While at a dinner, in the office, reading the news or binge-watching TV, there’s little chance you haven’t heard about this new hype: blockchain. But despite being part of our everyday vocabulary, the technology is still hard to pinpoint, not to mention its many applications to the art industry, a system which is known to be complicated in itself. If you’ve wanted to dust off from all the sayings and partial knowledge, here’s a chance to understand the technology and what lies at the core of its relationship to art.

The first thing to acknowledge is that blockchain does not equal cryptocurrency. It is instead the technology that virtual money relies on to keep track of transactions, and is thus not about what we trade but how we trade. The confusion initiates from the launch of Bitcoin in 2007 as it was the first concrete application of a blockchain. Blockchain sees many fields of application besides finance, with a spectrum ranging from agriculture, health, and public administration to — of course — art.

Blockchain works like bookkeeping but with a computer, creating de facto a digital database. In what is called a “smart contract,” people define a protocol which is held within the blockchain with many sorts of data, including but not limited to the record of transactions. Each time an action or transaction takes place, miners approve of it and create a block adding to a chain of other blocks (literally like breeding a necklace). This process results in a “block”-“chain,” a name to interpret literally. Another good memo of the concept is blockchain’s alternative name, DLT or Distributed Ledger Technology.

Ledger: got it! Technology: obviously. But what about “distributed”? The word refers to the system’s central second characteristic: its structure. There is no central body but a whole network of entities responsible for keeping the information. Once a block adds to the chain, it is fed to millions of computers simultaneously. Although a hacker could access data from one of the many recipients and modify data at this specific location, this type of corruption would only remain local and would leave an un-erasable trail behind, making it utterly inefficient when it comes to modifying the overall encrypted code. This way the blockchain’s fragmented nature ensures that data cannot be deleted, revised or tampered, providing with a secure technology for transferring digital information. This idea of transparency furthers with the provision of private or public access to blockchain information (reading only), but this verification process is limited to coders with strong IT abilities, so the tracking of transactions works much like a third party for now.

Two criteria advance a global use of blockchain and its transforming of our entire economic system: liquidity and transparency. For this article, we will focus on general applications to the art market only.

Liquidity and the democratization of financial products

Blockchain allows for the commodifications of goods through what is called “distributed ownership.” Much like owning shares of a company, one could hold portions of an artwork. With works evaluated in millions and a steady worth, masterpieces present a safe investment which explains investors incentive to purchase in this commodity. Until the introduction of the blockchain, high prices meant these money placements addressed a certain elite only. Distributing fractions of ownership allows for fairer prices, accessibility, and more liquidity through the trades of financial titles.

Conspicuously, this approach not only democratizes the access to financial products but it also offers the opportunity to build portfolios of artworks which — much like funds — helps to manage risks and volatility — something especially valuable with regards to contemporary art (see Deloitte’s Art & Finance Report). It is also important to note that a growing part of the population shows interest for brokers platforms and crowdfunding with more concerns for managing their wealth with one or different “purposes” (e.g., savings, social, environmental) in mind. This principle of “financialization” must thus be understood as a wide-ranging phenomenon.

Transparency, authenticity, and provenance

Another field of application is for digital art registries. In 2014, Geneva’s Fine Art Experts Institute (FAEI) reported that over 50% of the artworks they examined were either forged or misattributed — a telling fact knowing the importance of the city’s free port. Verifying an artwork’s authenticity and provenance has been one of the most challenging issues of the art market, as well as price speculation due to the number of intermediaries on the secondary market. Blockchain disputes the market’s opacity and fraudulent behaviors, as all transactions are recorded and secured through cryptography.

Although the system’s transparency could reinforce buyers’ trust and the resulting number of purchases, good verification is essential. Once data enters the blockchain, it cannot be erased. However, attributions are often questioned — Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi makes the case, works that are looted change owners a posteriori, and the provenance of a piece is intricate to determine, especially with non-living artists. In such cases, relying on experts for vetting stands as a necessary but partial solution, but the problem of linking artifacts to blockchain-secured information is real. For now, the technology as we know it might be better suited to the primary market, or to living artists at least.

This article will be followed by a later publication describing Danae’s approach to the blockchain.

*Cover image: Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billion (Working Title), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, 2010, © Studio Tomás Saraceno.

