British artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith work collaboratively as boredomresearch since the late 1990s, creating interactive and generative artworks, animations, and films inspired by natural environments and living systems. Since 2014, they have collaborated with scientists in the making of their projects about the diversity of natural systems, and the health of both our planet and our own bodies. Their work has been exhibited worldwide, in art and science museums, symposia, festivals, and art galleries.
On the occasion of the launch of their solo artcast Still, Life, curated by DAM Projects, the artists spoke about their work and their particular approach to scientific research through artistic creativity.
Explore the beauty of natural systems in boredomresearch’s artcast Still, Life
Why boredom research? The combination of both words is humorous and intriguing…
Paul Smith: We came up with the name, around 1998-99, as an umbrella term for our collaboration. Initially, we felt it implied playfulness, but also referred to serious research. More recently, it has grown into the idea of exploring the world in one’s own terms, being creative without the pressure to provide a solution to a problem, as scientists are expected to. So boredom is about having the freedom to be interested in something on your own terms.
Vicky Isley: Boredomis also about unpredictability. In our early works, it was very much about what could be driven through computation. And that led to things emerging that were quite unpredictable, which is what you experience in a state of boredom as well. On the other hand, we carry out serious in-depth research to produce these computational artworks, so it is a combination of study and play.
“Early in our career, we read that the time people spend with artworks in the gallery is about 5 to 30 seconds. So we wanted to reverse that paradigm, to have people spend months experiencing our work.”
You both have a background in Fine Arts, where does your interest in biology and natural systems come from?
VI: We’ve both always been inspired by natural systems. We love being immersed in nature. So to us, that’s really an integral part of our work. That’s where our passion comes from.
PS: Very early on, we became very interested in the computer as a tool. We had the opportunity to work with computers during a residency at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, back in 2001. We had been focused on human computer interaction, but there we created our first computational artworks that had no human interaction. They recreated beings that interacted with each other.
VI: We also became interested in artworks that were not linear and ran in real time, creating unique experiences for the viewers. Observing a system instead of interacting with a program is like observing nature, and that led us to look around and ask ourselves which are the rules in all these natural systems, why do living creatures behave like they do?
boredomresearch, Biome, 2005
You have often worked with scientists and mentioned “negotiating that space with the scientists.” How would you describe these collaborations and the role that art plays in scientific research?
PS: We started originally working with scientists that were interested in creating models of systems, the first scientist that we worked very closely with was working in the field of epidemiology. We became fascinated with their work because there was a huge similarity between what we were doing as artists and what he was doing as a scientist. We spent a lot of time talking about motivations, methods, ways of doing things, and we found that we had a lot in common. We found it hard to separate the space between scientists and artists, and I suppose to some extent, we’re still exploring that now.
VI: We understood that mathematical models are almost like fictional worlds as well because they are very contained in what they can visualize, which is very similar to an artistic model that creates a fictional system. Still, I would say that all the scientists that we’ve worked with, we’ve had to build up a trust relationship with them, to the point where they feel like they can trust us in their lab, because early on in the collaborations, they can be much more rigid.
boredomresearch’s Real Snail Mail (2006) is an installation that uses snails equipped with RFID tags to deliver email messages.
Time, duration, and real time processes are key to your work. How do they shape the conception and development of each artwork? How do you imagine the reaction of viewers will be?
VI: Very early in our career, we read an article about the time people spend with artworks in the gallery. And we found it quite shocking, because it’s mostly like 5 to 30 seconds. So we wanted to reverse that paradigm, which is something we very much did with Real Snail Mail: we took a technology that is about efficiency and speed, and then completely reversed that. So that has been present from a very early stage in our careers.
PS: We consciously wanted to create something in reaction to this idea of a seven second viewing time: we wanted to create something that would last six months. So we had this process where someone would create an entity which then haunted their computer and would develop slowly over a period of time. It worked a little bit like a virus running in the background, which used operating system components such as alert windows to communicate with its “host.” The program would ask for a file that was generated on another host’s computer, and so they would have to look for that person and get the file for the whole process to end. This took around six months.
“For us, it’s really nice to know that the collectors are living with these artworks on a day to day basis, because then they will experience them in the long term. They will be able to see different forms being generated from time to time.”
