New York-based artist Claudia Hart’s background in art and architectural history and publishing has defined an artistic practice developed since the late 1980s and focused on bridging the physical and digital worlds. An art critic and curator as well as an artist, her production is infused with literary and art historical references, using the words of male philosophers, poets, and painters such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, or Walter Gropius to apply a feminist approach to the representation of women in art and the influence of digital technologies in our patriarchal society.
An early work that she has come back to regularly, A Child’s Machiavelli combines many of Hart’s interests, from literature to analog and digital image making, performance, and a satirical view of society.
Claudia Hart. LittleGuys, 1994.
A Child’s Machiavelli is a series that started in 1995 and has seen many different versions over a span of almost three decades. Hart was living in Berlin at the time the city was reinventing itself after the fall of the infamous wall. As the artist recalls, despite the spirit of newly regained freedom and the reunification of its people, the emerging art scene was fiercely competitive. She told a friend, sarcastically, that what was needed in that context was a revision of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). The oft-quoted treatise on politics, known for its pragmatism and lack of morality, seemed particularly apt for a young society that was plunging deep and fast into capitalism. Hart’s version of The Prince, however, was not meant to be a guide for ambitious and reckless artists, but rather a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest. She chose to create a primer to teach bad manners to children, aiming to spark a reflection on contemporary politics through the obvious contradiction between the childlike illustrations and the shockingly expedient advice.
Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. Exhibition at bitforms (New York), 2020.
The initial version of A Child’s Machiavelli counted 31 small oil paintings, each one combining an illustration taken from a classic children’s book and the text that Hart had written, updating Machiavelli’s dictums in a more informal language. The paintings were exhibited in 1995 at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, accompanied by a small catalog produced by the Realismus Studio. From the beginning, the artist saw her Machiavelli as an imaginary book, with the paintings representing its pages, and quickly the project morphed into different formats, such as the first printed edition (Machiavelli für Kids. Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1995), or the hip-hop track Babyrap (1996), performed by Hart and produced in collaboration with the French band Assassin. The artist then imagined the next iteration of A Child’s Machiavelli as an animated series (intended to be aired in the popular MTV music video channel), which became her first 3D work, setting a turning point in her artistic production.
Hart’s version of The Prince is a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest.
The series saw three more printed editions, one in French (Le Petit Machiavel illustré. Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998), and two in English. The first English version was published by Penguin Books in New York in 1998, and a decade later a second edition was published by Beatrice Books in a redesigned version. This latter edition, that came out in 2019, proved how relevant Machiavelli is to this day, and how aptly Hart’s satirical guide for infantile and selfish rulers reflects actual politics: in 2020, the results of the United States presidential election were contested by Donald J. Trump, who refused to concede defeat and led his supporters to attack the US Capitol. The way in which Trump’s foolhardy self-interest and childish narcissism almost ended democracy seems right out of Machiavelli’s playbook and even more outlandish than Hart’s mordacious fairy tale.
Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. New York: Beatrice Books, 2019
In 2021, as the NFT market boomed, Claudia Hart saw in this form of distribution and commercialization of digital art something akin to her experience with publishing books and magazines. The possibility of both widely distributing her artworks while retaining a sense of ownership (as is the case with printed books) appealed to her. So, the next version of A Child’s Machiavelli consists of 20 animated short films distributed as NFTs and presented in an exclusive artcast on Niio. On the occasion of this new phase in the Machiavelli project, I had a long conversation with the artist, in which we focused particularly on the latest iteration of the book as a series of NFTs.
Claudia Hart. DonDontThrowYourMoneyAround, 1994.
Continuing A Child’s Machiavelli as a series of NFTs seems a logical next step in the project, but what has been your experience with the NFT market so far?
When I first entered the NFT market, I was participating in auctions but I pulled out because they were taking what was intended to be a one-of-a-kind painting, a unique artwork, and then turning it into an edition. It seemed to me that this would hurt me. I always had a very ambivalent relationship with digital, but when NFTs came along, I realized that they are a hybrid of publishing, and digital, which is interesting to me. I’ve also had a very good experience with the community, it is very supportive.
What is happening in the NFT space now that the crash happened, is that NFTs are being developed as a medium, not just as a register on the blockchain. If I take my earlier work, where for instance I do a movie that is 12 to 20 minutes long and it took me a year to make, and then I sell it as an NFT, I am giving the collector a guarantee of provenance and ownership. But the artwork is not “an NFT,” it’s a movie. As a medium, NFTs are serial, not sequential, because you can’t put things in order, like a baseball card is serial, but not sequential.
“NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism.”
Claudia Hart
Since the original drawings are inspired by 1920s children’s books and the text was written in the 1990s, have you considered creating a new version using other references from children’s literature and updating the language to how kids talk today?
The illustrations I use in this series (the potter, the rabbit, Alice, and so forth), are all in the public domain. I have a collection of these illustrations from out-of-print books from the olden days, which I used to create the paintings and drawings for A Child’s Machiavelli. This is relevant in terms of copyright in relation to NFTs, because these are also about rights ownership. I think the issue of ownership, certified on the blockchain, coupled with distribution everywhere, is mainly the radical part of the production. The rights of the artwork usually remain with the artist, but lately several NFT projects have been offering the copyright of the image to the owner of the NFT, so some NFT collectors expect to have full rights over the artwork they bought.
Claudia Hart. YoureNoGood, 1994.
Therefore, it can be said that NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism. I believe that by selling NFTs I am not helping, but that is also part of why I want to make all my NFTs very dark and perverse, and about power. I have done another series about the Art of War, which has not been released yet. I also have handmade illustrations that I will turn ultimately into animations as well. Those have vocalizations, where I process the sound and I do interesting things with it.
Claudia Hart. GivingThingsAway, 1994
The NFT market has been quite wild over the last two years, maybe as fiercely competitive as the art scene of the mid-1990s in Berlin. Do you see Machiavellian tactics in it?
The crypto winter cleared the ground of the pure, speculative designer ethos. It cleared the ground for artists, because now that there’s not so much money and attention we can focus on exploring NFTs as an artistic form. Some artists are bringing back generative art in new forms, and then there’s what I said about it being a serial but not sequential type of medium. Also, the NFT marketplaces are now looking for new blood, because those that were there in the first place are a bit contaminated right now. So they need a whole bunch of newbies like me, because they can sell us for cheaper. It’s the same thing in the art world: after a fiscal crash, the speculators like to bring in new “undiscovered artists,” because we’re cheaper.
Paris-based artist Antoine Schmittdescribes himself as a “heir of kinetic art and cybernetic art,” aptly indicating the two main aspects of his work: the interest in all processes of movement, and the use of computers to create generative and interactive artworks. With a background as a programming engineer in human computer relations and artificial intelligence, his career spans almost three decades and is characterized by a combination of interactive installations, process-based abstract pieces, and performances. He has collaborated with a wide range of professionals from the fields of music, dance, architecture, literature, and cinema. He also performs in live concerts and writes about programmed art.
Schmitt’s award-winning artworks have been exhibited internationally, in prestigious venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and world-renown festivals Sonar (Barcelona), and Ars Electronica (Linz). A selection of video recordings from his generative works have been featured in our curated art program, including the artcasts Unvirtual Art Fair (Paris) and Possibles, which was exhibited at the ISEA2022 Barcelona Symposium. The artist kindly answered a series of questions about the concepts and processes behind his work.
Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux. ATOTAL. Audiovisual concert, 2021
From your early works to the latest installations, there is a constant interest in the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, and more generally between a human and a machine, that often become intimate, connected to emotions and to physical proximity. What do you find interesting about this strange relationship between an individual and a machine, or an apparently sentient entity?
Programming has always been for me a means to approach reality, by recreating it. I consider programming as a radically new material, in art and in general, because of its active nature: programs are processes embedded in reality and can react to it and act upon it. This specificity allows me to recreate programmatically aspects of nature that interest me. One of the most complex entities in reality (known so far) is the human being. Many of my artworks stage a programmed artificial entity that embodies a deep aspect of human nature. These artworks act for me as mirrors for the viewer, a way to question deep human mechanisms or ways of being, like desire, curiosity, language, conflict, gravity, etc… not forgetting that humans are also animals, and are also bodies in space.
This approach also allows me to reflect on the way we humans are programmed, by laws, evolution, society, etc… My artworks are, like deep science fiction, very much fueled by philosophy, physics, metaphysics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc… Using programming to create artificial entities, more or less intelligent, more or less sentient, but all embodying dynamic aspects of human life, allows me to focus each artwork on a specific concept or aspect of human nature. They are forms of living caricatures that are all the more effective.
