Last November he became the most expensive living artist as his canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s postwar and contemporary art auction, New York. David Hockney, 81, is also a reference at exploring new technology. More than a move from physical to digital painting, the artist sees the two mediums as being complementary — a demonstration of how new tools can contribute to the artist’s creative process.

While some artists get variety from changing subject matters, Hockney is all about the medium, and, in a sense, that’s what makes his vision of digital art so empowering. He innovates within the traditional forms like still-life, portrait, and landscapes, making these subjects contemporary again. By exploring the same themes throughout his career, Hockney relentlessly renewed himself in the methods of representation, which eventually drove him to digital technologies. “Drawing was going out of style actually, it was,” Hockney jokingly explains, “I’m amazed that it’s the telephone that can bring back drawing.”

Digital tools are mobile and offer so much more flexibility than carrying brushes, paint, and pens for an outing. Grab your pocket-sized device, and here we go. For Hockney, this meant he could wake up and start representing his everyday environment — indoor — and as he progressively mastered digital brushwork — outdoor, moving from interiors, bouquets, and books on the bedside table, to the beautiful sceneries of the British countryside in Yorkshire and his love for painting en plein air.

Not much. Hockney is not interested in leading the race for technology. He uses basic software on iPhone and more recently iPad, and is, in fact, rather appreciative of the way it’s easy-to-use. His point is instead to use new tools as an opportunity to rethink representation. Drawing on a piece of glass, the sense of touch changes, altering your practice. Digital brushes have a different feel, and so you need to adjust your usual drawing techniques to new processes and learn how to do things over again.

How do you paint with your fingertips? Blend colors? Achieve thinner or thicker strokes? Set transparency and edges softness? How do you create effects like light reflection on materials such as white porcelain and polished brass? How do you give in the brightness of freshly-cut flowers or the autumnal tones and ambient humidity of trees? All this panel of settings took some time to master but as Hockney explains digital painting prevented the loss of color. Because of the accuracy obtained with fingers, the painter also felt the challenge and opportunity of using a limited number of marks on his representations.

One thing that is essential to Hockney is details. Each living being — may it be an individual or a plant — is unique, and by giving much attention to the representation of specific traits, the artist values each constituent of the (eco)system. By looking closely he sees things we don’t, and so we observe again, more intensely, and rediscover the beauty of multiplicity. Digital painting allowed this interest for observation to foster as he zooms in and out allowed for a more considerable amount of details than the change of views experienced when stepping back from the canvas. To maximize sharpness and color saturation, Hockney works with vector-based images, which, unlike pixel-based works, he can render in large-scale prints for the better display of his preciseness.

On top of iPhone and iPad drawings, Hockney also works with digital photography. Frustrated by the limitations of one-point perspective photography, the artist always thought of bringing multiple narratives, notably by representing artworks within the artworks — which ultimately result in numerous oft-connected descriptions. Works like Four blue stools include photographs of people taken from many angles and with multiple vanishing points, and that are then joined together digitally to form a single, unsettling, reality. Digital collage is a primary medium to capture the diversity of looks, but such pieces also include images of other artworks from the artist pointing to the importance that he gives to mixing media.

“The iPhone makes you bold,” says Hockney. You can go back anytime, and thus explore all possibilities, instincts, and drives. Digital art is not about fashion but about the risk-taking and experimental approach it gives to creation.

*Cover image: David Hockney, In the Studio: December 2017. Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on Dibond, edition of 25. © David Hockney.

How Artists Connect with Digital versus Physical Painting: The Case of David Hockney

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

Known as the father of video art, Korean Nam June Paik (1932–2006) first intended to make a career in music. Despite also studying art history and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, it is his fascination for the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone technique which pushed him to move to Germany in 1956. Most likely, the first decisive moment in his career is his encounter with John Cage who introduced him to the Fluxus movement and grounded his interest for open-end processes and artistic experiments.

Promoting what critic Craig Saper described as a “laboratory-like atmosphere in the study of arts and humanities,” Fluxus members developed interactive art pieces where participant-users could experiment with the artwork. De facto, the group revived a Duchampian ideal in not controlling an art piece’s result, leaving some parameters open to experimentation for people other than themselves.

The duo Cage/Paik proposed exciting developments in that regard. With Imaginary Landscape no. 4 (1951) and his silent piece 4’33’’ (1952), Cage realized the first “open artworks.” In the former, musical structures (including radio transmissions) randomly overlap as the conductor requests his instrumentalists to change stations, volume, and rhythms; while in the latter, silence give place to contextual interruptions as Cage materializes the idea that sound is always present — even when coming from an audience’s coughs, whispers, and glitches. Williams Mix (1952) is also an excellent example of Cage experimenting with electronic music as he composes graphic scores from cut-outs of generated and found tape tracks.

But while Cage’s work involves random creative processes, Paik introduced interactivity as to leaving control to audiences on the outcome, meaning people moved from being mere interpreters to active players. Reasonably unnoticed at the time, his exhibition “Exposition of Music — Electronic Television,” organized at architect Järhling’s private Galerie Parnass in 1963, laid the ground to essential components in digital art. The installation Random Access Music diverted a tape recorder from its initial purpose — reading music in a linear, repetitive fashion — to offering an unlimited number of possibilities for music pieces. How so? Paik randomly fixed tape tracks of found sounds onto a wall in an overlay forming a network. As he detached the playback head from its recorder, visitors could create their sound sequence without having him intervene.

