Tag Archives: digital art

Driessens & Verstappen: driven by process, shaped by time

Pau Waelder

Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen have worked together since 1990 in the creation of process-based artworks using software, robotics, film, photography, sculpture, 3D scanning, and many other analog and digital techniques, as well as enabling, manipulating, simulating or documenting physical, chemical and biological processes, including plant growth. Following the presentation of their artcast The Kennemer Dunes, curated by DAM Projects for Niio, we have discussed the main concepts that drive their artistic research and the processes behind some of their most influential artworks.

Kennemerduinen 2010, scene E, 2011

Process is a key concept in your work, that is carried out automatically by programmed machines, spontaneously occurring in a natural environment, or happening through physical and chemical reactions. Why is creating, enabling or documenting processes so fundamental to your work?

Not all generative processes are equally interesting to us. We are mainly focusing on decentralized processes, the so called bottom-up processes. In these processes the patterns are not defined by a central authority but by local interactions between a vast amount of  decentralized components. Examples for this are bird flocks, ant colonies, market economies, ecosystems or immune systems.When we study the landscape, what we see are the interactions of the elements in the ecosystem that react, adapt, and evolve over time. And that is also exactly what we try to model when we work with computers: the interactions of many small elements that together create a coherent global structure. We try to express that in the generative systems that we build. For us, this way of working implies another role of the artist. In the tradition of art, artists tend to work top-down, taking a piece of material and then shaping it to match an idea they had on their mind. We’d rather take a step back and see how the material can organize itself, albeit creating certain preconditions. As artists, we create a process that can make something by itself or react on the stages of development, so that it is the system that shapes the product instead of us determining how the material has to be formed. So there are different angles on why we are so interested in process, self organization, and evolution. 

“As artists, we create a process that can make something by itself, so that it is the system that shapes the product instead of us determining how the material has to be formed.”

Time is also an important aspect in these processes, of course. A landscape has many timescales: there are things that take ages to form, while others belong to a shorter time scale, like the seasons and the flowering. So there is this relationship between the different timescales that make it hard to understand exactly what has happened and why it is exactly like that. But when we look at the landscape, we feel the natural intertwining of all those small and big events that have led to the big picture that we see in front of us. And I think that’s why landscape, as a genre, has such a long history in art, because these inimitable processes, which take place differently in every place on earth, constantly evoke new aesthetic experiences in us.

Kennemerduinen 2010, scene H, 2011

In relation to the factor of time in your work, in The Kennemer Dunes the process is sped up, but still shown at a slow pace. What do you find most interesting about this slowness?

In the Landscape Films (2001-2010), we create an acceleration by the compression of time. We decided to do this because we experience the landscape at a given moment in time and we cannot predict or remember exactly how it looks in another season. We chose to show the series of still images in the form of a slow, fluent movie of around 9 minutes to enhance our perception of the slow, but powerful seasonal transformations. What we did here, then, is to take a picture from the same place on the same time of the day during different days over the course of a year. This gave us the opportunity to notice small things one would usually not pay attention to, the subtle changes in the landscape that happen at a pace that is the pace of nature and not humans. 

What we created is related to time-lapse animation techniques, but we decided not to simply put all images one after another, because that would generate a very hectic activity, with clouds passing by quickly and plants nervously growing towards the sunlight. In our view this would not support the landscape experience, so instead we chose very few images, around 52, and added a 10-second transition between them. The  transition between each photo is not a proper representation of what has happened  there and then, because it is just interweaving the pixels of one picture to the other. So it is not accurate as a document, but as an experience it is more accurate, because it keeps the quietness of the experience of contemplating the landscape.

Morphoteque #15 (2011). 27 elements, 1:1 copies of peppers. Plaster, acrylic paint.

A third outstanding aspect of your work is that of categorization and collection, as is made evident in the Morphoteque series or in Herbarium Vivum. What can you tell me about these artworks?

In these works, where we deal with static forms, particularly in the Morphotèque series, we always have a collection of objects that are expressions from a certain process and then we want to show the variety of the different outcomes. For instance, the Vegetables Collections (1994-2011) consist of rejected vegetables that have been collected by us from groceries and markets, and then cast as a sculpture, in order to preserve them, as they will obviously decay. We could have taken a photograph, but since the work is about morphology, we needed to keep the three-dimensional form rather than just an image. This work comments on the fact that, in our industrial world, we want our food to be produced in perfect and identical shapes. This is convenient for the machines that harvest and process them, but it is also the result of an aesthetic decision. But of course the plant growing the vegetable does not follow these principles, so it can produce asymmetrical or “abnormal” vegetables, which taste  the same as the “perfect”-looking ones, but nevertheless are put apart and used for cattle fodder or just thrown away. 

By collecting and preserving these irregular specimens, we show the wide variety of possible growths within a particular plant species. And that they are visually more rich-than the symmetrical and straight forms that we normally get to see in the supermarket. This type of work also gives us an opportunity to talk about processes that you cannot carry out in any museum space or in an art space. You cannot show the growth of a pepper, but each selected shape refers to an individual growth process, while the collection as a whole also shows the typical similarities.

Solid Spaces, 2013. 3D print in acrylic, approx. W.35 x D.25 x H.15 cm.

What drives you to create physical objects out of algorithmic processes (as in Accretor) and real space mappings (as in Solid Spaces)? What does the physicality of sculpture bring to your work?

In Solid Spaces (2013), particularly, there was an interesting connection between the process, the space, and the outcome. We had the 3D scanner working inside the church, we displayed two  sculptures that were made from previous scans of the interior of the church, and there was of course the architectural space of the church itself. People could see all of this at once and relate the objects with the space and the process of production. One thing we like about 3D printed objects is that we can create them by letting the machine look at something in the real world, an existing church for instance, but it can also be a completely virtual object, existing in a digital space. In the latter, the object that has been generated using generative software can be so complex and detailed that it might be difficult for the 3D printer to produce it. 

Sandbox, 2009. 245 x 122 x 176 cm. Wood, lacquer, metal, fans, sand, electronics.

The Kennemer Dunes can be connected with your diorama artworks of that time, Sandbox and Hot Pool, which also show a slowly evolving landscape, although through different means. Which connections would you make between these different types of landscapes?

