People, traits, and emotions — depicting facial expressions is a recurring art historical theme for its ability to represent changes in society and trigger empathy. In parallel to this week’s launch of Art Futura’s edition on humanized technology, we thought to bring a selection of ten artists we follow for their work on faces and embrace of the digital medium — an excellent way to learn emerging names and practices or add new feeds to your Instagram.

Antonella Arismendi (IG: antonellaarismendi)

We love Antonella Arismendi’s GIFs imbued with aesthetics of the fashion and beauty industries. The Spanish artistic director augments her photographs with moving images that enlarge facial attributes, such as pale skins, eyes, and lips. Arismendi furthers this mirror-like effect with glitters and other geometrical graphics which she uses to adorn her models’ faces while always keeping with a minimalist design.

No wonder Nobumichi Asai is a creative director at the renown Japanese studio Wow Inc. Her work Kagami is both technologically vanguard and timeless. The installation features a ‘3D mirror’ that replicates a person’s face in three dimensions and then projects in video mapping elegant designs of bamboo, butterflies, kingfishers, ibis, sunsets, and cherry blossoms onto the sculptural, facial replica — a techy breakthrough that engages with the viewer in utter pureness and simplicity.

Yoshi Sodeoka is a New-York-based digital artist that Laffy Maffei Gallery supports. His neo-psychedelic style, use of online imagery, and interest in computer graphics are visible in this series called Disintegrated Depictions where photographs and screen effects are decomposed and reassembled in a collage. Sodeoka’s work with faces has notably been the subject to many illustrations in magazines like the New York Times and Wired.

Valérie Belin (IG: valerie_belin.officiel)

Photographer Valérie Belin makes forceful picture montages as she overlays portraits with contextual information on a period — mostly the 1950s. Added content takes the form of comic books’ hand-drawn cartoons and speech bubbles, timely flower-patterned wallpapers, or chinoiseries. In the case of the All Star series, visuals saturate the image as a reminder of the hectic world that once fueled the American dream.

The poetic realm of digital artist Aykut Aydogdu cannot but remind of Surrealism, with an Instagram account telling of his constant focus on portrait-style pictures that mix dream and reality, contemporary and elements and diverse timely-fashioned characters. On a day-to-day basis, Turkish-born Aydogdu works as an illustrator for magazines, commercials, and movie posters but his artistic practice is worth keeping an eye on.

Featured at the Art Futura Festival, Marina Núñez represents the Spanish digital art scene. With 2D and 3D, moving and still images, she depicts otherly individuals as she merges human shapes with computer-generated graphics or natural elements (earth: Seísmo, 2016, fire: Phantasma, 2017). The result is often uncanny offering fictional narratives to question notions of identity.

CG Artist and sculptor Luigi Honorat’s videos show engaging permeability between physical and virtual forms. His work starts with building projects in physical spaces to inform digital ones, with shapes that move from liquid to solid going through an immense range of materiality and compositional processes. Conspicuously, Honorat uses the human as a recurrent shape to outline matter.

Zach Lieberman is a leading digital artist known for his work on open frameworks. Besides his investigations on shapes, lines, and geometrical constructions, he has experimented new ways of depicting faces. The above piece taken from his Instagram works as a dreamy decomposition of a selfie, iconic of the internet and mobile devices era. Lieberman previously built a face generator called “Reface” that mashed up the different facial traits of visitors.

“Balance” is the first word that comes to mind when thinking of the pieces that Japanese composer and motion graphics designer Shota Maehara creates. His airy and light environments often stage nature with humans or artificial computer-generated objects, seemingly exploring a peaceful reconciliation amongst elements that surround us — a refreshing approach to digital art.

Graphic designer Vince Fraser gained our attention with his Instagram account where he focuses on the representation of Afro-futurism, namely Afro-Americans with vanguard, tech-like impulse. His black-and-white series consists of motion graphics where an image portraiting a man or woman fragments into lips, nose, masks and other wearables which then rotate, multiply and reassemble into the original photograph — graceful, fun and persuasive.

*Cover image: Yoshi Sodeoka, Disintegrated Depictions. Dibond Mounted Inkjet prints, 111.8 x 111.8 cm. © Yoshi Sodeoka.

10 Digital Artists Working with Figurative Representations

Why do we empathize with digital humans and how do we relate to the virtual worlds they live in? — These questions now repeatedly appear as marketers consider the influence of virtual Instagrammers like Lil Miquela as the next big thing for driving product sales. But could the art world respond to a similar interest? Out of the emerging artists in the ArtTactic’s Top 100 NextGen Report, a dozen of them work with new media, and although most practices are broad in range, a fourth of the digitally-oriented engage with avatars and virtual worlds.

What’s at stake for both artists and marketers is the blurring between the virtual and the real, and the understanding of new social constructs both within the online world and outside, comparatively. These concern especially makes sense in the post-truth era where images and recordings are manipulated for political or economic purposes while celebrities endorse brands for the paycheck. So what is legitimate? And why would the online world be less reliable than the information actual people give us? Could the virtual world be more authentic from the only fact that it’s evident about being fake?

But although artists and marketers depart from a similar observation, their goals and practices differ. It’s important to note the difference between the digital humans that marketers refer to and the avatars which we find in virtual worlds; the former gives the impression of “being” and living like the rest of us, while the later acts as a visual identity for a computer user. As a graphic illustration, an avatar does not necessarily have to look real — on the contrary, people often use it to express their fantasy.

Another point of differentiation is their diverging approach to control and surveillance. On one hand of the spectrum, marketers look for power. “Everything about a digital human can be cognizantly created — from their personality to their struggles to the way they overcome those struggles, explains QuHarrison Terry, “all of this is used to build trust and ultimately push an agenda. In many ways, digital humans are a marketer’s ideal influencer.” On the artist’s hand, however, it’s not about surveillance, but the lack thereof, and what people can create and dream of without political or social restrictions? For Top100 NextGen Artists Cao Fei, Jon Rafman, and Ian Cheng, and possibly many more, virtual selves seem like less of a construct and more of one’s true nature than what we give to the real world, the society of the spectacle.

The virtual world Second Life played a vital role in the development of Chinese artist Cao Fei (born 1978)’s career in art. The artist is known for observing the evolution of contemporary China and the impact of urbanization. Within the country’s communist/capitalist system, the social dynamics are engaging but hard to express, so when she discovered the SL online platform in 2007, a new realm of experimentation takes place. She builds her own avatar China Tracy who falls in love (i.Mirror) and develops her own city (RMB City). When asked in an interview for Art21, Fei explains that “the personality of an avatar is quite close to one’s own. This comes from my observation of people in their habitats, demeanor of doing things,” and notes a certain degree of violence in the way people interact, talk or type which shows people true persona. To the artist, the virtual world brings an escape, a realm where concerns from our real life can be solved, a way for her to document an alternative society facing globalization and its many urban issues.

Jon Rafman (Canadian, born 1981) is a digital wanderer using online information to discover societies subcultures. In 2008, he started to record situations from Google street view (Nine Eyes), but also explored Second Life in an approach similar to Walter Benjamin’s flâneur. His avatar Kool-Aid Man stood and observed weird situations developing amongst other avatars of the virtual world, in the form of voyeurism, which he started documenting in films and stills bringing uncanny relationships and social environments to light. Interestingly, Rafman chose to work with SL for its artificiality show through, with rudimentary graphics underlining a computer-generated aesthetic. With more abstraction, all darker habits become visually tolerable grasping the disturbingly violent and sexual essence of human beings hidden in the corners of the internet. Rafman now continues to create videos within other virtual environments, which he develops based on his anthropologist analysis of internet subcultures and the dark web. Why? To grasp the limits between the real world and simulated ones, and how moving from one to the other affects our psyche.

