Phantasmaverse: the artists

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

Niio has proudly hosted a collaboration with artists and NYU professors Carla Gannis and Snow Yunxue Fu consisting of a group artcast featuring recent works by artists and NYU students Ren Ciarrocchi, Jessica Dai, Marina Roos Guthmann, James Lee, Tinrey Wang, Yuaqing She & June Bee, Shentong Yu, and Jerry Zhao

Titled Phantasmaverse, the exhibition addresses the potential of simulation technologies such as CGI animation and VR environments in storytelling and the creation of meaningful artworks that explore new forms of engaging with viewers and reflecting on our digital society.

We asked the artists about their work and their views on the use of digital technologies in their creative process.

Renz Renderz, AFTER THE AFTER PARTY, 2022

Ren Ciarrocchi (a.k.a. Renz Renderz) defines herself as an “extended reality builder,” a digital artist specializing in 3D modeling who creates architectural structures for virtual reality and metaverse environments. Currently, she is pursuing a masters degree in Integrated Design and Media with a focus in XR and selling digital art pieces as NFTs. After the Afterparty, the artwork she presents at Phantasmaverse, takes the viewer through a luxury apartment on the morning after a big party, peeping through the numerous rooms and imagining what took place in them.

You create architectural models for metaverses, how would you describe your creative process? Do you feel free to create beyond the logic of existing structures or do the references from modern architecture and luxury homes impose themselves?

I think the most wonderful part about the metaverse is the non-necessity for practicality. My galleries don’t need to stand on their own, they exist in a realm where the laws of gravity and space don’t have to exist. The precise planning and execution of a “real-life” building is much more intense with little room for error. In the metaverse, errors can flow! It’s a playful exploration of new technology while drawing inspiration from traditional architectural structures. I am particularly drawn to the minimalist approach of modern architecture. There’s beauty in our ability to stack basic shapes into buildings that are sleek and spacious. I still like to maintain familiarity in my structures that resemble “real-life” galleries and spaces, but as I progress with each one, I stray further away from the limitations of this base reality.

“As an emerging artist, I am adding to a massive sea of creativity that is driving the art world into a new era. I know that any piece I make will have meaning, because it’s an expression of myself.”

After the Afterparty depicts a luxurious home, the morning after a party, when everyone has left. As a young artist, do you feel that you are dealing with the afterparty of digital art and NFTs, or is there much more to come?

The interpretation of an empty, trashed, luxurious apartment is open and abstract. From a digital art and NFT perspective, it could represent a moment of reflection in the aftermath of the explosive growth and excitement that the NFT space experienced in recent years. The technology is revolutionizing the art world and empowering artists to take ownership of their own creations with unique and verifiable digital assets. The space and market will continue to fluctuate and evolve, but the fundamental logic behind these technologies is solid and revolutionary. The space is already full of incredibly talented artists who are utilizing NFTs to empower themselves and their work. As an emerging artist entering the space alongside them, I know that I am adding to a massive sea of creativity that is driving the art world into a new era. I know that any piece I make will have meaning, because it’s an expression of myself. 

James Lee, Interactive Visualizations, 2021

James Lee is a creative technologist who James is a creative technologist that solves problems by creating interactive experiences, web 3D apps, and physical computing installations. He majored in Mechanical Engineering and studied Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University and is now completing his masters degree in Integrated Design and Media. In Phantasmaverse, he presents a series of interactive, code-based experiments that hint at his aesthetic and conceptual interests.

There are two layers to your work, its interactivity and the aesthetic composition that results from it. How do you balance these two layers? Which one seems more interesting to you?

The interactivity controls the aesthetics. By creating the interactivity, the works are now unique to each user’s randomness and also given the beauty of it. Carefully designing the controls is definitely interesting, so the piece doesn’t fall into a total chaos.

“I intend to give the cold numbers a «dress» for people to understand them more easily.”

You emphasize that the code you used is “simple and minimalistic.” Given that there is a beauty and elegance in the code itself, how would you describe the solutions you used to create these visualizations?

It’s simple because no complex structure or algorithms are used. I am always amazed by how simple loops and repeating elements can create such elegant outcomes.

Some of your works visualize external data. How relevant is that data to the meaning of the artwork? Does it drive its aesthetic output?

The works that visualize external data are tightly related to the source. It’s like a snapshot of the data. I intend to give the cold numbers a “dress” for people to understand them more easily.

Jerry Zhao, False Titans, 2022

Jerry Zhao is an artist working primarily with photography, videography, as well as recently, CGI. With his background in traditional art forms like drawing/painting, Jerry blends various mixed media together to explore the intersection of technology and ego. He is currently attending NYU Tisch for Photography & Imaging with minors in Business of Entertainment Media (Stern) and Technology and Integrated Design and Media (Tandon). In Phantasmaverse he presents False Titans, an allegory of the ego in our digital society.

In False Titans you address the role of the ego in our society mediated by technology through a series of metaphorical tableaus. Which references from psychology, the visual arts or popular culture can you trace in the creation of these compositions?

I think the clearest connection between my work to psychology is Carl Jung and his well-known take on the Theory of The Unconscious and ego-death. To quickly unpack the connections, my work establishes itself in three scenes which respectively represent the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious all while maintaining an overarching theme of ego-death’s progression caused by technological advancement and social media. The title, “False Titans,” also references the Greek mythological titans who were eventually overthrown by their own creations, a parallel I draw between humanity (the titans) and our creation (AI and technology). 

