Too often, the atomic unit of digital art is taken for granted. The pixel, that minuscule point of light, an irreducible particle of the screen, is both the foundation and the limit of everything we see on a display. Whether an artist distracts us from the mosaic or leans into its blocky grid, the pixel is the beginning and, in Kim Asendorf's practice, the very subject. Throughout the years, he has been circling this fundamental element with escalating ambition: first in PXL DEX, his series of 256 abstract three-dimensional animations composed of coloured points pulsing over darkness, and now in PXL Pod, a work that takes the cylinder as its vessel and the single pixel as its atomic inhabitant.
It is one of the more beguiling paradoxes of screen-based art that volume can be suggested where none exists. Asendorf's Pod is technically a cylinder, a radial geometry populated by particles that assemble, warp, and drift in configurations that never loop and never resolve. Each point occupies a position within the cylinder's internal coordinate space, rendered first in what Asendorf calls "the frontal view," a stage of calculation where every vertex is placed without any awareness of the in-software camera's rotation or zoom. Only in a second rendering stage does the cylinder find its orientation in the space we actually see on screen. The result is a kind of doubled existence: each particle lives simultaneously in two frames of reference, one computational, the other spatial and perceptual. The Pod knows where its particles are before it knows where it is.
It is one of the more beguiling paradoxes of screen-based art that volume can be suggested where none exists. Asendorf's Pod is technically a cylinder, a radial geometry populated by particles that assemble, warp, and drift in configurations that never loop and never resolve. Each point occupies a position within the cylinder's internal coordinate space, rendered first in what Asendorf calls "the frontal view," a stage of calculation where every vertex is placed without any awareness of the in-software camera's rotation or zoom. Only in a second rendering stage does the cylinder find its orientation in the space we actually see on screen. The result is a kind of doubled existence: each particle lives simultaneously in two frames of reference, one computational, the other spatial and perceptual. The Pod knows where its particles are before it knows where it is.
This two-stage pipeline might seem like a technical footnote, but it is in fact the conceptual engine of the work. In the first stage, Asendorf employs what is known as a vertex transformation feedback loop, a mechanism by which previous positional data is fed back into the current calculation, allowing each particle to carry a trace of its own history. The pixels are not just simply placed- they remember where they have been. It is hard to overemphasise how much this recursive architecture means to the visual presence of the work, since the particles seem to dreamily drift, and accumulate behaviour over time rather than simply executing an algorithm frame by frame. The feedback loop is what gives each Pod its particular quality of organic restlessness, a sense that the structure is not animated but alive, metabolising its own past journey.
Asendorf has also discovered a peculiar property of rendering that he cannot fully explain but has learnt to exploit. When pixel density on screen is low, when particles are sparse and isolated, saturation drops dramatically. Even white particles fail to appear white. There is some kind of volumetric system at work within the rendering engine, a perceptual algorithm that clusters brightness: where particles gather, each individual point becomes more luminous, as if borrowing energy from its neighbours. When the pixel scale is doubled using a retina override, pressing on the keyboard so that each logical pixel occupies four physical ones, this effect nearly disappears, and every particle achieves its true assigned colour. The rendering, suddenly, becomes honest. Asendorf suspects this is a built-in humanisation of the display pipeline, an algorithm designed to trick us into better perception at the cost of strict accuracy.
The Pod series exists within what Asendorf calls the pixel ecosystem, an expanding constellation of works that includes PXL DEX and anticipates future collections. Only by creating the Single and Duo Pods did Asendorf discover certain behaviours and visual possibilities that he had never encountered in PXL DEX. These discoveries, he says, have already paved the way to the next step. It is a process in which the artwork is not just done but ongoing, each collection a chapter in what builds like a tale, accumulating meaning retroactively as new instalments recontextualise what came before. This is perhaps the most radical claim embedded in the Pod series: that a generative artwork is not a fixed object but a research instrument, and that the artist's relationship to their own code deepens not through planning but through prolonged cohabitation with the output. The work speaks, and the artist listens, and what is heard in the Duo Pod could not have been heard in the Single Pod, just as what was heard in the Single Pod could not have been heard in PXL DEX. Each iteration is an evolution, because with each new work the artist knows more, has seen more, understands more about how the system behaves under conditions that did not previously exist. The collection slowly reveals its secrets.