Ian Cheng (American, born 1984) also believes in a porous relationship between the “real” world and the virtual one, and focus on how technologies can bring new realities of situations or things that cannot be predicted. Remindful of Sol LeWitt and his wall drawings, Cheng codes a virtual 3D environment, builds some characters with a specific set of behaviors, and then run the installation to see how all the components will interact within his unexpected result over an infinite duration. In Emissary in the Squat of Gods and Emissary Forks at Perfection Cheng assigned goals to his digital avatars to give his simulations emotional acuity. In these respective works, a shaman and a Shiba act as titular emissary characters trying to guide their simpler counterparts throughout a journey which starts over again with each simulation, creating new dramas each time. Most interestingly, Cheng reversed the dynamics between man and avatar so that participants need to follow a digital avatar throughout the exhibition space with the use of augmented reality — forcing them to follow self-processing technology.

*Cover image: Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015. Live simulation and story. © Ian Cheng.

Working with Avatars: A Drive for Sales in Digital Art?

Today’s art market follows a 19th-century formula where artworks gain value based on scarcity. Artists’ recognition, provenance, visual quality, state of conservation, and a low number of pieces available on the market all impact on the valuation of an artwork, defining what rare is. Auction houses, prime art galleries, and fairs take advantage of this system with rocketing sales results, and extensive buyer’s premium which when introduced in 1975 by Sotheby’s and Christie’s accounted for an extra 10% but now represents an additional 30% from the sales price — pointing to art’s speculative nature. In a capitalistic market, it is conspicuous that rare art is more expensive and limited to the elite like any luxury commodity. Nonetheless, this approach sounds outdated given the rise of the sharing economy, amongst millennials most notably.

But what comes with digital art, a form of creation founded on the sharing of ideas and information? What could make the value of an artwork that is computer-generated, and thus duplicable, printable and subject to mass-distribution? “In digital art,” explains critic Oliver Grau, “the aura originates through artificial inaccessibility or deep, immersive contact with the work — for example, when observers are obliged to travel long distances to a festival to see a stand-alone installation of a much-discussed virtual work that is rarely on show owing to the expense involved. In theory, it would be possible to replicate this work any number of times, but in practice, it is seldom to be seen in its spatially polyvariant form and the image worlds it generates differ each time it is viewed.”

Replicating artworks numerous times without preventing its valuation? Grau’s argument highlights both current systemic flaws and the opportunities that Danae HI harnesses. Conspicuously, the digital art and design hub creates value by differentiating a digital artwork’s intellectual property from its physical reality. The idea was inspired by the early influencer of American conceptual art, Sol LeWitt, who, with his Wall Drawings (1968), was the first to distinguish an artwork’s intellectual creation from its materiality. When collectors bought a Wall Drawing, the artist gave them a piece of paper with the recipe to make the art piece — and that’s what stood for the original, the artwork. Afterward, the given collectors could enjoy their artifacts by asking the artist’s assistants (or post-mortem, people accredited by the Sol LeWitt Foundation) to make the recipe for a specific wall. As a result, the Wall Drawing takes a physical form and size that is related to the setting and interior space. Remindful of Plato’s Theory of Forms, what the collector looks at is not the artwork per se but the incarnation of its idea. Also, if collectors move out or get bored, they can destroy the given version and make it over somewhere else, wherever and whenever they wish (of course, they own the recipe).

What is the ultimate goal and value obtained through this dissociation? It solves the said discrepancy between rarity and accessibility. On the one hand, artworks’ intellectual creation is protected, divided into shares (tokens), and purchased by a limited number of investors who own the “idea,” the “concept” behind the digital file that the artist created. This type of collectors receive royalties on the exploitation of their given artworks, and because their commodity is rare, it gains value before reaching the secondary market. On the other hand, art enthusiasts have the opportunity to buy custom-made prints and installations of the artwork, with size and materials fitting their interiors or the purpose of display. Within this model, artists keep a resale right on their work, allowing for their fair compensation all career long.

Digital art has been existing fueling the contemporary art scene for the past 40 years, but without a market to sustain its valuation and copyright management the genre strives to survive. Little commercialization, as well as limited exhibition and academic work show how economic and social appreciations relate. With nowadays rising interest for technology including (but not limited to) 2D and 3D art, VR, AR, video, and mixed media, the growing enthusiasm for digital art is evident, especially amongst younger generations. The reason it did not emerge as of now is entailed to art market’s very own structure — something which Danae HI amends, offering the capital market for this scene to foster.

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*Cover image: Sabrina Ratté, Escales, print and video, 2015.

Danae’s Mission: Copyright and Valuation in the Age of Digital Art

Apple lost you last week when they announced the “revolutionary” feature of an A12 Bionic chip on their new phone? Tell me again, was it better for augmented reality, virtual reality or both? And, actually which is which, how do they function, and how are these technologies complementary? If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, here’s a clarification.

First of all, both augmented and virtual realities fall under the umbrella of what we call “immersive technologies” — technologies that connect a physical world and a simulated one, blurring the limits between what is real and what is fictional. Say scuba diving, skydiving or astronautical journeys are immersions, in this specific case the experience is provided through a device, as a user interface (e.g., screen, goggles, keyboard, mouse) which allows the viewer to interact with a given immersive environment. The latter draws to the concept of interactivity as media deliver different visual, textual or multi-sensorial information depending on users’ input through the interface. Users thus shape unique experiences through a sensorimotor exploration of an image which runs through both space and time.

Augmented Reality (AR). Yes, this is one you get on your phone and all sorts of screen displays. This technology adjusts just as well to 2D and 3D environments, moving or still image. We say a picture is augmented when it features information — textual or visual — that was not included on the original shot and is distinct from the context or environment it describes. Snapchat stands as a good example. If you wish to post an image of a life event and overlay it with a label or an emoji, then you’ve literally “augmented” that picture. AR has many fields of application, notably in advancing museums’ multimedia. For instance, instead of listening to an audio-guide facing an artwork, you could also enhance your experience by superposing digital elements — visual or textual — to what you see, using a phone or tablet as an interface. The said information is usually triggered by either a QR code or image recognition, and you’ll most probably be asked to download an app developed for the specific purpose and context of the exhibition.

Artists who adopted AR technology early include Joseph Farbrook, John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer, and Zachary Brady, often collaborating and investigating public spaces as demonstrates Pappenheimer and Brady’s Drawing Constellations (2016), and Freeman’s Metro-NeXt, Grand Central Station (2014). Amongst other artists promoting this scene, we see Carla Gannis and her augmented book The Selfie Drawings (2016), Michael Mittelman and his digital enactments of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings in AR.Lewitt (2016), and Claudia Hart’s The Flower Matrix (2017), which consists of patterned wallpapers embedding QR codes for the enhanced display of three-dimensional animations of flowers. Similarly, Laffy Maffei’s Justine Emard works with AR in Intermissions (2016) as she augments drawings of US open-air cinemas with the screening of videos projected during intervals in the fifties.

Virtual Reality (VR). You can also get this one on your phone, but it’s usually for when you wear goggles, as by definition it consists of visually sealing viewers off from their external reality. More than just a panoramic view, VR immerses observers in a 360° environment while giving the visual impression of evolving around 3D objects. The technology works with both parameters of space and time, but compared to AR the spatial dimensions look way more real due to its hermetical and three-dimensional character. Simulations can either depict a real or a virtual environment, and some include additional sensory information, for instance, sound through headphones or speakers. Up to certain levels of immersion, VR can also be displayed through screens (computers, tablets, phones) in the sense of providing a 3D and interactive journey, although won’t be as persuasive as when using stereoscopic devices.

In the creative sector, VR mostly emerges from joining video and installation art. The technology, pioneered in the 1980s by Jaron Lanier, has been explored as early as 2002 by artists like Langlands and Bell, and later with Cao Fei for her installation RMB City at the 56th Venice Biennale. With works like Brand New Paint Job (2013) and Transdimensional Serpent (2016), and Legendary Reality (2017), digital artist Jon Rafman quickly became essential for 3D representations and VR art. Other significant protagonists include Jordan Wolfson and his controversial installation Real Violence (2017), Jacolby Satterwhite and his time-based animated narratives, and Rachel Rossin creating immersive paintings such as the stereoscopic 360° video Man Mask (2016). But the VR industry impacts more of the art world daily, which explains how acclaimed artists like Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, and Yinka Shonibare now turn to the medium. Big tech players also take action, and just as Rafman and Rossin used Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Google’s app Tilt Brush influences the development of artists like Elizabeth Edwards and Stuart Campbell.