“I consider programming as a radically new material because of its active nature: programs are processes embedded in reality and can react to it and act upon it.”
Your work is characterized both by its interactivity and the generative processes that bring it to life. What do you find most interesting about these two types of processes, the one carried out by an autopoietic generative artwork and the one carried out by an interactive installation?
All my artworks are active and exist in real time, i.e. the same time as the spectator. Some artworks are not sensitive to the real world, they are not interactive, they live their life in their own universe, and we watch them like we would watch a strange animal in an aquarium. With these artworks, the main link between the audience and the artwork is through empathy. By projecting oneself in the existential universe of the artwork, the spectator recognizes and feels the situation. It is the same process as with movies and books, with the additional dimension of the real time: with realtime artworks the spectator knows, or feels, that what happens happens here and now. It is not a recording. This gives a different dimension to the empathy, like when watching a live performance which also happens here and now.
Antoine Schmitt. Systemic. Interactive installation, 2010
With interactive artworks, I usually want to question the behaviors and inner mechanisms of the audience themselves. It is the actions of the viewer which are the artwork, I create the dynamic situation in which the viewer is immersed and I orient it so as to highlight and question certain deep ways of being. For example, theSystemic (2010),Lignes-mobiles (1999) and La chance (2017) installations draw dynamic arrows on the floor in front of passers-by to question their intention. In Psychic (2007), a text on the wall describes the movements and intentions of the spectators in the exhibition space (“Somebody is coming”).
I tend to adopt a minimalist approach: I don’t use an artistic dimension (color, figure, interactivity) unless it is mandatory for the artwork. So I don’t use interactivity unless the artwork’s subject is the spectator themselves.
“In my interactive installations it is the actions of the viewer which are the artwork, I create the dynamic situation in which the viewer is immersed and I orient it so as to highlight and question certain deep ways of being.”
Since the beginning of your career, you have collaborated with performing artists, among which composers such as Vincent Epplay, Franck Vigroux, and Jean-Jacques Birgé, performers such as Hortense Gauthier, and choreographers such as Jean-Marc Matos and Anne Holst. How did these collaborations take place? What have they brought to your own work and your creative process?
I have two different approaches to performance, whether I’m on stage or not. When I work with professional performers who use their body and actions as their main material, we craft situations where the human entity is confronted to an artificial one. This allows us to precisely stage the encounter and focus precisely on certain aspects, which become the subject of the performance. The situation usually centers on the concept of an encounter with an “other” and on the modalities of dialog. In Myselves with Jean-Marc Matos, it is about exploring various modes of dialog like imitation, fight or fusion. In CliMax with Hortense Gauthier, it is about finding mutual pleasure. In these setups, the mirror effect happens between the performer and the artificial entity rather than with the audience. The audience is watching the encounter. The artificial creature becomes an actor of the performance, in the spirit of performance: taking risks in a staged delicate situation.
Antoine Schmitt and Hortense Gauthier. CliMax (Préliminaires), 2018
When I am on stage, I usually play live images, using a videogame-like visual instrument that I program myself and that recreates a specific abstract though consistent live universe, while the other performer plays live music. We are in a situation of semi-improvisation and we create an audio-visual temporal exploratory journey around a specific theme (the birth of shapes in Tempest, the cohabitations of multiple timelines in Chronostasis, totalities in ATOTAL, flows in Cascades, etc…). As a performer, I appreciate sharing the energy of the present moment with the audience, especially while being delved into an artificial universe and struggling with it, which the audience can feel.
Antoine Schmitt. Generative Quantum Ballet 21 Video Recording, 2022
Besides the performing arts, another strong reference in your work is scientific research: you often mention theories from mathematics or physics as the conceptual ground for your pieces. What does science bring to your work? How do you build a bridge between the scientific method and your creative process?
I am very sensitive to the deep and strong laws of the universe that math and physic theories can give us, as they allow me to both approach our reality and imagine other possible realities. What is interesting with these laws is that they are programmable so I can recreate them using programs, thus focusing on deep mechanisms, to stage them or alter them. For example, in the Tempest show, I created a universe containing many of the forces of our universe but also invented forces, thus opening the doors to parallel universes.
I often say that science and art are interested in the same subject : the crack that exists between reality and our abstraction of it. This crack is our curse as human beings. Animals do not feel this pain but as soon as one has the gift of abstraction, the distance between what we abstract and what is, is the source of all mental suffering. Science tries to close that crack by explaining as much as possible through theories and language, more and more precisely, even though it is an impossible task (as was demonstrated in the 20th century by the scientists Heisenberg and Gödel). On the contrary, Art delves in the depths of the crack, exploring all its modalities, playing with all the emotions that stem from it. And the narrower the crack, the deeper it is.
“I often say that science and art are interested in the same subject: the crack that exists between reality and our abstraction of it.”
The aspects of your work that we have previously addressed all point to a main subject which are the processes of movement, as clearly highlighted in your artist’s statement. These processes are explored in a wide range of contexts, from the quantum realm to urban societies, and among different actors, be it people, bodies, or particles. Why are these processes so important to your work, and which of these contexts is more rich, engaging or interesting to you?
I think that I’ve always had this abstract approach to reality which can be synthesized in the question “why does it move like this?”. I started with a rather scientific approach through my studies as an engineer, and when I decided to become an artist, I continued to explore this question in a different way. It is an analytical approach, a way of looking at the world, and a way to question it. I frankly appreciate all the dimensions of it and will continue to explore them, but I think that the strongest and the ones that give me the biggest satisfaction are the most abstract approaches, the ones that are the most remote from reality and still apply to many aspects of reality, existing or perceived. Black Square (2016), where a flock of white pixels try to enter an invisible square and bounce on it thus revealing it, can lead to multiple interpretations. It is a fundamental delicate situation.
Antoine Schmitt. Black Square Video Recording, 2016
The signature element in your work, the pixel, is introduced in Le Pixel Blanc (1996). There, you describe it as “a minimal artificial presence… something that almost did not appear, but that still would be «there».” Over time, the pixel has gained more presence and become as much an object, a presence, and an absence, as part of a flow or the representation of an individual. How would you describe the evolution of your conception of this basic element and its influence on your work?
The pixel and the square are omnipresent in my work. I like my artworks to be minimal, like mathematical theorems. This naturally led to the pixel, the minimal visual element in the universe of the computer. A pixel is a small square, and by enlarging it, you get a large square. And like Malevich, I consider the square like the symptom of the human being’s power and curse: the ability of abstraction These two elements are the basis of most of my artworks. What I work on is their movement, relatively to the space around them, or relatively to the other elements. They are minimal but open to all the possibles, through their movements and the infinitely rich possibilities of programming.
“The pixel and the square are minimal but open to all the possibles, through their movements and the infinitely rich possibilities of programming.”
Your career spans almost three decades, in which you have explored many different formats of creation and distribution, from multimedia projects on CD-ROM, to Internet-based artworks, interactive installations, video mapping, screen-based pieces, software art, live performances, generative cinema, NFTs, and much more. What is your opinion on the way technology has evolved over these decades and how it has influenced art making? How have you experienced this period of constant innovation and obsolescence?
These have been very exciting years, for one because computers are more and more pervasive (we all now have a powerful computer in our pocket) and also because art made with computers is now widely accepted. It is therefore easier to create programmed artworks and to show them. The technology is more easily available, the distribution channels — in the wide sense — are numerous and the audience is listening.
On the other hand, technology is nowadays mainly used for advertising, surveillance, entertainment and manipulation of opinions, which is a social problem and has an effect on art made with technology. Many approaches build upon or react to these social dimensions, which are all needed and interesting but leave little room for the more conceptual and radical approaches. This may be true for all forms of art, but it is stronger with technological art as technology so much shapes our society these days.
Antoine Schmitt. FaçadeLifeGrandPalais. Generative mapping at the Grand Palais in Paris, 2016
What is interesting also is that I think that no new concept was really born in the field since Alan Turing invented the computer, the “universal machine”. All computer-based technologies are avatars of this unique concept. This can probably account for the fact that my artworks have not radically changed since I started. My work does not reflect on the social impacts of technology on society, nor are impacted by the various technological “innovations” and obsolescence. It is minimal so does not make use of the innovations toward more “power”, and it is rather rooted deeply in the concepts of the universal machine which have not changed : with a universal machine, all thinkable processes are programmable.
“Art made with technology often builds upon its social dimensions, which are all needed and interesting but leave little room for the more conceptual and radical approaches.”