Blockchain-Art: Definition and Understanding of a Growing Relationship

Who wouldn’t like to think — instinctively — that the link between art and technology is “so new.” With last week’s first Christie’s summit on Art and Technology (focusing on the blockchain, our favorite!), there is no doubt about today’s current trend in exploring the intersection of these two fields. This spring/summer season has also seen a booming number of exhibitions on digital art, with teamLab’s newly opened Tokyo museum, as well as its shows spreading across Singapore, London, Paris, Shenzhen, and soon in New York.

Displays now involve mixed media, immersive and interactive installations, as well as inputs on artificial intelligence and the incarnation of human bodily artifacts — a production utterly subversive to all museum visitors. But while the development of hardware — as in artificial intelligence complemented with physical reality — makes things a lot more concrete, the art-tech relationship is more historical than first meet the eye. We notably tend to forget about the impact of software, a form of communication, information and code processing which emerged as early as the 1960s and now governs our everyday life. More to the point is the question of what defines technology? How long and in what forms has the link between art and technology prevailed, and why is it still overlooked today?

Taking from scholar Edmond Couchot, Art is etymologically equivalent to the Greek word Techne as in technique, referring to the skills and mastership required for the use of a specific tool. Seeing technology as technique, the link between artists, engineers, and scientists traces way back, with making-processes taking an integral part in the canon of Western art history.

A lot of critical literature has been produced on the merging of art and technique or scientific discoveries, showing correlations from Romanticism to the late Twentieth Century. Among oft-cited examples, we find Renaissance’s introduction to one-point perspective, Monet, Degas, and Impressionists look at nature with regards to Darwin’s evolution theory, and Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s influence on Neo-Impressionists’ use of colors and light (Paul Signac, Georges Seurat). Critics like Linda Henderson and Christopher Green also played a crucial role in associating Picasso’s work with the scientific popular culture of his time, notably looking at the fourth dimension and non-euclidean geometry. Meanwhile, records show X-rays, radioactivity, thermodynamics, the theory of gases, classical mechanics, and Einstein’s theory of relativity all influenced Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

Despite the incredible record of evidence until the end of Modernism, post-war and contemporary periods have seen very little art critics address the connections between art and technology. As explained Edward Schanken, the influence of technology on the arts can only emerge from a community of art professionals building a canon around this cross-influence, and learning from its historicity. The lack of literature and academic knowledge would thus explain the little visibility digital art gained in the second half of the 21st century.

Ultimately, this gap in knowledge might be the result of a change of meaning behind the word technology. When Bauhaus director Walter Gropius started claiming this connection in 1923 with his famed slogan “Art and Technology — A new Unity,” he referred to the potential for standardization and industrial production of art and design. But the German for technology translates as Technik — conspicuously highlighting mechanical ingenuity. On the other hand, techno-logy combines the terms Techne and Logos, that is both technique and logic. As Couchot said, electronic computing, software processing, and programming overall rely on a linguistic system that gives the machine a form of binary, structuralist reasoning. In that sense, digital technologies challenge the traditional dynamics between art and technique. Whereas tools used to follow a painter’s hand mechanically, artists now enter into a dialogue with the machine as part of a linguistic process. Because — yes — coding is nothing but a mathematical language.

*Cover image: teamLab, Installation from the exhibition Au-delà des limites, La Villette, Paris © designboom

Art and Technology: New or Old Paradigm?

We talk a lot about it, and yet its scope and embrace are hard to pinpoint, “Digital Art” describes technological arts, with fluid boundaries offering many possible interpretations of the terminology. The term itself has evolved through time and whereas computer art, multimedia art, and cyber-art were standard in the 1960s-90s, the rise of the World Wide Web added a layer of connectivity resulting in a shift in language. As such, we now prefer the terms digital art and new media which can be used interchangeably with some nuances.

Art historians often categorize digital art as twofold: object-oriented artworks and process-oriented visuals. In the first scenario, digital technologies are a means to an end, and function as a tool for the creation of traditional objects like paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures. In the second case, the technology is the end itself, and artists explore the possibilities entailed to the very essence of this new medium. This latter category — often associated with the term “new media” — refers to all computable art that is digitally created, stored and distributed. In other words, while some works rely on digital tools to magnify an already-existing medium, others use digital technology as an intrinsic and indissociable component in the making of the artifact. With these definitions in mind, the list below presents current practices linked to the digital medium.

