on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
Dear Feral File Community,
Today marks a new chapter for Feral File. In a few weeks we’ll open pre-orders for an art computer we call FF1. A computer with one purpose: to explore what it means to live with digital art that responds and evolves every day.
This whole journey began as a gift for me. At the start of the pandemic, Casey Reas and I were both in difficult places. UCLA was locked down, and he wanted to support his students and the broader community of artists working with computers and code. I was staring at a year of canceled projects at my last startup, Bitmark. Against that backdrop, Casey suggested we extend the a2p experiment, an artist-to-artist project in exchange and provenance, into something larger: part gallery, part publisher, part marketplace, living entirely online and showing code-based art. I said yes immediately. At any other time I probably would have hesitated, because betting everything on digital art felt impossible. Art online back then was nothing like it is today.
Since launching in March 2021 with Social Codes, we’ve produced 51 exhibitions. I’ll be honest, it took me almost half a year, and at least six shows, probably more, before I really fell in love with art.
Falling in love wasn’t a lightning strike. It was slower, almost invisible at first. I kept getting pulled in without even realizing it. At first I focused on design and engineering. Those are the parts I’ve always loved most. But the more time I spent with the works themselves—reading curatorial notes, coming back to pieces again and again, learning about the processes behind them—the more I began to see computation as a medium with its own kind of magic. Randomness, real-time change, interactivity. It makes the art feel alive. Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same river twice. With code you can’t even step in it once. Every moment raises a new question.
I didn’t grow up with art. Books, yes. Computers, definitely. But art? I can’t remember a single painting in our home. When I visited museums in my twenties, oil paintings and sculpture felt distant, like something behind glass I wasn’t allowed to touch. But with works made in code, my technical background offered an immediate entry point. What struck me was how naturally artists picked up the most advanced tools. Machine learning, new algorithms, things I thought I understood. But their art left me with questions I hadn’t even thought to ask about this new technology.
At first, Casey and I wanted Feral File simply to open doors for artists. But as I fell deeper into this world, one question lodged in my mind and refused to leave: what would it feel like to live with art that evolves with you every day, right on your wall?
Dead ends and a turning point.
That question wouldn’t leave me alone. I had to try. But the path wasn’t straightforward.
We poured a year into building a digital art wallet. Apple blocked us. Not just for blockchain, but because some works could be purchased outside their system. We made compromises and eventually shipped, but looking back, the real issue wasn’t Apple. It was losing sight of the question that started this for me. Art thrives in shared spaces. It becomes a living companion: ambient yet profound, always there in the background, and waiting for that moment of deeper connection. None of that existed on a phone.
So we tried TVs. The Samsung Frame looked like the obvious answer. For a while, I convinced myself it was. But the browser was outdated, code crawled, and app store approvals dragged on for months. I wanted art to feel like a living companion on the wall, but instead it felt trapped—not by the glass itself, but by the silicon beneath it. Sand turned rigid, locked into operating systems and hardware built without any care for code as art. What should have flowed like a river was frozen into walls. The dream was to put this work in our spaces, but at every turn, another wall rose to block us.
Then came a conversation with my friend Andrew “bunnie” Huang, one of the few people I trust when it comes to making hardware. I told him about the struggles with TV app stores, hardware limits, all the dead ends we had hit. He listened quietly and then said something simple: if you want this to work, you need your own device. Otherwise, it’s always going to break. If we want art that lasts, he said, we need to control the computer from the ground up.
I didn’t want to hear it because I had already been down this path. In my twenties, I started a company that built the first open-source phone. We wanted to open up the walled gardens of early mobile tech. It was thrilling and painful. A ten-cent resistor once stopped our line for days and cost me $300k. That’s the funny one I tell. The truth is there were worse scars, crashes that burned through millions and left us reeling. It was so hard, and in the end we had to shut down. After that, I swore off hardware.
But bunnie showed me what had changed. He walked me through Shenzhen this summer, introduced me to vendors who understand small-batch production, and even designed the first FF1 enclosure. Though I resisted at first, those old hardware scars ran deep. Slowly I rediscovered the joy of making physical things, and admitted he was right.
Opening new questions.
That’s how we arrived at this moment. On September 19, we’ll open pre-orders for FF1, the art computer from Feral File. Plug it into any TV, projector, or display, scan a QR code, and your personal collection of living art appears.
From your phone you can browse, build playlists, and send art to your wall.
Control FF1 from your phone.
Control FF1 from your phone.
We’ll start with 100 units in the first wave at $450, shipping in October. The next waves of 100 will follow in the months after. Each unit comes with a soulbound token that marks you as part of this first group. Early access for the first wave opens September 17 for Feral File alumni, the artists and creators who helped us get here. For everyone else, pre-orders begin September 19.
Most people who try to live with computational art end up cobbling something together. I’ve done the Mac mini to TV route. More often, the work just sits on a laptop. And even when you get it on a wall, it’s fragile. A browser update breaks the code. An IPFS link disappears. The server is gone.
FF1 aims to make those problems disappear, so what remains is the art itself. It speaks DP-1, an open display protocol we’re building as a standard for how digital art is shared and played. Think of how RSS once worked for the web: you could subscribe to any site and new posts flowed in automatically. It also quietly powered podcasts into existence. DP-1 brings that early-web spirit into art, letting anyone publish playlists of evolving works that play on any compatible device.
What happens when a community starts building and sharing playlists of art? What if they were like music playlists that capture a mood, with living works you could remix and experience together? How will it feel when artworks are no longer hidden on laptops but present in our spaces, responding and evolving alongside us? What would a Feral File exhibition look like on the wall instead of on a laptop? (You’ll start to see this in our fall and winter shows.) And what if 100,000 people gathered for an exhibition the way they might for a big game?
At this point, I have more questions than ever. And that feels like the right place to begin.
Join us.
The next step is simple: Join the waitlist to get early previews, behind-the-scenes updates, new videos, and the first chance to pre-order FF1.
More soon.
> Sean