In line with manipulating sound as a material, Paik also explored TV sets as an alternative electronic media, with the exhibition marking the transition from “Paik the composer” to “Paik, the father of video art.” For more than a year, the artist worked on his concept for Participation TV learning about electronics to navigate his way in the alteration of TV sets from different manufacturers and age. Twelve screens, placed at random across the venue, broadcasted the one German television channel of the time. Programs were barely recognizable because of Paik’s modifications of image parameters to show for instance horizontal or vertical stripes. Some TV sets required active intervention through microphones or pedal switch to activate image distortions — thus offering the foundation to 21st-century discussions on multimedia and interactivity.

It is significant that although artists like Wolf Vostell concurrently started working with TV sets in the US around 1962–64, Paik was the first to explore the actual nature of the medium, looking at the potential that electronics had to offer. Until 1965 and the commercialization of Sony Portapak no video camera was transportable and accessible price-wise, which explains how video art was first explored through its receiving objects. However, the equipment produced in the industry was not enough for Paik who soon collaborated with engineer Shuya Abe on the development of a video synthesizer for the live TV Broadcast of altered images (Videocommunes, 1970).

Taking from the 1920s and utopian ideas from the likes of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann in bringing universality and peace through mediums of global communications such as film and radio, Paik’s use of televisual media in the 1970s and 1980s was increasingly focused on connecting a global audience. His acclaimed TV-Buddha (1974) — where a sitting Buddha contemplates his image, videotaped and screened on a TV-set opposite — opens discourses between mass media and tradition, and between East and West. This theme, which was also central to his friendship and intellectual affinities with Cage, became of critical value within the Cold War context. Paik contested TV’s nationalism wishing for global communications on every country’s culture and news as people switched channels. With interventions like his 1973 video classic Global Groove and his 1984 live satellite TV broadcast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Paik materialized this concept, reaching up to fifty million people in twenty countries worldwide (Wrap around the World, 1988).

*Cover image: Nam June Paik and his Buddha TV (1974), pictured at “Projects: Nam June Paik”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977, © Eric Kroll.

New Media Precursor: Nam June Paik

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

Sure you have noticed that “revolutionizing the art market with blockchain technology” is becoming the new thing, and a subject widely covered by magazines like The Art Newspaper, Forbes, and Apollo Magazine, and other events like the Art Basel Conversations and Christie’s art-tech summit “Exploring Blockchain” to name a few. But asides all the excitement from the fancy and trendy, it’s important to know where value creation lies and what defines a business model’s worth. Following a previous article on the blockchain/art relationship, here’s the backbone of Danae’s approach to the blockchain and its applications to the art market.

Offering Both Copyright Management and Online Sales

Companies working with blockchain and art now offer either copyright management or sales of art assets online. But what about gaining value from the combination of these two practices. Copyright management and the safekeeping of artworks provenance can only be guaranteed if transactions from the primary and secondary markets are recorded on the blockchain, and Danae believes the fewer middlemen, the better when it comes to tracing ownership.

Focusing on the Contemporary Market First

Blockchain finds both its quality and weakness in the fact that once it records a transaction or action, the record cannot be edited or altered. In doing so, the technology prevents from fraud, but it is essential that the information registered is correct. Unlike other blockchain-based art databases, Danae works with living artists so that it can ensure the registry of correct information only. For the platform’s artists to register their works on the blockchain would be tricky which is why Danae think of this as a collaborative process where it takes care of the technology but works hand-in-hand with the given artists to set the terms of their artworks’ smart contracts and guarantee authenticity and transparency.

Creating a Market for Digital Art and Design

Danae focuses on the digital creation, a market segment which has only been partially addressed, if so. In contrast to the traditional art pieces, digital production first appears in the form of a computer file that is by definition reproducible and therefore hard to define as a rare commodity subject to valuation (for more details on the appraisal of digital creation read this article). The blockchain solves the paradox of making digital art scarce, allowing Danae to structure a marketplace for it. With an already-established recognition from academics, new media is already contributing significantly to art historical discourses thus showing great, new perspectives for collectors. In contrast to secondary market masterpieces providing with safe, stable and high-priced investments, the emerging nature of the market for new media entails potential for more substantial growth. Also, artists and galleries who join the platform will match a list of industry standards to make sure the platform only promotes high-end art quality.

Building an Ecosystem for Two Different Customer Needs

Circular economies are more sustainable, which is why Danae did not focus on one type of customer but thought of a viable and fair trading system where customers feed and source each other’s needs. Whereas a few projects have seen the potential in blockchain’s distributed nature for fractional ownership, art investment, and the creation of funds, Danae assessed that the financialization of art products could also allow for widespread user access (e.g., Netflix, Airbnb) which could benefit both B2B and B2C sectors. Art should democratize as audiences wish to enjoy qualitative art at reasonable prices and in various environments from museums to homes, offices, hotels, and shopping malls — something studies like the Vastari Global Reports and The Hiscox Online Art Trade Report confirm.

As such, Danae offers investors with the opportunity of buying portions of digital artworks’ intellectual property through a limited number of tokens (scarcity), while allowing art lovers and businesses to purchase an unlimited number of prints and installations of artworks for different personal or public usage (reproducibility). Physical versions of the digital artworks are moderately priced and open to consumption, while online orders provide investors with royalties and the valuation of their financial products, thus designing a complete and autonomous system for boosting the market of digital art and design.