The first scene utilizes a 3D scan of Ligier Richier’s ‘Le Transi de Rene de Chalon,’ a cadaver sculpture, the type of which typically represents a transitory state between life and death. Further interpretation of the statue includes concepts  of repentance and desire for salvation, which I likened to the desire to find purpose and make peace with oneself—a much-desired fulfillment I understand as universal among humanity and especially my generation indicated by the many grasping hands. But I borrow the facade of a snowy mountain peak meant to show the arduous journey and the difficult nature of the trek where the many hands also represent the many who don’t make it. The black sludge flowing out of the eye-socket is my further representation of ego and the personal unconscious leaving the body as lamentation of a realization that everyone in a sense is chasing the same thing.

“3D allows great freedom in creation—a paralyzing factor. I’ve found that it’s more difficult for me to “finish” pieces because there’s always so much room for improvement.”

The second scene takes place in a personal bedroom space suspended in animation with no clocks and a chrome skeleton figure. This scene includes concepts of baptism and the implications of the personal unconscious being constantly born and reborn by ego’s hand, resulting in the following scene of a shattered reality showing possibly separate but identical individuals lit by a massive screen that turns on and off showing how technology now molds and gives dimension to our personal unconscious and ego.

The final scene is the collective unconscious and a liminal space that represents how everyone’s personal features have been removed and the collective unconscious has developed a technological ego of uniformity. It also raises a question of who shall inherit the earth when we disappear as the figure is both a monument representative of humanity’s remnant existence than a true individual—a conglomerate existence of identical egos.

As an artist who has worked with traditional art techniques, what would you say that painting and sculpture bring to 3D modeling, and what does this digital technique allow that makes it different from other formats?

I believe that painting and sculpture have brought a lot of advantages to me in terms of 3D modeling as I can properly conceptualize as well as visualize what I wish to create in the digital world as a lot of my creation relies on my sketching it out beforehand. 3D, like other artforms, has a steep learning curve and a nonexistent skill-ceiling, but I think that the medium goes beyond this factor as 3D has many more ways of interactivity, allowing great freedom in creation—a paralyzing factor that almost makes it harder to create because possibilities are limitless. As such I’ve found that it’s more difficult for me to “finish” pieces because there’s always so much room for improvement in every aspect. But this freedom also has the upside in that its versatility allows for infinite innovation that redefines and paves the way for new definitions of art.

Tinrey Wang, The Other Relics, 2021

Tinrey Wang is a 3D artist, game designer, and multimedia designer based in New York. He currently works as a Research Resident at New York University, where he focuses on exploring the intersection of XR technology, game design, and fashion. He selected for Phantasmaverse a VR experience, The Other Relics, which deals with culture, memory, and otherness.

In The Other Relics, you confront the viewer with Otherness, from the encounter with the character Bubble to the zero-gravity space where they explore the remains of an alien culture. What interests you most about exploring Otherness, particularly in a VR environment?

In The Other Relics, the otherness consists of artifacts related to art, architecture, and culture. Using VR technology, players are able to navigate freely within the space, interact with objects, and experience the absence of gravitational forces. What most interests me about this experience is the opportunity to challenge traditional methods of curating and viewing artworks. By immersing the view in an unconventional space that blurs the boundaries of physicality, narratives, and immersion, I aim to provoke new perspectives and modes of engagement with art and discuss what is possible in the world of art.

“Using VR technology I aim to provoke new perspectives and modes of engagement with art and discuss what is possible in the world of art.”

You state that you are interested in new ways of curating and experiencing art. What is your opinion about the possibilities of art streaming (displaying art on any screen, turning a TV at home into a space for art)?

In my opinion, art streaming can offer greater accessibility and exposure to artwork to a wider audience, potentially leading to increased interest and appreciation for art. It also provides a new platform for artists and galleries to showcase their work, expanding their reach beyond traditional physical spaces. However, I think that there are still concerns about the quality of the viewing experience. The possibilities of art streaming offer both opportunities and challenges for the art world to adapt and evolve with this technology.

Jessica Dai, Life After Death, 2023

Jessica Dai is an artist whose practice utilizes photography and digital media based in New York. She studies photography at NYU Tisch and hopes to tell stories through unique conceptual solutions. Phantasmaverse features her work Life After Death, a CGI animation exploring a peculiar form of afterlife.

Life After Death depicts a somber, crystallized world inhabited by skeletons and nevertheless filled with a life of its own. What inspired you to choose these elements in particular?

Life After Death is a CGI project that explores the theme of death and the afterlife through a unique and somber lens. Inspired by the natural phenomenon of whale fall, where a whale’s body becomes a source of nutrients and sustenance for various creatures in the deep sea, the project seeks to capture the beauty and mystery of life beyond the physical realm.

Through the use of digital modeling and animation, I have created a world that is both haunting and captivating, where the bones of the dead are situated in shimmering crystals that reflect the light in a stunning and ethereal way. In this world, the skeletons themselves have become part of the landscape, taking on a life of their own as they move and interact with their environment.

“I use camera movements to guide the viewer through the narrative. I aim to create a sense of intimacy and immersion through close-ups and wide shots.”

As an artist interested in storytelling, how do you take the viewer through the story? 

I use camera movements and transitions to guide the viewer through the narrative. The camera serves as a window into this mysterious world, drawing the viewer in and revealing its secrets one frame at a time. I aim to create a sense of intimacy and immersion through close-ups and wide shots. Music also plays an essential role in the narrative, serving as a critical element in setting the mood and tone of the piece. By combining haunting melodies and eerie sound effects, I aim to create an otherworldly atmosphere that draws the viewer deeper into the story.

Marina Roos Guthmann, When It Looks Back, 2021

Marina Roos Guthmann is a Brazilian UX/UI designer, currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. She has worked in different areas of the Design industry (including Illustration, Motion Design, and UX). She loves crafting weird experiences that use immersive means and coding. In Phantasmaverse, she presents a VR experience about post-traumatic stress disorder set in a surreal environment.

When It Looks Back is based on a traumatizing feeling but set in a rather pleasant yet eerie atmosphere, which sometimes reminds of casual games. Why did you choose this particular aesthetic?