VI: We were surprised to find that quite a number of users would go through this process and that made us realize that there were people willing to have this kind of extended relationship with the artwork, that goes well beyond what you can experience in an exhibition. This is also one of the reasons why we wanted to create objects that would be owned by people and added to their collections. For instance, Lost Calls of Cloud MountainWhirligigs (2009-2010) is a generative artwork we created in an edition, and a number of them are already in private collections. For us, it’s really nice to know that the collectors are living with these artworks on a day to day basis, because then they will experience them in the long term. They will be able to see different forms being generated from time to time.
boredomresearch, Lost Calls of Cloud Mountain Whirligigs, 2010
In some of your artworks the subject of the endangerment of biodiversity and the effects of climate change comes up. How do you deal with this subject, and how do you think art can contribute to environmental awareness?
VI: Since we observe natural phenomena, and there are quite worrying things happening in our environment, our work can be quite melancholic. Recently, we’ve been looking at scientific topics like cancer, malaria, and things that perhaps people wouldn’t want to see in an artwork, which is quite interesting. So I think when we do create systems, likeAfterglow (2016), for example, which was about malaria, orIn Search of Chemozoa (2020), that was about cancer, there is a beauty and poetics to those systems, that draws people into a topic that perhaps they don’t really want to explore. And also, we don’t dictate that you have to know that they’re about. Sometimes people watching the artworks don’t really know that it’s an infection transmission scenario that is playing through, they might just be watching something that is visually more complex to them, or seeing the complexity of that system.
boredomresearch, Infection 626,239,238 Plasmodium Knowlesi, 2016 (video recording of Afterglow)
PS: Another aspect of this is that often scientists are interested in collaborating with artists because they see it as a potential means of communication. But we don’t see our role as being there to offer a way for the scientists to communicate their research to an audience. Our approach is not about communication at all, but rather about experience. An experience in which the viewer is an equal party, not just a non-expert who must be told things in simpler terms. So when we work with scientists we try to create an expression that is closely related to their research, but it is not an illustration of it.
“There is a beauty and poetics to natural systems such as the transmission of malaria or the evolution of cancer, that draws people into a topic that perhaps they don’t want to explore.”
Your work combines installations, generative artworks and also films. How do you work in these different forms of storytelling? You have stated that you are interested in the language of documentary, has that also permeated into your installation and generative work?
VI: Our interest in the language of documentaries first emerged when we produced Afterglow, because that was a commissioned project, and they asked us to produce a generative piece, but also a film version of the artwork as well. That was quite interesting, because the film version took you through the different infection scenarios which you wouldn’t see in the real time version in the gallery. So we had to think differently about the single screening version of that work and we learned a lot through that process. Now the narrative aspect is emerging more and more in our films, particularly in Chemozoa, where we added a godlike voice to bring together the voices of around 25 scientists from different fields.
We’re finding ourselves more out in nature with our work. Participating in artist residencies has allowed us to do field work which has led to our practice becoming more immersed in nature, whereas our early works were purely in front of the screen. I’d say that this has contributed to having a different involvement in what we observe, a kind of experience that we can communicate better using the language of documentaries.
“When we work with scientists we try to create an expression that is closely related to their research, but it is not an illustration of it.”
The sounds, or might I say music, in your generative works and films plays an important role, it creates an ambience. You have stated that “the sound comes at the end”, can you elaborate on the role it plays in your creative and production processes?
PS: Actually, in early works like System 1.6we sampled sounds from the Rocky Mountains and then we thought, what visual being could actually represent this sound? So in that case the order was reversed. In our film work, this is more challenging, because while we keep recording sounds from the environment, these come later on in editing. But in general I’d say that sound in our work has become something that gives things a voice. We usually conceive the visual aspect of our generated creatures before we introduce sounds, but then when we collaborate with scientists, there is sometimes the challenging question of finding sounds that represent the beings and processes we are making visible.
boredomresearch, System 1_6, 2001
VI: In our generative artworks, particularly those we want people to spend a lot of time with, we look for a background sound. And there is a very fine balance to achieve that, because you don’t want it to be annoying, but at the same time you want it to create an ambience, and communicate the idea that the creatures are alive and active. The Whirligigs, for instance, can be quite chirpy, and then they go through periods of silence, so there are different moments in the artwork that are expressed through sound.