In traditional art marketplaces, artists don’t have resale rights and only earn from selling their works the first time. This system is known to be critical for artists’ whose works are usually cheap at first but earn significant value on the secondary market, through their lifetime and beyond. However for the art industry to prosper artists should be able to live from their productions, which is why Danae believes essential to sustain artists earnings in the long run. Danae registers artworks as part of a smart contract which grants its artists and galleries a commission each time a transaction goes through, may it be the purchase of tokens (primary and secondary market) or editions.

This article follows from a previous publication describing the blockchain-art relationship.

*Cover image:  Sabrina Ratté revived the facade of Los Angeles’ Yardhouse with her work Immeuble-Villas II, 2016. © Sabrina Ratté.

What Differentiates Danae’s Approach to Blockchain and Art?

Think Disney or Pixar led to the rise of 3D animated images? Well, you might need to reconsider the influence of Japanese animes. In the early 1980s, a time when animation was mostly drawn and then digitized, computer graphics artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi (born 1952) was the first to build three-dimensional computer-generated images solely based on algorithms and mathematics. With techniques still up-to-date, he changed the course of image making, introducing notions of volume, movements, and high-definition textures, let’s dig into the work of this remarkable precursor of digital art.

Kawaguchi made his first computer images in 1975, three years before graduating from Tokyo University of Education. He started off playing with simple geometries of black and white lines and soon developed a passion for generative processes, creating drawings with computer commands which allowed the design to evolve on their own. As he explains, “Even if I have no clear idea about the details of shape development, I can achieve previously unknown shapes just by defining a production condition for the development of such shapes.” This work translated into Kawaguchi’s “growth model,” a self-organizing, formative algorithm for computationally reproducing the growing phenomena of branches or cell divisions.

Morphogenesis is a recurring theme of Kawaguchi’s career, and one always imbued with organic shapes and the living. Growing up on a tropical island called Tanegashima, Kawaguchi discovered his love for the ocean and marine species young and consistently fueled his work with interpretations of shells, spiraling plants, medusas, and other blobby fantastic creatures. Are these organic elements real or not? Have they existed on Earth or elsewhere? Could they live one day? Kawaguchi never intended to produce faithful representations but directly focused on understanding principles of biomorphism underlying the generation of forms so that he created new pictorial spaces based on algorithms. The theme of organic change and evolution dear to the Japanese culture is also one core to digital art which later fascinated figures like Dieter Huber, William Latham, and Karl Sims, all working on the simulation of organisms, often called “artificial life.”

Conspicuously Kawaguchi worked with Professor Koichi Omura at the University of Osaka when his lab developed LINKS-1, a computer graphic system for realistic renderings. The machine was unprecedented for its processing power and unlike super-computers at the time, consisted of 34–62 regular-size processors connected in a networked system for faster calculations and the easy removal of deficient parts. From summer 1982 to spring 1983 — an extraordinarily short duration process — Omura and Kawaguchi used the LINKS to develop, Growth: Mysterious Galaxy a complex, 5-minutes-long animation sequence which stunned the computer art community at ACM SIGGRAPH that year — including Pixar’s then-president Ed Catmull who noted the piece’s unique sharpness and image quality.

Growth: Mysterious Gallaxy (1983) was the first example in 3D of using two techniques now essential to image rendering: ray tracing and metaballs. Ray tracing is an optical technique that calculates the luminance of each pixel, in Omura and Kawaguchi’s case, defining the color which should be rendered to give the 3D image some depth. The pair were indeed the first to use this technique for the representation of organic-looking n-dimensional objects called “metaballs.” Technologies changed and while he started using machines like Toyo Links “Personal Links” (1983-87) and Silicon Graphics (1987–2003), he continued producing short films like Embryo (1988), Gigalopolis (1995), and Cytolon (2002) which are telling of the process through which Kawaguchi perfected his technical and visual know-how.

In 1991, Eggy (1990) owed Kawaguchi a distinction for computer animation at the Prix Ars Electronica as he re-purposed his blobby, organic shapes to depict robot-like organisms in a 3D moving image. Since 1986 he researched High Definition TV (HDTV) and brought digital imagery to everyday objects, as show his giant plastic sculptures of Growth Tendrils and Eggies, as well as his pattern-printed kimonos — all strongly influenced by the Japanese visual tradition. In his late practice, he has also worked with performers in building “Gemotion,” an interface where his 3D productions, modeled on living organisms, follow the movements and shapes of dancers (Gemon Dance, 2000). Kawaguchi displayed his pieces at international venues like Images du Futur in Montreal, ISEA, Ars Electronica, the Venice Biennale, and at ACM SIGGRAPH, and in 2010 received the latter’s ultimate prize for lifetime achievement. He also taught extensively at the Nippon Electronics College where he introduced the cross-disciplinary teaching of fine art and technology, as well as the University of Tokyo, from which he just retired earlier this year.

*Cover image: Yoichiro Kawaguchi interviewed by Thomas Martin, founder of CGM, during his 2018 exhibition “L’univers des formes” at the Centre des Arts d’Enghien-les-Bains. © Gorkab.

New Media Precursor: Yoichiro Kawaguchi

Claudia Hart is a pioneer of media art, one of the very few that worked at the onset of merging art and simulation technologies in the 1990s. Starting with early 3D virtual imaging then-used in the military only, she subsequently experimented with upcoming techniques such as AR and VR in an all-embracing capacity. But is being technologically vanguard enough for artists to gain credibility? Is it just about mastering new tools? These questions ask to ponder the blurring of roles between a creative and an engineer or IT specialist. Conspicuously, while Hart’s embrace of technologies stands apart, it is also her capacity to generate discourses and claims around simulations that makes her art so meaningfully addictive. An excellent example for understanding the role of critical content and art history within the making of new media art.