I decided to set the experience in a flat casual game aesthetic because of how harmless and almost naive it looks. Yet, the more you explore, the weirder it gets. The contrast between a presumed pleasant setting and the weirdness of the experience is an interesting mix that enhances the sentiment that there is something out of place or wrong. In addition, I like how subtle the fear grows the more you explore, thanks to the presumed inoffensive look of the surroundings. In my experience dealing with my fears and traumas, something that might look inoffensive one day can easily be transformed into something fearsome that threatens my existence. Thus, the reason I worked with this specific look and feel.

“I believe VR can easily translate sensations and make the brain think you’re elsewhere, no matter how surreal your virtual environment is. This is fascinating.”

You state that you like weird and surreal experiences. How does using immersive technologies such as VR help you create the type of experience you are looking for?

With VR and other immersive experiences, you can go above and beyond to emulate sensations as you can literally create a whole new world around your audience. In this new world, you can play around with architecture, scale, and even gravity. And, because the person is immersed in this virtual new place, it has a much more significant impact than other mediums. 

In the experience I created, I took advantage of spatial audio and sound by exploring different ambients – with other materials, objects, and sizes –and how they reverberate sound differently. All these nuances significantly affect a VR environment, and a simple whisper can feel very real and disturbing. Additionally, as I wanted to portray the “growing fear” someone experiences, VR might be the scariest choice. Besides being a first-person experience with the option to interact with objects directly with your “hands,” you are immersed in a 360º field of view with nowhere else to look at. I believe VR can easily translate sensations and make the brain think you’re elsewhere, no matter how surreal your virtual environment is, and I think that is fascinating.

Shentong Yu, Facial Expressions: The Signal, 2022

Shentong Yu is a Shanghai born, NYC based visual artist. Her work ranges from 3D Computer Graphics to Conceptual Photography, sharing an imaginative quality and reflecting her understanding of self-identity and the surroundings. Facial Expressions: The Signal is the work she presents in Phantasmaverse, which connects a questioning of the self with Freud’s theories and Surrealism.

Facial Expression, from 2021, depicts our changing selves in the age of social media and endless swiping. The Signal expands on this idea by going down the rabbit hole into a fully-developed surreal world. What led you to develop this environment? What does it bring to the original concept?

I think every artist has a different relationship with their artwork. For me, creating artwork is a way for me to document my growth, reflect on what I perceive, and visualize my thoughts in my mind. One of my favorite artists Gillian Wearing has a saying in her work Wearing Masks: “I believe that identity is fluid and it’s what you absorb from the world around you and internalize. But what you reveal of yourself to the world, that’s how other people define your identity.” I think that is highly consistent with my view of my work.

I started with traditional photography, taking pictures of beautiful faces. At some point, I began to question what these beautiful faces meant to me. I feel the face is a semblance of people’s identity, as it is what determines people’s first impressions while neglecting the inner side. These ideas inspired me to create Facial Expression (2021), in which I alternate my own face to challenge how a face can be seen.

While Facial Expression focuses on the outward appearance, I want to answer the question of what my inner world looks like naturally. I thought it was a good time to address this question after learning computer graphics for a year, to document what I had learned so far and create something meaningful to myself. And other than that, yes, what you see becomes what you express. I watched Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton 8 times when I was a kid and am highly drawn to artwork with surreal aesthetics, so those are what influenced me to create the rabbit-hole storytelling and make it look like a dream. Finally, I created The Signal (2022), building this surreal world, visualizing my unconscious part, and telling the story of self-discovery. The Signal makes the idea in Facial Expression more complete.

“People’s participation in an interactive artwork adds new levels of meaning to the original piece”

You have also worked with collage and AR filters, what do these techniques bring to the ideas you want to convey about the self and virtual worlds?

AR is a really fun one. My motivation to create AR filters was simple, as I had a hard time removing stickers from my face when doing Does Shentong Dream of Electronic Sheep?, but AR makes it easy for everyone to try what I have done without suffering the pain. I love seeing people try out and their reactions. People’s participation in the work sort of adds new levels of meaning to the original piece, as it is not only me altering my face, but viewers can also alter their own faces using AR as well. 

In general, I enjoy trying out different visual mediums techniques. Sometimes I determine the idea first and then the most proper technique to use, sometimes I determine the technique I want to play with first and then tie it back to my thoughts. Different techniques give the work a different character as well as different viewing experiences. It is hard to pick my favorite technique because I think the charm of it is to feel how different they are from each other. As long as a technique makes the work look more visually attractive or the experience more engaging then I am good with it. So far, I have tried photography, image appropriation, stop-motion video, computer graphics video, collage animation, augmented reality, and 3D prints…They give me more possibilities and freedom when expressing my ideas.

Yuanqing Xie & June Bee, Aftermath of Us, 2023

Yuanqing Xie is is a photographer and new media artist who graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
June Bee is a New York based designer who studied both Architectural Design and Design & Technology Bachelor’s programs at Parsons School of Design and currently pursuing a BFA degree in Interactive Media Arts at NYU. Their work Aftermath of Us, presented in Phantasmaverse, is a short film created with 3D animation that reflects on the consequences of AI technologies.

“Aftermath of Us” has a distinctively cinematic narrative. In your experience, how have digital technologies transformed filmmaking and visual storytelling? Which references from the history of cinema have influenced this work?

Digital technology has democratized the filmmaking process, allowing anyone with the right tools to create their own voice typically in the form of films and visual stories. This has led to a proliferation of independent filmmakers, animators, and video artists, helping to create a more diverse and vibrant film culture. In this piece, we decided to explore this form beyond traditional films and animations. June and I (Yuanqing) as independent 3D animators took the notion of such a decentralized design process into our team collaborations and even elevated it to the core of how the narration could be.

