Note: We invite readers to press “play” with the audio turned on for the video artworks embedded in this article.

A suited man works at his desk.

He organizes his papers. Charts flicker across his screen. The desk is cluttered with documents: a coffee mug, a stack of files.

He is absorbed. Oblivious to the world around him.

The scene repeats, but his surroundings change.

He appears at his desk on the city pavement. Stranded in the desert. On a busy street. Alone in a dark room.

Each artwork is composed of looping elements — a repetition that at times is barely perceptible, and at other times dominates the image.

Hundreds of identical figures rush across a crosswalk. A sea of cubicles. A body of water.

This is “everything vs nothing” by Joe Pease — a collection of thirty 1/1/x video artworks, forever connected to a 1/1 artwork that will never be minted.

An Endless Task

There are few texts about Joe Pease’s work in the public domain.

Almost no interviews with the artist himself.

The persona of “Joe Pease” is akin to a blank space, though nothing is deliberately obscured. Indeed, following the traces available online, one can readily identify Pease’s background in skateboard filmmaking and music videos.

The artist minted his first crypto artwork on Ethereum in May 2021. Over the next three years, Pease would methodically release 22 one-of-one video artworks.

Pease chooses to let his work speak for itself, giving away very little about the individual behind the world and his motivation to create. To the question about what inspires his work, Pease answered, laconically:

“I want to tell more stories.”

A similar approach can be found in the video Pease released to announce his residency with glitch Gallery.

This short piece, depicting his work routine interwoven with glimpses of his private life, remains notably abstract. The artist himself is absent — what we witness instead is the iterative rhythm of shooting footage, editing, shooting more, and editing again. The video’s robotic voiceover comments the scene with:

“back to work shoot more footage an endless task”.

This obsessively iterative process is only punctuated by brief interludes for repetitive daily tasks and approaching deadlines.

Despite his devoted following, collectors remain notably vague when discussing Pease’s work. Many are first struck by Pease’s technical mastery. Yet, it’s the sense of awe that overwhelms the viewer, leaving little desire for interpretation.

This is no coincidence.

There is no latent meaning that the viewer is asked to decipher. The story the videos tell are of a different nature. Pease’s work defies a conventionally linear sense of narrative storytelling, instead combining different worlds and durations within an image.

In nearly all of Pease’s videos, the viewer assumes the role of an observer, almost that of a voyeur — seeing the scene without being seen. Here is where Pease’s early influences emerge. At times, the perspective is detached, viewed from above; in others, the camera moves fluidly with the scene and subject(s). Such a cinematic effort seems to reveal Pease’s life as a professional skateboarder – and his early, grassroots documentation of the sport.¹

Loops are the key elements that hypnotically draw the viewer into Pease’s depictions of everyday life. Repetition is both the content and the form of Pease’s work. The repetitive processes of daily tasks are portrayed in endless loops. As glitch Gallery director Madison Page notes, we can compare this rhythmic content to how repetition impacts dance choreography. Not only can repetition in movement send viewers into a trance, it can equally work to create a compelling narrative inside of the score.²

Certainly, there is a rigor in repetition. Yet, Pease’s repetition isn’t restrictive. Instead, it works to create an ambient, contemplative tone in and of itself.

While the depicted tasks appear monotonous — like people buried in paperwork — the form has the opposite effect on the viewer.

In scenes framed by the observer’s detached perspective, Pease composes impossible images. The view suggests an integrity of time and place, yet the individual elements interact in highly implausible ways.

Everything in Pease’s work appears perfectly ordinary, and yet entirely adrift.

These impossible images may evoke moments of genuine daydreaming in the city—standing still amidst the sensory overload as urban life unfolds, mixing memories and associations.

And the “impossible” nature of these images, their distinctly surreal quality reflects that strangeness one senses in everyday experiences, a strangeness that distances one from the world.

everything vs nothing

Every artwork in “everything vs nothing” can be seen as a response to a set of interconnected problems. The most evident problem that the collection addresses is that of composition.