Hybridization refers to mixed realities and is becoming more and more frequent which probably explains the AR/VR confusion. When faced with both at once an excellent way to recognize AR is that it provides graphical information that is “disconnected” and additional to the reality you see (may it be real or simulated). On the other hand, the VR experience involves moving through a three-dimensions space and defines the actual environment you evolve in.

With evolving technologies, the scope of application could even get more substantial (and we shall keep updated). Mat Collishaw’s 2017 installation, Thresholds, is only a first example of what a fully immersive environment could be. At Somerset house last summer the artist restaged William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 photography exhibition not only using VR, but also including sound, touch while moving around physical objects, and other sensory stimuli like feeling the warmth from a burning fire. You might need to get yourself ready for improvements in immersive realities, not just more interaction, but even perceptions referring to all senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactive, and gustative.

*Legend cover: Will Pappenheimer and Zachary Brady, Drawing Constellations, 2016, © Will Pappenheimer. Participatory drawing installation where the application transposed visitors’ 2D pictures (AR) in a 3D environment (VR).

Augmented and Virtual Realities: Highlight on Immersive Technologies

It’s that time of the year again when, after a whole lot of celebrations, comes the moment for best wishes and numerous resolutions. So why not pump up 2019 with compelling readings on digital art and its impact on contemporary culture? Enjoy this list of 14 books we gathered for you to grasp the essentials of new media or further your knowledge with recent releases. Let the fun begin!

An accessible but thorough reference book always comes handy, and with Digital Art, Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, definitely pins it down. The author presents a short history of digital art, and questions the conservation and collection of digital media. She provides descriptions of all new media which she categorizes as being either object- or process-oriented and then describes the essential themes specific to digital art. All come with carefully chosen examples, overviewing a complete spectrum of artists and practices within the field.

With Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, Melissa Gronlund succeeds in telling how media arts relate to our online society. The book divides into themes such as precursors of the digital age, posthumanism, violence and the surveilled internet, virtual identity, language and body representations, and how the framework of the art world changes as a consequence of the internet era . We recommend this reading for understanding the creation of art whose content relates directly to the democratization and circulation of information on a global scale.

Jay David Bolter coined the concept of digital plenitude, a vision he explained through many articles and lectures, and finally made into a book to be released in April 2019. At key is the impact of online platforms and digital communication that mass spread information through multiple practices from making to remixing, sharing, and critiquing. These new media ultimately affect the way we relate to cultural artifacts, which in Bolter’s view, points out to a decline in cultural elitism. How and why is art becoming more equally accessible? At Danae, we are all about democratizing access to art and promoting the digital culture, so we can’t wait to get reading, and we hope you do too!

As you might already know, Danae is a French Start Up, so naturally, we look at the literature of our country’s beloved scholars, and in digital art, Edmond Couchot and Norbert Hillaire are the ones to follow. The pair co-wrote L’art numérique: Comment la technologie vient au monde de l’art, a reference paperback which traces the hybridization of art and technology in the 1960s, and gives clear and straightforward definitions on the different digital media, descriptions of essential protagonists, and analysis the degree of implication of France within this global art scene. For all the French natives out there, this is the one to pick first.

Ars Electronica — since 1979 the festival brings together the most innovative artists and researchers to reflect on the links between art, science, and technology. It’s one of the few yearly reunions not to be missed in digital art and luckily comes with a publication that rounds up in-depth essays and elegantly illustrated art pieces to accompany visitors’ experience. Mostly, each edition focuses on a specific topic to advance research and in 2018, Error, the Art of Imperfection, analyzes society’s understanding of failure and perfection which ultimately varies as technology becomes more accurate, outperforming, giving people both leverage and diminution. Should humans define their strength in emotional intelligence to feel complementary and not threatened by machinery? Read the book to build opinion and (re)discover this tremendous event.

If you wish to know more about Net Art, the one person to look for is Omar Kholeif. The young and trending curator organized the exhibition I Was Raised on the Internet at the MCA Chicago last summer, showing the influence of global online networks as an art practice from 1998 to the present day. The release of an eponymous book followed shortly, but this is not a mere exhibition catalog for essays from the industry’s leading thinkers and practitioners such as Jeremy Bailey, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Michael Connor, and Trevor Paglen accompany images of the artworks and site-specific commissions. A cutting-edge reference.

One of the biggest challenges with new media art is for museums to collect, curate, and maintain works that are immaterial, developed on software, and computer file formats that run out of date. Integrating these new methods of creation are crucial to institutions for preserving this artistic legacy and making it accessible to the general audience. And who better than Oliver Grau to highlight current trends and opportunities? See for yourself in Museum and Archive on the Move.

The Whitechapel Gallery’s famous series “Documents of Contemporary Art” form a critical source for the theoretical understanding of contemporary art practices gathering texts abstract from artists, sociologists, thinkers, and critics that relate to a specific theme. A handful relates to digital art, but we believe the one to consider first is Systems. The book, edited by new media specialist Edward A. Shanken, brings foundations on cybernetics, generative and social systems with texts from Norbert Wiener, N. Katherine Hayles, Nam June Paik, Roy Ascott, Jack Burnham, Iannis Xenakis, Manfred Mohr, Brian Eno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour. If you’d love a bit of theory, this will get your brain wired.

With the auction sale of the first GAN artwork (Obvious’ Portrait of Edmond de Belamy) and Mario Klingemann’s win of the Lumen Prize, 2018 was surely marked with questions on the role of artificial intelligence in art. Something the MAXXI anticipated as it put together its exhibition Low Form, featuring international new media artists who reflect on the role of AI. The catalog not only documents the show but also augments its content with essays by Low Form’s curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, as well as critics like Nora Khan, Eleonora Farina, and Giulia Bini. Mostly, the book gives virtual environments some historical perspective as it posits the influence of Surrealism in current trends for simulation.

With the museum of electronic arts, HeK, in Basel, and the Migros Museums of Contemporary Art and Museum of Digital Art (MuDA) in Zürich, Switzerland is making clear moves in embracing new media arts. With Media Arts in Switzerland, Dominik Landwehr promotes the fruitful local scene for both practitioners and thinkers. The publication covers media like sound and video art, Internet art, hacking, mashup and remix, do-it-yourself, robotics and machine art, and depicts the early start of such practice in the mid-90s up to this day. A promising to discover ASAP.

This academic publication from Claire Taylor compels for the way it questions how locality and socio-political frameworks show through on globalized online environments like the web and social networks. The author draws her comments from one specific example per location — Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the US-Mexico border, and the US. How do artists represent places, traditions, affiliations, and regional identity? And, how do these cultural representations spread, assert, and transform the transmission of knowledge online? Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture makes you travel and question the dialectics of the local versus the global.

Environmental threats are one of the most pressing social issues right now, and while 2018 has seen a sharp increase in consciousness, humans relation to the Anthropocene needs to strengthen. Artists and architects contribute to fostering knowledge about current developments and potential futures, and Eco-Visionaries will convince you of that. The book comes as a mash-up of the exhibitions organized on the subject at four museums with complementary approaches to art, architecture, and new media: Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), the Bildmuseet in Umea, the House of Electronic Arts in Basel (HeK), and the LABoral Centre of Art and Industrial Creation in Gijon. Want to get green and digital in 2019? Here’s the winning combo!