The Pod series exists within what Asendorf calls the pixel ecosystem, an expanding constellation of works that includes PXL DEX and anticipates future collections. Only by creating the Single and Duo Pods did Asendorf discover certain behaviours and visual possibilities that he had never encountered in PXL DEX. These discoveries, he says, have already paved the way to the next step. It is a process in which the artwork is not just done but ongoing, each collection a chapter in what builds like a tale, accumulating meaning retroactively as new instalments recontextualise what came before. This is perhaps the most radical claim embedded in the Pod series: that a generative artwork is not a fixed object but a research instrument, and that the artist's relationship to their own code deepens not through planning but through prolonged cohabitation with the output. The work speaks, and the artist listens, and what is heard in the Duo Pod could not have been heard in the Single Pod, just as what was heard in the Single Pod could not have been heard in PXL DEX. Each iteration is an evolution, because with each new work the artist knows more, has seen more, understands more about how the system behaves under conditions that did not previously exist. The collection slowly reveals its secrets.
The Duo Pod, Asendorf's latest development for the solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, compounds this architecture by placing two cylinders in a shared visual space. Each cylinder retains its own camera, its own internal rendering, where they are, technically, independent systems. And yet because they are rendered into the same screen context, their proximity demands interaction. When the two cylinders overlap, each particle performs a test: Am I inside the other cylinder now? If so, it is pushed outward along a radial force emanating from the centre of the neighbouring form. The deeper the intersection, the stronger the repulsion. It is modelled like simple physics without using any physics, with a simulation of tension of spatial negotiation between two entities that share a space but not a coordinate system. Asendorf is careful to note that this interaction is not the point of the Duo Pod. It is, rather, a necessary feature to create what he calls "the right feelings," a haptic intuition of three-dimensional volume in a medium that has none. For our brain, as he puts it, the structure definitely has volume, even if it is just points. The pixels assemble something like a sculptural presence, and the interaction between two Pods reinforces this illusion by making the forms behave as though they displace one another. What the viewer perceives is not collision detection but something closer to breath, two forms inhaling and exhaling in proximity, each one's movement slightly altering the other's contour. But the deeper ambition of the Duo Pod is aesthetic rather than technical. One sometimes is not enough. Asendorf recognised that by placing two instances of the same generative system side by side, a different and deeper level of the code becomes visible, not unlike how a stereo image resolves into depth only when two slightly different perspectives are combined. The Duo Pod offers a stereo view of process itself. You see not just what the algorithm produces but how it varies, how the same set of rules yields distinct and often contradictory expressions.
There is also the matter of brightness. The Duo Pods are deliberately more luminous than their predecessors, designed with what Asendorf describes as "daylight properties," calibrated for the conditions of a fair or public presentation, where ambient light competes with the screen. The Single Pods and PXL DEX pieces tend towards darkness, with palettes in which fifty per cent of the colours are already deep. Those works belong to the evening, to the intimate glow of a screen in a darkened room. The Duo Pods, by contrast, are built for confrontation with the real world's brightness, for the corridors and booths of an art fair where the work must hold its own against fluorescent overhead and the visual noise of a crowd. Asendorf's insistence on not fixing the aspect ratio of the Duo Pod is telling. When a fellow artist urged him to lock the proportions, a standard design instinct, he refused. He wanted, he says, the no-go version. He wanted the work to stretch and compress according to the screen it inhabits, to become something proportionless, something that resists the tidiness of design in favour of the unpredictability of painting. On a square screen, the two Pods are compressed and elongated; on a wide display, they breathe. At certain zoom levels, the forms dissolve into pure abstraction, and the viewer loses any sense of what the object is. This is what Asendorf likes especially, the moment when the work stops being a recognisable digital object and becomes instead a field of colour and motion, fluid and borderless, closer to the logic of a canvas than a screen.
It is curious that the pixel, that most rigid and geometric of visual units, should become, in Asendorf's hands, the material for something so close to painting. Every point of light remains visible, distinct, irreducible. And yet in aggregate, these points produce forms that pulse, breathe, interact, and suggest a volume that exists nowhere except in the viewer's perception. The pixel, tokenised and multiplied, becomes something more than itself. The Pod is its vessel, and what it contains is not data but the perpetual unfolding of a system that has learnt to surprise even its creator.
Dr. Mimi Nguyen, 2026