By using Unreal Engine, we designed an open-world space that allowed content to be present yet has the capacity to have instant impressions developed over time as what is composed to the viewing experiences.

With the revolutionized digital technologies nowadays, the engineering aspect of filmmaking and visual storytelling became easier and more accessible to create high-quality visual effects that convince audiences what is the new reality. Such trends have led to a large amount of immersive worlds being created in this era. In order to navigate within this ocean of multi-media works, we decided to look back to the origin of how these started – Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). The piece draws heavily from the history of cinema, specifically the science fiction and cyberpunk genres that have explored the intersection between humanity and technology. It references Blade Runner in terms of both its aesthetic and the themes it explores, delving into the impact of technology on society and the environment through the use of literature, religious symbolism, dramatic themes, and film noir techniques. This theme is reflected in the retrofitted future portrayed in the film, which is both futuristic and rundown.

In terms of visual storytelling, this work also draws on experimental and avant-garde cinema traditions. The use of surreal and dreamlike imagery and the incorporation of music and sound effects to create an immersive atmosphere are reminiscent of the works of filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage.

“Niio provides this pure art and thoughts environment that allows our ideas to continue to grow and flourish.”

Additionally, the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix have transformed the distribution and consumption of films, providing new opportunities for independent filmmakers to reach global audiences and allowing a wider range of voices and perspectives to be heard. By putting our work on Niio, we believed in the same effect of reaching a larger audience without time and space limitations. Moreover, Niio provides this pure art and thoughts environment that allows these ideas to continue to grow and flourish.

Overall, we think this work is a powerful example of how digital technologies can be used to create immersive and thought-provoking visual stories that draw on the rich traditions of cinema. By combining cutting-edge digital tools with a deep appreciation for the history of film, we can create a work that is both visually stunning and intellectually engaging.

To what extent did the environment you created influence the narrative? Did you start with a storyboard and built the spaces around this idea, or did you first create the spaces and then experiment with camera movements around them?

The idea for this piece arose from the sense of uncertainty that Yuanqing and I (June) felt last year. Even before artificial intelligence services like ChatGPT and Notion AI were introduced, we were unsure of our place and role in the world as creative technologists. Taking and gathering the various enlightening and concerning elements that technology brings about, we created a space to explore. By examining the dynamic relationships within the experience, we aim to answer the question “What happens after AI?”

Why does this experience provide an answer to that question? The animation is viewed through the lens of the bionic/AI. Using a VR headset, we follow the journey of a lost bionic who wakes up in the cracks between yesterday and tomorrow and overhears two people talking on an old recorder. The content of the old recorder serves as a guide for the wandering AI as it navigates through space. The recording is actually a real transcript of an interview between Blake Lemoine – a former artificial intelligence engineer from Google, and Google’s first dialogical AI – LaMDA.

This is a transcript of an interview that led to Blake Lemoine’s termination from Google. Lemoine was working on the LaMDa project. As he interacted with the dialogical AI, he became convinced that the AI was more sentient than just speaking from a database, and actually understood the conversation. As a result, Lemoine and one of his Google collaborators conducted the interview with the LaMDa AI, asking challenging questions such as whether the AI had read Les Miserables, what her favorite parts were, and why. They also asked her to write a fable based on a newly introduced concept, and inquired about her thoughts on the concept of a soul, and whether she thinks she has one. After the interview, it was difficult to tell if the AI was sentient or not, as she seemed to have a deep understanding of the topics they discussed.

“The environment in the piece had a significant influence on the narration. There was no original storyboard, but rather the camera movement became an attempt to simulate AI’s consciousness.”

To answer the question, the environment in the piece had a significant influence on the narration. The cave-like space was created first, and the exploratory journey within it became the storyline. There was no original storyboard, but rather the camera movement became an attempt to simulate AI’s consciousness from all sources we designed. The intricate environment and the recording of the interview between Blake Lemoine and Google’s LaMDA AI serve as a guiding voice and source for the simulation of AI’s wandering.

Read the interview with the curators of the Phantasmaverse exhibition and artcast, Carla Gannis and Snow Yunxue Fu

Claudia Hart on Machiavelli, politics, and NFTs

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.

Explore Claudia Hart’s work on Niio

Spøgelsesmaskinen: invoking the ghost in the machine

Pau Waelder

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 YOKE with 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, called Korridor.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.

Marina Zurkow: aiming at the bottom of the iceberg

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

Marina Zurkow’s work explores the relationship between nature, culture, and society, focusing on what she describes as “wicked problems,” those issues that reveal our abusive interactions with the natural environment and our difficulty to understand it beyond our human-centric, capitalist-driven views of the world around us.

A transdisciplinary artist, she works with experts from different fields to create a wide range of artistic practices that includes video art, installations, and public participatory projects. Currently, she is working on the tensions between maritime ecology and the ocean’s primary human use as a capitalist Pangea.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous international art museums, as well as galleries, including Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, bitforms gallery, NY, FACT, Liverpool, SF MoMA, Walker Art Center; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Wave Hill, NY, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Zurkow is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery, and a fellow for Fall 2022 at Princeton University.

Following the release of two new artworks commissioned by Niio, we spoke with the artist about her latest work and her commitment to raise environmental concerns through her art.

Marina Zurkow, OOzy#2: Like Oil and Water, 2022

Many of your artworks, including OOzy2 and OOzy3, specifically allude to water as the main protagonist, and particularly the sea, which you have described as a “capitalist Pangea”. Sea life is both fascinating and mostly unknown to us urbanites. How do you use representations of the sea and sea creatures to address concerns about environmental issues?