How do users communicate with their computer? Through interfaces. Devices or programs allowing man-machine interactions are literally everywhere, although smooth access and smart communication tend to make these encounters seamless. Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold argue for the presence of the invisible but still present “Metainterface,” and demonstrate how such infrastructures and dynamics of action take place through cloud services, smartphones, apps, net art, software art, and electronic literature. Ultimately, the duo of digital design professors shows how it disrupts urban life and changes the way we design and inhabit cities.

In 2015 the Ars Electronica Futurelab initiated the “European Digital Art and Science Network,” to facilitate artists’ ties to seven scientific research institutions including ESA, CERN, and ESO. This book shows the challenges and opportunities raised when art and science come together in joined works, projects, lectures, exhibitions — a strategy that follows from the ones’ that develops since the 1960s in the US through the MIT Media Lab and tech companies like Bell, Google, and Facebook. Europe is on a roll for SciArt collaborations, and it’s only time we get to know more.

14 Books to Read on Digital Art in 2019

The web has an immense influence on our daily life and the social relationships we construct, making undeniable the importance of internet culture and its associated artistic creations. With Rhizome launching its utmost exhibition The Art Happens Here at the New Museum — showcasing 16 artworks of the 100 online pieces it organized and restored in the past two years — the place of network media is more present than ever on the curatorial scene. But what again are the central concepts and hotly-debated topics underlying art on the internet?

Net Art sounds like a short and trendy way of referring to internet art which is not false but inaccurate as the term is more encompassing relating to “network art,” something which artists started exploring in the late 1970s with the appearance of the end-user information system Videotex or what the French referred to as Minitel. As artist Eduardo Kac explains, “There’s a general misperception when we talk about online culture. Everyone is so obsessed with the internet, but to me, it’s a historical phenomenon. It will be superseded by other networks in the future.” In Reabracadabra (1985), for example, Kac used pre-internet telecommunications as a medium to share poems and explore the limits of language. With the sole word “abracadabra” he draws attention to the actual working of the communication network.

Regarding internet art, we refer to net art when describing the art produced during the nineties or what we call “Web 1.0.” that is the period concerned with static web pages and no user interface. But as curator and writer Omar Kholeif claims, “increased change also means that certain aspects of culture become rapidly outdated” and “net art today sound hopelessly antiquated, clunky, uncool.” Oops, then what is contemporary? Post-internet Art and New Aesthetics.

In 2006, Marisa Olson coined the term “Post-internet art” and its sister phrase “art after the internet” to distinguish what stands outside the internet since she worked with online content as raw material for later production offline. For instance, while in the 1990s artist Olia Lialina was concerned with developing an artistic language fit to the internet, by the mid-2000s she had turned her focus to curating the content that circulates online, recognizing what artists and others produce as equally relevant to cultural production.

In spite of this, the use of the word “post-” changed and now doesn’t ask for a clear demarcation between a before and an after but rather points out to a gradual, technological transition towards Web 2.0. The rise of dynamic interfaces where users can share content in real-time — think blogs and social networking sites like Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), and more importantly YouTube (2006) and the release of the first iPhone in 2007 — resulted in the omnipresence of internet. According to Michael Connor, “the artist, even art itself, is assumed to be fully immersed in network culture and is no longer quite able to assume the position of an observer.” The main difference thus lies in the position of the artist himself which in the later form not only witness acts but engages with the web just as any other participant of this community would.

Conspicuously, in Web 2.0, “outside” the internet does not exist anymore, which makes for interesting questionings on the all-embracing capacity of post-internet art. In the essay Contra-internet aesthetics, artist and curator Zach Blas criticizes the term “post-internet” as an “empty descriptor” inducing “saturation” and “(pseudo)totalization,” a dilution of militancy which shows through in the insufficient variations in wording for expressing transgressive, political and subcultural discourses on the internet and digitally. As he frames it, “Is “post-” not more of a stylistic convenience that evinces a blind spot, an inability to account for the present in specificity and singularity? Is it not a shorthand for what could be called an impasse to think the contemporary?”

The phrase New Aesthetics gained momentum in 2012 and refers to the merging of the virtual and the physical as a result of the internet and the spread of digital technology. Although aesthetics usually refers to an object’s visual outlook, here its inventor James Bridle, an academic specialized in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, wished to bring attention to the systems underlying artistic productions. By asking how artworks came to be and how they will evolve Bridle shows the partial understanding we get of these pieces through screenshots, video sequences, and other incomplete representations of processes. Mostly, New Aesthetics reviews the network itself, its rhizomatic structure, and modes of functioning — a technological apparatus that will become increasingly important to apprehend the arts.

*Cover image: Jon Rafman, Nine Eyes, 2008 — ongoing. Screenshots from Google Street View. Rafman approached Google Street View as a repository of images that records scenes with total indifference to human relationships, © courtesy of the artist.

Net Art, Post-internet Art, New Aesthetics: The Fundamentals of Art on the Internet

Representing our physical traits and those of others, realistically or not, is a constant subject of art history which continues to intrigue artists working with digital tools, network systems, and biotechnologies. From avatars to cyborgs and technologically-augmented humans, here is a highlight of several themes and approaches to body depiction in the age of new media.

When thinking of video games and online worlds, it seems most likely that virtual worlds give an excuse for “escapism,” erasing all the physical problems from our daily routine to become whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. But digital artists and critics of new media understand the field of body and technology as providing with new opportunities to challenge binaries — curvy or slim, short or tall, black or white, female or male — and the power dynamics inherent to our patriarchal systems. For instance, artist and posthumanism pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson describes works like hers as “strategies of resistance” and furthers:

They are counter attempts to defy the limitation of censorship and eradication of an individual’s voice biased on the logistics of their body, gender, and perceived limitations imposed and sanctioned by an ineffective and prejudiced society.”

This vision matches that of two major theoreticians of the field — Sherry Turkle and Katherine Hayles — who reveal how technology provides momentum for physical emancipation. Despite similar intent, the two thinkers show diverging streams of thought — one valuing disembodiment and virtuality while the other considers the binding of body and mind as a prerogative to the human condition.

Online identity, avatars, and multiplicity

In her influential book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), Sherry Turkle analyzes issues of identity in cyberspaces, arguing that online worlds allow people to act out different scenarios, and explore new sides of their personality, which they can then apply to “real life” interactions. These experiences continue the Pygmalion story and the fantasy that we are not limited to our histories and can recreate ourselves. Virtuality allows people to play multiple facets at once, personifying a plurality of avatars and online personas.

Beyond allowing a simultaneous presence in different windows and contexts, online interactions foster constant reproduction of the self without the body — advocating for a split between mind and body as a means for freedom and confidence. Avatars can take the physical or organic shapes that their creator chooses so that material aspects match personal judgment without leaving any place for friction, self-hate, and a lack of appreciation of a non-chosen physical reality. For instance, artists like Lu Yang and Theo Triantafyllidis use virtuality to explore the fluidity of identity, gender, and sexuality — bringing to the forth the idea that avatars can escape binaries (they don’t even have to resemble humans). Another good example is LaTurbo Avedon, a virtual protagonist who creates online personalities and socially interacts in cyberspace only. As the artist-avatar explains,

I’m more interested in personhood and individuality, but in the sense that a single user can have all sorts of “individuals” and aspects of themselves worth exploring and sharing. I mean this in both a personal and a creative sense. I think a lot of people have missed out on interesting aspects of their experience due to the expectation of a singular “real” self. I dislike these sorts of normative structures, and the Internet has shown that there are all sorts of branches and variations of identities that can be explored in virtual space.

In Ribbons (2014) and Safe Conduct (2016), Ed Atkins also questions the dissociation of body and mind by using his avatar to represent cadavers as flesh without a soul mirroring the nature of an avatar as a shell. Beating, fragmenting, and maltreating the bodies of his digital characters to death, Ed Atkins looks at triggering corporeal empathy. Voices, breath, and other material noises accompany the visuals to further the bond between the avatar and its viewer. Conspicuously, while viewers metabolize the avatars’ physical trauma, they stand behind a screen forgetting about their existence and sensation. But isn’t it ludicrous, neglecting our flesh to embody the other?