You were already working with generative text twenty years ago, in The Automatic Critic (1999). What is your opinion about the current trend among artists to use machine learning models such as ChatGPT?
Although I am quite impressed by the quality of the interactions of users with ChatGPT (I thought that this level of quality would take more years to happen), the generative approach on these systems are in the normal continuation of the original concept of the computer. We are at the stage of imitation: these algorithms generate media that look like media created by humans, as the central mechanism of neural networks is pattern recognition and pattern generation, whether it is text, images, music, reasoning, etc… This is quite fascinating for users and it is similar to the caricatural mirror effect that I was referring to at the beginning. The art, or more generally the forms of expression, created by these algorithms in imitation of ours are a mirror to our forms of expression and thus question them.
But art is intention and responsibility. These two notions are still unique to humans. But maybe one day, we will be able to create an algorithm able to feel pain, express it with intention towards its fellow humans and take responsibility for it. There is no theoretical impossibility for this in the theory of the universal machine and I look forward to it.
In the meantime, as an artist, the most interesting aspect of AI systems remains for me the creation of biased algorithms which focus on some dimension of human nature, like Deep Love (2017) which answers all questions with “I don’t know, but I love you.”
Antoine Schmitt and Franck Vigroux. Tempest. Audiovisual concert, 2013
You entered the NFT scene in 2021 with Buy Me! a particularly conceptual, and generative piece. What has the NFT market brought to your practice? Has it influenced your production? Have you found new forms of creation or sources of inspiration, beyond its commercial dimension?
It took me some time to understand that the main new concept behind the NFT market boom was the perspective of financial profit, for collectors and for artists. This is the reason I created the satirical piece Buy Me! (2021), which embodies an algorithm desperately trying to convince its viewers to buy it, using language techniques inspired by advertising and psychological manipulation. It is a piece on the processes of marketing.
Apart from greed, the NFT market has opened the field of computer art to a new audience, which was really interesting, but I am eager to see the fusion of the traditional art market with NFT seen as a new way to buy and collect artworks.
Antoine Schmitt. The Fall of Leviathan. Interactive installation, 2021. Photo: Quentin Chevrier
You recently quoted the mathematical theory of catastrophes to describe the year that has begun and may bring sudden change, positive or negative. How does this year look for you? Which upcoming projects can you share with us?
I am very excited to start a collaboration with the DAM Projects gallery in Berlin. Its owner, Wolf Lieser, has been involved in computer art for a few decades and I look forward to working with him and his team. We will start with a solo show next autumn, with a selection of historical works and new artworks.
I am also very excited by two new live audiovisual performances, Videoscope and Nacht, with Franck Vigroux, which are in the making, and that will tour the world along with the existing performances (Melbourne, Gijón, San Francisco, etc..).
The following text is an excerpt from my contribution to the book The Meaning of Creativity in the Age of AI, edited by Raivo Kelomees, Varvara Guljajeva, and Oliver Laas (Tallinn: EKA, 2022). The volume is focuses on critical observations of the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in the field of the arts and includes contributions by artists, art professionals, and scholars Varvara Guljajeva, Chris Hales, Mar Canet Solà, Jon Karvinen, Luba Elliot, Oliver Laas, Raivo Kelomees, Mauri Kaipainen, Pia Tikka, and Sabine Himmelsbach.
The book, which addresses key questions currently being debated around AI systems such as DALL-E 2 and Chat GPT, has been recently made available as afree PDF.
On 5th February 1965, during the opening of Georg Nees’ exhibition of algorithmic art at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, there was an exchange between the engineer and an artist who asked him provocatively if he could teach the computer to draw the same way he did. Nees replied that, given a precise description, he could effectively write a program that would produce drawings in the artist’s style (Nake, 2010, p.40). His response echoes the conjecture that had given birth to the field of artificial intelligence ten years earlier: that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (Moor, 2006, p.87). It should be noted that, at least at this point, the machine is not meant to think or create, but simulate. In his seminal paper from 1950, Alan Turing already suggested that computers could perform an “imitation game” (later known as the Turing Test) in which the aim was to mimic human intelligence to the point of seeming human to an external observer (Turing, 1950).
Therefore, what Nees asserted is that the computer could create a successful imitation of the artist’s work. The exchange between Nees and the artist did not go well, as the engineer’s vision of a computable art seemed to threaten the superiority of artistic creativity. Upset and resentful, the artist and his colleagues left the room, with philosopher Max Bense trying to appease them by calling the art made with computers “artificial” (Nake, 2010, p.40) – as opposed, one might think, to a “natural” art made by human artists. The need for this distinction denotes the uneasy relationship between artists and their tools, the latter supposedly having no agency at all, being mere instruments in the skilled hands of the artist.
The computer introduced an unprecedented level of autonomy: the artist only needed to write a set of instructions, the program did the rest.
Certainly, there had been some room for randomness and uncontrolled processes to emerge in the different artistic practices that had succeeded each other during the 20th century, but until that point creativity was unquestionably anthropocentric, with the artist (or their assistants), at the centre of the creation of every artwork. The computer introduced an unprecedented level of autonomy: the artist only needed to write a set of instructions, the program did the rest. This was challenging for artists at a time when few had seen a computer and even fewer knew how to write a program or understood what it could do.
Vera Molnar. Untitled. Plotter drawing. Ink on paper, 1968. Courtesy DAM Museum
Despite the profound differences from our current perception of computers, over fifty years later, AI still holds the same fascination and is subject to the same misunderstandings as early computer art. The initial rejection of computer-generated art has turned to uncritical enthusiasm, and the prospect of an art that does not need human artists has been celebrated with a spectacular sale at Christie’s. But the artist was never out of the picture.
Pioneering computer artist Vera Molnarcreated her first artworks in the 1960s with a “machine imaginaire”, a program for an imaginary computer that helped her develop a series of combinatorial compositions of geometric forms and colours. In 1968, she started working with a real computer (which back then was only available at a research lab), but she has always stressed that the machine is, to her, nothing but a tool: “The computer helps, but it does not ′do′, does not ′design′ or ′invent′ anything” (Molnar, 1990, p.16).
“The computer helps, but it does not ′do′, does not ′design′ or ′invent′ anything”
Vera Molnar
Another pioneer, Frieder Nake, recalls the experience of creating his first algorithmic drawing in 1965, underscoring his role as the creator of the artwork:
“Clearly: I was the artist! A laughable artist, to be sure. […] But an artist insofar as he – like all other artists – decided when an image was finished or whether it was finished at all and not rather to be thrown away. I developed the general software, wrote the specific program, set the parameters for running the program. […] I influenced the process of materialization by choosing the paper, the pens, and the inks; and I finally selected the pieces that were to be destroyed or to leave the studio to be presented to the public.”
Nake, 2020
Manfred Mohr, one of the first artists to work with computers who, like Molnar, had a background in fine arts instead of mathematics, has frequently stated that his artworks transcend the computational process they are based on: “My artistic goal is reached” he states, “when a finished work can visually dissociate itself from its logical content and convincingly stand as an independent abstract entity” (Mohr, 2002).
Manfred Mohr. P032.Plotter drawing on paper, 38 x 38 cm., 1970. Courtesy DAM Museum
Algorithmic artists have played with the balance between control and randomness, always keeping a direct involvement in every part of the process of creation, from the code to the final output. The software, however, can be allowed a greater portion of the decision making. This is what Harold Cohen did in 1973 when he developed AARON, a computer program designed to generate drawings on its own, with no visual input, based on a complex series of instructions written by the artist.
Influenced by the ideas that were being discussed at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the time, Cohen sought to understand how images were made. AARON aimed to answer that question by creating drawings that simulated those of a human artist, without human intervention. Cohen stressed AARON was “not an artists’ tool” but “a complete and functionally independent entity, capable of generating autonomously an endless succession of different drawings” (Cohen, 1979). This autonomy led to thinking about AARON in cognitive terms, with Cohen himself stating that the program “has a very clear idea of what it is doing” (Cohen and Cohen, 1995, p.3). For over four decades, the artist kept developing the program, establishing a relationship that he described as the kind of collaboration one would have with another human being:
“AARON is teaching me things all the way down the line. From the beginning, it has always been very much a two-way interaction. I have learned things about what I want from AARON that I could never have learned without AARON”
Cohen and Cohen, 1995, p.12
Cohen’s work prefigured the current applications of AI systems in art making, not only in the way the program worked but also in its role as a collaborator rather than a mere tool.
