Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) — Everydays — the daily practice (2007 onwards)

2007

Artists: Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) · Year: 2007 · Medium: Daily digital artwork — one piece per day, posted continuously since May 1, 2007 · Substrate: Cinema 4D, Octane Render, various digital-art software; posted to Winkelmann's website and social media; accumulated into successive Everydays projects · Place: Charleston, South Carolina / North Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, USA · Institution: Independent practice; later Beeple Studios (2022) Mike Winkelmann's Everydays practice began on May 1, 2007, when he committed to producing one digital artwork every single day without missing one. He has continued the practice without interruption for more than 7,000 consecutive days as of this archive's compilation. The commitment is extraordinary independent of the work's aesthetic quality — the sustained discipline across nearly two decades is unmatched in digital-art practice. The practice's visibility before 2021 was modest. Winkelmann built a substantial social-media audience through the 2010s (several hundred thousand followers) but was largely unknown outside digital-design circles. The March 2021 Christie's sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days (covered separately) transformed his practice's public profile in a matter of days. The same practice that had been quietly accumulating for fourteen years became, overnight, the most famous digital-art body of work in the world. The Everydays' aesthetic quality is contested. Critics have argued that Winkelmann's commercial-design-influenced imagery is artistically thin; defenders argue that the discipline of sustained daily production produces a meaningful aggregate even when individual works are uneven. What is clear is that the practice's shape — daily commitment, public posting, accumulation over decades — has influenced thousands of subsequent artists who adopted daily-digital-practice routines. Winkelmann continues the practice. New Everydays are posted daily on his website and social media. Lore Mike Winkelmann lived in Wisconsin from his birth in 1981 through the end of 2020 and built the entire pre-fame Everydays practice from a modest house in Appleton. His partner and their two children were part of his life during the project's middle years; family life is visible across the daily images as occasional cameos and recurring visual themes. Winkelmann maintained a day job as a freelance designer for the first decade of the project, accepting commercial commissions that he would file alongside the daily personal images. He moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 2021 after the Christie's auction, partly to be near a major airport for the international travel his post-fame schedule required. The complete Everydays archive — over 5,000 images and counting — remains hosted on his own servers. Sources • Winkelmann, Mike — beeple-crap.com • Christie's — Everydays: The First 5000 Days catalog (2021) • Beeple Studios — Charleston archive