Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
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German

1981

Kim Asendorf is a digital artist whose work with pixel-level manipulation helped define the field of generative and glitch art. His creation of the Pixel Sorting algorithm introduced a new visual language that continues to influence digital art and creative coding worldwide.

Full Bio

Kim Asendorf is a German digital artist and programmer born in 1981 in Kassel, Germany. Growing up with early access to computers thanks to his father, Kim developed a lasting fascination with technology, video games, and music. He pursued formal training in art and design before relocating to Berlin, where he continues to live and work.

Asendorf’s art merges programming with visual expression, focusing on abstract systems constructed at the pixel level. He is best known for creating the open-source Pixel Sorting algorithm in 2010, a foundational tool in generative and glitch art that manipulates images by sorting pixels based on brightness or color values. This algorithm sparked a global wave of derivative artworks and remains a signature technique in digital art. His practice spans experimental and conceptual work, emphasizing the dynamic tension between order and chaos. Through projects such as Mountain Tour (2010), which repurposes found images into pixel-sorted compositions, to Monogrid (2021) and COLORS OF NOISE (2023), he crafts immersive animations and sound-based digital environments. Asendorf’s Cargo (2023), released on the Ethereum blockchain, exemplifies his exploration of real-time WebGL generative art, featuring interactive, adaptive compositions that fill browser windows and evolve with macro- and micro-level pixel interactions. His works continuously refine the balance between randomness and control, offering visual complexity and meditative simplicity.

His work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at Transmediale in Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, Eyebeam in New York, and the Overlapping Biennial in Bucharest. His project Gezi gelen Limon, made with Ole Fach during the Gezi Park protests, was part of ZKM’s global aCtIVISm exhibition. In 2010, he and Fach launched Fach & Asendorf Gallery, an early online gallery for digital art that treated the website itself as the exhibition space. The following year, he launched Gif Market, an experimental platform where collectors could buy GIFs with different levels of rarity and publicly attach their names to the works. It anticipated many ideas central to blockchain collecting today, and XCOPY’s first-ever digital art purchase took place on this site. Asendorf was also one of the first fifteen artists selected for the MOMA Postcard project and co-directed Metallica’s “Chasing Light” video, bringing his algorithmic aesthetics into mainstream media. Throughout his career, Asendorf has consistently pushed the possibilities of digital art, rethinking how it is made, shared, and collected.