Harold Cohen. Arnolfini series. Plotter drawing, ink on paper, 1983. Courtesy DAM Museum
Artists working with artificial neural networks nowadays describe their experience in similar terms to those expressed by AARON’s creator. When Anna Ridler created her own dataset of 200 drawings to train a GAN for her animated film Fall of the House of Usher I (2017), she sought to push the boundaries of creativity by producing an artwork that is a machine generated interpretation of her drawings, which in turn represent scenes from a silent film based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The outcome has led her to wonder where is the “real” artwork, and to doubt the role that the program plays in its making: “I do not see a GAN as a tool like I would think of say a photoshop filter but neither would I see it is as true creative partner. I’m not really quite sure what is is” (Ridler, 2018).
For Patrick Tresset, working with robots that can draw in their own style enables him to distance himself from his work: “I found it very difficult to show my work, as a painter, as an emotional thing, and the distance that we have with the action when you use computers, that you are not directly involved… makes it far easier for me to exhibit” (Upton, 2018).
Memo Akten explores the structure and functioning of artificial neural networks and uses Machine Learning as a form of exploring human thinking: “My main interest,” he states, “is in using machines that learn as a reflection on ourselves, and how we navigate our world, how we learn and ‘understand’, and ultimately how we make decisions and take actions” (Akten, 2018).
Gregory Chatonsky criticizes the perception of the artist as purely autonomous and the machine as a simple tool, while describing his creative process as an interaction with the software that not only generates images but also spurs his imagination: “Working with a neural network to produce images or texts,” he states, “I perceive how my imagination develops, becomes disproportionate and germinates in all directions. I try to adapt to this rhythm, to this breath. It’s almost alive” (Chatonsky, 2020).
Artists have carried out a dialogical relationship with the software they have used, considering it not just an instrument, but a collaborator.
These statements show that artists have carried out a dialogical relationship with the software they have used, considering it not just an instrument, but a collaborator. However, the deeply entrenched perception of the artist as the sole creator of the artwork, in full control of every aspect of the outcome, looms over this partnership insisting that either the machine is to remain a mere tool or it is destined to take over the artist’s role.
Anna Ridler. Mosaic Virus. 3-screen GAN video installation. 2018-2019. Courtesy DAM Museum
Towards post-anthropocentric creativity
The question whether a machine can be creative is recurrently asked as AI systems increase their capabilities and become more sophisticated. Recently developed systems such as CAN (Creative Adversarial Network), which is taught to deviate from the examples it has learnt in order to produce new types of images (Elgammal et. al., 2017), or DALL-E, which can generate images from text descriptions (Ramesh et. al., 2021), illustrate how far computers can go in creating visual content.
CAN has even been used in an attempt to pass the Turing Test, that is, to produce machine-generated art that appears indistinguishable from that created by an artist. The results have been disputed in a study that shows a preference for art made by humans and suggests that what should be asked is not if AI can create art, but whether the art created by AI is worthy (Hong and Ming, 2019).
What should be asked is not if AI can create art, but whether the art created by AI is worthy.
Seen from this perspective, the debate pivots to more practical considerations: what can AI do, and how can it be used? GANs are widely employed by artists nowadays, but they tend to generate the same type of images because of the limitations of the programs and the processors. In this sense, the artificial neural networks are not particularly creative because they do not produce anything that breaks out from a set of established parameters and similar outputs. The creativity stems from how artists use these images and assign them a certain narrative. Therefore, to expect machines to become creative by following problem-solving approaches seems limiting and even counterproductive (Esling and Devis, 2020), given that we don’t even understand how creativity works and cannot translate it into computable formulas.
Instead of asking whether an AI system can replace an artist, it would be more interesting to consider how artists can expand their creativity using AI. This proposition does not imply considering the artist as the sole creator of the artwork, but moves past this preconception to embrace a notion of creativity that includes all the actors involved, human and non-human.
Guido Segni. Demand Full Laziness. Lot 2018/000022. AI-generated image, 2018.
Jan Løhmann Stephensen suggests the terms “postcreativity” or “postanthropocentric creativity” to challenge the idea of creativity as something that is exclusive to humans and a marker of human “greatness” (Løhmann, 2019). Through the lens of postcreativity, we can consider artworks as the outcome of an interaction between a variety of actors, including humans, objects, systems, and environments. In AI-generated art, this means taking into account all the people, animals, natural environments, institutions, communities, software, networks, etc. that take part, more or less directly, more or less willingly, in the artwork’s making.
This opens up deeper reflection on how the piece is created, as do Anna Ridler and Memo Akten in their examination of the artificial neural networks they use. It also allows artists to distance themselves from the specific output while retaining authorship of the process, as do Patrick Tresset and Guido Segni – the latter currently engaged in a five year project titled Demand Full Laziness(2018-2023), in which he outsources his artistic production to a deep learning algorithm trained with images from his moments of rest. Overall, it emphasises the potential of co-creation between humans and machines, in which computers do not mimic, but expand human creativity.
Through the lens of postcreativity, we can consider artworks as the outcome of an interaction between a variety of actors, including humans, objects, systems, and environments.
Artificial Intelligence has developed at a growing pace over the past seven decades, and it will continue to do so, bringing new challenges and possibilities for computer-generated art. As several authors point out, AI is currently at a stage equivalent to the daguerrotype in photography (Aguera, 2016; Hertzman, 2018), and it is difficult to predict what novel forms of creativity it will unfold. It might well be, if AI were to reach a stage of consciousness or self-volition, that a program may not be interested in producing a drawing or a photograph and would rather express itself through elegant programming code or a beautiful mathematical equation. Or, maybe it would even create art that is not intended for humans to understand, but is addressed to fellow AIs.
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Chatonsky, G., 2020. Imaginer avec le possible des réseaux de neurones. Gregory Chatonsky, [online]. Available at: http://chatonsky.net/imager-neurones/ [Accessed 14 March 2021].
Cohen, B. and Cohen, H., 1995. Conversation: Harold Cohen & Becky Cohen. In: The Robotic Artist: Aaron in Living Color Harold Cohen at The Computer Museum. Boston: The Computer Museum. Available at: https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/the-robotic-artist/ [Accessed 14 March 2021].
Elgammal, A., Liu, B., Elhoseiny, M., Mazzone, M., 2017. CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks Generating “Art” by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07068 [Accessed 14 March 2021].
Esling, P., and Devis, N., 2020. Creativity In The Era Of Artificial Intelligence. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05959v1 [Accessed 14 March 2021].
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Hong, J. and Ming Curran, N., 2019. Artificial Intelligence, Artists, and Art: Attitudes Toward Artwork Produced By Humans vs. Artificial Intelligence. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl., 15(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3326337 [Accessed 14 March 2021].
Løhmann Stephensen, J., 2019. Towards a Philosophy of Post-creative Practices? – Reading Obvious’ “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy.” In: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019 (POM2019). [online] Beirut: BCS Learning and Development Ltd., pp.21-30. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/POM19.4 [Accessed 14 March 2021].
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Ramesh, A., Pavlov, M., Goh, G., Gray, S., Voss, C., Radford, A., Chen, M., Sutskever, I., 2021. Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation. Cornell University [online] Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 [Accessed 14 March 2021].
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Rune Brink Hansen (Denmark, 1979) is a digital designer and artist who has developed a career in web design, 3D modeling and VJing since the early 2000s, creating stage design for operas, concerts, and festivals, as well as spatial design for museum exhibitions. Since 2010, he has created a wide range of immersive and interactive light installation pieces in Danish galleries and museums and has also worked as curator in several contemporary art projects. In May 2021, he created Spøgelsesmaskinen (“the ghost machine,” in Danish), an alter ego and a specific project for the NFT scene that focuses on creating short 3D animations in a distinctive pixelated style that depict surreal and eerie scenes involving computers and other machines. After successfully selling his NFTs on Tezos, Ethereum, and Solana, he is now preparing screen-based pieces to exhibit in art galleries.
On the occasion of his solo artcast Abnor Mall, we spoke about his career, his aesthetic and conceptual choices, and the influence that the NFT scene has had on this production and creative process.
Rune Brink and Yoke Aps, KONSTRUKTUR. Interactive installation at Nikolaj Kunsthal, 2018
You are known for your interactive and kinetic light installations, which often create a novel experience of the surrounding space. What interests you about working with light and the architectural space?