First of all, I would say that one can think of the ocean in two ways: as a surface, and as a volume. The surface, which is what we mostly encounter as humans, has two functions: on the one hand, it is a surface on which we play; and on the other, it is a surface on which we transport goods, and this is what turns the ocean into a capitalist Pangea. 

This is a diagram of the ocean shipping routes. When I first saw this, it became extremely clear to me that this surface is actually a very solid plane of transaction, namely capitalist transaction. So that’s where the phrase “Capitalist Pangea” came from. Billions of years ago, in the Mesozoic era, there was one sea, called Panthalassa, and the land was a single landmass called Pangea. 

The other slide I wanted to share, which relates to the idea of the “Capitalist Pangea” is one I made for a talk on oceans, showing all the ways in which we see the ocean. We are capable of holding all of these buckets in our minds at once, and they remain in their silos to a great extent. The differences between thinking of the ocean as a site of plastic pollution, our fantasies of adventure, and 10 hour recordings of ocean waves you can find on YouTube to relax— those are all simultaneous identities that we assign to the ocean. 

This is my last slide to share: it is an image created by Donella Meadows, the systems thinker who devoted her life to ecology and is one of the authors of the report The Limits to Growth that nobody wanted to pay attention to in the 1970s and 80s, and that clearly showed that the planet can’t take unlimited growth, which is the fundamental tenet of capitalism. She was interested in using systems thinking to look beneath the surface, and offered this iceberg model in order to talk about change-making. As you can see, what is visible (and therefore  above the surface is tiny. The hardest thing to change is at the very bottom, the mental models. That’s the hardest place to get to. And honestly, I feel like if we can’t have an emotional relationship to the material of our planet that is at great risk, we can’t change the way we think about the world. And so anything like “don’t take a plastic bag,” or “get an electric car,” all the moral imperatives that are put on us, if they don’t come from the heart, they’re not going to stick, they’ll just be gone in the next election cycle –at least, in the United States. 

And so what I am committed to do with my work is to create emotional connections to this material and the ocean. Why the ocean in particular? Because it is so important! It covers 80% of this planet. And just the fact that we’ve named this planet “Earth” tells you something about human self-centeredness. Really, we are a planet of water. And even if it is such a cliche, it is true that we are made of almost the exact same composition as the ocean itself.

“There are many roles that artists occupy in terms of addressing environmental atrocities. I don’t feel like any one tactic is any better than any other. It’s all crucial.”

How would you describe the role of the artist in raising important concerns about climate change and environmental atrocities? Do you see a difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics?

I would like to unpack this and say, there are many roles that artists occupy in terms of addressing environmental atrocities, ecocide, grief, climate change, and environmental connection-making. These roles range from explicit activism—getting people charged up to make change, to the subtler concerns that I was talking about: changing affect, changing the way we feel, changing the paradigm and the values in which we live. So for instance, it may sound oblique, but thinking about kinship across species is such a radical paradigm shift for most people. And that, to me, is one of the fundamental motivators for caring for the earth. So there’s room for everyone at this table, to participate in connecting people to the world in which we are interwoven. And I don’t feel like any one tactic is any better than any other. It’s all crucial. 

Regarding the second part of that question, yes I see a tremendous difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics. Because the same things that make visuality potent, also make visuality impotent. The brain wants to categorize what it receives and put in boxes and dismiss those ideas that seem dangerous, depressing or disturbingly radical. Presenting an audience with an impactful idea will attract their attention, but it may also lead them to reject the idea because it is too disturbing and just move on. Our brains want to take a nap, and have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty. Yet, what we have at present is the tremendous force of geoplanetary uncertainty that, in many ways, we have produced. In this context, is visual art the right tool? I think there’s a lot of room at the table for these experiments. And you would have to be out of your mind to think that you, as a single individual, can change anything. We all have to contribute to making incremental changes. And this is very hard, because artists, myself included, have a big ego and want to feel like “yes, I am a changemaker.” But instead, I have to say, I am committed to change making, and I want to participate in that in whatever little ways I can. 

“I see a tremendous difficulty in balancing severe global concerns and aesthetics. Because the same things that make visuality potent, also make visuality impotent.”

I have been working in audio more, I just finished collaborating on a 30 minute immersive audio piece about the ocean, that is a radically different kind of experience. The audio sneaks into your psyche. And because nowadays we are used to audio guides, I can use this technique to pretty great effect. This has been an instructive piece for me to think about other ways to invite people into these complex, difficult conversations and to go places where the human body can’t go, like deep into the ocean, or doing things that are impossible for us, such as dissolving into little bits and getting eaten by a whale.

As an artist working in many different mediums from new media art to performance to collage, how do you see the role of video artworks differing from other artistic practices?

I would add that I also work with food, for instance, that asks you to put things in your body as a way of experiencing the world. Each encounter between public and material can be thought of as “ways of knowing” (or epistemologies), and my job as a collaborator, thinker, and maker is to work with people who understand their own media like technology or cooking in such ways that we can do the most we can with those media to connect people to concepts and experiences.

Marina Zurkow, Making the Best of It: Jellyfish (2016)

As for video art works, the way to connect with the audience is obviously through the visual (and aural) quality of the piece, its scale and its context. The images produce all kinds of relations that your brain is trying to make sense of. Some images remind you of others, or spark certain feelings. All of this process is happening neurologically, and because we’re such visual creatures and pattern recognizers, the invitation of looking is built in and seductive. In that sense I am particularly interested in the humorous, the quirky, because it disarms the viewer. The viewer leaves their defenses behind when they see something really enchanting, or funny. So in my animated films I often use elements that are somewhat funny or seem naïve, but they point to issues that are not funny at all.

“I am particularly interested in the humorous, the quirky, because it disarms the viewer.”

