Simon Denny is a New Zealand contemporary artist whose work critically explores the aesthetics and politics of technology. He creates multimedia installations that investigate how tech companies construct narratives around innovation, control, and societal transformation. His practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, print, and video. He also works with web-based media and emerging platforms, such as Non-Fungible Tokens.
Denny’s conceptual focus includes corporate storytelling, digital infrastructure, game-based systems, and the intersection of art and politics. He often reinterprets real-world tech artifacts to expose the ideologies embedded within contemporary tech culture, such as server racks, startup pitch decks, or board games. His artwork invites viewers to reflect on how technology mediates power, play, and participation in the digital age.
Through corporate storytelling, digital infrastructure, and systems influenced by game mechanics, Simon Denny’s artworks explore how technology shapes power, control, and culture. He critically examines the ideologies embedded within contemporary tech culture by reinterpreting real-world artifacts, such as server racks, board games, and startup materials. His installations unpack the myths and promises used by tech companies to frame innovation, often revealing tensions between idealistic branding and real-world consequences. He visualizes the invisible systems behind the internet, data centers, and surveillance technologies, making abstract power structures tangible and accessible.
Through references to games and play, he critiques how serious domains like capitalism or governance are increasingly structured as competitive, rule-based environments. His engagement with blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens goes beyond medium, questioning their ideological claims of decentralization and transparency. In Secret Power, he investigates how national identity and state surveillance intersect in the digital age, using visual languages borrowed from intelligence agencies and tech marketing.
His artistic strategy is often described as archival and forensic, which involves collecting and re-presenting existing materials to expose the aesthetic and political logic behind them. Rather than offering simple critique, his work invites viewers to reflect on their own participation in digital systems, whether as users, consumers, or citizens.
Simon Denny references playable artifacts to critique how technology, governance, and capitalism are increasingly structured as game-based systems, such as board games, maps, and collectible items. These objects serve as metaphors for real-world power dynamics, inviting viewers to reflect on their roles within digital and institutional frameworks.
In Dungeon (2024), he reconstructs classic board games with tech culture elements, such as NVIDIA chips and startup office visuals, which explore intersections between fantasy, branding, and infrastructure. In Games of Decentralized Life (2018), he uses the visual language of games to examine blockchain culture and decentralization, incorporating cards, tokens, and modular components to show how cryptocurrency systems mimic game mechanics while claiming to disrupt traditional power structures.
His use of games is not merely aesthetic, reflecting his archival and forensic strategy, where he collects and re-presents real-world materials in game-like formats to expose the aesthetic and political logic behind digital systems. By referencing familiar games, he makes abstract concepts more tangible, emotionally resonant, and accessible to viewers, like surveillance and decentralization.
Simon Denny’s works invite deep reflection on how we participate in technological systems, and how we are shaped by technological systems. His installations challenge us to examine our roles as users, citizens, and players in a digitized world. Through themes like corporate storytelling, digital infrastructure, game-based structuring, blockchain, and surveillance, he exposes the hidden architectures of power that structure our everyday lives.
His artwork resonates with me deeply, because it mirrors questions I often ask myself: What systems am I complicit in without realizing? How does branding shape my sense of progress? And what would it mean to engage with these systems not passively, but critically and creatively?
He doesn’t offer easy answers, but that’s precisely what makes his art so powerful. It opens up space for ethical, political, and emotional inquiry. It invites us to stay with the discomfort of not knowing. For me, his artwork is not only about technology, but also responsibility, awareness, and the courage to reflect.
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