I have always been interested in telling a story in a different way than you would normally find in a movie or a book, a way in which you can become the main protagonist of an experience that the story creates. I have done a lot of installations for cultural heritage museums, and in them I’ve tried to develop a visual language that would keep a certain level of abstraction, in a way to focus on telling the story. And then by doing spatial projections, or light installations, I have created a landscape around the visitors that would trigger their imagination to feel that they are the main character of the story, instead of watching something at a distance. For instance, if I had to depict a war zone, I’d rather create an atmosphere of anxiety and work with the feelings it generates rather than show images.
So I would say that this is the reason why, when I started to work in art installations, coming from a design background and then doing visuals for music, I decided to create these spaces for the audiences where they really feel immersed and not just watching someone else. I have always been hesitant to create a narrative that is too defined and detached from the viewer, even when I did live visuals for music. I didn’t want to create a perception of the music that was too concrete, too pre-defined.
Spøgelsesmaskinen. Abnormall: Parking, 2022
The animations you create as Spøgelsesmaskinen usually depict scenes in carefully set up spaces, how do they relate to your artistic installations?
In 2009 I did a stage design for the opera Konsumia by Rasmus Zwicki. The story was about a group of people trapped inside a digital illusion. The opera singers would have to sing to make sure that the computer controlling the illusion couldn’t understand what they were talking about. All of this was situated in this dull, eerie, office landscape that represented the capitalistic world. I did the stage design in the exact style I’m now using with Spøgelsesmaskinen, with non-antialiased, very hard pixels and low resolution.
So I thought, okay, I would really like to go back to this world. It was really a very nice world for me to work in. So that led to what is Spøgelsesmaskinen, basically. And then things started to take off, I started to go into different directions, but I also went back into doing more abstract experimentations. But obviously, the style that is identified with Spøgelsesmaskinen comes from stage design and probably that is why they look like tableaus, in small spaces, although without any characters. But there may be a spirit somewhere in the room…
“The style of Spøgelsesmaskinen comes from stage design. That is why they look like tableaus, in small spaces, although without any characters.”
Spøgelsesmaskinen means “The Ghost Machine:” why did you choose this alias? Is that connected to the idea of “the ghost in the machine” and the use of glitches?
In my early childhood, maybe at the age of eight or nine, the first computer came into my home. To me, the computer was always surrounded by mystery, an uncanny feeling. The computer was in a corner of my bedroom. I was in my bed at night, and I was looking at it and just expecting it to wake up on its own. Because for me, this was magic. In Microsoft DOS, there was this application called Q Basic, where you could write small applications. And I wrote my first chatbot, which would just reply to different prompts. And I could sit for hours chatting with the bot, having a pre-programmed conversation, and feeling that there might be a spirit in this machine, somehow. This continues coming back to me: the complexity of the machine is still enough to fool me into believing it’s alive, in a way.
And how do the glitches come in?
The glitches are what the computer does that is unexpected to the human. I guess that’s why glitches are celebrated, especially right now, as the computer’s capability of being an artist on its own, in a way creating things that are unexpected. Design today is very inspired by how HTML is wrapping different boxes around and making mistakes. There is a huge trend of putting text on top of images halfway, all these different things are coming out of what the computer can do. And so the glitch is proof that the computer is superior or that the computer can surprise us.
“The complexity of the machine is still enough to fool me into believing it’s alive, in a way.”
In relation to this ability of the computer to create, now that artists are increasingly integrating AI tools into their creative processes, are you interested in this possibility?
Yes, certainly. I recently did an installation for YOKEwith AI Sweden for the Nobel Prize Museum’s new exhibition, Life Eternal, at Liljevalchs art gallery in Stockholm. The installation is based on GPT SW3, a Swedish version of the GPT-3 generative language model, and used the text of the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Visitors can have a conversation with an AI system modeled after the protagonist of the book on the theme of eternal life. So, I have worked with AI in the facet of my work related to installations and stage design, but not yet as a tool to create visual compositions. I’m very open to doing so, but I just haven’t found the right opportunity.
Spøgelsesmaskinen. Abnormall: Electro, 2022
The aesthetics of your work as Spøgelsesmaskine are clearly influenced by computer graphics from the early 1990s, which is about the time you started doing 3D animations before becoming a graphic designer and VJ. How do all these experiences collide in your present work?
I have this background as a graphic designer, and then I’ve worked with a lot of installations, festivals, and live events, building big physical installations that are very costly, so I’m used to dealing with all the pressures and limitations, making sure that things are not coming down from the walls or that I don’t go over the budget. In this work with 3D animations I feel that I have the complete freedom to do anything I want, to experiment in any crazy way I like to. And sometimes it seems to me that I am also sketching physical works to come. So in a way, they are a sort of doodle, or a sketch. Even though they are self contained pieces on their own.
“The glitch is proof that the computer is superior or that the computer can surprise us.”
Your low pixel resolution work becomes instantly recognizable. Do you feel that in an environment saturated with images, and particularly in the NFT community, with many similar artworks, it is important to stand out with a distinctive visual style?
Yes, I’m trying to stick to it. Because I feel that it’s becoming my signature. And I never really had a style before, I never drew, or painted. So it feels like I’m finally coming to a place where I can connect with what I create very easily. Working with 3D has always been limited by the looks of the final render, because the final render never looks like reality, it’s very hard to make it look realistic. And so I’ve always been struggling with 3D, but now I found a render style that is actually taking me into a more humble space. I think it was p1xelfool who said that the lower the resolution, the more connected to the machine he felt. I agree and I think that working in low resolution is a way for us to feel this craftsmanship and also to feel that the computer is not overdoing it, that you can still be in control. It’s not this hyper technological thing that you need the robots to do it for you. It is also a way to say: I don’t need 204k screens, I don’t need to buy new things all the time. I can work with what I have, what has been here for a long time.
In that sense, you have mentioned that you find a lot of 3D models in libraries of objects that no one uses anymore, and that you include in your scenes.
Yes, there are so many 3D models on different platforms that represent different times in history, for instance old mobile phones that are not being used anymore for the commercial purpose they were built for. So it’s a fun way of diving into the history of 3D models, and it’s interesting to see how much time and thought went into modeling all these objects that are now lying in digital junkyards.
Spøgelsesmaskinen. Abnormall: Flash, 2022
So, to better understand the process, you create the whole model in 3D, and then you apply the rendering in a very low resolution, is that correct?
Yes. For some of the scenes I’ve used all these different 3D models I’ve found and put them together, and for others I model from scratch because I need to build a specific scene. Then an interesting thing happens with the loss of information when rendering at a low resolution: sometimes it doesn’t look good the first time, and I have to change the objects, the positions, maybe zoom in more, get more or less details, and so on. I render them in 320 x 240 pixels and scale them up frame by frame, to double the size, and then turn them into GIFs. I think Photoshop is getting rid of GIFs, so maybe soon I will probably have to start working on older machines to actually be able to run the software
Right now I’m working with a company that builds LED screens and I’m doing tests to have an animation run in the screen at the exact size, each pixel an LED, with no scaling, a sharp image. For that I need to avoid any form of antialiasing, which luckily can still be the disabled in some software.
You have decades of experience with 3D imaging and digital creation tools. What do you think about the development of digital technologies for creatives? Do you consider that open source software has had a major impact on creativity?
I wouldn’t be able to use abandoned software and hardware in the future if there wasn’t an open source community. I did a small project called Memory Leaks in which I worked on the Classic Mac OS. And that was only possible because of the community that is still putting up the software online, hosting it, and making it available for free. The same goes for the 3D models. I’m working on a series of assets for people to create their own scenes. So I’m planning to do a series in which every model is made by me from scratch and everything is released for people to use in different ways.
“The NFT scene has changed my life completely.”
What has the NFT market brought to your practice and its sustainability?
It changed my life completely. I went from working freelance for museums, and very rarely doing my own installations, maybe once a year, to only being on my own now. So it has completely changed everything. In Denmark, there is a lot of interest in blockchain because it is still so new and few people work on it. So basically every week, I have five phone calls with organizations asking me how they can implement blockchain and what they can do with it. I started a small think tank with two friends of mine, calledKorridor.digital, which is a shared workspace for blockchain projects in the field of art. We try to help other artists, we do workshops. And we just recently moved into an art foundation where we are now helping to consult in this field.
My network has really changed, I have made so many friends all over the globe in the last few years, and such a huge network, having places to crash in all the major cities of the world, that it is completely mind blowing, and amazing. Even if NFTs are a capitalistic project, they have become a huge social movement. I also worked for some time on the Afghan NFT project where we try to raise money for African artists and Africans in general in need. About 50 artists donated works, and we raised around $18,000. Unfortunately crypto is currently banned there.