PS: Actually, in our generative works we do not create soundscapes, we create a mechanism that produces sounds autonomously, and that becomes a soundscape. But lately we are increasingly taking responsibility for the quality of the sound and integrating a sound design process in the creation of the artworks, even with musical scores, that we develop in collaboration with professional musicians. The themes we are dealing with are also more serious, so there is probably a certain darkness in those sound pieces as well.
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 professors and co-curators Carla Gannis and Snow Yunxue Fu about the exhibition’s curatorial process and their views on the use of digital technologies for exhibiting artworks.
Snow Yunxue Fu, Daughter ICE avatar and her metaverse home on Sansar, 2023
Snow, you created Daughter ICE as an avatar that connects you with your mother and your family. Which possibilities do you see in metaverse spaces and avatars to build human relationships and experiences of presence with a distant audience?
I approach the Metaverse space sometimes to “make dreams come true”. Daughter ICE is a long-term project that in a way materializes my long-distance relationship with my mother and family members in China, and the Metaverse home of Daughter ICE is this visualized space of a dream house, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, where nature and architecture harmoniously come together. This digital space also functions as a place where one can gather together with other people, like with my family at a distance. In Daughter ICE’s home, we can have pop-up shows, we can attend a live opening in the virtual space no matter which counties we are physically located in.
Snow Yunxue Fuworks with imaging technologies, such as 3D Simulation, AR, XR, and the Metaverse in interdisciplinary explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime.
Carla, as a “digital flâneuse,” you collect fragments of the real world to build immersive digital compositions. What is your experience creating metaverse spaces?
I have been working for over five years on a large multi-reality project entitled wwwunderkammer, that explores building a feminist, post-human, decolonized wunderkammer for the Web3 age. It launched as both an XR and physical reality solo exhibition in March of 2020 at Telematic Media Arts produced by me and my avatar C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N.(Crossplatform Avatar for Recursive Life Action Generative Adversarial Network). Currently, an evolution of this project, as video, physical printwork and metaverse experience is on view again at Telematic Media Arts, and it will be premiering at The Halsey Institute of Art in May. I have been collecting physical objects and 3D virtual models from across the global internet that represent topics that feel both curious and urgent to me: climate change and its impact on emerging and endangered species; historical and current political frameworks; networked culture and digital semiotics; decolonization and global pluralism; humor as salve and feminist salvation. In addition to the rooms I have built addressing these topics, I have built wwwunderchambers to date for 5 different experts on the topics of absurdity, decolonization in design, destigmatization of attitudes around sex and comfort in tech, digital accessibility, and preservation of digital art. There are currently 15 experiences that make up the metaverse aspect of the wwwunderkammer that you can visit online.
In 2020, I co-curated with Clark Buckner The Archive to Come, a 57 artist exhibition, (that included Snow!) as an extension of the wwwunderkammer. – both on-line and in the gallery – of short time-based works that address questions of loss, memorialization, crisis, and re-invention, through the lens of contemporary networked culture and digital media. I built the social VR/metaverse gallery, (a giant splash in a sea of water) to house all of the amazing works in this exhibition.
Two physical catalogs have recently been published by Telematic Media Arts documenting these metaverse projects.
Carla Gannisis a transmedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces works that consider the uncanny complications between grounded and virtual reality, nature and artifice, science and science fiction in contemporary culture.
View of the Phantasmaverse exhibition at Daughter ICE’s metaverse home, 2023.
Can you share your experience of curating a show in the digital space?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Curating shows in a digital space is great because we can both rely on the guidelines of physical show curation, and also can expand the rules into territories that digital platforms uniquely can provide and support. There are also boundaries we still have to work with because of the development of technology, but in general, it becomes more imaginative.
“It only feels natural to exhibit art in spaces native to where the creation happens, where the ideas emerge from, where we are increasingly spending our time accessing and viewing art.”
Carla Gannis
Carla Gannis: It only feels natural, given the artists we selected, who all have digital practices, like Snow and myself, to exhibit art in spaces native to where the creation happens, where the ideas emerge from, where we are increasingly spending our time accessing and viewing art. Being able to experience in your home an art gallery via the portal of a screen brings art to a much larger public too.