Post-humanism, cyborgs, and the extended body

What limits the previous theory is that subjectivity equates with the mind, which, according to Katherine Hayles, shows a strong denial of the impact our bodies have on the way we think and act. The reality of being disembodied into an electronic device brings back some old thirst for transcendence, immortality, and perfection, but also asks for actual feasibility. Hayles stresses the reality of hunching over a computer, eyes dry and fatigued from long screen exposures, and wonders how we forget about the physical discomfort we experience as we “immerse” into virtual worlds — something Sondra Perry brilliantly captured in her work Graft and Ash (2016) as she points to the oppression of technology and its adverse health consequences.

As the interplay between man and machine becomes inevitable and the need for interfaces grows, Hayles calls for symbiosis with technology through posthuman forms — cyborgs and extended bodies. The primary issue remains how we would incorporate robotics, prosthetics, and the internet to facilitate our relationship to technology, making it more materially comfortable to sustain. For instance, Eduardo Kac’s Time Capsule (1997) announced the implant of microchips as a mean of liberating the body from the machine, but also as an attempt to freedom because of the permeability of information entailed to connectivity and networked communication.

While a fusion with technology feeds a utopia, it also opens a field for SCI-FI nightmarish situations where the machines take control over our bodies — something pioneer artist Stelarc encapsulated with his piece Exoskeleton (1998), a mechanic walking machine activated through muscle stimulation as a remote audience enables the device through internet. Likewise, Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015) presents dancing bodies which enter into motion when stimulated by sunlight. In doing so, the artist evokes how our bodies progressively become data sources — an illusory promise for augmentation, improvement, and participation which could condemn us to become an “interpassive” species.

*Cover image: LaTurbo Avedon, Sittin’ up in my room, 2018, courtesy of the artist.

(Dis)embodied: How Technology Affects Representations of the Body

In the post-digital and internet-aware era, the cultural palimpsest in its networked dimension of images, words, ideas quantified and put online, becomes the rich repertoire for many artists, engineers, and activists of post-modernity. In this context, a hacker is an anti-net-surfer who seeks unconventional solutions and exits from the pre-established routes of the web. We have selected a series of texts that deal with the figure of the hacker as an artist, and vice versa, drawing what is still current in hack-tivistic practices. The hacktivists’ philosophy does not accept historicisms or reductions to linear storytellings, nevertheless here is our Net-anthological selection: a playlist of classical insights on hacker culture.

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen (London: Vintage, 2001)

“The first guiding value in hacker life is passion, that is, some intrinsically interesting pursuit that energizes the hacker and contains joy in its realization.” (139p)

The Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen elaborates a manual of nethics, mapping the relationships between ethics and technological development, and taking as reference the figure of the hacker. The manual, introduced by the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds, and commented by the author of “The Information Age”, Manuel Castells, presents three fundamental axes for the construction of hacker ethics: work ethics, money ethics, and net-hics.

Himanen repeatedly analyzes the similarities between Protestant ethics and capitalist economics, as well as the consequences of hacker inscription in a world where 'time is money'. In this sense, hacking would correspond to a creative alternative that questions the dominant Protestant ethics and which is impregnated with the architecture of information on the net.

From this point of view, Himanen places the hacker in a grey and hybrid zone between work and leisure, between Friday and Sunday, suggesting that free creativity is both a responsibility and a pleasure and that hacking is a serious game, even today, in vibrant evolution.

Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age by Domenico Quaranta  (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011)

“There is no way around it: whatever is digital is copyable and can be manipulated by whomever gets possession of it.” (p12)

In “Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age”, theorist and curator Domenico Quaranta curates a review of reflections on the artist as an accumulator, cataloguer, remixer of online cultural material. The artist online in the Internet Age faces a new dimension of memory - quantified, dematerialized, if not eternal subject to the law of obsolescence of its own support devices. The fact that the artist/archivist's tendency towards documentation explodes simultaneously with the massive adoption of computers and the Internet by consumers is no coincidence for Quaranta. On the contrary, the internet world of professional-amateurs, collectors, and image recyclers is a symptom of accessibility to the net and, with it, all its contents.

The author collects in his book the writings of art critic and theorist Josephine Bosma, art writer and curator Gene McHugh, and senior editor of Rhizome Joanne McNeil. A second part of the book is dedicated to the presentation of 25 collectors: artists and art collectives who are masters in the appropriation, collection, and détournement of online codes and cultures. Among them, we find artists such as Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Eva & Franco Mattes, and other cultural net-appropriators.

Now that post-internet culture is fermenting and accelerating, are forms of storage, human and digital memory compatible? Are they, today, complementary or contradictory?

Anti-media: ephemera on speculative arts by Florian Cramer (Rotterdam: New York, NY: nai010 publishers, 2013)

"In both anti-art and anti-media, a love/hate relationship is undeniably at work. And both perhaps signify twentieth-century nostalgia, since the notion of creative industries may be about to make both terms obsolete." (p.14)

Florian Cramer is a practice-oriented theorist whose research deals with new communication technologies and their cultural impact. Cramer states that if there is anti-art and counter-culture, there are also anti-media, in which everything is changeable, speculative, and often provocative. The author defines his speech in four parts that follow the structure of the book title: Anti, Ephemera, Speculative, Arts.

Cramer's text, with its personal but always skilled style, proposes a sociological investigation of his contemporary artistic production, always imbued with a magma of data and pixels, where computer engineering is also socio-cultural engineering. Cramer's online cultural actor is put into perspective concerning pop culture, as well as folk culture, contesting the fact that the universality of language, even if computerized, is not possible (and perhaps not even desirable). In this sense, anti-media (appropriation, speculation, theft, remix, etc.) call into question the alleged neutrality of technology as a means of creation and socio-cultural sharing.

THE PIRATE BOOK by Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska (Ljubljana: Aksioma; Clichy: Pavillon Vendôme Art Center, 2015)

This book could not have been made without the help of: street vendors, photocopiers, bootleg recordings, double cassette decks, cracktros, .nfo files, VHS recorders, CD burners, scanners, BBS, copy parties, game copiers, Warez, keygens, Napster, eDonkey, Soulseek, The Pirate Bay, UbuWeb, Library Genesis, Karagarga, Megaupload, FilesTube, and many more…

The pirate book by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska is not an online pirating manual, nor a hymn to computer anarchy, but a logbook for explorers, researchers, net-surfers, and, therefore, pirates. The book, introduced by art theorist and curator Marie Lechner, collects multiple stories that include research from multiple environments and then shows us a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the world of hacking.

The publishers propose historical, internal, industrial, and geographical perspectives, as well as an opening to new research projects and artistic speculation. The collection highlights a dimension of hacking that has a strong link with the serendipity of knowing how to arrange, DIY, and informal sharing of resources. Which pirates do we need today?

Hacktivism Reviewed: Selected Books On Hacking, Net-Art and Activism in The Digital Age

The emergence of new forms of art on and offline raises the need to rethink and rework traditional modes of art preservation and exhibition. Contemporary artists, curators and thinkers do not hesitate to provide us with numerous tools for reading and reflection. How do we construct our network culture? What paths does the virtual offer us? We have selected some texts that provide brilliant perspectives for the construction of new networks of meanings and new forms of artistic conception and perception.

Omar Kholeif, Art in the Age of Anxiety, The Mit Press, Mörel Books and Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021

What does it mean to make art in the Age of Anxiety? Omar Kholeif curated the exhibition and the homonymous catalog Art in the Age of Anxiety. The exhibition, born at the rising of the pandemic emergency, brought together a global group of contemporary artists to explore the ways everyday devices, technologies and digital networks have altered our collective consciousness. Kholeif borrows the poem The Age of Anxiety, by W.H. Auden (1947), to highlight a powerful and frighteningly consistent analogy and with the contemporary condition: isolation and the proliferation of technology and information become the cornerstone of a reflection on the ways of creating and sharing at the post-digital age. 

