Mike Winkelmann (born June 20, 1981), is an American digital artist and graphic designer that is known by the name Beeple. For over a decade he has been an active participant and one of the originators of the 'everyday' movement, producing and uploading an original piece of art everyday to various social media platforms.

In February 2021, Crossroads an animated Non-Fungible Token (NFT) by Beeple sold for $6.6 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) on Nifty Gateway. The piece made history as the most expensive single NFT ever sold.

Everydays
On May 1, 2007, Beeple, posted a new work of art online. He did the same thing the next day and the next, and the next one after that, creating and posting a brand-new digital picture, or ‘everyday’ as he called it, every single day for 13-and-a-half years. Now those individual pieces have been brought together into a single collection EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS.

Minted exclusively for Christie’s, the monumental digital collage will be offered as a single lot sale concurrently with First Open from 25 February to 11 March. Marking two industry firsts, Christie’s will be the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) — effectively a guarantee of its authenticity — and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ether, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.

In an interview published on The Verge on January 3, 2020 before he completed the project, Beeple stated:

"The Everyday project is making one picture from start to finish and posting it somewhere on the internet each day before midnight. That’s the only ritual I adhere to. Beyond that, where I do them, when I do them, how long I have to do them, and who’s around me when I’m doing them is all completely dictated by what’s going on that day. Normally, I just do them at night after the kids are in bed, and I’m alone in my room. But I’ve done them all over the place and in all different circumstances: airports, cafes, emergency rooms. I look at it more like brushing your teeth. You don’t have a big ritual around it; you just go in and brush your teeth."

Themes
A lot of Winkelmann's work features popular Disney characters in futuristic/dystopian settings and situations. In December of 2019, he posted a short animation of a robot dog with a Baby Yoda head eating the entrails of babies on Instagram, titled 'Stray Baby Yoda Dogs."

He also posted an Everyday animation of a giant human body blob with Mickey Mouse's head. The blob is stationed with giant feeding tubes protruding from the giant stomach as workers in hazmat suits walk around and fiddle with the computers attached to the blob's dock. He titled the October piece "Disney +" and posted it on Twitter.

On the appearance of these recurring pop culture themes in his art, Winkelmann commented:

Disney is this massive omnipresence, especially in the last week, how much Rise of Skywalker shit you see everywhere. I was on an airplane yesterday, and the napkin they brought me had a fucking Rise of Skywalker logo on it. Every fucking thing, just everywhere. Taking and reappropriating some of their IP and brands, I find fun. I think it’s interesting to imagine if you took these characters and infused them with AI far into the future, and they had a life of their own, what would they do and what could happen?Like with the Baby Yoda robot dog. What if, in the future, you could buy a Baby Yoda puppy, and it knew to play with kids. But then it got screwed up, and it got confused, and the algorithm got messed up, and it started eating kids, and it got stray, and there were these attacks of stray Baby Yoda robots that used to be toys, but they got so much AI in the future that they got loose, and they’re fricking eating kids.

Beeple also creates a lot of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg-related art. In October of 2019 as one of his Everydays, Winkelmann uploaded an animation on Instagram of a robotic, breasted spider with Zuck's head. The spider Zuck walks through what we assume is the Facebook factory, with giant headless silver women-without nipples-swaying to and fro. Beeple titled the piece 'ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA'.

Mediums
Winkelmann uses Cinema 4D for most of his digital artwork. He has sorted his Everydays by rounds, each round is a collection of the work created within a certain period of time and medium. His first round starts with illustration and progresses to photography and Cinema 4D. On June 4, 2019 Beeple made an appearance at the NAB Show where he live-streamed creating his Everyday for June 4.

Album ArtBeeple has also created many album covers including Imagine Dragons' 2017 album Evolve. He has also animated music videos for Flying Lotus' 2010 Kill Your Co-Workers and Brainfeeder's We Are The Transparent Machines™.
VJ Loops

Winkelman creates free video jockey loops that he uploads online across his various social media accounts. His Youtube channel has over 250 vj loop videos uploaded. He also posts them on his official website, beeple-crap.com.

Beeple has created concert visuals for popular music artists including:
Justin Bieber
One Direction
Katy Perry
Nicki Minaj
Eminem
Zedd
Deadmau5
Wiz Khalifa

Virtual Reality
In 2017 Beeple created a virtual futuristic Las Vegas. The Vegas: Alter Your Reality project features what Beeple calls a 'virtual playground'. In a 2017 interview discussing the project with Visit Las Vegas, Winkelmann commented

The biggest [challenge] for me is that … there isn’t framing. The person can look in any direction. That changes a lot of the little tricks you can do. One of the main things I want people to take away from my piece [is a] sense that everywhere you look, there’s something happening or something changing. [Vegas] is such a dynamic place; it always feels different and new. You could see the piece again and have it be different to you each time.

Fashion Week (2019)
Winkelmann's futuristic art from his Everydays collection was even featured on the runway of Paris Fashion Week on October 2, 2019. The event was held at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Beeple's art was displayed on 13 of the 45 pieces for a Louis Vuitton spring/summer collection.

Source: Everipedia, March 2021

From simple drawings to life in 3D

Consumers of internet culture will already be familiar with the South Carolina-based graphic designer and motion artist known as Beeple.

His visionary and often irreverent digital pictures have propelled him to the top of the digital art world, winning him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and high-profile collaborations with global brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Nike, as well as performing artists from Katy Perry to Childish Gambino.

In EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, the artist has stitched together recurring themes and colour schemes into an aesthetic whole. The individual pieces are organised in loose chronological order: zooming in reveals pictures by turn abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd, deeply personal or representative of current events. Recurring themes include society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence.

‘Beeple is looking at his whole body of work as it’s presented on Instagram as a kind of Duchampian readymade’ — specialist Noah Davis
The notable differences between the early and later pictures reveal Beeple’s enormous evolution as an artist. At the project’s inception, ‘everydays’ were basic drawings. When Beeple started working in 3D, however, they took on abstract themes, colour, form and repetition. Over the past five years, they have became increasingly timely, reacting to current events.

‘I almost look at it now as though I’m a political cartoonist,’ Beeple explains. ‘Except instead of doing sketches, I’m using the most advanced 3D tools to make comments on current events, almost in real time.’

Digital art has an established history dating back to the 1960s. But the ease of duplication traditionally made it near-impossible to assign provenance and value to the medium.

The recent introduction of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain technology has enabled collectors and artists alike to verify the rightful owner and authenticity of digital artworks. EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS will be delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by a unique NFT encrypted with the artist’s unforgeable signature and uniquely identified on the blockchain. MakersPlace, a digital marketplace, has issued the NFT for the piece.