An obvious way to think of Hart’s work would be to delve into the history of animation starting with flipbooks and hand drawings up to today’s sophisticated 3D persona — but that would be a mistake. Hart diverges from the past of animation, giving a refreshing approach to the media. Instead, the artist looks into simulations, or what she calls Simul-isms, as something that has more to do with the history of automatons, giving digital bodies an environment to interact with and seeing from there how these avatars evolve on their own. While she always conceived these beings virtually through computer-generated imagery (CGI), she progressively infused them with physical perceptions through motion capture and the use of sensors, making these immersive environments more real and distorting viewers’ understanding of the fake.

Digital bodies and the Iconography of the Virtual Female

From painting to internet productions by post-cyber feminists, the representation of women is a recurring subject of art history and a most-important sociological question today as women still fight for equal rights. In CGI and 3D imaging, Hart was the leading figure to raise these issues being one of the rare female artists in the sector. IT, gaming, military and animation industries were (and still mostly are) male environments where pragmatic ideals dominate, and computer-generated images make the objectification of female bodies apparent. Women stand as standardised objects of desire and big breasts, thick lips, tight waists and curvy hips define a supposed global truth for attractiveness. Conversely, Hart depicts avatar-women as poetic beings of high sensuousness, retracing the emotional nature of women, the charms of their bodies beyond pre-conceived criteria, and their ultimate ability to express their desires and depart from male dominion.

Hart advocates a return to a form of Romanticism, an idea shared with other new media artists, and which she notably theorised as part of the article “The New Romantics: Flâneurs and Dandies of the Twenty-first Century.” At the core is the use of mythological, literary, and art historical references recalling the 19th-century movement with its exploration of personal feelings and human psychology as well as its use of allegory and revival of classicist forms — think Greek sculptures and other canonical imagery. Some works of Hart such as Ophelia (2008) see a direct allusion to Romanticism as the inert body of a nude odalisque-like figure floats underwater with perfect buoyancy, an adjacent plastic bag as the sole indicator of our period in an otherwise timeless frieze.

Landscape and pictorial scenes are also subjects of nostalgia against our technocratic pulses. In her latest work, Big Red (2019), Hart arranges a still-life with vivid colors and black outlines similar to those in Matisse’s canvas. The piece announces a new stream of works where she reinterprets the Fauvist painter’s depictions of his studio filled with paintings. Moving from the 20th-century scenes, set in time as in a photograph, to the ever-evolving possibilities of 3D simulation, Hart highlights the changes in communication flows and signals the overwhelming amount of information that saturates our techno-centred society. This approach, which diverges from her focus on digital bodies, reflects her extensive use of comparison with past representations to understand or question current times. And who better to emulate than Matisse whose work reveals such a poetic, emotional and intrinsically human vision?

Subversion and Repurposing of Capitalistic Symbols of Power

Another characteristic of Romanticism is the use of political irony — something Hart signals by using comparative symbols of past and present times. One example is the use of emojis covering the walls of her VR environment in The Flower Matrix (2016). Symbols of technocratic power as well as recurring elements of the fast-paced, emojis epitomises consumerist society and its mode of visual communication. Interestingly, the structure of this simulation describes the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, a subversion of the Greek myth for denouncing how embedded we are with capitalism. In media ballet The Dolls (2017), Hart uses billboard dresses as reminders of the collapsed Habsburg empire to signify the fall of authorities. The background shows a collection of buildings from fallen empires such as Cesar’s Roman Forum, Louis XIV’s Versailles, and Marie-Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon, which Hart found on Google 3D Warehouse and which she depicts plunging in a surface covered with a grid of welcomes, as if alluding to Google whimsical take over past and present political, power entities.

Theatre and the Combination of Multiple Media

Through her interest in staging and spectatorship as well as her use of multiple media, Hart links back to the artistic tradition of the early 20th century. She extends her work with virtual worlds to the conception of the physical spaces where her experiences take place, and carefully designs augmented furniture and wallpapers, for instance in The Flower Matrix (2016) where the visitor starts exploring her work as he enters the set.

While Hart’s live performances remind of past theatre productions, she also restores Modernists’ cooperative approach to creation where many artists brought their understanding of a specific media. For the Alices Walking (2014), a sculptural opera and fashion show, she collaborated with composer and sound designer Edmund Campion and vocalist Mikey Mc Parlane, as well as performers to bring the five Alices alive. On stage, they wore sculptural costumes that Hart designed in shapes reminiscent of Picasso’s design for the ballet La Parade (1917), and which Hart augmented with poetic text animations through an application developed by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.

Similarly, her media ballet The Dolls (2017) was subject to collaborations with Kristina Isabelle, Kurt Hentschlager and Liviu Pasare. Her costumes also share the streamlined allure and cumbersomeness of Oskar Schlemmer’s designs for the Triadic Ballet (1922), another appealing reference knowing how the Bauhaus valued cross-disciplinary collaborative approaches, appreciated the role of women as artists, explored upcoming media and reevaluated some crafts to the status of art — all themes which are essential to Hart.

*Cover image: Claudia Hart, Big Red with Big Red Noise augmented Wallpaper, 2019: 3D visualization, bitforms gallery, NY, 2020, courtesy of the artist.