All these works relate to our fascination with decentralized processes. What we did in Sandbox (2009) and Hot Pool (2010) is that we reduced all the elements that are in the landscape to three things: the box itself, which hosts the diorama, the wind or heat, and the particles of sand or wax. In Sandbox we create artificial winds using 55 individual fans placed on the roof of the box, with a software program that controls them. However, the result is not a pre-planned choreography, but there is an unpredictable process involved that turns on and off the fans. Of course, the wind shapes the dunes, but in turn the dunes change the direction of the wind.here is a complex interaction between the sand and the wind that is less deterministic than one might imagine. The geometry of the box causes even more complex turbulences, so in making these seemingly simple miniature landscapes, we realized that they are not so easy to understand and predict. If you change one little thing, it has an influence on everything, even in this very small secluded world. This is also something that we discovered working with software: when you change one of the many parameters a little bit, it can have a really dramatic effect on the whole. And that’s exactly something that we would like to communicate with our work: when you change a little thing in a complex system, when you take out one species, for example, one plant, or you change the temperature just one degree, everything changes and often in an unpredictable way. 

“We, as human beings, have to be more in balance with the ecosystem that we are in, and we should be humble when we interfere in systems that have evolved over many years”

Most things in the world are part of a complex system. So we, as human beings, have to be more in balance with the ecosystem that we are intertwined in. And we should be humble when we want to interfere in existing systems that are in balance, or have evolved over many, many, many, many years. We think we understand the system and that we can control what will happen when we change it. But actually, we always create a reduced model of the system and we let out some small things that we think are not important. And then it turns out that it’s this very small thing that you did overlook that is very influential in the end. 


E-volver, 2006. 4 breeding units with displays, 5 prints on canvas 600 x 300 cm. Permanent installation, interactive software. Research Labs, Medical Center Leiden University. Commissioned by LUMC Leiden and SKOR Amsterdam.

Works like E-volver and Breed deal with artificial evolution programs. How would you compare the processes involved in these computer simulations with your work with natural processes, either observed (Landscape Films, Pareidolia) or manipulated (Tschumi Tulips, Herbarium Vivum)?

We are interested in evolutionary processes as a kind of bottom up, decentralized process. Evolution is difficult to observe in the real world because adaptation to the environment and the passing of information to the next generation is rather indirect and it occurs  in small steps. But if you manage to model this slow and gradual process in the computer, it suddenly becomes observable, largely due to the acceleration of time (like in the landscape films). So in recent years we have set up a number of projects in which we have used evolution as a step-by-step development of an artwork, but also as a way of not completely controlling the results (due to the complex feedback loops involved).In Breed (1995-2007), for instance, the  process of mutation and selection is completely automatized, there is no human intervention. The artificial evolution takes place completely in itself, because the fitness score is determined by objective and measurable properties of the shape: the form that is generated inside this virtual environment should be structurally correct and be able to be materialized as a real object.  In E-volver (2006), there is human intervention involved,  since the mutations and variations of the animations are influenced by the subjective preferences of the people that interact with the work E-volver was made for the Research Labs of the LUMC in Leiden, where scientists and students in human genetics can grow abstract, colorful animations on four breeding units via a touch screen. It’s there now for I think 16 years, and it’s still working. It is always creating something new, and people can see that they have an influence on the outcome of the program, but it is more of a reactive intervention than a  creative one. E-volver involves an unusual collaboration between man and machine, providing a breeding machine on the one hand and a human “gardener” on the other. The combination of human and machine properties leads to results that neither could have created alone.

The outcomes of these artificial evolution programs can be connected with the Vegetable Collections in the sense that they also show how the industry speeds up evolution towards the genetic code that produces a set of desired outcomes, such as round potatoes and straight carrots, while what we want is to show the diversity in these morphological processes. We are equally interested in showing both the results of this virtual growth process in terms of diversity and detail, and the industrial production process that is automated from design to execution. Our approach shows that technological manufacturing processes do not necessarily have to lead to standardization, control, simplism and homogeneity, but to the contrary. When we started these projects in the 1990s, people were not used to computers as an artistic medium, and we had to explain that the artworks were generated in the digital realm, with digital processes, but now people understand that this is something that is created artificially.


Pareidolia, 2019. Robotics, microscope, camera, perspex, wood, metal, sea sand, screen 50 inch, black coated metal housing. Commissioned by SEA Science Encounters Art.

In your recent works, Pareidolia and Spotter, the task of observing nature is carried out by a machine through cameras, face detection software and machine learning models. It seems that this leads to a fully automated and autopoietic system, is that what you are looking for? Which possibilities do you see in machine learning for your future artistic projects?

We started working with neural networks some 10 or 15 years ago, but back then the computer processing speed was so slow that you could only do something very simple, and then it would take days before you could see the output. So it was very limited, but later on, when it became more achievable, we dived into it. However, we are reluctant to further elaborate on it, because artificial neural networks tend to take on an aesthetic that comes from the system itself and therefore all the artworks generated by these techniques look more or less similar. And it’s also very hard to understand how it works, beyond the fact that you can influence the training of the machine learning program by selecting input images and also some other training parameters. But what it has brought us so far is not very satisfying. Certainly now, with programs such as DALL-E or Midjourney, there are interesting possibilities to explore. These are very complex systems based on enormous amounts of data, and it can only be run by big companies and universities. Everyone can actually rent the software as an online service. As artists we are interested in building the systems we work with, not just using them to obtain specific results. So for us there is little to gain with these text-to-image generation systems. 

“We do not want to work with a big black box and wait for something to come out of it, without understanding anything about it. We want to build the system we are working with.”

The relation between process and result must also take place on the level of creating the system. We do not want to work with a big black box and wait for something to come out of it, without understanding anything about it. Although the systems that we build also are hard to fathom, in the end, we do have a very satisfying understanding. It’s a deeper understanding of what you cannot control. For instance, in Pareidolia (2021) we created a robot that uses machine vision and face detection to identify human faces in the texture of grains of sand. We built the face recognition program ourselves so that it would work on sand particles rather than the usual application of such software. Although it is hard to understand how the artificial brain learns to distinguish a face from something that is not a face, it was very satisfying to build the software based on our own database with tens of thousands of images. And then to see it applied to sand, whose morphology is really rich but too small for us humans to perceive. If you think that every sand particle in the world has a unique shape, then you can imagine a gigantic amount of sculptures that are right there under our feet. Applying machine learning to our own face detection software has so far been more interesting and satisfying than the potential of generative neural networks (GANs), yet another type of machine learning. But you never know, sometimes it can take quite some time before you are able to transform and internalize the possibilities opened by a new technology and use it in a personal and original way. 