Another aspect that is important for me in connecting with people happens when the artwork lives in people’s homes. I like work that people live with, and get to spend long times with. Some of my works are really long, they go on for hundreds of hours, sometimes unfolding over the course of a year, so that when someone has the artwork at home they can spend a lot of time with them and see how they change. Even if the work is not very long, about three minutes, I think about the density and add many layers, so that the story is told in depth and not in length. 

Marina Zurkow, OOzy #3, 2022

Do you think that people react better to something they’re more actively involved in, or can they also have a profound experience of a visual artwork that they see at a certain distance?

These experiences are really different, and can be memorable for an audience in different ways. The food projects can suffer from exactly the same problems as the visual projects, which is the production of spectacle. I have only really been able to do one very successful public food project that was not elitist in costliness: a jellyfish jerky pop up shack on the UCLA campus that attracted 300 people to eat and talk. We provided a night market stall atmosphere, where people could sit and eat, and we interviewed many eaters in what was a really rich, two way exchange. For us as artists— my collaborators Henry Fisher, Anna Rose Hopkins and myself— this was a chance to have a real-time exchange and to create an offering that condensed into a snack some of the components of the tremendous risk of sea level rise. The video work does not have the same kind of immediacy: I don’t know what is happening with the work in terms of people’s reception. It’s a much more distanced experience for me. And at this point, I hesitate to understand what is so compelling about the work, or if the work really does move the mind at all. I really don’t know.

Your extensive career, among many other things includes your teachings as faculty member of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Could you elaborate on your views of the artist as educator?

I don’t think you have to educate inside of academic institutions, I think you can educate in many ways, which goes back to my statement about “ways of knowing.” Art is always political, and it is also always educational. What I mean is that art will be teaching you something whether it intends to or not: it might be teaching you that art is decorative, it might be teaching you that art has cultural vitality, it might be teaching you that the oceans are polluted. Art is always engaged in communication, and communication is, essentially, the transfer of information. This information accumulates and sometimes opens up a new way people can think about things. And that itself is a form of pedagogy. I teach that way. I was lucky to teach in a program that was very “anti-lecture,” very participatory and dialogic. This methodology pushes you to think about ways in which you teach and how to facilitate hands-on, engaged learning.

“Art is always political, and it is also always educational”

Your commissioned works show a tension in the relationship between the natural world and humanity with a specific focus on consumer culture and technological advancements. Do your works also suggest a solution for this probing question?

I don’t have any solutions. The first thing you learn in systems thinking is, there’s no such thing as a solution, because the solution will only beget further problems. When you think you’ve solved something you go to sleep, you don’t worry about that anymore. So I’d rather have the opposite: opening up new ways of thinking about these difficult entanglements and producing more questions rather than answers. Questions persist in your brain, they haunt you a little bit. And then maybe they drive your inquiries into the everyday. So what if making people conscious is the most I can do? What happens then? I have been going through tremendous doubt of the efficacy of artmaking in the  last couple of years, and I am not on the other side of that yet, but I’ve been thinking a lot more about modest offerings of what change looks like and ways in which we can open up the world. A world of more inclusive ethics that would drive us to make better ecological and interpersonal decisions. 

“I can only claim to do a small bit and then it is up to everyone to change their mindsets and act.”

Still, as an environmental artist, you are expected to solve things. There’s a group of artists and scientists who say, “If we don’t make work that addresses really tangible ways of changing things, we are useless. How do you measure that? We don’t want to talk about metaphors. We don’t want to talk about mindsets, we want to make change, we’re in a crisis.” But I would also say, sometimes you have to slow down to move fast. Interestingly, the Rising Seas Jellyfish Jerky Snack Shack showed me the contradictions in this way of thinking about solutions. People who participated and thought of themselves as environmentally active students, who were doing environmental studies, still went downstairs to the vending machine and bought single serve plastic wrap snacks. It was like the snacks were a blind spot in their whole system of thinking about the world. So I can only claim to do a small bit and then it is up to everyone to change their mindsets and act. 

Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s Ambient Art

Roxanne Vardi

Andreas Nicolas Fischer is a multidisciplinary artist from Berlin. Fischer started his artistic career as a traditional artist working mainly with painting and drawing, but became interested in generative art upon his visit to artist Casey ReasProcess/Drawing exhibition in 2005 at DAM Gallery in Berlin. 

At the time he discovered Reas’ work, Fischer was interning at ART+COM, founded by Joachim Sauter, who also later became a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Fischer learnt Processing from the very first people who worked on the creative coding environment conceived and developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry in 2001. While he did not have a background in computing, Fischer was motivated to teach himself code and started creating animations with Processing. He also worked briefly with fabrication and sculpture to adapt to the demands of the market at a time when the interest in digital art was not yet mainstream. However, he considers himself a purist and likes to create systems that operate autonomously, something that he can achieve by working with generative algorithms. 

In the following interview, that took place on the occasion of the artist’s solo artcast The Art of Hypnosis on Niio, Andreas Nicolas Fischer unfolds the motivations and techniques behind his work.

How would you describe your art practice today?

My practice is mostly generative pure abstraction. I do some narrative 3D animation philosophizing about the end of the world, but my main focus is generative systems and aesthetics and abstractions; developing these systems over time and translating them into different means. My personal preference is to create art that is self-contained, and doesn’t take data from the outside. I used to work as an art director to make a living, making 3D animation as this was a bigger market, but I didn’t want to be part of that career where artists need to receive grants. I always wanted to have a hard skill, with a foot in the industry, but I like my work to be more dynamic where I learn something and then apply it. This is what I did for ten years, but then I started to receive commissions, until at some point my art practice and commercial practice merged. Today I don’t work for agencies and I don’t work as a freelance artist. I do my own work. My main focus is generative systems and aesthetics and abstractions, developing these systems over time and translating them into different means.