Digital painting appeared in the 1990s and embrace traditional painting techniques like watercolors, oil painting, and impastos. While the artist develops a graphical design with the use of a computer, tablet or stiletto, the process itself is similar to painting with traditional materials and result in painterly aesthetics. Digital paintings also share features that are specific to computer art visuals like the repetition and distortion of elements and can result in abstract imagery. The last year has also seen the rise of 3D painting entailed to the use of virtual reality with Google’s app Tilt Brush and its artists in residence. Our first gallery Laffy Maffei specializes in this segment with the promotion of artists like Andrej Ujhazy, and Alexandra Gorczynski.

Digital photography includes the use of images taken from reality through photographs, scans, satellite-imaging, and other possible records of what exists. This segment often mixes what is and what is not, blurring boundaries and distorting our understanding of truth. Traditional techniques of collage and the assemblage of elements, as well as the overlaying and blending of visuals through morphing technology, are part of this strand of digital imagery led by artists like Nancy Burson, Daniel Canogar, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gorsky.

Sculpture results from a design on computer-aided software, which can later be either displayed as physical objects/models or shown as virtual images on screens. Computing allows for the manipulation and controlling of complex geometry, as well as their 3D visualization, significantly enhancing traditional design abilities to foster grander creative ideas. Robert Lazzarini’s use of anamorphisms demonstrates this new realm of possibilities, while artists like Tony Cragg, Wim Delvoye, Birch Cooper, Jon Rafman, and Anish Kapoor use IT technology for the development and assemblage of complex and intricate elements, as well as organic shapes.

Digital installations closely relate to the sculptures for their 3D nature but offer a new typology in their relation to the viewer. Mostly, this type of artworks can be interactive — that is responding to visitors’ inputs (e.g., body movements, voices, touch). Alternatively, these art pieces can be immersive, presenting viewers with a new spatial environment or altering the nature of their surroundings. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are typical examples of the technologies promoting this kind of experience. Nonetheless, these installations require expensive material, logistical, computational, and architectural planning. Ultimately, this art form is now suited to museums, and institutional and public spaces, offering the vast areas and infrastructures for people to experience the medium entirely. Leading protagonists in the design of installations include Team Lab, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Michel Bret and Edmond Couchot.

Videos, animation, and the moving image constitute the most obvious scene for the questioning of reality. This technology allows the full recording of an event through both space and time, while simultaneously dealing with montage and the transformation of what honestly happens. Two strands define the moving image: live action on the one hand, and animation and 3D Worlds on the other. The moving image is often the privileged medium for the development of virtual reality and immersive environments, which explains its close link to installation art. Examples of digital artists working with video include Pipilotti Rist, Ryoji Ikeda, Yoshi Sodeoka, Toni Dove and Jacques Perconte.

Internet and networked art are process-oriented objects looking at the functioning of computing structures and networks. The web is an intricate net of information similarly to any network, and artists working in that field mean to highlight or challenge the complexity and nature of these systems (e.g., Mark Napier, Olia Lialina). Beyond this pure stamina, internet art also includes all works that are meant to be distributed on the web, or that take inspiration and information from the net as a basis for their artistic development. Krist Wood stands as an excellent example of the latter practice, both because of his artistic practice and his involvement with the Computers Club and Internet Archeology.

Software art focuses more specifically on computational engineering as in the machine’s language, communication systems. These works can either be connected — interfering in live action with visitors — or auto-generated — meaning visuals result from set algorithms and codes. Whereas the artist encodes following an idea/concept, the resulting images and other stimuli entirely depend on the computer process. Artists such as Adrian Ward and Casey Reas are notable for their use of programming languages.

Mixed Media is essential to the digital medium. As opposed to traditional creation, computation implies elements of different nature can be associated and coordinated to produce a whole experience for the viewer. Artworks can thus combine, still and moving image, augmented reality, sound, photographs, and so on. One medium of the artwork can also be singled out meaning one digital creation can result in various physical outputs, depending on the joint wishes and purposes of commissioners, artists, and curators.

*Cover image: Alexandra Gorczynski, Languor in the flowers, 2016, still image mixing digital painting and photo collages.