Niio in 2022: the articles

Niio Editorial

As we reach the end of 2022, we look back at a very busy year, and forward to an even more intense 2023. In this series of posts, we have selected some of our favorite artcasts, artists, artworks, articles, and interviews. They outline an overview of what has happened in Niio over the last months and highlight the work of artists and galleries with whom we are proud to collaborate. However, there is much more than what fits in this page! We invite you to browse our app and discover our curated art program, as well as our editorial section.

Five articles from 2022

Niio is part of a wider ecosystem that includes the contemporary art world, the art market, and digital culture in general. In our Editorial section, we look at what is happening globally and offer our views and analyses, based on our professional knowledge and observations. We have visited and reviewed some key events in the international art world calendar, such as the Venice Biennale, and followed the latest developments in the NFT scene, as well as the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence programs in artistic research. We have also initiated two series of educational posts, titled Ask Me Anything and Quick Dive, seeking to offer our readers an introduction to the main concepts and terms in the digital art field and the contemporary art market.

We have chosen five articles among more than 60 posts enriching our Editorial section this year. Click on the titles to read each article.

The Role of Art in a Climate Emergency

On 13th October 2022, two climate activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, threw two cans of tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers (1888), on display at the National Gallery in London. The controversy sparked by this protest brings up the question: what is the role of art in a climate emergency?

The article analyzes the reasons behind the protest and the reaction of artist Joanie Lemercier, as well as the views of other artists addressing climate change through digital art.

We care more about representations of nature than about nature itself. We have made cities and virtual spaces our habitat, while using natural environments as sites of leisure, or even just as an image to be displayed on the computer’s desktop. 

Digital Art at the Venice Biennale

The 59th International Art Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, its satellite pavilions and shows marked a strong emphasis on the advancements of digital art as a rightful art world medium. This article explores the different digital art focused exhibitions displayed at the Venice Biennale Arsenale & Giardini, and satellite events.

Installation View, Sonia Boyce Feeling Her Way, British Pavilion.

This year marked a great leap for the new media arts, artists and practices as the 59th Venice Biennale can be seen as a celebration of the digital, setting the placement of the digital arts side by side with traditional respected mediums.

ISEA2022: the possible spaces of new media art

Drone show on the closing night of ISEA2022 Barcelona

The 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art took place in Barcelona from 9 to 16th June, bringing to the city a community of more than 750 experts in art, science and technology and hosting 140 presentations made by experts in the field, 45 institutional presentations, 40 talks given by artists, 23 screenings, 18 posters and demos, 16 round tables, 13 workshops, and 13 performances. The main organizer of the event was the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), in partnership with ISEA International, the Government of Catalonia and the main cultural and political institutions in the region. The article reviewed the three main exhibitions of digital art in the scene, alongside several shows taking place in commercial art galleries.

The exhibitions in Barcelona feature three different forms of presenting new media art: a setup similar to contemporary art biennials, a process-oriented, artist-in-residence environment, and a new media art festival exhibition.

Out of the grid, into your screen: display your NFTs anywhere

The NFT revolution has brought an unprecedented attention to digital art, which is now easier to collect than ever before: once you sync your wallet to the marketplace, you only need to browse, pick your favorite NFTs, and in two clicks you’re the proud owner of a rare gem that just dropped. It is so easy that many collectors have hundreds, if not thousands, of digital artworks in their wallet. The excitement of owning something beautiful and unique, paired with the immediacy of the transaction, can become addictive. As the collection grows, it fills row after row of an endless grid that you can see on any web browser. With a simple copy and paste, you can also share your collection with anyone and brag about your possessions, your taste, or your ability to seize the opportunity and get that coveted artwork that is now out of reach of most wallets. This article explores how you can preserve and display your NFTs using Niio Manage.

Just as most collectors have artworks in different sizes that fit certain spaces of their homes, it is possible to have a series of screens to display different kinds of artworks

Miles Aldridge: photography and a love for cinema

Miles Aldridge, “A Drop of Red #2”, 2021.

Miles Aldridge is a British photographer and artist who rose to prominence in the mid nineties with his remarkable and stylized photographs which reference film noir, art history, pop culture, and fashion photography. Miles Aldridge is the son of Alan Aldridge, a famous British art director, graphic designer, and illustrator, who is known for his work with notable figures such as John Lennon, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones. Alan Aldridge was the art director for Penguin books. His work is mainly characterized as a combination of psychedelia and eroticism. Miles thus grew up in an artistic environment even posing with his father for Lord Snowdon as a child.

Niio Art in collaboration with Fahey/Klein Gallery recently published an artcast featuring a selection of Miles Aldridge’s extensive oeuvre. This article is based on Miles Aldridge’s interview with Bret Easton Ellis for Fahey/Klein Gallery.

“I like the sense of eternity, when a figure seems to be permanently frozen. The power of an image is not to have a beginning, middle, and ending, but that it’s a complete universe. It’s like the figures are permanently there”

Miles Aldridge

Fabio Catapano: the beauty of simplicity

Pau Waelder

Fabio Catapano is an Italian digital artist and designer who works with code, CGI, and motion. Encouraged by the possibilities that the NFT market has opened to digital artists, he is developing a growing body of work inspired by Japanese aesthetics and creating generative art that moves away from strict geometry and explores the poetic side of creative coding. On the occasion of his solo artcast A Theory of Color, we had a conversation about his creative process and his views on the future of digital art.

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221201, 2022

What took you to create your artworks using generative algorithms and how would you describe your creative process?

It was the result of a series of choices. When I was younger, I worked for a long time as a VJ making visuals for clubs and musicians. In that process, you need to create a lot of video content, and I used a software called Quartz Composer, which is pretty much one of the first node-based generative system software programs. Besides my work as a VJ, I have always been passionate about programming languages and I learned some Visual Basic as a hobby. So I had both the interest and the motivation to use this software and explore the creative possibilities of generative algorithms. Since what I did is write the code and then the system would generate the outcome, I found it fascinating to ask myself who is the creator, me or the machine? I feel that we are co-creators, and the software is not just a tool, it is something else.

“I take cues from the way software developers think and collaborate, how they create iterations and updates of the same program.”

The initial idea for an artwork can originate in a shape, the feeling of motion, or a texture, colors, or the combination of two or more elements together. The process in itself is very, very experimental, a form of research in which every outcome is a good outcome. How the project develops is very spontaneous: for instance, I started two years ago with the series Colorem and I wasn’t expecting to create so many pieces. But I ended up creating day after day a different iteration of the same system in a way that felt as a journal of the whole process. I take cues from the way software developers think and collaborate, how they create iterations and updates of the same program. This is why the artwork titles include a reference number that indicates the date of creation and are therefore similar to the versions in a computer program. 