How Media Artists Relate to Art History: The Case of Claudia Hart

“Are we just secretly yearning for an endless summer?” asks Pedro Gadanho, director of Lisbon’s MAAT Museu de Arte in Eco-visionaries (2019) and, frankly, who would say no to that. But while this question might have appeared innocent a few years back, the tide has turned. From Greta Thunberg’s 15-days sailboat journey across the Atlantic to the Amazonian forest burning down, at last, one stops to ignore, forget, overlook and dismiss. The idea of a technology ensured, corporately maintained future for the very few bothers. Digital art, also, participates in challenging mindsets around ecology, raising awareness, calling for action or suggesting inspirational solutions.

Core to the strategies of activism that digital artists put in place is the concept of Anthropocene. More than hype, the term digests a new geological epoch marked by antagonistic relationships between human activities and global warming. Following atmospheric chemist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Crutzen, who coined the word in 2000, this period started in the year 1874 when James Watt invented the steam machine and has been ongoing since the industrialisation. Conspicuously, the concept shows the ultimate need to move onto a new geological era that reconciles technology and nature as part of a “Post-Anthropocene”.

Visualising the dialectics driving the Anthropocene is probably the most long-standing strategy for eco-activism in art, and one that digital practitioners follow. With his piece Merge Nodes (2016), artist Joe Hamilton displays today’s juxtaposition of industrial and natural landscapes in a digital, internet mapping and searching aesthetic. The work brings a descriptive approach to the Anthropocene and its global, infrastructural functioning around city hubs. Another fascinating depiction is AI artist Jake Elwes’ CUSP (2019). The animation shows images of birds generated with neural networks displayed on a portable screen in the tidal landscape of Landermere Creek (UK). Artificial audio-visual renditions interact with native, marsh birds, both augmenting and disrupting the ecosystem with technology in an unsettling dynamic.

Other depictions of our geological epoch come with witty criticism, and sarcasm. An excellent example of which is Julian Charrière’s The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories (2013) where the artist digitally photographed his intervention of melting Arctic ice with a gas torch. Beyond its ecological meaning, the series reminds of the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich “suggesting at once mastery and insignificance of the individual,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis puts it. John Gerrard’s statement piece Western Flag (2017) is also exemplary in its ingenious observation of the Anthropocene. The artist presents a computer-generated, contemporary vision of the Lucas Gusher on Spindletop, Texas, where, in 1901 was found the most significant US oil well. The site which now acts as a post-industrial wasteland then represented the fierce of capitalism maintained by a booming industry of cheap and extensively accessible petroleum. John Gerrard marks its location with an oil-burning flag warning of the ultimate outcomes from favouring consumerism over land preservation. As he best explains,

“One of the greatest legacies of the 20th century is not just population explosion or better living standards but vastly raised carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This flag gives this invisible gas, this international risk, an image, a way to represent itself.”

Another strategy consists of making people virtually impact on ecosystems when accumulating waste or consuming readily-available goods. In This Changes Everything (2014), journalist and writer Naomi Klein express the taboo that we are all climate deniers looking at the facts but then moving back to our ordinary lives as part of a defence mechanism. Drastic changes scare us, making it easier to postpone the time for action. Arguably, the reason for climate change denial is that people don’t perceive the direct threat to humanity. Events such as increased greenhouse gases, weather disruptions, extreme pollution, and ocean acidification need to connect with personal realities to convey the notion of urgency.

An early example of showing people’s agency is eteam’s Second Life Dumpster (2007). For this time-based, performative work, artists duo Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht bought land in the 3D online world Second Life to collect and dispose of the items found in avatars’ trash folders. The performance brought awareness to the question of handling waste in virtual realms and how notions of disposal and recycling are obliterated in these spaces even more readily than in physical life.

In Evolution of Fish (2019), Tamiko Thiel prompts viewers in participating in experiences. The installation consists of a video projection immersing visitors underwater with different schools of fish, from reef species to Silvery Amberjacks known for their love of debris. But the trick lies in visitors’ interactions with the piece; the more people change the directions of fish streams between left and right, the more animals turn into plastic waste. Conscpicuously, both the above practices focus on the idea of impotence or rather the lack thereof. While people often feel powerless with regards to climate change, processes of interaction manifest that they can have a positive or negative influence in making a difference.

Apprehending data through images also help materialise the direct link between our actions and climate change, notably by making dependencies and relations of exploitation visible. For instance, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s We Live in an Ocean of Air (2018) records heartbeats and breath through sensors to immerse viewers in their organic reality. The installation shows reliance on other co-beings and underlines the responsibility of sharing the same ecosystem.

Other data-oriented pieces assert how machines entertain an ambiguous relationship with ecosystems as they provide knowledge on biospheres, but also alienate their materialities, in effect distancing ourselves from these realities. In CO2GLE (2014), Spanish artist Joana Moll shows the amount of CO2 that Google.com emits per second for global internet searches. Her real-time installation asks to ponder the material consequences of information technologies. As the artist painfully notes, “Almost nobody recalls that the Internet is made up of interconnected physical infrastructures which consume natural resources. How can such an evident fact become so blurred in the social imagination?” Mathieu Merlet-Briand also questions pollution related to immaterial communication technologies like the web. In #iceberg and Environnement (2017), he recycles and repurposes large image data sets from Google to present the biased, technology-driven ecosystems that we inhabit. Critical to this approach is the aesthetic quality of the result making viewers uncannily enjoy the consumption of data.