Spøgelsesmaskinen. Abnormall: Escalation, 2022
You work under two different names, one of them specifically directed to the NFT market. How does that affect your practice? Can you balance both aspects of your work?
I don’t know. What should I do? Help me! The Spøgelsesmaskinen project is growing, now I’m going to do exhibitions in Copenhagen, so I guess I will start to work with some specialists who can help me out a little bit. Because I recently did a permanent light installation in a park which is like a playground where you can play with light, and that has really nothing to do with the concept of Spøgelsesmaskinen. So for me it is good to have these two names and separate the kind of work that I do. Being online as a different person that is not related to my real identity or my personal life is very interesting. And starting from scratch Twitter and Instagram accounts that are now outnumbering my other accounts, this gives so much energy. So in that sense, I am enjoying the freedom it gives me to try out something new.
With thirty years of experience, Wolf Lieser is one of the most veteran art professionals in the digital art market. A visionary gallerist who saw the potential of digital art early on, he supported pioneers such as Frieder Nake and Manfred Mohr and later on some of the most celebrated artists from each decade, from Lynn Hershman Leeson to JODI and Casey Reas. His work is not limited to representing artists from his gallery, but also spans influential projects devoted to educating audiences about the history of art and digital culture, such as the DAM Museum, the DAM Digital Art Award and two books providing a comprehensive introduction to digital art.
Georg Nees. Ornamental Spaces. Solo exhibition at DAM Projects, 2022.
Your first contact with digital art was in 1987. What interested you about contemporaryart before that, and how was the transition to digital art?
I started working as an assistant for a painter, then I became an art consultant, and later on in 1993, I founded my first art gallery. As an art consultant I was mostly developing art projects for companies, curating exhibitions and taking care of everything related to them, from art leasing to organizing workshops or lectures. It was a broader activity always oriented towards the purposes of the marketing department of the specific company. That had not much to do with the typical art market, which involves collectors, museums, and art fairs. It was only later on that I decided to concentrate on the typical gallery game, which involved artist representation, a regular exhibition program in my own space, and mostly dealing with customers and collectors.
The gallery was in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt. When you start as a young gallery, and you don’t already have good connections in the art scene, you are not able to reach out to the most valued artists at that point. You have to build a reputation, and when people start to believe in you, you are gradually able to attract collectors and get more good artists involved. Accordingly at the time I represented artists from the area, mostly young artists from different fields like painting, sculpture, installation and mixed media. But I was already interested in digital art when I met the artist Laurence Gartel in Miami in 1987. He was teaching computer graphics at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I was fascinated by his color prints created on the Amiga Commodore and bought one right away. I started to exhibit some of his art, as well as those of other artists in the field of digital art who I discovered. Many of them were not well known. There was for example Wolfgang Kiwus, who worked with plotter drawings for quite some time. Many of these artists didn’t really have a career, which is not surprising considering that it was a difficult market at the time.
Laurence Gartel. Self-portrait, 1983. Courtesy DAM Museum
In the 1990s I met Manfred Mohr and other pioneers at SIGGRAPH in the US and Ars Electronica in Linz (Austria), which were the two main events where you could meet some of the leading artists working with digital art. Manfred’s approach, as being very conceptual, just complimentary to the pop-art oriented Laurence Gartel, fascinated me from the beginning. Through Manfred and attending these events I got to meet further artists working with digital media. Back then I had the only gallery presenting digital art as a new genre, so they were happy to collaborate.
These were, among others, Yoichiro Kawaguchi,Yoshi Abe, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Roman Verostko and later Casey Reas. Many of these artists were later included in the first version of the online Digital Art Museum, which I started in 1998. Beside all that the backbone of my gallery, what kept it going financially, was still painting and sculpture as a larger part of the program. But I worked on it.
“The idea of the online museum came about because I realized, by talking to professionals of the art world, that there was a lack of understanding on the history and importance of this genre.”
In the late 1990s, you curated a solo show of Laurence Gartel that went to several citiesin Germany. Was digital art getting more recognition then?
I curated the solo exhibition for Laurence Gartel titled “20 Years of Computer Art” in 1997. It was sponsored by Philip Morris and shown in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin. My connection with this company came from working as an art consultant. They commissioned three pieces from Gartel, who at the time had been working for two decades in digital art. He had started in the 1970s, coming from photography and video. Despite succeeding in getting commissions from the likes of Philip Morris, Commerzbank (a major German bank) or VISA Germany and other companies, the interest that companies had in digital art was mainly about positioning themselves in connection to a form of avant garde art that spoke to a younger generation and was in line with the growing visibility of digital media. So this didn’t mean yet that there was a widespread interest or that the art market was opening up. There were some sales, but compared to the market for traditional media, it was really, really tiny.
The initial iteration of the DAM Museum ran between 2000 and 2009. It remains available as an archive at digitalartmuseum.org
Also at this time you started working on the concept of a Digital Art Museum, which was supposed to take place in what we now call a metaverse. Why did you decide so early to create an online museum and at the same time to move away from a simulated 3d space?
The idea of the online museum came about because I realized, by talking to professionals of the art world, that there was a lack of understanding on the history and importance of this genre. As an example, I was a member of the Friends of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, which had recently opened, and I met the director, Jean-Christophe Ammann, with the purpose of introducing digital art to him. He totally rejected it. He didn’t want anything to do with computers and art. And that happened with many others. I was still very excited and at the same time naïve, so I thought they would be interested too, but no. This made me realize that none of them had a clue about the history of digital art. They didn’t know about the pioneers from the 1960s, the different forms of artistic creation or the conceptual basis of working with algorithms. Accordingly, the idea of an online digital art museum seemed to make sense to communicate this history.
I got in touch with the director of the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt and pitched him the idea. He loved it and suggested an architect and designer, Rupert Kiefl, who could help to develop an initial concept of the online museum. Kiefl developed a virtual space using VRML, that would host the artworks as placed on the virtual walls. Something you find now all over in the metaverse. But here we were at the end of the 1990s, and the internet was still really slow and the resolution of the images was too low in connection with the virtual environment that needed to be loaded as well. It was an interesting idea, but on the one hand it didn’t provide a good experience, and on the other I felt that it didn’t make sense conceptually. Why have walls, a ceiling, and a floor in the virtual world? You don’t need that. It felt kitschy for me to try to repeat the experience you have when you go into a museum or a gallery. So that’s why I ended up with a more basic platform.
I can understand now, as processing times and image resolution capabilities have improved enormously, that a 3D environment can provide an engaging experience, and that, for instance, it can be an advantage to see the real scale of the artworks. But still, I think that there could be much more interesting concepts to present art in the metaverse.
The Digital Art Museum (DAM) went online in 2000. Back then I was in London, running the Colville Place Gallery with a partner, the web-designer Keith Watson. We got in touch with Dr. Mike King, an artist and academic from Guildhall University London, who liked the idea of the museum and took part in developing the structure and the contents of the initial website. The site was designed and developed by Persistent Objects Ltd. The first DAM Museum was funded by a grant of the AHRB and built over a period of one year.
The DAM Museum was relaunched with a new design and contents in 2020.
Colville Place was the first art gallery at the time fully devoted to digital art. You were a partner in it from 1999 to 2002. Can you tell me about this period in your career?
I joined Colville Place Gallery, which was started in 1997 in London, on invitation by Keith Watson. He had been running the gallery with another partner, who had quit at the time. I decided to join him. I kept the gallery in Wiesbaden, traveling back and forth between Wiesbaden and London. I actually slept in the office of the gallery in London, because it was too expensive to rent an apartment. We didn’t make any money, and we had to put money into the gallery in London every month to keep it afloat. So it was a challenging, but also exciting experience. We hoped it would take off, but in the end it didn’t. Back then I was making money basically from the more traditional art I sold in the gallery at Wiesbaden. After three years, I had to realize that the London gallery was not going to succeed, so I decided to leave it. Keith kept it going for another 2 years.
“Usually it can take about six or seven years for a gallery to turn a profit, so you need to invest a lot of money, hoping it will work out in the end.”