Working in iterations. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

Every day there is a different outcome and a different exploration, that may be driven by a series of colors, or shapes, or something that I did before. Sometimes I want something that is a bit more grainy, or a bit more clean. But none of those, in my opinion, are the correct answers. They are just moments in time, part of an exploration. That’s pretty much how I started to work with generative art. 

Ideas lead to other ideas. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

Color plays an important role in your latest series of works. This is an element that is crucial both to designers and visual artists. How do you work with color in the different facets of your professional work? What led you to make it a central part of your artistic research?

It’s funny, because many years ago –I was 17 back then– when I started to create digital art with Photoshop and other programs, it was very colorful. After that, I discovered generative art, and I shifted to black and white. I did so because I was more focused on learning the system and how to create genuine art. So I was more interested in how to create shapes and decided to remove the colors from the equation, and everything became black and white. But then I realized that there was nothing really creative about it. Many other generative artists at that time were creating very geometrical, black and white art that, to me, looks only like a lazy version of a work by Bridget Riley. So I was learning but it felt like I was bringing nothing new to the conversation. 

That’s when I started to shift to colors. I also did so because I wanted to do the opposite of what you expect from computer art, very geometric and strict, with shapes but not colors. I wanted to show that a computer can dream. So I created these shapes that are fluid and can move from one color to another. Also at that time I became interested in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which deals with appreciating the simplicity, imperfection, and mutability of things. I took inspiration from the book WA: The Essence of Japanese Design by Rossella Menegazzo and Stefania Piotti, which shows how Japanese artists such as Takeshi Hara or Koichi Ogawa, among many others, manage to bring such quality in the designs they create. I was also inspired by the Polish artist Wojciech Fangor. I love the way these artists deal with simplicity, structure, and color. 

Japanese inspiration. Images collected by Fabio Catapano.

I also want to show that generative art can be something else, not just the geometrical art that is usually represented by the cyberpunk community. Generative art does not need to be futuristic, it can be something else: it can be white, it can be slow, it can be dreamy… Slowness is also important to my work because nowadays everything goes very fast in our digital lives, social media promotes content that grabs attention in the first three seconds, and I intentionally try to go in the opposite direction, towards a calm and slow contemplation.

“I wanted to do the opposite of what you expect from computer art, very geometric and strict, with shapes but not colors. I wanted to show that a computer can dream.”

While you work with generative algorithms, the outputs of your work are usually still images, videos, and prints. How do you work with these different formats? What makes you choose which will be the final shape of a particular piece?

I have released only one project as a software, Origami, that generated a new output every time it was minted, in a limited edition. This was on (fx)hash, last June. I have never released an artwork as a software that someone can run on the computer, mostly because I find it complicated to explain and distribute. However, I think that, for instance, Colorem as work shouldn’t be a video, it should be software. Because the idea is that it can run there and just constantly change and never be the same. But that’s pretty much true for any generative artwork. So if one day I find a way to distribute those ideas through software, I will be happy to explore further and introduce a new layer of variability and new layer of randomness that is informed by an external factor. I would like the artwork to be detached from me at some point. 

Creating with a computer. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

In my work I try to think in a more fluid way where I don’t care much about, for instance, the ratio, because ideally with a few clicks I can change the format. And if I work in a print on paper, then I choose a particular moment in the process which to me is interesting, and that can stand on itself as a static artwork. There is also an important process taking place when I create a print, which involves choosing the paper and seeing how the pigments react to the paper, and how the texture of the paper gives a new dimension to the colors. Actually, working with paper inspired me to introduce grainy textures in my digital artworks and try out gray backgrounds, which is something I am still experimenting with.

In this sense, something that is interesting is that artists today can work in a way that artists before couldn’t: today we can use social media as a lab, by posting tests and experiments and getting a response from your audience. To be honest, it is important for me what my followers say, to have that feedback, because I don’t create the artworks to just put them in a drawer, I want them to be seen.   

Another format that I want to work with is projection. As a VJ, I worked a really long time with a projector. And I’m missing right now that in the equation: I have a screen that emits light. I have a paper that receives light. But the projector does something else, it throws light on a surface. That is way more interesting because that again becomes not just an image, it becomes a lighting solution. And the reason why I haven’t tried that yet is because you need the right projector, the right space with the right amount of light, the right attention from the audience, and stuff like that. It’s nothing new, of course, but I would really like to explore that other avenue.

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221025, 2022

You have been nominated as one of the ten most influential NFT artists in Italy. What has the NFT market brought to your practice, what do you find most interesting in distributing your work in this format?

There is this well-known saying: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I’d say that also value is in the eye of the beholder. What this means is that, after NFTs, even JPEGs have gained value, a value that is supported by a collective agreement and a collective trust. So we decided that the JPEG from now on is not just a JPEG that one can find on the internet, but is a JPEG that can have a $1 value and tomorrow can increase that value to $2 and so on. So, what the NFT market brought me as an artist is a community and a collective trust that turned digital art into something valuable. We know that digital art has existed for many years, and that it has had its value, but suddenly, we have more attention. And it’s a good thing, because there are many projects, many museum shows, and many new things happening. To me it has also meant being able to proudly say: “I’m a digital artist,” and that people can understand what that means.

Value is in the eye of the beholder. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

On the other hand, the NFT market brought me some revenue and the opportunity to focus on the practice itself. I launched my Genesis with SuperRare. The series was called Data Collector, and it referred to the fact that nowadays collectors are actually collecting data, a bunch of information that moves from one wallet to another. And suddenly this data has value, because we all agreed that it has. So I took these classic statues and made them into particles that move like data moves from one wallet to another. Beyond art, I think that NFTs and blockchain technology will be very important in many more aspects of our lives.

“What the NFT market brought me as an artist is a community and a collective trust that turned digital art into something valuable.”

Having participated in exhibitions in museums, galleries, and also metaverses, what would you highlight in these spaces as the most interesting for the presentation of your work?

I would say that the one space I don’t like is the metaverse as it is designed right now. I see no reason why I need to have a puppet moving in a digital world, watching very low resolution JPEGs. Why do you need a room at all? Additionally, what is being offered now looks like a cheap version of a video game. In fact, I’d say that Fornite and Minecraft are better “metaverses” than most projects I’ve seen.

Then when it comes to galleries, I have to say that most of the people running these spaces don’t know how to display digital art, because they don’t understand the medium. They don’t understand its physicality and the technology behind it. Now everyone wants to jump on this trend, but there are so many things that you need to consider: choosing the screens, the right environment, the lighting, and so forth. Still, I believe this will change and it will get better.

