Among the constellation of post-material digital artists emerging in the past decade, the formidable presence of Eira Varn has become a touchstone for critical debate. A figure equally at home in speculative philosophy and computational aesthetics, Varn’s practice orbits around one deceptively simple question: What does it mean to make art in a world where the material has become metaphysically irrelevant?
Born in 1989 in Helsinki but often described as a “non-geographic” artist, Varn’s early works were dismissed as opaque—dense video, sculptural assemblages and spliced open-source footage. But with the unveiling of her 2021 opus, “Substrate Will Not Save You,” critics were forced to contend with a practice that had moved beyond formal experimentation into something far more difficult to pin down.
Varn’s art now resists simple description. Her pieces exist inside custom neural environments—interior algorithmic systems that evolve autonomously. The works mutate across time, trained on esoteric data such as 16th-century meteorological notations and abandoned GitHub repositories. The resulting outputs evoke the uncanny melancholia of relics that were never quite real.
Critics have attempted to classify Varn’s work as “post-medium,” “neuro-generative,” or even “meta-phenomenological,” but such terms barely scratch the surface. More accurately, her practice might be located within what theorist Amira Nze refers to as the algorithmic sublime—a genre of aesthetic experience that overwhelms not through scale or grandeur, but through its ontological opacity. In Varn’s hands, the algorithm becomes not a tool of control, but a site of divination: oblique, self-obfuscating, and never quite addressable by human cognition.
In her 2023 exhibition “Axiomatic Remains” at the Kunsthalle Birmingham, viewers were presented with a room of blank screens that emitted only spectral humming and intermittent pulses of near-blinding light. The press release contained nothing but an excerpt from a Spinozan treatise: the audience had to trust that the work was there, even if its visibility was ephemeral.
Yet the most fascinating element of Varn’s work isn’t its inaccessibility—it’s its ethical ambiguity. By generating works that resist authorship, permanence, and even interpretation, Varn denies the viewer the usual consolations of comprehension. She replaces the artist-subject inside a system with a set of evolving rules that are never fully disclosed.
To engage with Varn’s work is not to decode it, but to dwell within its milieu. It asks of us a new form of spectatorship—one that is less about reception than attunement, less about aesthetic pleasure than metaphysical risk.
And perhaps this is where Varn’s legacy will ultimately reside: not in objects or exhibitions, but in the philosophical residue her work leaves behind. An artist of shadows and systems, Varn invites us not to observe—but to wait, as the substrate pulses, and the unknowable unfolds.