In turn, Claire Malrieux’s dynamic drawing or hyper-drawing Climat Général (2017) is fuelled with real-time data on the weather and general climate. The artist defined different drawing scenarios or behaviours in her algorithm that the engine interprets in a non-linear fashion depending on the data it receives. Graphics and drawings come in perpetual mutation showing both humanity’s impact on the environment but also the evolution of the Anthropocene pertained to climate disruptions.

Imagining Mutations, Adaptation and New Eco-Realities

Fictions around extinction and adaptation bring new developments to the field of eco-art, notably with the premise that our civilisation could move away from the Anthropocene. Because industrial production led to climate change, technology and the wellbeing of natural environments are often opposed and handled as separate elements. Digital artists play a primary role in imagining narratives that combine human activities and ecology, helping people apprehend the idea of symbiosis within alternative ecosystems.

The 1990s have seen several artists looking at the creation of other beings through technology-driven, bio-engineered processes. Austrian Dieter Huber and British William Latham, for instance, have worked in the production of artificial life forms based on existing organisms. Their respective works propose fictitious, digitally-produced mutated plants and beings which ask about the engineering of nature and blur the limits between reality and fiction.

Recent works from Eva Papamargariti, such as Precarious Inhabitants (2017), follow this tradition of combining the real and the unfamiliar when investigating possibilities of adaptation. In the video mentioned above, humans, AI machines and other organic and synthetic bodies come into symbiosis with their environment in sarcastic if not pessimistic scenarios. The work mixes actual and virtual backdrops to show potential mutations resulting from the toxins, wastes, and polluters of our industrial age. Ultimately, the artist acts out our responsibility in changing ecosystems and envisions its impact on living organisms, we included.

On the contrary, in The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future (2014), Rick Silva uses this story-telling strategy to bring an ethereal, optimistic and poetic vision to the merging of the natural and the bio-engineered. The artist narrates an ornithologist’s encounter with species featuring new physical properties, such as metallic textures, weightlessness, and fast mutation abilities, and moves the viewer into a non-euclidean, reassuring world.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen also provides compelling scenarios for new eco-realities that hybrid poetic and pessimistic realities. In his video and VR work Re-animated (2018), he creates an environment to set fictitious species. Birds, insects, moss, plants, water, and light enliven the virtual landscape acting as a seemingly healthy ecosystem. But a gigantic, noisy and mischievous bird inhabits the simulated island, unsettling the atmosphere of the place in echo to the potentially negative impact of mutations. Kudsk Steensen’s extensive fieldwork, collection of 3D scans on fauna and flora, and interviews of ornithologists and researchers all contribute to making a compelling evolutionary case of this computer-generated animation.

Overall, strategies of observation, interaction, data analysis and fiction-telling provide exciting experiences for understanding the need for new ecologies. Despite this, digital art practices don’t necessarily offer solutions which new media artists tend to materialise otherwise, notably in the production of prostheses and object-oriented works. Visualising new modes of existence could thus provide another fruitful stream of endeavours in the future. According to Laura Kim Sommer and Christian A. Klöckner’s recent publication for the ArtCOP21 event in Paris, artworks proposing an “awesome solution” come first in stimulating audiences to take action. Key to solution-driven digital experiences could be Felix Guattari’s book Three Ecologies (1989). Critically, the philosopher asks for a systemic transformation of society and politics, highlighting environments’ codependence with individual and social contexts. If all three aspects of life should be reorganised to generate change, how would these new infrastructures come together? How would digital artists participate in the creation of these multi-ecological scenarios is yet to explore.

*Cover image: John Gerrard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, video still. Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York.

The Endless Summer: How Digital Art Urges for New Ecologies

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

Elektra is a Montreal based organization that presents works and artists that combine contemporary artistic creation and new technologies, and are in line with the current aesthetics of research and experimentation. Since 1999, ELEKTRA has organized an international digital art Festival featuring multimedia art performances, involving immersive and participative experiences. ELEKTRA produces the BIAN (Biennale internationale d'art numérique, International Biennial of Digital Art), exhibiting innovative artworks dealing with new technologies, and the MIAN (Marché international d’art numérique, International Market of Digital Art), hosting since 2007 major players in the digital art and culture ecosystem. Alain Thibault, artistic and producing director of ELEKTRA, shares an idea of the museum and of artistic display that favors innovation, participation and the removal of the limits of traditional exhibition methods. His virtual museum project is based on an avant-garde and original approach, proposing the realization of an interactive space of menstruation and artistic enhancement. For this reason we asked him some questions about his idea of virtuality and the construction of digital spaces thanks to new technologies.

What were your inspirations during your first creations?

What is the purpose of virtual exhibition spaces? Is it creating a new space to display art or is it about rethinking the very nature of the art experience? Does the very notion of exposure remain?

We firstly recreated existing exhibition spaces to give the visitor the best possible experience of the in situ exhibition (hybrid mode). Our position regarding 3D, unlike Street View type exhibitions, also allows us to create spaces straight out of the imagination of architects and to present exhibitions without the physical constraints.

How is a virtual exhibition space different from a physical one?

Less constraining in terms of space but still having to take into account the current technological limits if one wants someone in Paris, Montreal or Seoul to have the same experience.

What should be the distribution of roles among the architect, the scenographer, the curator and the artist in a virtual space exhibition?

I believe that they are interrelated, in the same way as in a physical space but with different parameters.