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221207, 2022

How would you compare your creative process when working with a brand as a designer and when you are creating as part of your own artistic research?

An artist today has to be many things at once: a designer, a photographer, a marketer… There are a lot of things that probably have been there before, but today even more so because the market is more competitive. In my commercial projects, I didn’t actually create the work for them. Rather, the brand bought an artwork I had made and licensed it to use it in their communications and design. It is more and more common that art and design are combined or fused in some contexts. Design is great, but it can be very dry from a storytelling point of view, while art can push those boundaries and can explore new visions.

Fabio Catapano. Colorem Fragments v1, 2022

You have expressed interest in the possibility of displaying digital art on any screen, in a way that can be compared with street art taking over public space. From the perspective of sociology and anthropology, how do you see this presence of digital art evolving in the future?
It is clear to me that we are increasingly surrounded by screens and digital devices. We have quickly switched from having one television set per home to having multiple TVs, smartphones, tablets, and computers. These screens are also closer to us than the television set ever was, and they are not in one room anymore, they move with us and invade every space we inhabit, also the public space. Looking at films like Blade Runner, I see a future with screens everywhere, in which the content will be customized to every user. This can also happen from an artistic point of view, so for instance the content is actually related to the person that is looking at it. Similarly to what is happening now with NFTs, every person is identified by their wallet and carries their art collection with them, wherever they go. With connected screens, we will be able to take our art with us and enjoy it wherever we are.

Niio in 2022: the interviews

Niio Editorial

As we reach the end of 2022, we look back at a very busy year, and forward to an even more intense 2023. In this series of posts, we have selected some of our favorite artcasts, artists, artworks, articles, and interviews. They outline an overview of what has happened in Niio over the last months and highlight the work of artists and galleries with whom we are proud to collaborate. However, there is much more than what fits in this page! We invite you to browse our app and discover our curated art program, as well as our editorial section.

Five interviews from 2022

Interviews are an important part of our Editorial content, because we believe that artists, gallerists, and curators have important things to say, and we want their words to reach our readers. We are privileged to live in a time when it is possible to connect with people around the world and have a conversation with them, learn from their experience and get a first person account of their creative process. This year we have spoken to wonderful and generous art professionals who have spent time with us explaining their work and their views on digital art, sometimes at a distance, and other times visiting their studios. These conversations are certainly worth reading for anyone who wishes to understand how art is created nowadays.

We have chosen five interviews from almost 40 conversations published in our Editorial section this year. Click on the titles to read each article.

Photo: Joanna Holloway

Steve Sacks founded bitforms in New York in November 2001, at a time when digital art was getting attention among the contemporary art institutions in the USA as well as Europe. Major exhibitions held that same year, such as Bitstreams and Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and 010101: Art in Technological Times at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art were particularly inspirational for him.

Photo: Joanna Holloway

Over two decades, bitforms has achieved an influential position in the contemporary art market as a gallery devoted to digital art, participating in major art fairs and representing some of the most recognized artists in this field, such as Manfred Mohr, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Casey Reas, Quayola, Auriea Harvey, Refik Anadol, Gary Hill, Claudia Hart, Beryl Korot, Marina Zurkow, Daniel Canogar, Daniel Rozin, Siebren Versteeg and many others. On the occasion of the third series of Niio Commissions, which was curated by Sacks, we sat down with the gallerist to discuss his views on the development of the contemporary art market and the role that digital art is now playing in it.

“Niio gives my artists more exposure and it’s much easier for collectors to view and manage their artworks”

Steven Sacks

Marina Zurkow, artist

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.

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.

“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.”

Marina Zurkow

Daniel Canogar, artist

The leading artist in the Spanish media art scene, Daniel Canogar‘s influential work spans almost four decades and a wide range of media from video art installations to generative software art. On the occasion of his solo artcast Liquid Data, our Senior Curator Pau Waelder interviewed him in his studio in Madrid.

“My work as a media artist is about trying to think of data, of sculpture, of the history of art, in a synchronous way where it all comes together.”

Daniel Canogar

Tamiko Thiel, artist

Tamiko Thiel is a pioneering visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, objects, installations, digital prints in 2D and 3D, videos, interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence art.

We had a conversation with the artist on the occasion of the launch of her solo artcast Invisible Nature curated by DAM Projects, in which she discusses the evolution of technology over the last three decades, her early AR artworks and her commitment to create art that invites reflection.

“What is truly the value of an artist making work about a subject such as these is that the art work can be exhibited time and time again, in different places around the world.”

Tamiko Thiel

Patrick Tresset, artist

Patrick Tresset is an artist who explores a form of mediated creation in which his drawing style is transferred to a set of robotic drawing machines or applied to video footage to create artworks that are curiously algorithmic and spontaneous at the same time. He is also the co-founder of alterHEN, an eco-friendly NFT platform and artist community whose artists have participated in a previous artcast on Niio. Tresset has also presented his series Human Study in a solo artcast launched recently.

Our Senior Curator Pau Waelder interviewed him in his studio in Brussels on the occasion of his visit to the Art Brussels art fair. They discussed his work and the series that originated from an exhibition in Hong Kong that he had to remotely orchestrate during lockdown.

“So there is this weird thing with control, because in the beginning I have control, but then when the robots start, I don’t have any control. And that leads to an interesting form of spontaneity.”

Patrick Tresset

Niio in 2022: the artworks

Niio Editorial

As we reach the end of 2022, we look back at a very busy year, and forward to an even more intense 2023. In this series of posts, we have selected some of our favorite artcasts, artists, artworks, articles, and interviews. They outline an overview of what has happened in Niio over the last months and highlight the work of artists and galleries with whom we are proud to collaborate. However, there is much more than what fits in this page! We invite you to browse our app and discover our curated art program, as well as our editorial section.

Five artworks from 2022

Screens have become the canvas of the 21st century. Artists display their creativity in digital artworks that are meant to exist on a screen, sometimes inside a web browser or even a mobile app. We believe that artworks are better experienced and appreciated in a dedicated screen, and therefore our whole system enables setting up a screen at home or anywhere that becomes a space for art. Within this space, many things can happen: the images that appear on the screen can be painstakingly created through 3D modeling, or drawn using a generative algorithm. They can also consist of video footage mixed with hyper-realistic CGI elements. They can be abstract or build a precise narrative, and they can be crafted from scratch or appropriated from an external source. It is quite impossible to describe everything that an artist can create digitally and that fits on a screen, as it is defining everything that a painting on canvas can be.