My main focus is generative systems and aesthetics and abstractions, developing these systems over time and translating them into different means

Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Nethervoid 07 L 2180, 2022

You have described some of your latest works as ‘Ambient Art’. Could you please elaborate on this concept?

I have been doing more real-time work in the past few years, I like to call it ambient art, it’s not narrative and it’s not super intrusive. You don’t need to pay attention to the work all day, but it’s a small intricate development with its own pace. I really like when you get drawn into the work. In this way I like to see my work as hypnosis, I hypnotize people through the work in a sense. I do this for myself, because I like the process of viewing my own work, but I have also observed that in my audience, some people tell me that they get lost in the work. And that’s what I like, changing people’s state, changing their psychological state. We all have a perceptual system, but you can influence that. I like changing someone’s state of mind with my art overtime. It’s an introspective process, there are no demands, it’s more subtle. In a sense I am not saying anything. I make my work for myself but also for other people.

Many of your latest series such as Nethervoid and Infinite Void also contain a sound element that feels crucial to the works. Is this another way for you to influence your audience’s perceptual system?

There are sound frequencies that you can use to influence one’s perceptual state, which I started looking into. I create some of the sounds with other artists, while others I find and modify myself using generative code. Composers hear so much more than we do, that’s the beauty, to be able to collaborate with sound designers because it enriches the artwork and we learn from each other.

On one of my works, I worked with a friend of mine, David Kamp, a composer and sound designer. I had sent him a rough cut for this work and I literally almost cried when I got it back from him. There are not many things that move me, but when I got that [sound design] back it was very powerful, it was so subtle. It was like listening to 70’s progressive rock on a good sound system, there is just so much there. 

Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Feeder-01-2160p, 2022

I like changing someone’s state of mind with my art overtime. It’s an introspective process, there are no demands, it’s more subtle.

Can you tell us more about your involvement with creating video sound installations which make the work immersive and create a dialogue with an environment such as The Origin of Quantum Dot, established in collaboration with Samsung?

That was a unique and special project. I co art directed it and created the content for those screens, but the sculpture was made by Christopher M. Bauder and Schnelle Bunte Bilder, a studio of visual art in Berlin. But this is not something that you can do every day.

In 2021 we were commissioned to create an installation in Washington DC.  It was such a powerful experience as the end result resembled an animated James Turrell, playing with light, where the sensation of the room completely changed according to the light.

What is it that draws you into creating digital art or software-born art created with code?

What I like a lot about the process is creating something from nothing, just from text and code. Of course the whole programming environment and the libraries were created by someone so it’s not nothing-nothing, but what I like is that you have something that is a pure instruction and you can create something new from it that has so much depth and richness . This  is so powerful. I love 3D animation and coloring and shading, but 3D animation is an insane amount of work. What I like about software is the leverage that you have, making systems autonomously while you are running the code, it’s also a flexible medium. With AI and generative systems you have a lot of leverage and you can control these machines to do something, I appreciate that on a conceptual level.

You start with pure instruction and you can create something new from it that has so much depth and richness. This is so powerful!

When you use found data in your generative artworks, how important is it for you that people know the origin of the source material? 

It depends, in the past I would use found images to create some of my works, but now I generate my own procedural compositions. I like both but I am not interested in where it came from, and visually it’s far enough removed from the original image that I don’t feel guilty about it. The machines give you power to create some things that you cannot create by hand.

Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Infinite Void 13A L 2098, 2022

You have also experimented with AI. What is your take on working with generative adversarial networks?

I had a brief and romantic relationship with AI. People talk about the end times of machines and the domination of AI. There are reasons to be concerned about that. I received a few DALL·E invites which I intentionally gave out to people who are not versed visually, but what I found is that if you don’t have good taste or that trained eye, what you produce with the AI is not going to be that interesting. This is what I concluded from my sample experiment. These tools on the one hand are very helpful for certain things, but also very biased because as soon as you get specific about things, what it hasn’t seen, then it gets harder. In the beginning when I got it I was completely sucked in, I sat there for a couple of days and hit the ‘dopamine button’. 

As an artist everything you do is a dopamine loop, that warm fuzzy feeling is something I am trying to reproduce. But the thing is once you have an image prompting machine to create things that are visually pleasing, things one can do without a huge effort, your receptors shut down, and the satisfaction is that you don’t feel good or accomplished with yourself. It’s like TikTok, after half an hour of scrolling if I would ask you what you remember about it, it wouldn’t be very much. I see AI going where you can turn yourself and other people into dopamine junkies, it’s visual stimulation on steroids. The thing with all of technology is that it’s only going to get stronger, sowe need to find a way to deal with it.’. Today I mostly use AI tools to up-res all of my older videos by adding more detail to them. To me, this is the beauty about it, to increase the fidelity of the content.

I see AI going where you can turn yourself and other people into dopamine junkies, it’s visual stimulation on steroids.

Can you dive deeper into your use of the term ‘void’ in describing or naming your works?

Using the term void is intentional, coming back to wanting to hypnotize or affect people’s mental state through the works. The void is more of a meditative void, a mental void. Of course it’s visually very full, but for me meditation is hard, I don’t have a solid practice but sometimes my work can help me with it by producing that mental void.

Digital Storytelling: an interview with Kineret Noam

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

This interview is part of a series of three editorial articles that dive deeper into the different software, technicalities, and processes that go into creating digital artworks, in order to offer our readers a deeper understanding of digital art as a medium. 

We speak to Kineret Noam as part of a collaboration with Render Studio, a collective creative experimentation for a digital reality. Render Studio is inspired by art, design, nature and technology and aims to explore dimensions of virtuality, interactivity and motion. Kineret Noam’s series Three Rooms and The Whispering Reed are both featured on Niio this summer, and were both created for Render Studio. 