Usually it can take about six or seven years for a gallery to turn a profit, so you need to invest a lot of money, hoping it will work out in the end. There are exceptions, and of course it is different depending on your background, your connections, the money you can invest, and so on. When you start from scratch, like me, and deal with a type of art that is not well known or understood, it is particularly difficult. You have to be really persistent. And of course, you need to have a vision which hopefully turns out to be successful. Keep in mind that, just to run the gallery, with some staff, rent, transportation, and so on, you need at least around 10,000 or 15,000 € per month. So even if you are selling from your shows, which will usually involve a young, lesser known artist selling at low prices, you will most likely be paying off your expenses. Many galleries last for only a few years, even if they start with a considerable investment. I remember, for instance, Carroll/Fletcher in London: they had an impressive space in the city center and developed a great program with very well known artists in this genre. They must have spent a fortune. And after five years, they just disappeared. I was lucky that, despite having invested so much in the London and Wiesbaden galleries, I could recover over the years. But when I moved to Berlin and opened the DAM gallery, in the beginning I had to be careful about costs and I couldn’t attend many art fairs.
While you were running the Colville Place gallery alongside Keith Watson, there was an unprecedented interest in digital art, and more specifically Internet art, partly due to the dot com bubble and the new Millennium. What was your perception of the London art scene and the market at the time?
I remember very clearly being at the gallery in London and talking with artists who were doing net art, and I was so excited about this field, because there were such fantastic things happening, but there was not much understanding about the web, particularly in the art world.
Also, the problem was that there was nothing to sell! Everything was online and there seemed to be no way to sell it. Artists like JODI, who were creating purely avant garde pieces that were among the first to address Internet culture and an aesthetic of web-based art, found it difficult to sell any of their artworks. Most artists were just excited to get recognition for what they were doing. You could reach your public directly, without a curator or gallerist, that seemed to be the future.
“In the early 2000s, there was the feeling that digital art was finally being recognized in the art world, but as it turned out this surge of interest was short-lived.”
In London there wasn’t that much of a dot com bubble, at least I don’t remember that it directly affected business as it did in the US. But there was, as you say, unprecedented attention to digital art. TATE was commissioning Internet projects back then, and in New York the Guggenheim was acquiring net art pieces for their collection. There were also many exhibitions taking place in museums and art centers, with curators like Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul who was involved in the famous Whitney show BitStreams from 2001. Net art communities like Rhizome existed since 1996 and a magazine devoted to digital culture called ArtByte around 2000, which sadly only lasted a few years. There was the feeling that digital art was finally being recognized in the art world, but as it turned out this surge of interest was short-lived. Still it resulted in another gallery dedicated to that field: bitforms gallery in New York opened in 2001.
In 2003 you opened the DAM Gallery in Berlin, after closing the galleries in London and Wiesbaden. Why did you choose Berlin? Which were your expectations about the art market there?
I was still very excited and convinced that digital art was going to be widely recognized. And I realized that in London the market was still comparatively conservative, and while there was a lot of money around, collectors were mainly focusing on the big names of contemporary art. So I started to think where in Europe could I set up such a gallery? In Italy there was not much happening regarding digital art at the time. In France, the Paris art market also seemed quite conservative. And Berlin was this large newborn city with a lot of potential and a large vacuum. You did not need to invest much to create something because the costs were comparatively low and, as I felt it, people were coming there to discover something new in the art world. More than any other city in Europe, Berlin was representative of very contemporary new movements and art. The other side of it, of course, and I learnt this very quickly, as every other gallery told me as well, was that there was no money in Berlin. There were hardly any collectors, and so very little of my sales were actually happening in Berlin. But the art scene was and still is exciting. There were so many good things happening.
First DAM Gallery in Berlin, at Tucholsky Straße in Mitte, 2010. Photo: Pau Waelder.
I opened the gallery in Mitte, which was the location you had to go in the former East part of town, where all the galleries were, among them many of the most famous ones. Every foreigner who came to Berlin went to Mitte to visit the galleries. So I had a first space there, and when I rented it from the owners, they said they already had two galleries in there, each one survived only one and a half years. So of course, there was a lot of fluctuation. And they were really happy when they saw that I persisted. Still, in the first 10 years in Berlin, I made it was still difficult for the gallery. I survived by combining the gallery with my work as an art consultant.
Group exhibition at DAM Gallery Frankfurt, 2014.
You have had different locations in Berlin, and a secondgallery in Cologne, followed by another one in Frankfurt. What motivated these different changes? And what did you see each time in the market as a result?
As I mentioned, there really wasn’t a market in Berlin, so I looked for a second location. I had a gallery in Cologne for two years, the most established art market in Germany. But the gallery community was not so open for newcomers. I couldn’t even announce my shows in the gallery associations’ agenda, even though you had to pay for it. But this is a different story about the gallery scene. Nevertheless I met some interesting people, made some new customers and kept some friends among the galleries there as well.
Exhibition Aesthetica. 50 Years of Computer Generated Art at DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2015.
Some years later, I had another second location in Frankfurt, which seemed a good choice because I already knew several collectors there and I originally came from that area. But it turned out that these collectors would rather go see my shows in Berlin than to visit the gallery in Frankfurt, so after one year I closed that space again.
I have moved a few times with the gallery in Berlin with the intention of providing a better location for the artists. For a long time Berlin Mitte had been the place to be for galleries with a high concentration. But that area has become quite expensive and mostly been taken over by large chains. In recent years, more and more galleries have moved to the old West-Berlin Charlottenburg, which has a lively well developed infrastructure. We have taken the chance during lockdown to find a nice shop location there, which allows us as well to organize different kinds of events and concerts for the local community. Right between Charlottenburger Schloss and a lake with a park on the other side. Our neighbor is a gallery as well.
Robotic art pioneer Norman White was the third recipient of the ddaa award, in 2008.
In 2005, shortly after you opened the gallery in Berlin, you created the d.velop digital art award ddaa, a lifetime award for major pioneers of the genre. Can you tell me how it came about and its development?
I was approached by the company d.velop AG that asked me to create an award for digital art in 2004, which was a great project for me as it was well funded and helped to expand the gallery while building a reputation for the digital arts. At the same time, Wulf Herzogenrath, director of Kunsthalle Bremen, who was an opinion leader for video art back then, recognized the potential of digital art and offered to host the exhibition for the lifetime award winner. He was introduced to the whole field by the pioneer Frieder Nake, who lived in Bremen as well. So it was a lucky coincidence that I could put together these sponsors and launch an award consisting of a prize of 20,000 €, an exhibition at Kunsthalle Bremen and a catalog. The award took place every two years until 2011, recognizing the work of pioneers Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Norman White, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. The award was discontinued in 2012 due to the end of the sponsorship, but I have plans to relaunch it this year as the DAM DIGITAL ART AWARD, in a different format.
Manfred Mohr’s work exhibited at the Sony Center public art screen in Berlin, 2004.
Also at this time you stared the Digital Art at Sony Center program in Berlin, a unique public showcase of digital art. How did it come about, and how has it been developed?
The public video screen in the courtyard of the Sony Center in the middle of Berlin pursued from the beginning a mixed strategy of advertisement, PR, and other content. Since 18 years we collaborate with the owner of the screen and provide every 6 months a new program that usually showcases the work of 3 artists, each one exhibiting one artwork. This program is shown 5 to 6 times every day. In this program, we have worked with external curators or introduced new artists ourselves. From what I know, this might be the only public screen that shows digital art continuously over such along period of time.
Wolf Lieser’s The World of Digital Art, published by H.F. Ullmann in 2009.
You wrote a book about digital art that was published in 2009 and widely distributed.Can you tell me why you decided to write this book and what impact did it have onpopularizing digital art?
When I had my gallery in Cologne, I went to an opening in another gallery and there I met the chief editor of Tandem Verlag, a publisher and distributor of books and electronic media, which also sold publications with CDs and DVDs. They had started a line of small books about art, they had just published one about street art and were interested in including one about digital art. The challenge was that I had to write it in three months, following a fixed structure. The book, titled “Digital Art” came out and was translated into six languages and sold nearly 33,000 copies. They liked it so much that they offered me to produce a coffee table version with a DVD, which came out in 2010 and sold nearly 7,000 copies. It was the first book in Germany that gave an introduction to this field. For this version I had more time and brought in some guest authors to contribute small sections to the main text. The book was quite popular, and I think it did contribute to bringing some awareness about digital art, although of course there are more influential books, like Christiane Paul’s Digital Art from 2003.
“I love what Niio is doing. It allows you to really get involved without having to pay a large amount of money to own a piece. And you have the opportunity to experience a lot of different art.”
And what is your perspective on the popularity of digital art nowadays, is this the time when digital art will finally be integrated into the contemporary art field?