Omar Kholeif's book proves to be much more than a classic exhibition catalog, and offers with masterful care a variety of insights into art and its evolving relationship to technology. What if our everyday devices and their attendant networks have affected our collective and individual consciousness? What art does the Age of Anxiety deserve, what art does it need? Omar Kholeif tells us in the words and images of: Hoor Al Qasimi, Anonymous, Saira Ansari, Cory Arcangel, Jeremy Bailey, Douglas Coupland, Simon Denny, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Aruba Khalid, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, W. J. T. Mitchell, Todd Reisz, Danko Stjepanovic, Marc Tuters, Cory Arcangel, Douglas Coupland, Simon Denny, Danko Stjepanovic, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Cory Arcangel, Jeremy Bailey, Wafaa Bilal, James Bridle, Antoine Catala, Douglas Coupland, Thomson & Craighead, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, Constant Dullaart, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Cao Fei, Oliver Laric, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Rafael Lozanno-Hemmer, Eva and Franco Mattes, Josha Nathanson, Katja Novitskova, Trevor Paglen, Jon Rafman, Tabor Robak, Pamela Rosenkranz, Aura Satz, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Jenna Sutela, United Visual Artists (UVA), Siebren Veersteeg, Andrew Norman Wilson, Guan Xiao and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES.  Welcome to a new age of anxiety, but also a new age of art.

Annet Dekker: Collecting and Conserving Net Art

Annet Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art: Moving beyond Conventional Methods, Routhledge, 2020

Annet Dekker is an independent researcher and curator whose work focuses on the evolutions and reciprocal interactions of art and network cultures. In his book Collecting and Conserving Net Art, Dekker explores the peculiarities of net art in relation to museum studies. How does the emergence of net art highlight both the gaps and possibilities of art conservation, curatorship and exhibition? By arguing that networked systems bring into play the power relations of the traditional art palimpsest, Dekker highlights the mutability and transience of hardware and software. Art conservation in its virtuality is subject to the rapid obsolescence of technological supports. In this regard, Dekker sees in net art and in particular in software-based art a fertile field of study for the critical analysis of the choices of artistic conservation. Dekker's book is without a doubt addressed to an audience of experts, and its precision and accuracy prove to be a valuable tool for reflection for art professionals.

Domenico Quaranta: In Your Computer and Sopravvivenza Programmata

Domenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, LINK Editions, Brescia 2011

Domenico Quaranta, Sopravvivenza Programmata Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art, Edizioni Kappabit, Rome 2020

In addition to being a brilliantly prolific author, curator, and publisher, Domenico Quaranta writes books and essays. His research clearly draws the evolution of digital art, the one made in the Net and for the Net, from Software art to videogames. His book entitled In Your Computer. Or, how I learned to love the art that comes to you through your computer screen and why you should learn to love it as well includes a collection of texts written between 2005 and 2010. His selection of essays, articles, and interviews with artists traces the history of Internet art, critical research around creative and self-generative processes, and methods of exhibiting and preserving works online. In your Computer… features many interventions of artists such as Eva and Franco Mattes, Casey Reas, UBERMORGEN.COM, Oliver Laric, Cory Arcangel, Tale of Tales, Jon Ippolito, and Gazira Babeli.

Quaranta's book offers a heterogeneous mixtape of artistic interventions that even more today - about twenty years after their birth - have a nostalgic flavor. Nevertheless, the book respects its promise and teaches its reader how the gaze on the works evolves together with the works themselves, and how one can love art that is made and proudly shown through a computer screen. Quaranta's research has most recently led to the editing of SOPRAVVIVENZA PROGRAMMATA. Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art («PROGRAMMED SURVIVAL. Ethics and practices of conservation, from kinetic art to Net Art", in collaboration with Valentino Catricalà (2020, in Italian). The book provides the cues for an even more topical and profound reflection on the preservation, and therefore survival, of digital art. In this sense, Programmed Survival faces the obsolescence and potential inadequacy of traditional methods of care. In the introduction of In Your Computer Quaranta asks « Why should you look at the world in a different way? ». The answer becomes now more than ever an imperative, and the art that flourishes on the Internet needs the rise of a new look and new care. 

Joasia Krysa, CURATING IMMATERIALITY: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems, Autonomedia, 2006

Joasia Krysa’s Curating Immateriality: the work of the curator in the age of network systems is the third volume of “AutonomediaOs DATA browser” series. Krysa, as an editor, curator and researcher analyzes the different parts of the debate around curating in the internet age. In Krysa's reading, the emergence of the net has triggered an evolution in the process of artistic production and distribution, shifting the attention to the process dimension of the network and no longer oriented towards the artistic object. One of the central ideas proposed by the author concerns the question of the immateriality of cognitive and creative work. It is this very immateriality that is called into question with the advent of the Internet as a virtual cultural space. Immateriality becomes the starting point for the definition of the concept of a distributed curatorial practice. 

Krysa's publication is based on a systemic philosophical approach, in other words the action of curating is inserted in the context of interconnected and networked systems. Can we think of networks and algorithms as a future tool of art curating? Curating Immateriality proposes theoretical reflections and concrete examples of the application of the binomial software-curating, through the interventions of philosophers, artists, curators and other cultural agents. The book features articles by Joasia Krysa, Tiziana Terranova, Marina Vishmidt, Grzesiek Sedek, Geoff Cox, Christiane Paul, Eva Grubinger, Jacob, Lillemose, Josephine Berry Slater, 0100101110101101.org & [epidemiC], Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, Franziska Nori, low-fi, Trebor Scholz, Beryl Graham, Piotr Krajewski, Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin and Matteo Pasquinelli. Curating Immateriality, published in 2006, represents the avant-garde of its time and a fundamental reference for contemporary matters.

Displaying Immateriality: Selected Books On Conservation, Care and Exhibition of Digital Art

People look intrigued by digital art like it’s some alienated media that doesn’t have a market yet. Fact is, it’s not. Many artists using new media have entered a network of galleries, blue-chip included, the only issue being their artistic process remains explained by art professionals themselves.

Few specialized galleries set the scene of digital art to this day amongst which bitforms, Annka Kultys Gallery, Transfer Gallery, Roehrs and Boetsch, and Laffy Maffei Gallery to name a few. While these venues present themselves as forward-looking and supportive of artists exploring new media environments, the majority of established galleries close to international art fairs and global markets don’t provide strong evidence of digital artworks although a substantial number of their well-recognized artists work with computer-generated photographic collages, video art, and prints. Examples include Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Pipilotti Rist, Jenny Holzer, Michele Abeles, Borna Sammack, Mat Collishaw, Bill Viola, Tacita Dean, Artie Vierkant, John Gerrard, David Hockney, and so many more, all presented by the likes of David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Blain|Southern, Sprüth Magers, Perrotin, Sadie Coles, Thomas Dane, and Marian Goodman.

When it comes to digital art, galleries refer to media as tools saying this or that artist relies on photography or video, or work on the computer. But references to the skills required for production and even more importantly post-production are hardly mentioned. Is that because we consider today’s techniques as “simple,” and so, made irrelevant? With the complexity of software and programming as well as the extensive range of existing media, this seems rather unlikely.

Digital artworks’ technical quality, as well as a historical necessity, call for more attention to creative processes. From the glaze technique that painters like Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck used extensively during the Renaissance to the alla prima paintings and impasto which prevailed during the 19th century, with Impressionists notably, media and techniques have played an invaluable role in art history. Materials and methods that artist employ carries social bearing and help to retrace narratives from specific historical times. While understanding a piece of art consistently involves the analysis of its content, iconography, and socio-political message, the comprehension, and appraisal of craftsmanship and expertise behind a work remain crucial to the creation of meaning.