Over the past three years, Pease has only released short-length one-of-one video works. While adhering to this format, “everything vs nothing” marks the artist’s first attempt at exploring a more complex format for his work.

Thirty unique videos. All part of a single thread.

Each of the thirty videos comprising the “everything vs nothing” exhibition is an expanded fragment of the one of one work released here for the first time. This original video can itself be considered a one-of-one piece, though it will never be minted as a standalone work.

One might think of this original video as a cosmos containing a multitude of worlds, which unfold through the thirty video artworks. In this way, the viewer comes to understand each scene in the original video as a glimpse into the artist’s world, or conversely, each of the thirty video artworks as part of a larger narrative universe. This seems to hint at the artist’s own way of seeing — his endless iteration of the work, where each element can be continually adjusted, as it holds its own world and story.

All of the footage in “everything vs nothing” is shot by the artist himself. Yet the highly saturated colors give the impression of readymade or even found archival material. The hyper-saturation, combined with Pease’s editing techniques, estranges the imagery, rendering the depicted places and faces almost unrecognizable. This can be seen as a kind of “bracketing” of the world in Pease’s work. The filmed world appears washed out, nearly blank, as if the artist is capturing not a specific place or person, but anyplace and anybody, nobody and nowhere.

Such is the film’s “main character” — without a story or face. Someone or no one, telling anyone’s story. What we see is what he does: repetitive work. Both literally and figuratively, this man at the desk is at the center of “everything vs nothing,” providing cohesion to the different tableaus — as if he were traveling through each of the thirty pieces.

Whether on the street or in nature, the man remains unseen with his back to the viewer. He is as isolated on the street as he is in the desert. Unacknowledged, even as people walk right next to him.

Each element is, of course, filmed separately and placed within the scene through editing — a fact that eludes our immediate perception, but our mind insists this must be true.

The pronounced remoteness of the main character could be read as a commentary on the atomized nature of modern urban life and the repetitive cycles of contemporary work, a theme that has often been explored in the history of film and video art.³

And while there is a sense of existential isolation that pervades “everything vs nothing,” Pease’s work seems to be more concerned with showing the world than commenting on it. Here, the image is not a representation of the world, but a depiction of the relationships between its elements. Each element reveals that beyond the linear progression of time, the world contains a multitude of stories and temporalities. Like a daydreamer distancing himself from his own perspective, contemplating the world as a dream-image, Pease’s films make this coexistence visible and perceptible.

The title, “everything vs nothing,” resists direct interpretation.

Yet one might come to see it as suggesting different ways of viewing the world — either as full of meaning or as defined by emptiness, loss, or lack of purpose. Pease tells the stories of how we perceive the world, and how these perspectives interact — or fail to interact — with one another.

In describing art, the adjective “unique” is used so frequently that it has lost much of its meaning. While Pease’s work is genuinely unique, it might be more appropriately described as “untimely”. The work is untimely in as much as it does not coexist with others quite like it. Its roots lie in commercial videos, yet it carries a very different artistic ambition.

Its “surreal” qualities might superficially resemble AI-generated images, but are the result of highly accomplished editing, not prompting.

The work shares neither genre nor style with other works.

And so, in its untimeliness, Pease’s work appears eminently contemporary.

To view the entire collection, please visit the everything vs nothing auction page: https://www.everythingvsnothing.com/auction

The glitch curation team wishes to thank all who attended our exhibition of “everything vs nothing” at Art Blocks Weekend in Marfa in November 2024, Joe Pease for creating this beautiful collection with us, and those who continue to support our efforts across the internet.

1. Spike Jonze (Director). (1989). Rubbish Heap [Film]. World Industries. Retrieved November 26, 2024. ↩

2. Thierry De Mey (Director). (1997). Rosas danst Rosas [Film trailer]. Based on the 1983 dance performance by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Retrieved November 26, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82pqDvbPtx4&t=39s. ↩

3. Chantal Akerman (Director). (1976). Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [Film trailer, in French]. Starring Delphine Seyrig. Retrieved November 26, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdydEl07eGc. ↩