The artists featured in Phantasmaverse. Left to right: Jerry Zhao, Jessica Dai, Marina Roos Guthmann, Ren Ciarrochi, Shentong Yu, Yuanqing Xie & June Bee, James Lee, and Tinrey Wang.
How did the Niio platform support the curation and the assembling of the student show?
SYF: The available tools in the Niio platform help speed up the curation process, such as artwork submissions and info listing. It also reaches a wider audience that is different from a physical show curation. It’s systematic while attentive since we are also to work with Roxanne and Pau from Niio to make things customizable so it would better suit our purposes within the designs of the show.
“The Niio platform helps speed up the curation process and reach a wider audience that is different from a physical show curation.”
Snow Yunxue Fu
CG: It has been such a pleasure to work with Snow and the Niio team on this project! My direct interface has been with Pau and Roxanne, but the entire dev team has been super supportive in helping with onboarding and customizing the exhibition space to accommodate the multi-modal work being exhibited, allowing viewers to see the work in context of each other and individually for a deeper dive into each artists’ practice.
Read the interview with the artists participating in the Phantasmaverse exhibition and artcast
DISØRDINARY BƏAUTY is an ongoing art project by Domenico Barra that explores ugliness through glitch art. The project has been developed as a series of NFTs, with a new phase taking place on Niio as a work in progress, in which the artist will periodically upload new artworks and accompanying documentation. Here in the Editorial section, we are publishing email exchanges bringing light into Domenico’s creative process and the ideas and influences behind this project.
Follow Domenico Barra’s work in progress on your screen in DISØRDINARY BƏAUTY: art canon
Domenico Barra, DB a̶r̶t̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶o̶n̶ | s̶e̶l̶f̶-̶p̶o̶r̶t̶r̶a̶i̶t̶, 2023
Second ɛʍǟɨʟ exchange
This exchange took place shortly after the NFT sale “Natively Digital: Glitch-ism,” which was scheduled to take place at Sotheby’s from March 24th to the 31st, was cancelled due to the backlash caused by the absence artworks by women artists in the selection presented by the auction house. Sotheby’s is currently working on re-launching the sale with the inclusion of artworks by women artists who have explored the aesthetics of glitch.
from: Pau Waelder
to: Domenico Barra
date: Mar 29, 2023, 10:03 AM
subject: Continuing our conversation on Niio Editorial
Hi, Domenico!
This time I’d like to ask you three questions:
Why did you choose these two portraits that make the Disordinary Beauty series so far? In Artvee there are many famous paintings, including the Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo that is depicted on the cover of some editions of Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty. There are also avant garde artworks, which already “glitch” the notion of beauty. Why then these two relatively unknown portraits?
Continuing with Eco and the eternal question of beauty, which reflections have you extracted so far from your experiments in glitching beauty?
You have recently expressed on Twitter your disappointment at the lack of understanding of glitch art and how it is becoming trendy in the NFT space. Can you elaborate on this discussion? Would you say that artistic expressions like glitch art are often ignored and then suddenly launched into mainstream attention in a superficial way?
I hope these questions are interesting!
from: Domenico Barra
to: Pau Waelder
date: Mar 30, 2023, 1:07 AM
subject: Re: Continuing our conversation on Niio Editorial
Hello Pau,
RE:1 (Why did you choose these two portraits that make the Disordinary Beauty series so far?)
My selection of paintings for my ongoing glitch art video series, Disordinary Beauty | Art Canon for Niio Art, was motivated by several factors. Firstly, the choice of format dictated the selection process, as I wanted works that required minimal cropping to retain their original integrity. The video format I had to adhere to was 9:16, and I sought paintings that would complement this format and still showcase the unique and peculiar features of the original pieces.
I chose Portrait of a Lady as Diana, also known as A beauty in violet by Paul Quinsac because the author came from a generation of artists who received rigorous academic training and went on to pass this academic training to the following generation of artists. Quinsac contributed to the transition from grandiose art to modern art that still respected classical tradition, and this dedication to building a legacy with the past during an artist’s contemporaneity is what I aim to challenge, this strong tradition that persists over time is where I want to create a conflict with my work. It’s this sense of beauty, as idealized by classical academic education, that I wish to disrupt through my glitch-alterations of the painting.
“It’s this sense of beauty, as idealized by classical academic education, that I wish to disrupt through my glitch-alterations of the painting.”
