Iconoplasm (2007–2009)

Iconoplasm (also referred to as The Iconoplastic Period) represents one of Iain Ball’s earliest, most raw experimental art systems, developed during his undergraduate studies at Oxford Brookes University. The project centers on ephemeral, real-world object and substance arrangements, assemblages, public interventions, and process-based interactions. Visceral and deeply personal, the work navigates profound existential crisis, intense emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and alienation, transforming consumer detritus alongside organic and bodily substances—ranging from Prozac and household chemicals to semen, animal remains, alcohol, cash, and household products—into a chaotic friction against the architecture of advanced modernity.

Framed by the artist as “a test waged against the Richard Hamilton Building,” the project spanned vital public interventions and actions across Oxford, Reading, and Michaelwood Services from 2007 to 2008. Originally documented and distributed across early post-internet and Tumblr-era networks, this phase marked a foundational collapse and repurposing of art, life, waste, and energy under the pressures of consumer capitalism, establishing the raw, systems-oriented language that would define Ball’s later practice.

A selection of photographic documentation from this period has been archived on-chain and curated into the Iconoplasm X Live Trap NFT contract, presenting these early ephemeral works as a single archival body.

Iconoplasm EVOLVED (2026)

Iconoplasm EVOLVED adapts material from the original 2007–2009 experimental system. In 2026 a selection of the documentation images were fed into AI image-to-video models, allowing the works to be reinterpreted and extended through computational processes.

This methodology furthers Ball’s long-standing systems and cybernetic approach to art production as a continual, emergent process. It also reflects how human craft is increasingly cyborgianised—pattern recognition, optimisation, and generative agency from AI tools imprint themselves onto the original material as it moves into new computational realms.