About Kjetil Golid
Kjetil Golid works as a system developer in Trondheim, Norway. A graphic design course introduced him to Processing in 2011, and he went on to a bachelor's in cognitive science and a master's in computer science. At first he drew algorithms to understand them. During his master's he started bending classic ones into what he calls "needlessly complex methods" of making images from random numbers. He shares much of his code openly, including the palette library Chromotome, and makes interactive tools for creating images without code.
Archetype came out on Art Blocks Curated in February 2021: 600 outputs of a system that began as a way to split a rectangle into smaller ones. Golid has described a repeating pattern "fighting its way through" a chaotic structure. Selected outputs were shown on the ZKM Cube in Karlsruhe that year, and Sotheby's has offered Archetypes in its Grails sales. Paper Armada followed on Art Blocks Playground, symmetrical spacecraft rendered with loose, hand-drawn lines.
Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich included him in The Game of Life in 2020, then presented Expanse at ART SG in Singapore and Change of Basis in Paris in 2023. With Deca, an online platform for building NFT galleries, he made Decagon, its generative membership token. For Oracle Red Bull Racing's Velocity Series II with Bybit he made Decision Matrix and Risk / Reward, both built from stacks of chips.
Notable works
Top sales
- Archetype #397Sotheby's · 2023$330,200
- Archetype #268202355 ETH (about $121,100)
- Archetype #287202524.99 ETH (about $94,100)
- Archetype #240Sotheby's · 2024$50,800
- Archetype #13320247 ETH (about $25,400)
- Iterations IISotheby's · 2024$22,860
Exhibitions
- 2023Expanse by Kjetil Golid, a presentation at ART SGKate Vass Galerie, Singapore
- 2023Art Salon: Node to Node, with Change of Basis, during Art Basel weekKate Vass Galerie, Paris
- 2022PHYGITALKate Vass Galerie, Zurich
- 2021CryptoArt: It's Not About Money, with selected Archetypes on the ZKM CubeZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe
- 2020The Game of Life: Emergence in Generative Art, with DualKate Vass Galerie
Collaborations
- Decision Matrix and Risk / Reward, for Oracle Red Bull Racing's Velocity Series II with Bybit, curated by AOIOracle Red Bull Racing and Bybit
Press & resources
Milestones
- 2011
- 2020
- 2021
- 2023