To what extent are video games a source of inspiration and what should be the typology of such a virtual exhibition space?

At ELEKTRA we want to maintain the highest value of the place and the works of the artists we propose. Therefore a closed space, which will be able to expand according to our projects, but completely under control.

Do you think that only specific works of art are suited to be exhibited in a virtual space? In this case, which ones? Or, on the contrary, every kind of artwork could find its place in a virtual exhibition regardless of its medium?(digital works or not, immersive, generative, sculptures, classical paintings, etc.).

Indeed some physical works will be more difficult to show or represent. But these 3D representation techniques are evolving rapidly. For video works, their duration is the current issue. For interactive works, we develop different strategies in order to make the visitor experience the interaction in the best way. For digital works, in general not so much worries because they fit well in this type of environment.

What could be the new ways of visiting and what role does the visitor play in a virtual space? Should they be alone, in a group, accompanied by a guide or with strangers as in a traditional museum?

For the moment the visitor of our exhibitions is alone. We are going to explore the idea of being able to receive multiple visitors in order to make it a space for socialization. The question of self-representation remains: what would his avatar look like?

What technologies do you use to create virtual spaces?

Which devices are the best suited? Virtual reality headsets, still owned by few art enthusiasts, smartphones, or computers?

For the moment we are aiming at a fairly wide spread from there the use of a web browser like Chrome. We try to avoid downloading an application. It will depend on the technical constraints on the display of the works in a browser.

What do you think of the initiative of the Phi Center in Montreal, taken over by the 104 in Paris, to rent a headset with an uploaded experience?

For the moment we do not want to invest in the realization of exhibitions for VR headsets: problems related to current and future health constraints, the resolution and very little widespread among the public. Let's wait and see how they evolve.

Is there a recommended place to visit a virtual space? At the museum? At home? Elsewhere?

Why not at home, especially in confinement.

What economic models do you see for these spaces? Public grants, commissions from museums, art centers or foundations? Brand sponsorship? Financial contributions from visitors?

All these models are possible. Public aid generally gives us more freedom for artistic choices.

Q&A with Alain Thibault

Liz Trosper grounds her practice in the tradition of painting while exploring a variety of media such as drawing, digital imaging, photography, assemblage, installation, performance and video. In acts of squeezing, coating, tearing and scratching, she reconciles the digital image with materiality, playing on the sensation of paint, how it looks and feels.

Associating paint with lush cosmetics and using glossy photographs to indulge in the selfie era, liz trosper builds abstract compositions that inform on the beauty myth in the digital age. With technology and hyper-mediation, the fetishisation of women bodies is increasingly visual. In emphasising materiality, painting, and brush touches, Liz Trosper reminds of the tactile nature of sensuousness.

Liz trosper is a lecturer at the college of visual arts and design, university of north texas. She has exhibited extensively in Texas, with a notable solo show at the wilcox space curated by John Pomara and participation in the group presentation plugged-in paintings at site131.

“My artwork is about the struggle between mediation and material, between image and substance. I learned everything i know about the tension between look and feel from my experience and education as a woman.”

“I see connections between the actions of making up, of painting and of a metaphysical healing and transformation. My work speaks the language of cosmetic product shots. I’m trying to harness the glow as something that is alive and magic and that eludes the lens and the brush and touch.”

Installation views include shots from Centraltrak and Barry Whistler 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.

Aaron Scheer uses creative software tools to translate analogue techniques of painting into the realm of the digital. Brush and paint effects, collage, and photography mix with keyboard commands, touchscreen swipes, saturated colours, distortions and blips, confusing the viewer into understanding the limits between the human-made and the technology-driven.

Further to his explorations of digital and traditional art techniques, aaron scheer feeds his work with online content and other information from data and photos. His practice suggests a visual language of virtual matter. 

Aaron Scheer has had solo and group exhibitions across london, berlin, mexico city, edinburgh, and gothenburg with annka kultys gallery as well as  dateagle art, painting at the end of the world, off-site project, state of the art and isthisit.

“I have a love-hate relationship with machines. On the one hand, they’re fascinating me, on the other frightening me.

The easiest way to develop a relationship with tech for me was to humanize it. (…) if i start manipulating machines and force errors? Do machines then become more human? Do machines have a soul? Do they interpret what we dictate them to do? Are machines creative, and can they add something to my work as an artist?”

 Interview by Vanessa Murrell & Martin Mayorga  I DATEAGLE ART

“We’re not getting inspired by our natural surroundings anymore, but by a corporate and socially constructed intangible digital space, which is slowly replacing nature; it’s becoming nature, somehow.”

Conversation with Elliott Burns I CURATING THE CONTEMPORARY

Carla Gannis produces virtual and physical works that involve around augmented reality, virtual reality, videos, animated gifs and 3D sculptures. Her work contemplates the human conditions through dark comical fictions, often staging her avatar as a mediated self to reflect on representation and identity.

Fascinated by digital semiotics and the line age of hybrid identity, Carla Gannis takes a horrorvacui approach, culling inspiration from networked communication, emerging technologies, as well as art and literary history. Digital aesthetics and iconography, combined with historical references, characterise her work.

“My work always grows out of cultural observations, how we visually emote for example, and how we have done so in the past, and how we may do so in the future. I am fascinated by contemporary modes of digital communication, the power (and sometimes the perversity) of popular iconography, and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of technological virtuality and biological reality.”

