1025 colors is a collective visual system in which perception and authorship dissolve into process in reference to Gerhard Richter’s 1024 Farben. All participants face the same image space, yet each encounter produces a different configuration. What is shared is not a picture, but a condition of visibility shared by cooperation but structured by rules and limits.

The work shifts the question from what is represented to how representation emerges. Each contribution is minimal, irreversible, and immediately absorbed into a larger dynamic. Authorship becomes distributed. The image no longer exists as an object, but as a temporary state within an ongoing negotiation between individual choice and systemic constraint. The project raises awareness: Are we ever free to decide in technology? Who has power in these spaces? Is there ever no "governing authority" in the sense of Kersten in (technological) systems? 

„Der Schwarm organisiert sich selbst, ohne Plan, ohne Zentrum und ohne dirigierende Instanz.“
(Jens Kersten, Schwarmdemokratie, 2017)

"Influence can be exerted at particular points, while power is a phenomenon of space."
(Byung-Chul Han, What is power?, 2019)

Participation follows a simple gesture: selecting a color, adjusting saturation and brightness, placing it into the next available position. This apparent freedom unfolds inside a rigid framework that predetermines scale, sequence, and resolution. The tension between autonomy and structure becomes the true subject of the work.

"Der Schwarm [ist] idealtypisch [...] die Entfaltung emergenter Kollektivität durch eine Gruppe von Menschen [...], die neben- bzw. miteinander handeln, [...] ohne dass dieser fluide Superorganismus sich organisatorisch zu einer kollektiven Person verfestigen würde." (Jens Kersten, Schwarmdemokratie, 2017)