We have chosen five artworks from more than 230 moving image artworks and 185 photographs featured in our curated art program this year. Click on the artists’ names to find out more about their work.

Yoshi Sodeoka. Synthetic Liquid 8, 2022

Supported by a hybrid creative process that is both analog and digital, Sodeoka deploys an unconventional artistic approach that challenges the video medium. While questioning the major issues of visual media, its perception, and the interpretation of the world in the digital age, the work navigates narrative universes with singularly ultra-guided aesthetics. “Synthetic Liquid” depicts organic forms and blatant colors that open a portal to psychedelic and illusory world far from reality.

A multifaceted artist, Yoshi Sodeoka creates a wide range of audiovisual artistic works that include video art, animated gifs, music videos, and editorial illustrations. Influenced from an early stage in his career in noise music and glitch art, as well as avant garde movements such as Op Art, his work is characterized by breaking down the structure of the musical score and visual integrity of the image to find new forms of artistic expression.

Driessens & Verstappen. Kennemerduinen 2010, scene H, 2011

Kennemerduinen 2010, is a project for which the artists documented six locations around the Kennemer dunes (near the North Sea). Each film has a duration of almost nine minutes and covers exactly one year, from one January to the next. On a weekly basis, each scene was repeatedly photographed from the same position and at the same time of day, around noon. With custom developed software each series of shots was edited into fluid transitions. Slow transformations and changes in season, that are never directly perceptible in daily life, are perceptible on a sensory level. By systematically computerising and formalising observation, the Kennemer dunes films became studies of the spontaneous course of nature, of the emergent and entropic processes underlying it.

In the past years Driessens & Verstappen have documented three different types of Dutch landscapes: a historic landscape park (Frankendael 2001), a dike landscape (Diemerzeedijk 2007) and a dune landscape (Kennemerduinen 2010). From each landscape type several films are made.

Katie Torn. Dream Flower I, 2022

“Dream Flower I” is a 3D animation that depicts a snoozing biomorphic female arrangement made out of flowers, leaves and pipes. As the creature sleeps, a plastic like liquid flows from the pipes creating a relaxing fountain. The work is inspired by Victorian botanical illustrations.

Katie Torn’s work explores the female figure in a world shaped by digital technology and obsession with self-image boosted by social media and consumer culture. She uses 3D graphics and video to build assemblages of natural and artificial elements that question the boundaries between beauty and decay, body and prosthesis, organic and synthetic, and between a person’s own self and the image she creates of herself. 

Julian Brangold. Observation Machine (Iteration), 2022

A sculpture depicting a seating man is multiplied six times, the copies rotating in a choreographed fashion. Colored in a pink hue, the sculptures resemble consumer products, souvenirs lined up on a shelf waiting to be purchased. At the same time, the artist applies an effect that makes the sculptures come to pieces, as if an invisible hand were trying to touch them but destroyed them in the process.

Julian Brangold (Buenos Aires, 1986) is one of the leading names in the growing digital art community in Argentina. Through painting, computer programming, 3D modeling, video installations, collage, and a myriad of digital mediums, he addresses how technologies such as artificial intelligence and data processing are shaping our culture and memory, as well as our notion of self. An active participant in the cryptoart scene and NFT market in Argentina he has been exploring art on the blockchain since 2020 and is currently the Director of Programming at  Museum of Crypto Art, a web3 native cultural institution.

Julie Blackmon. New Neighbors, 2020

Courtesy the artist and Fahey-Klein gallery

Julie Blackmon (b. 1966) is an American photographer who lives and works in Missouri. As an art student at Missouri State University, Blackmon became interested in photography, especially the work of Diane Arbus and Sally Mann. Blackmon’s oeuvre also shows influences from Masters of the Dutch Renaissance such as Jan Steen.

Niio Art in collaboration with Fahey/Klein Gallery recently published an Artcast of Julie Blackmon’s photography works in digital format. The artist focuses on the complexities and contradictions of modern life, exploring, among other subjects, the overwhelming, often conflicting expectations and obligations of contemporary parenthood. Blackmon has stated that her works deal with “modern parenting, and the contradictions and expectations and the overwhelmed feeling that go with parenting today as compared to the past” furthermore the artist has stated “with the little ones it’s more metaphorical than about parenting, and speaks of the anxieties of everyday modern life”.

Thomas Lisle: On 3D painting, abstraction, and punk rock

Roxanne Vardi

Thomas Lisle is a British artist who works in 3D animation, painting, digital art, and installations. Lisle’s works display his intention in creating new forms using digital tools, and his interest in psychology and the environment. Moreover, his artworks are part of the collections at Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York. This interview is presented in conjunction with the launch of our latest curated solo show artcast titled Thomas Lisle: New Forms and Plasticity.

As an artist you create both paintings and digital artworks. Moreover, towards the creation of some of your digital works you also use digital paint techniques? Could you share with us your thoughts on combining more traditional historical art mediums with today’s available digital tools?

So I don’t see a combination of mediums; I see different mediums but with shared values (no mathematical values !), shared visual languages, shared symbols and psychological responses, it’s just a continuation of modern art practice in a new medium.

Let’s be clear the digital medium is very different from the real world, art critics and writers used to talk about an artist’s relationship with the media they were working in, but today very few art commentators have much knowledge of the practicality and techniques of digital art.

Artworks may be evaluated on the visual images, ideas and reactions that they invoke. We do care and think about how traditional paintings and sculptures are made. People talk about responses to mediums, and the specific use of a material in the artwork, like Eva Hesse (Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy.) Wikipedia. or Richard Sierra and rusty steel. A drawing made with a pencil and a drawing done with mud or blood, for example, the medium makes a difference. 

So I see the autographic, the hand-making marks by the artist as central to the paintings that I admire along with composition colour and form. What’s extraordinary about digital 3D painting is that it opens up the boundaries of what a paint stroke is capable of. If you think of ‘loading’ a brush with paint, then this paint flows out of the brush onto the paper and depending on your point of view, makes something beautiful, interesting or not. The brush is an emitter, the paint, carbon, ink, whatever flows out its just a real world liquid that can be simulated digitally. You can copy this with a digital paintbrush, but every aspect of the paint stroke can be programmed, if you use a tablet, then the pressure, direction and speed data all gets collected, and that data can be then fed in to control how thick your brush is how hairy, how anything you like, almost.