“My work has often been full of art historical references. I mix works from the “Canon” with contemporary imagery, sometimes as parody, sometimes as a reflection of human tendencies, ideologies, or societal constructions that have ultimately not changed for centuries. And then again, sometimes my mashups speak to what has changed culturally as a result of our Digital Revolution.”

“One of the most compelling (and sometimes daunting) aspects of digital narrative is how it can traverse electronic pathways and physical spaces in more adaptive ways than traditional mono mediums. For instance, in “The Selfie Drawings” project I began with digital drawings that I then translated into videos and interactive augmented reality works — from print to projection to screen. I have shared these works on social networks and in online exhibitions, as well as in physical galleries and media centers. Each iteration and locality provides a different emotional and cerebral context for the subject matter.”

“Unlike the immediate action of selfie photography, I have “re-represented” myself, a mediated self, reflexively through a slower, more traditional process. And in doing this I have detached myself from the direct reference of the photographic, i.e. the seemingly “true” representation of a person. As I continued making the drawings over a course of one year, they began to take on broader dimensions outside of personal self-analysis and reflection. I began to weave together references from the past with current topics, finding collision points for visual storytelling, and I became more of an actor within these stories.”

Interview by Tina Sauerlaender | Artefuse

Carla Gannis has appeared in exhibitions, screenings and internet projects across the globe, including Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Artport, but also TRANSFER, DAM Gallery, Arebyte Gallery, the Tribeca Film Center, the Boston Cyberarts, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation Art House, NRW Forum, the Fondation EDF and LABoral. She is an Industry Professor at New-York University in the Integrated Digital Media Program, and the Tandon School of Engineering.

Installation views include shots from humber Street Gallery, DAM Gallery, NY Media Center and Thoma Art Foundation / Transfer Download.

Tamiko Thiel investigates augmented and virtual reality, and how these tools 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 today, 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 /p 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.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator who examines political, social, and cultural contradictions. Technologies and the internet provide her with the 21st-century philosophical toolset to document and archive the personal and collective lives and struggles of our times.

Through her videos and 3D prints, Morehshin Allahyari questions memory and the impact of time and location in the understanding we have of cultural artefacts at large. Dwelving from her experiences in both Iran and the United States, she challenges the dogmas of Iranian society, the country’s loss of heritage with Daesh’s destruction of cultural objects, colonialism and its effects in our perception of Middle-Eastern female figures.

“The 3D printer is a machine that offers the promise of being able – one day – to make copies of itself – a radical metaphor for the capacity of life breathed into the world of inert matter. #Additivism sought to wrest control of 3D printer narratives away from the white tech males who dominate the field. So it’s a call to those on the ‘outside’ to seize control and multiply the possible spaces and worlds they inhabit, from fablabs to commercial spaces. For me, 3D printing is just another technology that has the potential to be used as a tool for resistance and activism.”

Conversation with Christiane Paul | Liverpool Biennial

“For me, the answer wasn’t to make work directly about my identity but rather to find elements and stories that were poetic, personal and collective, then find ways to connect them to issues that were of concern to me. So as much as my work comes from a personal place, it also tries to avoid the simple binary representations of who I am (…) I decided early on that I wanted my work to go beyond identity politics and I think my love of history and storytelling and my hatred of stereotypical orientalist work really helped me achieve this space in a unique way."

Morehshin Allahyari received a commission from Rhizome, and co-commission from the Whitney Museum’s Artport, FACT Liverpool and the Liverpool Biennial. She has participated in exhibitions, festivals, and workshops worldwide including the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, Tate Modern, Dallas Museum of Art, and Jeu de Paume.

“I want technology to provoke thought but also emotion. I am tired of new media art works that are just silly and lazy and privileged. That kind of approach is such a first world approach to technology. I want to see more serious, more radical, more emotional/poetic and challenging works around me.”

Installation views include shots from Mackenzie Art Gallery and HMKV Dortmund.

I want technology to provoke thought but also emotion. (...)  I want to see more serious, more radical, more emotional/poetic and challenging works.

Snow YunxueFu develops topographical computer-rendered animations which embrace amulticultural approach to the tradition of landscape painting. Her CGI and VR environmentsdelve into the allegories of the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich but also recalls traditional Chinese landscape paintings, as she blurs linear perspectives into voluminous virtual spaces.

The artist probes the notion of Sublime and actualises the theme of immersion in landscaperepresentations within the framework of digital technologies. Drawingparallels betweenphysical and virtual spaces, she engages with the concept of liminal territories and ponders ourunderstanding of the world when challenged with digital realities.

“Painting seemed burdened by always carrying around centuries of conversation and baggage.One would almost have to choose to either fully carry that baggage or find a way to creativelydismiss it all to explore what one wished. Yet, when I came to 3-D experimental animation, itwas like a sudden discovery of a better language. (...)I think the painter in me will never die,but, as in my real life, one language might work better than another to express myself. Witheach language you learn, new perspectives are available to you to explore.” S. Yunxue Fu

Interview by Katherine Williams and John Ryder | LANDESCAPE ARTREVIEW

Fu has exhibited internationally with institutions such as Thoma Art House, the VeniceArchitecture Biennale, TRANSFER Download, NADA Art Fair, Art Basel Miami Art Fair andthe Moving Art Museum, and is now Assistant Arts Professor within the Department ofPhotography and Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Installation views include shots from Chazan family gallery, Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, Student Union gallery, Yellow peril gallery, Fort Gondo gallery and galerie Protege.