AI art makes a compelling example of the importance of understanding technical processes better. When Christie’s sold Obvious’ piece Portrait of Edmond de Belamy for $432,500 in October 2018, the community of AI artists was outraged because of the little skills this work involved in training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Forums and social media platforms like Twitter suddenly burst with comments on the use of GANs and its associated skills, most of them with tech language a non-savvy would not necessarily understand.

How can we judge these technical achievements as art professionals? Specialists know how to promote aesthetics and associated forms of meaning, but with technology like AI, all seem out of control. Images that result from a simple process and manipulation compel to the external viewer yet stand as just a little practice exercise. Computational sketches cannot hold the same value as painstakingly developed works because of the lack of human dedication, but by not knowing or understanding these pieces’ technical reality, art historians cannot lack skills to assess different levels of refinement. How hard is that to admit.

The fact we don’t understand techniques or rather technicity means we can’t marvel at it — or only partially. James Bridle’s point of accusing weak technological literacy in the arts is key to a new way of thinking. As he explains,

“willful anti-technicalism, which is a form of anti-intellectualism, mirrors the present cultural obsession with nostalgia, retro, and vintage (…) those who cannot understand technology are doomed to be consumed by it.”

Mostly Bridle explains that what we now perceive as a misunderstanding of the media should lead to further lack of aptitudes in interpreting artistic discourses:

“Technology is political. If you cannot perceive the politics, the politics will be done to you.”

As such, having a working knowledge of technology stands for art professionals as the next essential, as is today speaking several languages to face a globalized industry. Does that mean we need to train art specialists or instead collaborate with science and technology experts? And should consulting advisors be external or included in-house? Answering these questions will affect the current structures of galleries. Integrating tech specialists or people with more practical skills for software and hardware will become a must for understanding the quality of the digital artworks, not to mention installation, maintenance and conservation purposes — a take media-based museums have already observed, furthering galleries’ need to pace up in adjusting to digital environments.

*Cover image: Michele Abeles, Baby Carriage on Bike or Riot Shield as Carriage, 2015. Digitally composited collage of the artist’s earlier photographs. Abeles conceived this billboard for the Whitney’s new building and southern entrance to the High Line, © courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Name It: Why Established Galleries Already Feature Digital Art But Don’t Say So

Rachel de Joode is a multimedia artist, using sculpture and photography as mediums. Her artistic approach interconnects physical, real, and virtual worlds, “exploring the relationship between the three-dimensional object and its two-dimensional representation”.

The artist gives new forms to bodies and objects, thus distorting our perception in the face of usually familiar structures. These representations become wet, smoothed, drooping surfaces, thematizing the notion of touch.

“There’s this porous back-and-forth between everything around us and us, which is happening on our surface. That’s the only part we see. We leave traces, and traces are left on us. It’s this constant back-and-forth that I find really interesting about the skin. And it’s in flux. It’s always changing. "

Interview by Julianne Cordray | Berlin Art Link

Rachel de Joode has exhibited internationally with notable shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; Interstate Projects, New York; Higher Pictures, New York; and Elaine Levy Project, Brussels. She has participated in residencies at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Sculpture Space, New York; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York.

Installation views include shots from Christophe Gaillard gallery, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, Photoforum Pasquart, Botanischer Volkspark Blankenfelde-Pankow, MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Neumeister Bar-Am Gallery and SWG3 Gallery.

Claudia Hart is a pioneering artist in the use of computer-generated imagery and simulation technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. Her virtual worlds explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal.

As a counter balance to our efficiency-driven, techno-centred society, Claudia Hart advocates a return to the exploration of personal feelings and human psychology through the use of mythological, literary, and art historical references which recall 19th-century romanticism. Her work notably includes the depiction of avatars to question notions of identity and what is (un)real female beauty.

“ I don’t consider myself a “character animator,” but I do work with digital bodies.(...)What’s amazing to me is creating automatons—giving them life to go and do things on their own. Instead, I set up physics environments in which the bodies are acted upon by forces. There’s very little traditional animation involved. I mix simulations technologies with motion capture. I capture motion data with sensors attached to real bodies and submit those to physical simulations. It’s closer to making robots than to making a flipbook. ”

 Interview by Sean Capone  | BOMB MAGAZINE

“I’m a world builder. I work with 3D animation and virtual reality software to create a computer model of an environment. Sometimes it’s architecture, but I have also built gardens. Usually there are people in these places, avatars that I also build. I then use this world to generate a variety of works.(...) I don’t think of the computer model as finished artwork but more as a half-formulated idea or ashadow that becomes real when it I turn it into a work. I also wouldn’t really call each of these works translations of one another; they are all unique.”

Claudia Hart is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited internationally invenues such as the Pelham Art Center, Pioneer Works, bitforms gallery, TRANSFER, Print Screen Festival, Halcyon Art Lab’s AR Festival, Gazelli Art House, Art Center Nabi, Mana Contemporary, and the Gene Siskel Theater.

Installation views include shots from Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University and Upfor Gallery.

I’m a world builder. I work with 3d animation and virtual reality software to create a computer model of an environment.

Tamiko Thiel investigates how AR and VR can allow the exploration of non-linear storytelling. Acting upon the merging of the body and device, she sees the interface as a window into another dimension that overlays our everyday world. 

Similar to a microscope, the screen reveals invisible layers of life and matter that coexist with us. In correlating these different realities, Tamiko Thiel reminds of the existence of other ecosystems, the flaws driving the anthropocene and the potential for techno-organic mutations. 

Tamiko Thiel has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Istanbul Biennial, the International Center for Photography, the Design Museum in the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, the Institute of Contemporary Art London and Boston, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and the Centre Pompidou.

“I know myself that artworks that only spread doom and gloom make an emotional impact, but leave the viewers depressed rather than energized. With all my artworks, i try to give the visitors a bit of delight to encourage them to engage with the artwork, which creates an emotional moment when they realize the underlying darkness.”

Tamiko Thiel in article by Allison Meier | Hyperallergic

“The more we are physically involved with a process, the stronger it becomes embedded in our memories. The physical engagement that ar requires is not a bug, but a feature.”

Since 2018 the artist has been collaborating on many projects including Unexpected Growth, a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art and Evolution of Fish. Installation views also include images from Digital Art Space Munich and Die Neue Sammlung / Pinakothek der Moderne Munich.

Gregory Bennett uses 3D animation software and motion capture to explore conceptions of theutopian and the dystopian through representations of the multiplied digital body. Humanoid forms are placed in perpetual motion and trapped into synthetic ecosystems. Spaces act a series of psychological landscapes, as representations of hermetic digital colonies, or as figures enacting some enigmatic ceremonial. In doing so, the artist shows systems of controland uncannily reflects on the social infrastructures we occupy while adopting a panoptic point of view.

Bennett has exhibited in New Zealand and internationally in the USA, Hong-Kong, China, Australia, and Europe. Notable exhibitions include real-fake.org.2.0, a 2016 survey of digital artists at the Bronx Art Space, New-York, the 2019 Rencontres Internationales, New Cinemaand Contemporary Art in Paris and Berlin, and the juried exhibition at the 2016 International Symposium on Electronic Art in Hong-Kong.

Salomé Chatriot builds installations that mix physical and virtual spaces, electronic sculptures and digital images. Techno-optimistic and fascinated by science, she envisions the possibilities for organisms and ecosystems to develop fluid interactions with digital technologies.

The body acts as an essential locus for transformation, healing and well-being; something Salomé Chatriot expresses through the depiction of corporeal flows. Breathing, pulse, the circulation of liquids and chemical changes evolve in real-time to demonstrate the potential binding of biotech. Similarly, the visual forms habiting her digital images embrace an organic sensuality drawn from the functioning of living beings

“My influences are very eclectic: from classical theatre, antiquity, its myths and their contemporary interpretations, to medicine and the human body, passing by the aesthetics of machinery and industrial materials living inside in a frozen but alive nature. At different scales, they all have in common the concept of [organic] representation. My pieces often create bridges into history, extracting classical concepts, enlightening them through the prism of technologies in order to comment on our contemporary society.”