What is Digital Art? Definition and Scope of the New Media

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

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

Nebulous and sublime, Sara Ludy’s creations embody a journey through the calmly supercharged mind of a plural artist. Across her multidisciplinary practice, the American artist unveils the mystery around the matter. Her research results in hybrid forms emerging from the confluence of nature, being, and simulation; questioning our relationship to immateriality and consciousness. Deeply inspired by the earth Ludy is currently based in Northern New Mexico where she observes the local fauna and flora like a muse. During our conversation, we discussed the artist’s relation to social networks, her traditional painting and music background, VR, quantum theory and the secret of happiness.

This month our magazine is about the artist using and working with social networks. Can you tell us more about your creating and sharing process? How do you use Instagram to play with your environment and your work? It’s fascinating to see how the landscapes you photograph come together in your work.

I use IG in a very casual way, mostly just posting everyday moments I’ve enjoyed and things I’m working on. It’s also become a way for me to reflect on the unconscious choices I’ve made, certain ideas and themes start appearing over time. My phone is both a toolkit and an extension of my studio. I used to tape images to the wall to get them out of the computer, and now I send images to my phone, it provides a new way of reflecting on my work.

It’s not the same to have images in your studio for yourself and to share them with an audience, what are your expectations from unveiling that part of the process?

I don’t expect anything really, it’s just me posting genuine moments. I’m happy when my posts resonate with others, but it’s mostly for me, kind of like a diary, that happens to be public. I also have 2 other accounts, one for my closest friends and family, and one where I used to post inspiration, but haven’t in 4 years. Soon, I will make one for our dog Finn.

Can you tell us more about your traditional painting background? I can really see it through your digital paintings, before I couldn’t believe painting could be digital and when I discovered digital painters like yourself I knew it was the future of painting. Could you tell us more about your practice and maybe about painters you look up to in art history?

My love of painting started when I was 2 or 3 from watching the Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. I was fascinated by his transparent process, and I would daydream about how I would make paintings, it became an obsession. When I was 11, I made my first oil painting; an ocean scene with some birds flying in the sky. I painted nearly every day for many years after and received a scholarship to SAIC for painting. Growing up in a small rural town, Bluemont, VA., I had limited knowledge of contemporary art. During my first semester in college, I was enrolled in a 4D class and learned that artists were making work using sound and video cameras. I discovered John Cage and Sadie Benning and was instantly mind blown, everything sort of cracked open for me. Although I still took a few painting classes, I moved forward in the sound, video, and art & technology departments; and developed an interdisciplinary practice. 

Over the last 20 years, I’ve mostly focused on using digital mediums in my work, but have always approached my work as a painter. I’ve been working on digital paintings for the last few years, and they’ve become the most rewarding works in terms of really getting into the nuance of digital materiality and its language. I have so many favourite painters throughout history and now, William Turner, Pierre Bonnard, Agnes Pelton and everyone in the Transcendental Painting Group, Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin, Charles Burchfield, Félix Vallotton, Laura Owens, Matthew Wong, Rezi van Lankveld, and on and on and on :) My favourite digital painters are Louisa Gagliardi, Petra Cortright, and Andrej Ujhazy. I just love painters that are very inventive and genuine.

Also, I didn’t know you were a musician, I’d love to hear you talk about it because it’s amazing to have these two artistic practices

I’ve been making music longer than I’ve been making visual work! When I was 7, I was gifted a Yamaha PSR-6, a keyboard with 100 preset sounds. I was enamoured with the high C on the “Wave” preset, it was so uniquely different, kind of broken and “wrong” sounding, that it left quite an impression on me. It sounded mechanical, like an air conditioner, and it was the first time I remember thinking about the qualities of sound. I then went on to learn as many instruments as possible, played in bands, wrote albums, composed music for film, tv, commercials. I also had a collaboration with my friend Austin Meredith for about 10 years called Tremblexy, we released our final album “Magmatic” in 2011. Since then, I’ve composed music for a few things, but now I mostly focus on unstructured compositions and field recordings. I’m currently building a sound composition in VR that I will virtually perform this summer for the Experimental Sound Studio.

You also work with musicians, don’t you?

