The Not So White White Paper: Wheel of Fortune

This paper examines the digital artwork Wheel of Fortune (WOF, 2010–) by the Viennese artist Sebastian Schager as a contemporary work within an art-historical context. WOF lets images pass by like a wheel of fortune, since 2010 as a tool of painting and, most recently, in the two cases this paper examines more closely: as the first purely digital installation, without painting, in the Magenta Art Room (2026, Collage mode), it drew on open museum and cultural archives, and a human image drop at the right instant condensed the images into an unrepeatable collage; as the first epoch, Trinity, in the browser (since 2026, Mono Scroll mode), it plays from a collection curated by the artist in three classes, and the players cut twelve seconds out of the running wheel. Its core thesis: in WOF, chance is not depicted but performed – the wheel follows fixed rules, and chance enters at two points, in the question of which images get into the run and in the instant at which someone intervenes; precisely the structure that already characterises the medieval Rota Fortunae. At the centre stands a double observation: with its title and its mechanics, WOF invokes a pictorial motif handed down through centuries of Western art – the Rota Fortunae, the wheel of Fortuna – and translates it into a technical dispositif of image holdings, score and blockchain. Methodologically, the paper applies Erwin Panofsky’s three-step iconographic-iconological model and deliberately extends it at one point, because WOF does not show the motif but lets it run. The analysis situates WOF within a genealogy of the readymade, collage/montage, appropriation, conceptual and generative art, as well as within the theory of the “Death of the Author” (Barthes) and of technical reproducibility (Benjamin). A new chapter sets the work against the language machine (Simanowski) and develops its argument from that comparison: against the average that statistics produces, neither chance alone nor the human alone is of help, but the change of levels – human, chance, human, blockchain. A separate chapter examines whether the NFT opens up an artistic – not merely speculative – space for this work, and at the same time names its limit, which the work has meanwhile shifted onto four blockchains.