Yes, I think so. To put it in perspective, there has been video art in the art market since the 1970s. Since then, it has been established on the art market on an international scale. But if you look at the actual market as such, an enormous amount of it is still painting, according to statistics a major part of the artworks sold are still paintings. So, video art amounts to a comparatively small percentage of the art market, even as nobody questions its importance and relevance. I think something similar will happen with digital art, although the NFT market has brought widespread attention to it, and the younger generation is much more connected to this kind of world. Nowadays, most people, and particularly young collectors, are finding it natural to have art on their screens. They live with it, they experience it on a daily basis.
Vera Molnar solo exhibition at DAM Gallery, 2014.
In that sense, now that you have started a collaboration with Niio and also haveexperience with other online platforms, what do you think about art streaming?
I love what Niio is doing. Because, first of all, it allows you to really get involved without having to pay a large amount of money to own a piece. And you have the opportunity to experience a lot of different art. This is particularly interesting, because I tell everybody who comes in for the first time into the gallery and is interested in digital art, and likes something, then I say, okay, wait a moment, come back in a week or two, or a month and look at it again, let it work on you, get familiar with it. Because that will change your views.
And that’s what Niio allows you to do, you can experience a lot of different kinds of art. And some of it you will be totally excited in the first five minutes. And after an hour, you might say, oh, well, okay, let’s go for the next one. While other artworks, you will want to live with them, to see them every morning.
I also like that it offers a way for artists to make some additional money without it interfering with their regular market where they sell or do unique one certifications or something like that. So I’m totally sure that this will gain momentum and that it will be interesting for people and companies as well as a means to gain access and understanding of digital art. And then they can check out DAM!
LA-based photographer Robert LeBlanc is known for documenting the lives of communities on the fringes of American society in photographic projects that usually take years, as he gains the trust of its members as is allowed to portray them at close distance. Since the publication of his first book, Unlawful Conduct, in 2016, his work has been increasingly on demand, leading to collaborations with mainstream firms and large companies, while also developing his own projects with funding that also comes from launching NFT drops and building a community of collectors around his work.
Fahey-Klein gallery is hosting an exhibition of Robert LeBlanc’s latest project, Gloryland,which is also available as an NFT drop on SuperRare and a limited-time artcast curated by Nicholas Fahey on Niio.
Robert LeBlanc. A New America #1 (2014-2022)
You have mentioned skateboarding as the reason why you got into photography. How would you say this experience contributed to shaping the photographer you are today?
I have always said skateboarding saved my life. I grew up in rural Montana, where I had no access to much art or culture, so as a youngster, I would see the world and experience art and culture through the pages of skateboard magazines and skate videos. Then, I started to use a camera when I would go out and skateboard with my friends and document what I would see in the streets when we would be out late skating around. I look back at those times and realize it was my “schooling” on how to navigate the streets, and that really helped develop the skills that honed my ability to access worlds I wouldn’t have normally seen. I firmly believe that skating gave me all the tools I needed to do what I do today.
Robert LeBlanc. A New America #64(2014-2022)
Your photography projects span several years. What is the process of developing these projects? Do you work on several projects simultaneously? Do the experiences in one project lead to another?
When working on long-term projects, it is a slow burn. You have to gain trust and spend a lot of time with whom I’m photographing to really get to the good stuff. Eventually, the subject’s walls slowly go down, and that’s when you get the opportunity to witness the real magic. I work on several projects at once, and sometimes one project will open the door to another project. You never know when the right opportunity will present itself, and you have to be ready for that; sometimes, you get one shot to gain that trust or access, and being prepared for those opportunities is a must.
“When working on long-term projects, it is a slow burn. You have to gain trust and spend a lot of time with whom I’m photographing to really get to the good stuff.”
In your projects, you use different types of cameras. What do each of them bring to the final output? Is the choice of camera driven by a specific type of image you want to create, do other factors affect this decision?
Yes, I like to use different cameras; sometimes, a particular camera is perfect for that specific project. Cameras are the ultimate tool that connects how I see the world into a visual story to tell a wider audience. For me, not only how the camera shoots but the size plays a huge factor. Sometimes I need something small and very discrete, and sometimes medium format is the only way to create the image I need. I’ve recently been using a monochrome-only digital camera, which is such an inspiring tool. Something about being able only to see the world in Black&White will steer my attention to things I wouldn’t have ever noticed in color. I also love what a cell phone can accomplish, and we all walk around with quite a powerful tool in our pockets every day, and its normality can be a mighty thing.
Robert LeBlanc. Gloryland. Untitled #35 (2018-2021)
Steve Schapiro, who was known for being able to blend in with the communities he portrayed, once said: “basically, if you’re just matter of fact photographing people in terms of who they are and what they’re doing, you don’t have any trouble.” Do you agree with this statement? How has your experience been when entering a community and gaining their trust?
Absolutely! When you leave your biases at the door and come into any situation with an open mind, you will learn something fundamental about the human experience. How you interact with whomever you photograph will be much more rewarding, at least in my experience. Trust is everything, and there is a responsibility within it too. These are real people with real lives and feelings; abusing that trust to me is the ultimate disrespect in my eyes. I have always played by those rules, and that has gotten me to the places I have been because of the respect I give to anyone on the other side of the lens, and I believe that’s the only reason I’m able to continue to tell their stories.
“Trust is everything, and there is a responsibility within it too. These are real people with real lives and feelings; abusing that trust to me is the ultimate disrespect in my eyes.”
In your description of the community of The House of The Lord Jesus in Squire you emphasize the need to look deeper and “sift through all the coal dust” to understand who they are and what they do. Considering that you intend to do this through your photographs, how do you develop the project with this aim?
I didn’t initially have that objective. I just wanted to witness a community that I found fascinating and widely misunderstood. But when I started to spend more time understanding who they were and the environment they lived in, I began to put those pieces together. It’s a tough part of the country that involves a lot of suffering; I not only wanted to show what they did but also show that they are kind, loving, and compassionate people. Mainstream media is at fault for turning what they do into such a spectacle and, in return, pushing a false narrative that talks about crazy folks who handle snakes, and honestly, that is so far from the truth. I watch people do things in the city every day that seems crazier and more stupid than what they do. This is a rich history of tradition on the verge of excision.
Robert LeBlanc. A New America #29 (2014-2022)
In your recent projects you have had sponsorships and collaborations with big brands, how has that affected the development of your work as compared to earlier projects?
Luckily for me, it hasn’t at all. Large brands can be beneficial with funding and getting the word out there, and I’m incredibly grateful for brands who have supported my projects and ideas. But it’s important to know where the line needs to be drawn and remind yourself you are doing this because you are passionate about the project and not to be a PR firm that pushes a brand’s message. It comes down to finding a brand or company that shares the same message or beliefs, and if they start to push back or try to reshape what you, the artist, are doing, then they’re not the right fit. But it would be best if you were conscious of that, so you are not wasting each other’s time and money.
Robert LeBlanc. Gloryland. Untitled #39 (2018-2021)
What has the NFT market brought to the dissemination of your work?
I have opened many doors through collectors or funding. I’m incredibly grateful for all the folks who have supported my NFT drops; most of those funds help to continue developing work or the release of works and books. There is a lot of power within the NFT community, and I’ve met many people I have looked up to for years who are passionate about supporting artists and the art community. It’s been such a fantastic ride so far. The biggest struggle as a creative is how do you continue to finance and survive while creating. I think before NFT came about, we as creatives were held captive by large brands with budgets, making us all fight for scraps, but NFTs have changed the game entirely. Now I can give collectors a more personal experience one on one, and they know that their support will be significant in developing these bodies of work.
“Before NFT came about, we as creatives were held captive by large brands with budgets, making us all fight for scraps, but NFTs have changed the game entirely.”
Tin Lizards is a project that involves collectors in the process of creating the photographs, using blockchain technology to create a system of voting and rewards. How was that experience? Are you interested in further developing this type of project?
I’ve been loving it and hopefully to do many more projects like this. I love being involved with those who support my work, and I hope Tin Lizards is a perfect case study on how collectors can play a very involved role in creating a project
Robert LeBlanc. Gloryland. Untitled #9 (2018-2021)
On SuperRare, your photographs are sold as NFTs and also available for download at 9k pixels. Why is the image available at such high resolution? Are you concerned that it might be used or printed without your permission or control?
No, not at all. Technology constantly changes, and so do the screens that are used to display art. I want to make sure that the collectors can use these images no matter what size screen they are displayed on. I obviously don’t want collectors printing my work because there is a level of quality control that needs to be intact, but if they have a 98″ screen, I want them to be able to enjoy the art on a large scale without the art looking like a pixel mess. Plus the files I use to print photos are much larger than what is available on SuperRare.