I do, I’ve Vj’d many sets and have made many music videos. Recently I made Under~Between for Dialect, and Atlantis for my oldest and dearest friend Kass Richards. Making music videos is a true labour of love and it’s a sacred process, you become so bonded and invested in the music that it becomes a friend, one that is guiding you through the visual making process for weeks on end until all of a sudden you’ve built a world for your friend to hang out in, to make sense in. The song inspires you to build them a home.

And except for your environment and landscapes, do you incorporate what you see on the net into your work or is it mostly about nature?

I’ve made many works using found internet images such as Low Prim and Desert Rose, and each uses images differently. Low Prim is a collection of found images that have been arranged in a particular way, whereas Desert Rose uses the same kind of images but they’ve been stretched and blurred to become the texture of the forms. Even though my work tends to be rooted in a space that feels very distant from culture - sometimes in a different realm entirely, culture ambiently filters through, as in the case of using found images. I’m not interested in making work that is topical or directly “speaking to the times”, but I like acknowledging that these things exist while I’m occupying the perimeter.

And what about your VR practice, do you work with unity or do you do it yourself? It’s a humongous amount of work and time to acquire skills like these.

I taught myself VR through endless hours of watching Youtube tutorials and yes it’s still a huge amount of work! I learned Unity and Vive when I made the music video Time We Have for Steve Hauschildt, and afterwards started building my VR Aviary, which has been an ongoing project for the last 4 ½ years. I’m now working with Oculus and Unreal, and I’m still learning and troubleshooting every day. My dream is to start a VR studio. I have so many visions and things I want to build, but not enough time, I need collaborators :)

Why did you choose to move to New Mexico, for nature?

I’ve wanted to live in New Mexico since I was 15. For some reason, I can’t remember I have been in love with this place even though I only visited it for the first time 3 years ago. Even all my aol screen names were based on the desert. I’m sure I’ve had multiple past lives here, it feels like home in a way that nowhere else has. I love the plants and creatures of the high desert, it’s simultaneously barren and alive. In general, I’ve always appreciated harsh elements. I’m actually a winter person, I love cold weather and having wind freeze my face off. Here, I have to look out for scorpions in my shoes and stay away from sand storms. Those elements make you pay attention more, they activate your perception, bring you more in the present moment. It’s a gift to encounter these things.

Aside from nature, what else inspires you?

I have some hobbies, I enjoy reading, and usually spend winter months reading a lot, mostly philosophy and physics. Last year I read about 40 books, 6 of those were by Ervin Laszlo. He’s a philosopher and systems theorist and beautifully bridges quantum physics and spirituality. I started reading a lot of Buddhist philosophy as a teen and later existentialist philosophy when I was going through some challenging times. In my early 20s, I was having life-altering lucid dreams and they turned everything upside down for me. I wanted to understand these experiences more and somehow fell into quantum theory. I also have a remote viewing practice, which is accessing nonlocal information. I’m very much into normalizing psi abilities, we all have the ability to recognize our infinite nature and communicate and access information in this way, we’ve just lost touch with it. These things have always been at the root of how I see the world and a big inspiration to my work, how everything simultaneously exists as information, energy, and the representations we ascribe.

Perhaps this is the secret of happiness, a balance between connection and disconnection, materiality and spirituality

Exploring Consciousness and Materiality: Conversation with Sara Ludy

Mathieu Merlet Briand is a post-internet artist working with digital sculptures, prints, and installations to explore how technology challenges our perception of contemporaneous reality. Using big data, search engines and algorithms as media, he translates images and words into ethereal compositions.

Internet materiality and its representations are fundamental to Mathieu Merlet Briand’s approach. In analogy to nature, the artist shapes data flows through recycling processes, ultimately resulting in relics, crystallizations, fragments or abstractions of the world wide web. In binding the real and the virtual, he points to the environmental issues in the (im)material consumption of technology

Exhibits such as #iceberg (2017) or Environnement (2017) derive from this attachment to reality. In modelizing the outcome of the data cultivation in the form of sculptures, these installations make us physically close to the deterioration of the planet due to the impact of supposedly dematerialized technologies.

“Just as a biologist in his lab, Mathieu Merlet Briand collects his raw material on the internet before he starts cultivating it. (…) After the protocols and algorithms invented by Mathieu Merlet Briand sifted through the indistinct swarming of these raw data, something resembling a new perceptual texture arises.”