I get lots of satisfaction, both intellectually and visually, from making complex time-based abstractions from 3D paint strokes and 3D models. It relates to the need for some chaos, some randomisation in an artwork, some craziness, the hand-to-eye relationship. I use the variation in pressure, speed, and direction of a 2D brush stroke to become the starting point in a great deal of my artwork. Often the 3D brush stroke gets abstracted beyond the point of recognition as a brush stroke very quickly. This is intentional, and it’s not that I don’t like brush strokes, but that the initial motion and intent, is recorded and the data from it, is used to drive other values, such as the density of a cloud or velocity of a liquid, it’s a kind of transformation of one thing into another, a kind of ‘painting’ ‘form’ ‘psychological alchemy’ to me. A visual and coded metaphor for internal, psychological or collective change, progression, or distortion. 

So while the digital paint medium is very different from the real-world medium, and one of the biggest differences is that its time based, many things are the same. I think composition, colour and form are still important; they didn’t just get cancelled. Visual languages don’t just disappear; symbols and meaning didn’t just ripped up and forgotten about. The trouble is that it’s difficult to have access to the right software – it can be expensive, it takes many years to learn and then the artist has to find a means of expression with the tools, software and hardware that are available. 

I have personally been trying to make some kind of moving painting since 1982 when on my foundation, I started detuning TV sets and recording the results so that I could realise this idea of time-based art that is not photographic film/video, but rather abstract and based on visual languages. 

If you have only become interested in digital art in the last few years, then it can all seem just digital at first, and how it’s made doesn’t seem so important. However, I would argue that what software is used and how well it is handled has a very drastic effect on the artistic output. As a simple example of this, just look at how many bald CGI characters there are. Any idea why? I don’t think it’s because it’s a new way of depicting humans or some ideas about bodily purity (hair being unpure, intrinsically non-body), that’s for sure. And I’m guilty of making bald figures, too. I know why I have done it; it’s because adding hair involves a whole series of technical and time-consuming issues (and not because I’m fairly bald). If I wanted to add realism, then it is going to take a few days to program and set up so that it looks and moves realistically as the character moves. On top of that, there’s a huge hit on the render time per frame from computing the motion of all the hairs and rendering 100s of thousand of individual hairs. If I buy or download some license-free, none dynamic hair, just a solid blob of matter, I might feel I have compromised. If I didn’t know a bit about human IK skeletons and character rigging (the systems that enable character animations). I wouldn’t know how to keep that hair in the same place as the head; it’s attached to as it moved. You then need to give that hair mass a hair-looking texture and have to understand how UV mapping works (UV coordinates map textures to 3D objects); it’s quite difficult to learn. If my figure is in some way distorted or abstracted, I would have to apply a similar abstraction to the hair, and this is another big issue because if my hair model isn’t made in the same way as the figure, and I didn’t make the figure, I just downloaded it or bought it for £10, then I would have to learn how to model and how to integrate even the most basic hair model into the deformation in a way that matched the figures’ abstraction also not straight forward. So bald is the easy solution, but it really makes no sense; art history is not littered with bald Mona Lisas and Madonnas, ok babies are born fairly bald, so that’s ok. The world’s artists have never gone around and depicted people who would normally have hair bald for any reason whatsoever that I know of.

There’s also a huge difference between art drawn on an iPad and made by an AI or drawn, modelled in 3D. 

If you look at a digital artwork and think that someone has hand-drawn it when in fact, it’s a video effect off the shelf that took 5 minutes to achieve – it may not devalue the artwork, but it may still be fantastic in your eyes, it may be genuinely fantastic! Or you imagine an artist has cleverly programmed an Ai supercomputer to do it or built a filter from the ground up. It’s valuable to understand the artwork and the artist’s input. I’m being careful not to dismiss digital techniques that are not sophisticated or are off the shelf, the artist may be new to digital art generation the visual idea and the concept could still be fascinating, but if you don’t know the differences, then you don’t know what the artist did and you don’t understand the process or the artist’s practice. 

“So I see the autographic, the hand-making marks by the artist as central to the paintings that I admire along with composition colour and form. What’s extraordinary about digital 3D painting is that it opens up the boundaries of what a paint stroke is capable of.”

Thomas Lisle, Abstract 01, 2022.

For the creation of your artworks included in your latest artcast you make use of 3D digital tools. Could you dive deeper into the complexity of these tools and how to aid contemporary artists in expressing their explorations through this new medium?

I have been trying to make time-based paintings since I was 19. Yes, there is hand drawn/painted animation, but it takes so long, it’s not procedural, and on the whole, it hasn’t been the medium of many contemporary artists, and I would say that’s because it takes a very long time, there has been no market for it, and I would say it’s difficult too, but NFT’s might change that.

The artworks in my artcast are autographic, generative and procedural (procedural-an artwork defined by a computationally represented system of rules, relationships, and behaviours, enables the creation of works that are flexible, adaptable, and capable of systematic revision. Dynamic Drawing: Broadening Practice and Participation in Procedural Art Jennifer Jacobs MIT 2017). Many artworks are going to be both Generative and procedural at the same time, and they could be 3D, 2D, AR, VR, still or moving. 

In simple terms, procedural means that one programs an effect/distortion that affects a 3D model or some element in 3D or 2D and it abstracts it in a very specific way. Because it’s procedural, you can apply that effect to another different model by swapping over the input model i.e from a horse to a chicken. Procedural means all the elements that make up the abstraction effect can be tweaked, revised, animated and manipulated in more depth. I use these techniques a great deal and build on complex programming sequences that I have worked on previously, changing, modifying and improving the initial way the distortion or simulation works. Sometimes I take the whole abstraction code and make it part of a subset of another larger, more complex distortion/simulation. Once you start playing around with the fundamental building blocks, the DNA of form as it where you can start to build a new and personalised visual abstractions that are, in effect, similar to painting styles. This is particularly relevant to 3D artwork, where the scope for new forms and new and novel ways of abstraction is vastly wider than in 2D. This is because 3D encapsulates the whole object, whereas 2D only gives you the bit you can see. Leonardo only painted the front of the Mona Lisa, so if we manipulate her in 2D, we are never going to have access to the back of her, only the bit we can see in 2D.

The artworks in the artcast use lots of different techniques, from 3D painted forms to 3D painted forms turned to gases and liquids, deformed shapes, animated textures, several different types of gas simulation, directly painted tubes, particle flows, and more! It’s very much about contrasting visual elements motions and forms working in different ways to come to a sort of visual balance.