Salomé Chatriot has exhibited internationally at venues like the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the File Festival in São Paulo, San Francisco, London and Paris, Nicoletti Contemporary and Amac Projects. She had a first solo exhibition at Pazioli Lausanne in 2017 and another one at La Totale in October 2018 organised by Léo Orta and Iseult Perrault following her residency at Les Moulins.

"I would like to quote Matthieu Jacquet from the portrait he wrote. This sentence emphasises the porosity of my pieces, always at the border of several universes and therefore strangely fluid. “Through her works, Salomé Chatriot draws a vision of a near-future that confuses reality and fiction – a future where bodies and objects merge, distend, stretch and liquefy, where the image becomes sculptural and the virtual becomes material.”

"My plastic production can be divided into three tentacular projects (...) Opéra Passiflore with the philosopher Federico Nicolao, with whom I form the energy ‘The Apex of the Androgynophore’; Big World with the artist Samuel Fasse, with whom we are the creative entity ‘S//’; and finally my personal project Fragile Ecosystem. Fragile Ecosystem  is a polymorphous landscape in space and time, which morphs every time I exhibit it, from performance to sculptural installations, from physical images to digital videos. The main character of this project, initiated since 2018, is a gigantic machine, for me a kind of monstrous and fantastic female figure. This project is a direct result of my research on breathing and fluids that I had already started during my studies."

Installation views include shots from Nicoletti Contemporary, AMAC Projects, Club 7.5 Paris, Galerie de l’île, Les Moulins, Galerie Charraudeau and FIESP.

My pieces often create bridges into history, extracting classical concepts, enlightening them through the prism of technologies

Carolyn Janssen is an American visual artist who mixes collage, photography and painterly techniques to create mural-sized digital artworks. Her compositions come in continuation to the historic landscape as she presents über-universes with notable references to the Sublime and masterpieces of the Northern Renaissance.

Digital kitsch, miniaturised science fiction scenes, and religious morality tales infuses Carolyn Janssen's psychedelic photoshop-y works. Repurposing elements from personalsnapshots, she uses individual objects as brushstrokes, making each scene mark by mark. Figures populating these worlds engage in rituals and minidramas. Through these uncanny scenes, she reevaluates the blurred boundaries of gender, desire, and materiality

“While contemporary photography provides a critical location for my work, my earliest influences were painters. Intrigued by the morality painting of Hieronymous Bosch and Bruegel the Elder, the landscapes of the Hudson River School, and the world-building of Henry Darger and Paul Noble, I was drawn to images of vast, complicated mythic worlds.(...) I began to re-contextualize these historic trope—particularly religious painting and epic landscapes— by subverting the materiality: going digital instead of offering the aura of paint, and by populating the stories with packs of digital clone women.”

Interview by Gregory Jones | IN THE IN-BETWEEN

“Taking on digital kitsch feels like a very honest way for me to use Photoshop. As I amworking, I really try to exploit and utilize the “photoshoppy-ness” of the program, the same way a painter might exploit the inherent qualities of paint. Gradients, blurs, copy and paste areall fluent metaphors in our contemporary visual language, and I am excited to witness their long-term influence.”

Carolyn Janssen exhibited across the United-States in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh, Durham, Rochester, and New-York, but also in Nepal at the Patan Museum and in the Netherlands as part of the Unseen Photo Fair. Venues for her solo and duo shows include the North Carolina Museum of Art, Julie Saul Gallery and Quinta del Sordo in Madrid.

Installation views include shots from NCMA Museum and CAM Raleigh Museum.

Giulia Bowinkel and Friedemann Banz explore how human perceptions evolve in the digitally augmented real world. Their work - presenting the computer as both a tool and a topic - consists of generated scenarios that invite visitors to question the notion of reality.

Simulation technologies such as VR and AR ask to leverage how our preconditions of perception change. How do we define reality? How can we simulate it? What is real, and when? What is the nature of a such-created reality? At which point will it no longer be possible to look behind these self-generated images? Installations function as places of exploration, providing no answers but a realm of possibilities

Interview by Lisa Birch - berlin art link

“ Like the cinema, virtual reality seduces us into another world, other thoughts andemotions, another time, other physics. but unlike the cinema, in virtual reality there isno linear time line. you are the actor, that’s the main difference. ” G. Bowinkel

Banz & Bowinkel have exhibited extensively in Germany and internationally with notables hows at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, DAM Gallery, NRW-Forum, HEK–House of ElectronicArts, HMKV–Hartware Medien KunstVerein, Palazzo Pisani, Roehrs & Boetsch, the VRHAM Festival and TRANSFER Download.

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Let yourself be swallowed up by pipes and machines to feel the organic universe of Salomé Chatriot. Live the experience as if you were there

Let yourself be swallowed up by pipes and machines to feel the organic universe of Salomé Chatriot. Live the experience as if you were there.

This exhibition is a unique virtual and interactive experience that fosters a new collaboration with artist Salomé Chatriot. An already established and leading figure in the digital art scene, Salomé Chatriot creates works focusing on the creation of physical and virtual spaces where electronic sculptures and digital images coexist. Fascinated by organic materials, the artist uses new technologies to shape a fluid, digital and precious identity. The image becomes sculptural and the virtual becomes material. In disagreement with the techno-negative attitude, the artist wishes to create a future in which bodies and objects merge, distend, stretch, and liquefy. 

Salomé vows to conciliate the living and the non-living with real-time experiences and 3D and 4D installations of organic flows such as breathing, circulation of liquids and chemical transformations. The body acts here as an essential place for transformation, healing and well-being. Rather than fearing algorithms, data, and machines, why not try to invent a world together where technology can bring us closer and connect us?

Grasping the codes of video games, Organic Machines empowers a metaphorical pathway inside an underground space where pipes, walls and corridors play as body vessels and fabrics. This experience offers to sneak in a dystopic and regenerative bio-industry, inventing emotional ultra-contemporary images, between real life and medicinal techno-art.

The exhibition highlights one of Salomé Chatriot's major projects: Fragile ecosystem. Educated as a contemporary artist and an multimedia interaction designer, Salomé Chatriot - in the manner of a scientist - transpose biometrical data and their extension in digital, virtual and real spaces. Embracing an organic sensuality drawn from the functioning of living beings, she uses very eclectic influences: from antiquity, its myths and their contemporary interpretations, from medicine to the human body, and through the aesthetics of machines and industrial materials.

Infinite perspectives, between abstraction and figuration, recorded or real-time performances, her environments recreate the natural mechanism of beings. By designing polymorphic landscapes and integrating the real bodies of performers or virtual representations of human inner organs, Salomé Chatriot brings us inside ourselves between intestines, colon, guts and various fluids.

With Organic Machines, Salomé Chatriot opens a new chapter in art History within digital technologies of the 21th century evoking the new generation of artists and a near future. By working often collectively with other digital artists and contemporary musicians in relation to performing arts, the artist pursues a very singular use of the trends of the international contemporary art scene. Her fusioning distending stretching and liquefying forms, between sculptural images and virtual materiality, come from conceptual and aesthetic researches showing new statements of the digital art world.

Salomé Chatriot (French, born 1995) graduated from the Swiss University of arts and design of Lausanne in 2017. Winner of the 2019 curators prize - Opline Prize selected by the artist ORLAN, Chatriot has gained international recognition for her digital sculptures, stills and video works. Having been exhibiting at Palais de Tokyo in France or Centre d’art contemporain Genève, or at galleries like the New Gallery in Paris and the Nicoletti Gallery in London, Chatriot started a very fast career and launched a new era of contemporary art.

Soundtrack of the virtual environment : No Light Factory by Yatoni

Typography used : Bioweapon by Lucas Felipe

Organic Machines

At the forefront of digital painting, Alexandra Gorczynski is back with Farniente, Matisse and I, her second solo show at Danae. Presented in the form of a video game, the experience offers a contemplative walk on the theme of the female nude so dear to the artist.