Mathieu Merlet Briand participated in numerous solo and group shows in France and internationally, including the Kerkennah01 festival in Tunisia, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art at the New Tretyakov Gallery, the exhibition "the Synchronicity of  Elements" at the Contemporary Art Center of Nîmes, and "Parallel Call" in the collections of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Installation views include shots from EP7 in Paris, International festival of visual art & photography in Tunisia, Playground for All, Variation Media Art FAir - Cité Internationale des Arts, 7th International Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, University of Paris-Dauphine and Artplateforme in Paris.

Just as a biologist in his lab, Mathieu Merlet Briand collects his raw material on the internet before he starts cultivating it.

Alexandra Gorczynski creates two-dimensional, sculptural and video works that investigate the overlap of virtual and actual states of being. Layering together paint, photographs, and moving images, Gorczynski reframes the technique of collage and celebrates the formal potential of new media.

Her work questions the representation of the female body within the digital era as she opposes ideal nudes with the depiction of existing women. Her investigations on identity point out to new representational possibilities, as well as the gap between physical and virtual realities. In exploring the fluidity of identity, she shows the sensuous and corporeal limitations of the virtual and the real.

“Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the work is its play upon the continuum that exists between traditional painting and new media. While the use of new media is not insignificant in itself, only the most hubristic of artists is not cognisant of what has gone before. as t. s. eliot said “What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.”” Alexandra Gorczynski

With solo shows across the United-States and in London, as well as group exhibitions in Vienna and Paris, and participation in Art Basel and Pulse fairs, Alexandra Gorczynski has asserted her role in the digital art scene.

Internet artist Krist Wood is one of the most recognised and – paradoxically – most secretive, creative minds of the web, who holds a fascination for networks, systems of information, and the storage and loss of data.

Dreamscapes are distinctive of his work. Krist Wood believes sleep to be an ideal moment for recollecting memories. He uses these either vivid projections or blurred images of past events, often referring to a specific space with identifiable, visual elements like colours, contours, surfaces or atmosphere. Krist Wood merges these visions with the mass imagery available on the internet, looking for visuals that feature similar qualities as his visions. The resulting collages mix fantasy and reality, and present ethereal, otherworldly views of places. 

Krist Wood founded significant internet art websites like Computers Club, Begin Records, and Internet Archeology. Also a scientific researcher, he held a faculty position in the department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University, and lectured at Harvard Medical School in the department of cell biology.

“When i use the internet, i experience a sense of traveling. It feels like flying, like in a dream, or sometimes like walking down a strange path. Each day when i access it, i think about where i would like to go. Sometimes i find a special place, then i can’t remember how to get back to it again; maybe it’s gone. Other times i feel as though i’m hovering over someone’s life, like a ghost. I experience similar feelings in my dreams. For me, existing in the internet and dreaming are intertwined.”

“When i attempt to express myself artistically, with visual mediums as well as sound and music, i’m most interested in the sensation of space. If i conceive of a form or event that i want to pursue, then i devote myself to the characteristics of the space where i imagine it to occur. The colors and contours of a landscape, or the surfaces and ambiance of an interior become paramount to the realization of the subject.”

Galdric Fleury and Antoine Fontaine hold a fascination for architecture and its impact on our social behaviours. The duo explores the place each of us occupies in neo-liberal, artificial and secure environments. Through their computer-generated images, they examine how spaces affect the perceptions we have of our bodies as well as the relationships we maintain with the world and others.

Their work shows in various formats and displays from prints and video to installations, sculptures, and performances.

“fleuryfontaine’s work fully participates in this history to witness the shift from modernity to algorithmic governance.”

Alexis Jakubowicz, member of Montrouge Art Fair’s critic college | Montrouge Art Fair’s website

Now part of the well-known National School of Art Le Fresnoy, fleuryfontaine have been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, the Gaîté Lyrique, the Orsay Museum, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, EP7 and Thaddeus Ropac Gallery, and participated in the group show Du code à l’oeuvre (2019) curated by Dominique Moulon. 

In her work, she deals with the conditions and challenges of the digital age and its effects on our everyday life, society and culture. The focus is primarily on digital art, internet art and art with new media such as VR or AR. Within this framework, she also explores and uses the virtual as an alternative exhibition space.

Peggy Schoenegge participates at conferences, panels and events such as VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival, WISE Conference or Bauhaus University.