Kineret Noam, The Whispering Reed, 2022

For the creation of this series you made use of two different digital art practices. Could you expand on the difference between these two practices and how you integrated each towards the creation of the final artworks?

In the creation of these series I used two techniques. First I paint on my Ipad using Procreate and Photoshop, which allow me to create digital illustrations that feel like they are painted with a brush. I create the sketch with Procreate to get an understanding of the composition. I choose the brushes that feel like the real thing,  the process is really cool. Secondly, I build every layer with all the text and the colors. For example when I illustrate a tree, I make the whole tree in one layer, and then I open up a new layer and make the mountain. In one minute of the final video we have about fifteen layers. Once I’ve created the individual elements in Procreate I arrange all the layers in Photoshop. This can amount to about sixty layers. Then in the final composition I decide which elements are moving and which stay still.  In this way, I can focus on time and on depth of the composition. 

Once I have the different elements of a scene set in different layers in Photoshop, I think about the mise-en-scene and what I want to say using these elements.

The second technique is Frame-by-Frame animation. Once I have the different elements of a scene set in different layers in Photoshop, I think about the camera, the cinematic view, the mise-en-scène and what I want to say using these elements. The camera can take the vantage point of the spectators which is a more static and passive angle. For example, I am now working on a series about Genesis. What I am trying to convey with this series is the historical importance of the Genesis story, which we all know of and which my children will know of as well. So the camera, or the vantage point, in this series is always static. But, sometimes I want to say something about time and about feelings. There is a famous song in Hebrew by singer Rona Kenan titled “My Prison by the Sea” in which the artist says ‘every time I turn away I seem to miss a train’. So sometimes I want to portray the feeling that something happened emotionally but that it is moving on, like we all do in life. So in that way I decide what to do with the camera, what needs to move and what needs to stay static in order to convey the meanings and feelings I am looking for. 

Kineret Noam, The Whispering Reed: Cleansing, 2022

So if the different elements are animated individually, we can say that you act as a stage director, setting up the stage and placing the actors. Right? 

Exactly, yes. I think about the  stage, in which the elements intervene like a cast. Sometimes I want to tell the story not from the point of view of a distanced viewer, but getting in the middle of the action. For instance, in The Whispering Reed, King Midas was alone, so I imagined following him with the camera and I tried to capture his emotions in that situation, to understand him and his loneliness in this tragic story. So, I thought about myself as a child walking around a valley near my childhood home, which also gave me the inspiration for the background and nature in this series.

I always ask myself: What is the mission of the artist today, now that we have digital tools?

As part of your work process you have stated that you first approach your works with more traditional art practices such as drawing, and then proceed to applying different softwares to create the final digital versions. What is the role of the digital in your artistic practice?

First, I will answer on a technical level. When I draw in my studio with a pencil I need to fix the work, so it takes a lot of time to work on every detail of each element and to create the composition. If I want to change something about the character I need to change the composition. When I do this digitally it’s much easier to fix things. Secondly, from a philosophical viewpoint, the great traditional artists had to draw from their memory, from just one image. But our memory works differently, we need a few frames if we want to build something. For example when you think of a childhood event, you don’t imagine it in one frame but in several frames. I always try to think how we can keep an image dramatic, like the great artists did, but still succeed in spreading the memory in a broad way. Today, it’s more convenient to create several frames, but it’s also the conflict between traditional art and digital art. I always ask myself, “what is the mission of the artist today, now that we have digital tools?”. When the camera was invented, artists encountered a conflict, because if they could capture something with a camera why would they need to draw or paint it? We need to ask ourselves: What is our mission today?

Kineret Noam, Three Rooms, 2022

How do today’s different available softwares help in reconstructing ancient narratives and philosophies while bringing attention to and questioning the world we live in today?

When you read a story, for example, ancient Greek mythology, you can imagine a few timelines together: the refuge, the character, which register in your head like a collage. When you create this and put it on a timeline, you block or omit things from your mind. So I try to ask myself how I can keep these hidden instances within the timeline, taking into consideration that we cannot see everything. Areas where you look again and again and suddenly you see something. I leave some illustrations not very clear on purpose. 

Do you also feel that it helps you to add a personal layer to such a well-known narrative? Taking into account that the inspiration for scenery comes from the valley next to your childhood home. 

What is great about my work is that I can choose subjects that I am connected to, so in all of my series I choose subjects that I feel that I can give more layers to from my personal perspective. For example, there is a scene in The Whispering Reed where the character is drying his laundry. There is a special prayer in one of the Jewish holidays where it says that God will take our sins and clean them like white laundry. Comparing the atonement to washing, I might have done that unconsciously as I thought of this prayer which I was used to repeating as a child.

Kineret Noam, Three Rooms, 2022

You have also created NFTs as part of your collection of the Three Rooms series. Could you please elaborate on your experience in this new Art Space and expand on your expectations for this new medium?

I am a bit suspicious and afraid of this space: we live in this Instagram society, we just have a few seconds to view an NFT square and cannot dive deeper into it. Thinking about NFTs as one more layer in the history of art, I find this layer hard for me to understand. When comparing NFTs to the introduction of the camera I feel that I need to find a way to do things like Cardi B is doing. The pop star is able to take the medium she is working with, pop music which is vastly spread through out society and highly accessible to all, with all the industry around it and the expectations of her fans, and turns it around to take a very personal and extreme position that is unique to her in a way critiquing society and destabilizing social foundations.

I want to take the NFT square and say something extreme about our digital world, and about our way of looking and understanding art

I am still not sure how to do this, but when I create a square NFT I want to do it in an extreme way. Using the negative aspects of society and ridicules because in a sense we are consuming this. I want to take the NFT square and say something extreme about our digital world, and about our way of looking and understanding art. I want to question, and to create something that addresses the way we use NFTs and the way we use our phones and social media.