My heartfelt belief is that as cave women/men painted and people throughout history, it’s the element of the human expression that comes through using tools that they themselves wield and have a relationship with that have the meaning. The most direct way of doing that digitally is with a touch-sensitive pen or equivalent. As I mentioned earlier, an artist has to work with the tools that they have available, and I believe Blender ( a free open sources 3D package) has some 3D painting capabilities. It can make fluids, and gases, animate characters, deform models, it can do a great deal it has a modular programming functionality and a procedural node based programming language. I personally think that it’s easy to get lost in the effect and lose sight of the goal. I know that I have often spent months trying to learn a certain technique and forget why I wanted to use it in the first place. I use Maya for my artworks and have done for over 15 years.

I read an article by Alex Estorick a few years ago when he asked the question, “why are there not more painting-based 3D artworks”. Well, the answer is quite simple, it’s complicated to make a 3D paint mark that has fluid qualities and is programmable over time. The only solutions I have seen that incorporate touch sensitivity, a loaded multicoloured brush, and liquid simulations are in Houdini and Maya software packages maybe Blender. In 10 years time or so, I think people will have the computation power and disk space to do this easily. At the moment, it’s complex, and there is no off-the-shelf digital tool that does it properly. To get it to work, I have to program it procedurally, there are limits to how much detail and how long a fluid simulation will be defined by my computing power. It’s possible to make the paint stroke fundamentals in real time; the rest, the liquid simulations, take a few days to compute. I enjoy making something based on a paint stroke that then morphs into something uniquely animated and digital that no longer has any visual relationship with a brush stroke yet uses the data in the stroke to drive the animation/abstraction/deformation. And If I didn’t say anything you would probably never know.

Sometimes I have made these types of artwork and feel that the real interest lies in the struggle to work out how to do it, as the result is not as interesting as the amount of effort put in to make it. However, a few years later I find that I appreciate that learning and experimenting with a technology has led to all sorts of new and exciting work and has been invaluable after all. A splash of paint can easily become a sort of non-contemporary art thing, a more corporate communications symbol for some kind of creativity. I really want to avoid that! And find more interest in the abstraction and deformation of paint-like strokes; being able to turn off gravity reverse the surface tension of a liquid, and make paint stick to 3D characters or models opens up lots of interesting possibilities. I’m starting to treat paint simulations as an element of a larger artwork, an element that describes something but is not the centre of the artwork. 

I heard Frank Stella recently describing some of his work as painting in 3D, and this is what is so interesting about 3D software, it brings together two systems that have been thought of as two distinct systems. It’s a fundamental shift in visual thinking. 

“I enjoy making something based on a paint stroke that then morphs into something uniquely animated and digital that no longer has any visual relationship with a brush stroke yet uses the data in the stroke to drive the animation/abstraction/deformation.”

Thomas Lisle, In the Minds Eye, 2022.

Can you please elaborate on your interest in psychology and how this is incorporated into your artworks?

I will try and answer briefly. It seems that there are universal rules that apply to people’s psychology regardless of where they are born, which means that basically, we are all humans regardless of race and religion; religion itself seems to be oriented to where you are born and the culture you grow up in. So rather than think of specific issues to bring to the public attention in art why not look at the underlying causes of all the issues. And secondly, we are all developing psychologically; I don’t think many people can claim they have reached a full understanding of themselves or their full potential. We all have some personal issues, no one is perfect, and we all have a shadow side that we need to come to terms with. We are all moving towards individuation of one sort or another from birth, it seems to me.

As I studied psychology more and more, I started to find out about psychological symbols in art and film, and I started to investigate archetypes (  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=this+jungian+life+archetypes wonderful lectures of archypes) and their use in narratives and symbols, from folk tales to feature films. And symbols and psychological alchemy, the psychologist (James Hillman was written some eye-opening books on the subject.) And I started to incorporate ideas and concepts of psychology into my artwork. And Jung’s book “Man and his symbols” and introduction to Jungian psychology and symbols.

Thomas Lisle, Abstract 02, 2022.

Some of your artworks such as Abstract 01 and Abstract 02 may remind some of artworks by artist Wassily Kandinsky. Is there a purposeful reference to art history in your works?

Not specifically, but I love his work and subconsciously, its working away somewhere in the background. There are lots of references to the art history of the last 100 years, in my work.

Are there any other traditional artists or art periods that you look back at or are inspired by in the creation of your works?

In the 20th century, artists like Picasso and Rauchenberg, the Fauves and German expressionists have been lifelong influences. Helen Chadwick, Ron Haseldon, Marc Chaimowicz all had an influence on me when I was at Art school. Today some of the artists I find the most interesting are Albert Oehlens and Gerhard Richter. It’s the visual experience and ideas that make their work so interesting and important and an important influence on my work.

Thomas Lisle, Subconscious Motions, 2022.

As a young artist you became interested in Glitch Art and Punk Rock, could you outline how these art forms influenced your art practice and oeuvre of works in general?

I think there is an element of punk rock in lots of art movements, from the Fauves to Dada to Expressionism, at the time of punk rock, it only really lasted a few years; there was no equivalent visual movement, I was only 16 in 1978, it seemed an important movement to be part of and it was very cathartic. 

My glitch art was borne out of a desire to make art that was more about our time (then) and the media of the time, analog TV, to basically make images that had a new approach to abstraction by detuning TVs by making them go wrong and using ones that didn’t really work, capturing a bit of the randomness at specific moments. For those of you who never experienced analogy TV it was the high tech of the 70’s 80’and 90’s that really wasn’t very perfect and all controlled by the Broadcasters. Around that time in the early 1980s, I started to be interested in Electronic music – I can’t play an instrument or even hum in tune, but there was no equivalent to the synthesiser for artists in the 80s. Today I still like electronic music. I listen to a wide variety from classic to world, to electronic. The fascinating popular music for me today is the french “Trip Hop” scene, I can see elements of that kind of clash of taking all sorts of reference points and techniques and putting them together in a chaotic way that somehow finds some kind of balance or sense interesting in a number of ways with my digital art.

So going back to your question, I think the legacy of punk rock was to be happy to take risks and not worry about the results. My work with glitch art was aimed at finding new ways to abstract figures in a mode that was analogous to the times I lived in and to take on board the idea of time-based painting. I gave up making glitch TV artworks by the early 1990’s as I got frustrated with the inflexibility of the medium; there’s very little control. It seems less about conscious abstraction, especially of the figure, than about a symbol for the frailty of the digital era. Analog glitch art threw up interesting abstractions, very randomly. Digital glitch art is programmed. Digital 3D systems give me control of nearly every aspect of the artwork I make, it’s all a conscious decision it’s all intended, even the added visual chaos is orchestrated.