Among others, she realized the exhibitions SPECULATIVE CULTURES (Parsons Gallery/ New School, New York), TOUCHING FROM A DISTANCE. Transmediations in the Digital Age (Literaturhaus, Berlin), PENDORAN VINCI. Art and Artificial Intelligence Today (NRW Forum, Düsseldorf) as well as the online exhibitions CAT HEROICUS SUBLIMIS, Claiming Needles and Mirror, Mirror of the online screening series PARS PRO TOTO. Currently she teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt in the field of Expanded Reality.

Ida Kvetny is an interdisciplinary artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Through virtual reality, Kvetny merges the digital with her works in paint and clay, and thus creates a multimodal visual world. Herein, the unconscious occupies a privileged space, where her intuitive approach to image creation leads to places unreachable by rationality.

She holds a BA (hons) from Edinburgh College of Art and an MA from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. Since her graduation, Kvetny has received several grants and awards, including The Royal Scottish Academy Painters Prize, The Maclaine Medal, Aage and Yelva Nimb Honorary Scholarship, and Niels Wessel Bagge’s Foundation grant.

Kvetny has participated in exhibitions in Denmark at Brandts, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Holstebro Museum of Art, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Trapholt museum, Gl. Holtegaard, Thorvaldsens Museum, Nikolaj Kunsthal, CLAY Museum, Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art, and abroad at VRHAM! (DE), XR longlist Lumen Prize, (UK), Ystad Museum of Art (SE), The Museum of Art at Seoul National University (KR), The Torrance Art Museum (US), The Sovereign European Art Prize Exhibition at Sommerset House (UK), The Leroy Niemann Center (US), and Abrons Arts Center (NYC), besides been represented at the VOLTA SHOW in both Basel and New York.

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.

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.

Vanity Theater

Illuminated Crescent

Nightshades

Network D (Software 2)

Sediishm

She Who Sees The Unknown: Huma

Svar

Domestic Lanscape

Sun Stained

Void Liquid Crystal II

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.

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.

Dive into a dream island and its imaginary palaces. Live the experience as if you were there.

This exhibition marks the return of our collaboration with artist Alexandra Gorczynski. A leading figure in the digital art scene, Alexandra Gorczynski creates two-dimensional, sculptural and video works that explore the overlap of virtual and real states of being. By layering paint, photographs and moving images, the artist continues to explore techniques of collage and celebrates the formal potential of new media. Her work deals with the representation of the female body in the digital age. How to treat the female nude with a female gaze? Her research highlights new possibilities of representation, blurring boundaries between real and virtual by creating a hybrid universe.

Adopting the codes of video games, Farniente, Matisse and I offers a contemplative walk on the female nude theme, so dear to the artist. This experience offers an Arcadian escape in the footsteps of Henri Matisse, creating a bridge between tradition and contemporaneity, between body and mind.

Educated in Fine Arts and classical painting, Alexandra Gorczynski - who defines herself as a painter - transfers Matisse’s pictorial techniques into the digital medium. Flat tints, the outline of nudes, the absence of perspective, everything invokes the master of shapes and colours. By integrating photos of fabrics - referring to the ones used by Matisse in his paintings - the artist studies the possibilities offered by this new medium, in order to continue painting history. Gorczynski pursues her historical wanderings by focusing on other artists and trends. Her vigorous and repetitive brushstrokes evoke contemporary expressionism close to Cy Twombly.

With Farniente, Matisse and I, Alexandra Gorczynski delivers a synthesis of the great pictorial movements of the 20th century while proposing works with a clear contemporary statement. By juxtaposing digital painting and collage, the artist creates original compositions allowing the public to oscillate between virtual and real spaces.

Alexandra Gorczynski (American, born 1983 – ) graduated from the Rhode School of Design in 2006. With solo shows across the United States and in London, as well as group exhibitions in cities like Vienna and Paris, Gorcynski has earned clear visibility for her digital paintings and video works. Exhibiting at fairs like Art Basel and Pulse Art Fair, Gorczynski asserts her role as a contemporary trendsetter.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the work is its play upon the continuum that exists between traditional painting and new media. While the use of new media is not insignificant in itself, only the most hubristic of artists is not cognisant of what has gone before. as t. s. eliot said “What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.