One more feature influenced my choice, the beauty of the painting itself and the classical reference to Diana, the Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt. This drew me to this piece too, the ideal beauty of the divine, the myth. It was also fortuitous that the painting had been sold at Sotheby’s, an art institution known for its traditionalism and now venturing into the futuristic world of art with NFTs and crypto art. It’s a cunning coincidence that Sotheby’s screwed their first glitch art event sale.
Oona featuring Stellabelle,ITS A BEAUTIFUL DAY!!!!!! (2023). NFT created in response to Sotheby’s all-male Glitch Art sale.
I picked Carl Joseph Begas’s self-portrait as the second work of the series because of my interest in the self-narrative format of selfies, a precursor to which the self-portrait can be considered. Selfies are very much influenced by rigid photographic standards that follow specific rules to seduce the viewer’s attention and algorithms’ ranking priority. I wanted to put the self-portrait in dialogue with selfies, also because selfies are the raw material I use in the other collection series of the glitch art project Disordinary Beauty, what I like to call “Beauty is Chaos”. Begas’s classical academic training and work in Italy where he focused on biblical themes, a classic in art tradition, and his eventual specialization in portraiture, all piqued my interest in this artist.
“I believe what also needs to be disrupted is the attention we center on some artists who are always at the center of every reference to art history, past and present, and leave other artists out.”
I decided to showcase less popular artists and works to encourage further exploration of art history through my works. I like the idea of serving an educational purpose with my art. I believe what also needs to be disrupted is the attention we center on some artists who are always at the center of every reference to art history, past and present, and leave other artists out, maybe this serves also as a message of inclusivity. Do you know what I mean? Who knows, I never thought about it this way but now that I am writing, I like to read the motivation for the choice of these less-known artists in this way too.
Maybe I am still influenced by the Sotheby’s Glitch Art events of the past weekend, but inclusivity is something I am very fond of, this is why I started the project White Page Gallery/s, to create a decentralized and distributed network of spaces to experiment a new practice for curating online art but also the narration of the state of the art of digital art where less known artists are offered more spaces, making the circle larger, fitting more people in the narrative of what digital artists are making, giving value to more voices, more stories. I stop as I do not want to get off topic but I wanted to share this with you.
RE:2 (Reflections on glitching beauty)
My experiments in glitching beauty have led me to ponder the eternal question of beauty in the context of contemporary culture. Glitches have become increasingly popular and are now ubiquitous in popular culture. That glitches were going to get mainstream was also predicted by Rosa Menkman in her Glitch Studies Manifesto. We kind of expected it, and it happened. The “aesthetic” of glitches appeal has been commodified and incorporated into glamorous content such as ads, music videos, fashion, video games, sports, and film trailers. It’s as if glitches have become sexy, appealing to the contemporary generation influenced by technology. I am also thinking of the modern heroes, the myth of the rebellious hacker, as portrayed in Hollywood. Therefore, I believe that glitching classical beauty only enhances its appeal to the contemporary sense of beauty.
Rosa Menkman, Glitch Art Studies Manifesto (2009-2010)
“I believe that glitching classical beauty only enhances its appeal to the contemporary sense of beauty.”
This is why in my works for Disordinary Beauty | Art Canon I am more about challenging the viewer’s experience of the artwork. I aim to create a sense of vertigo, subverting the expectation the viewers have, that of a polished and rendered image with striking definition. I seek to alter the viewer’s expectations by targeting classical canons that primarily focus on my intention to corrupt that ideal of harmony in those artworks of classical tradition where the artists, and the public, expected that sense of harmony, peace, and a delightful view. I am also targeting the context of the digital screen, that by common use influences the expectation of the viewers, a beautiful viewing experience. When glitching, I concentrate on the glitch sequences, layer on top of the layer but especially the flow, pushing them beyond the limits, and exaggerating to create a sense of dis/harmony.
“I am also targeting the context of the digital screen, that by common use influences the expectation of the viewers, a beautiful viewing experience.”
RE:3 (Lack of understanding of glitch art)
This is a topic I am very fond of. In response to your question, I want to stress that the commercialization and superficial commodification of glitch art is a disappointing trend that threatens to reduce its cultural and artistic value. While the popularization of glitch aesthetics has brought the art form to the mainstream, thank Kanye West for that, it has also created a myopic focus on the superficial aspects of the work, ignoring the depth and complexity of its technical and cultural implications. Unfortunately, many people reduce glitch art to a mere visual effect, failing to recognize its broader cultural and artistic significance.
