain generative system. Released through Art Blocks Curated on November 2, 2022, the work comprises exactly 400 editions.⁶ Rather than presenting scans or recordings of analog outputs, LoVid constructed a code-based model of a modular video synthesizer organized around red, green, and blue channels.

The title links two histories of oscillation. Nineteenth-century tide-predicting machines used periodic mechanical motion to model the rise and fall of water. Analog video synthesis likewise organizes moving images through frequencies, periods, phase relationships, and electrical waves. In Tide Predictor, code translates this shared language of cycles into animated fields whose bands, grids, and color collisions continuously reorganize themselves. The Museum of the Moving Image describes the work as LoVid’s first code-driven generative artwork and explains that its JavaScript outputs simulate randomness while preserving the duo’s longstanding attention to electronic signals and natural rhythms.⁷

Translation is not presented as perfect equivalence. A browser cannot reproduce the electrical materiality of an analog synthesizer, just as a model cannot reproduce an ocean. Instead, LoVid makes the distance between systems productive. The work asks what analog practice can become when oscillation is expressed through variables and functions, then distributed as distinct on-chain instances. Across 400 editions, a common program produces marked visual heterogeneity. Each output is simultaneously an autonomous composition and evidence of a shared generative instrument.

The project’s museum history reinforces this collective logic. From March through June 2024, the Museum of the Moving Image displayed #173 with three additional outputs while announcing its acquisition of Tide Predictor #173 for the permanent collection. The installation used serial comparison to show how one source code could yield substantially different results.⁷ In August 2026, LoVid reported meeting with MoMI Associate Curator of Media Arts Regina Harsanyi to finalize the acquisition, with particular attention to the work’s long-term preservation and context.¹³ Harsanyi had previously served as a consultant for MoMI’s digital preservation efforts and was appointed to help grow its media-art collection and capacity for preserving variable media works.¹⁴ Together, the 2024 presentation and the later preservation work show that collecting a browser-based generative artwork extends beyond obtaining a numbered output. It also requires an institutional account of the code, dependencies, behavior, and conditions needed to keep the work intelligible over time. Seen together, the four displayed outputs resist the idea that generative art is reducible to either a privileged master image or a list of rarity traits. Their subject is variation as a visible event.

Live on Art Blocks: tide-predictor-by-lovid ↗

Code as textile logic

If Tide Predictor models the patching of a synthesizer, Augury turns its outputs toward the compositional logic of weaving, quilting, and decoration. Art Blocks records the project as 126 unique artworks released on May 3, 2023.⁸ The exact count, 126 editions, gives the project a more concentrated field of variations, but its images often suggest expansiveness: fragments accumulate along borders, mirrored structures meet, and luminous signals appear to fold across one another.

Augury draws frames from the Tide Predictor algorithm using new hashes, then arranges those fragments according to rules governing density, repetition, mirroring, and edge placement. The mechanism connects generative code to LoVid’s textile practice without claiming that digital assembly is literally weaving. Instead, it identifies related operations across media: selecting units, repeating motifs, joining boundaries, and building a surface through patterned decisions. The project’s own account connects these compositions to Pattern and Decoration and glitch art, while explaining that visual density is weighted toward the borders to displace attention from the center.⁹

This displacement has critical force. Modern interface design often guides attention toward a centered message and conceals the processes at its edges. Augury reverses that hierarchy. Borders become active zones where signals collide and structures disclose how they were assembled. The title’s reference to interpreting omens through the behavior of birds adds another model of reading: meaning does not arrive as a fixed declaration but emerges from attentive observation of complex movement.

The project also clarifies why textiles remain essential to LoVid’s digital work. Cloth is both image and structure. A woven pattern cannot be detached from the crossings that produce its surface, just as LoVid’s electronic images cannot be separated from signal flow. Hinkis has discussed entering digital art through video while confronting the gendered power structures surrounding technology.¹⁰ Within the duo’s broader practice, stitching, quilting, and decorative pattern challenge inherited divisions between technical invention and feminized craft. Code does not supersede those material histories. It enters into correspondence with them.

Live on Art Blocks: augury-by-lovid ↗

Bodies, archives, and resistant surfaces

LoVid’s generative projects are best understood within a practice that repeatedly gives electronic images new physical and social lives. 486 Shorts, for example, began by opening an obsolete computer and making direct circuit-board connections that generated unpredictable video signals. OFFSCREEN Paris describes the work as 486 clips created by deliberately shorting an i486 graphics card, later preserved with an archival disk image and installation instructions.¹¹ The work transforms the sealed computer from a consumer object into a field of risky contact.

That impulse continues in public art, wearables, tapestries, and participatory performance. It also explains the unusually embodied quality of LoVid’s screen works. Their color is not merely chromatic information. It carries memories of voltages adjusted by hand, studio sessions performed in real time, and images translated into paper, fabric, glass, or code. That archival logic remains active: Picture Theory will present LoVid at OFFSCREEN Paris in October 2026, with 486 Shorts as the featured work.¹¹

The significance of Tide Predictor and Augury within AB[500] therefore lies in more than their adoption of blockchain distribution. They articulate generative art as part of a longer ecology of instruments, crafts, signals, and relationships. The blockchain secures distinct outputs, but LoVid’s deeper concern is how images circulate among media and people. Their code remembers hardware; their pixels anticipate cloth; their patterns carry the pressure of hands. Across both collections, prediction does not promise mastery of the future. It names a practice of staying alert to rhythm, instability, and change.

Bibliography

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