Still from the music video of the song Welcome to Heartbreak by Kanye West. Directed by Nabil Elderkin (2009)
Furthermore, I believe that the technical process behind glitch art is often overlooked or ignored, reducing it to a mere novelty. Rather than focusing on the true complexity and potential of the art form, people frequently resort to using shortcut apps and plugins that are readily available. While these tools can be useful in creating an initial foundation for the art, a first step into more technical and engaging practices, they often fail to capture the true depth and complexity of the work.
“Glitch art is not just a niche interest for computer art nerds, but rather an art form with broad cultural and social relevance.”
It’s important to recognize that glitch art is not just a niche interest for computer art nerds, but rather an art form with broad cultural and social relevance. It can help increase digital literacy and awareness of the technological landscape, a creative way to explore it, and has the potential to address a wide range of important topics, from inclusivity to feminism, and security. I always tell during my classes and talk that glitch art is not just of interest for computer art nerds, but it should be of interest to everyone using technologies as glitch art is a way to gain more digital literacy by exploring the digital landscape through its imperfections, through the abnormal behavior of machines, the atypical hidden functions.
Learn more about the development of glitch art in this article by scholar Carolyn L. Kane, published in Invisible Culture Journal
Glitch art can help to spread more awareness, not just about topics related to technology. I introduced the metaphor of atypical machines’ behavior, a story of autism, and the life of a family: the glitch poetic can help to address many topics.
“Glitch art can be so much more than a mere trend or visual effect, and it’s time for us to recognize and embrace its full potential.”
Overall, the failure of institutions like Sotheby’s to fully embrace the cultural and artistic significance of glitch art is a missed opportunity, one that could have elevated the art form and brought it to a wider audience in a more deserved way. Glitch art has the potential to be so much more than a mere trend or visual effect, and it’s time for us to recognize and embrace its full potential.
I might sound biased but I made glitch art a way of life, my sort of philosophy to hack/decode life events and its short circuits. I am an imperfectionist. 🙂
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 Zhaois 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
An early practitioner of net art, Carlo Zanni is among the first artists to explore the nascent opportunities for the online art market and reflect on how the web would impact on our sense of identity and privacy. With a painter’s vision, he has seen in the development of online platforms and graphical user interfaces a space of visual compositions in which the computer desktop becomes a landscape, and everything in it is a fiction.
He has also developed new forms of storytelling through web-based projects such as the “data cinema” trilogy: The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success (2006), My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar(2007), and The Fifth Day(2009). In these online films, he combined a pre-defined narrative with data collected in real time from the same users who were watching the film, or from a distant webcam, or from different sources describing the social and political conditions of Egypt.
Embedded in his work as an artist, his research on alternative models to sell digital art has led to pioneering yet unrealized projects such as P€OPLE ¥ROM MAR$ (2012), an online platform dedicated to selling video art and fostering a community of creatives based on shared revenue, or ViBo(2014-2015), a “video book” aimed at facilitating the sale of video art at affordable prices in unlimited series. He collected his experiences with these models in the book Art in the Age of the Cloud (Diorama Editions, 2017).
Niio is proud to present two selections of artworks by Carlo Zanni: Data Cinema Anthology, which brings together the Data Cinema trilogy and an additional artwork, and Save Me for Later, a code-based artwork recently presented at Zanni’s solo exhibition Accept & Declineat OPR Gallery in Milan. In the following interview, the artist discusses the artworks presented in this exhibition, which can be visited until April 28th.
Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings, 2022. On view at OPR Gallery, Milan.
In this latest series you have come back to painting as a medium, after a long career focused on web-based art, but you keep exploring the same subjects. Can you take me through the main ideas in the Check-Out Paintings?
This cycle of paintings is part of a long-term investigation of the social and psychological role of eCommerce in our society. It stems from the memories of the eCommerce check-out pages: a final destination we all are funneled to, in every online buying process. The check-out pages of eCommerce sites represent a highly symbolic limbo that precedes the dopamine rush where we all hope to find shelter. A form of addiction, but as shown during the pandemic, also a lifeline.
“Our identity bounces between the happiness for buying, and the sense of guilt for having bought.”
Buying online is both a sort of pursuit of happiness as we have been taught by our society, both a way to escape reality, procrastinating any possible confrontation with ourselves. Our identity bounces between the happiness for buying, and the sense of guilt for having bought. Between the satisfaction of an increasingly frictionless, user-friendly, fast, and on-time experience; and the anxiety, and also the shame, for what this transient fake happiness often entails on a social, work, and human level for thousands of people: directly (shifts and working conditions, small local businesses), and indirectly (tax evasion of mega-corporations and environmental impact).
Unlike early works such as DTP Icons Paintings(2000), here you do not look for a realistic representation of the interface, but rather create almost abstract compositions, why is that?
True, because here is more about inner feelings than simple representation. It’s not witnessing from the outside but feeling from the inside, then trying to show a glimpse of it, if possible, in the real world. So the rationalist layout, typical of these pages, fades into memory, it turns into a dreamlike experience, into a psychological post-image, while some details of the transaction, such as measures, prices, and quantities, emerge from the background when one gets closer to the surface of the painting: they bring us back to reality.
The subtle color fields of these paintings make them very difficult to be mediated or “seen” online (e.g. on Instagram, or on a PDF), instead they open up and expand in front of the viewer when experienced for real. While our society continues to demand fast, easily communicable images, these paintings are slow, almost invisible, non-existent images, and they ask for something very precious: our time.
Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings, 2022. On view at OPR Gallery, Milan.
How did you achieve this faded effect in the canvases?
The color used in these works is acrylic mixed with water and in some cases acrylic medium. This way tones are soft and they mesh one into the other when seen from a certain distance, vaporizing the memory of the whole picture. I take advantage of the cutting plotter to write numbers and other “technical” details. I cut the letters in vinyl (negative) with a size that allows me to draw inside them with a sharp pencil without touching the vinyl edges. This way the sentences and the lettering look “straight” and “guided” from a distance, and handmade from a closer inspection.
“When you stick your nose onto the canvas, the work transforms from an abstract field into a condensed epic of our times.”
Formally speaking, the style of these paintings was born in response to a period of social isolation due to the pandemic, during which, as a balance, we have tried to mediate all the possible human activities: meetings, purchases, employment, leisure, study, culture… I felt the need to go the other way, working on something that could be only appreciated when seen in person.
If you want to find some roots, these works echo the mature practice of artist Agnes Martin, in the use of pencil and subtle water-based colors, but here all the “modernist” and “minimalist” values of the time are almost gone. So all the pencil details and most of the color fields are only visible when you stick your nose onto the canvas, and the work transforms from an abstract, almost white, field, into a condensed epic of our times touching themes such as anxiety, desire, happiness, fear, gender identity, pandemics, politics, tragedies, wars.
While the paintings look almost abstract, they also contain references to the present, as is frequently found in your web-based artworks, what role do these references play?
The paintings dig into our daily culture and politics, for instance by discreetly showing disclaimers referring to the current Ukraine war. (Since February 2022, many eCommerce added such disclaimers for multiple reasons: from giving updated shipping info to giving their support to the Ukrainians). I see these paintings as a vehicle for meditation, an attempt to temporarily alienate ourselves from this endless moment of upheaval and unrest; while being violently dragged back to reality when we get closer to the surface: they are a way to extract some time from our hectic lives to sense the delicacy and fragility of our body and the transience of happiness while diving into our time.
While they are very different artworks, I would point out to Average Shoveler(2004) as having a similar approach in terms of its meditative aspect and the connection to real life events. In that work, which was commissioned by Rhizome, I created an online video game in which the player controls a man who has to shovel the snow falling on the streets of New York. Each time he does, several images taken from CNN and other news outlets in real time pop up and disappear. Additionally, some non-player characters stop and speak out news headlines. The main character invariably ends up dying of exhaustion, unable to shovel the incessant amount of snow. But the game also includes some secret spaces meant for the player to relax and just observe the scene, distanced from the gameplay. In a way, these paintings also provide that distanced space of observation while having these subtle hooks to reality.
Carlo Zanni, Average Shoveler (2004)
Talking about hooks, you describe some elements in the paintings as “clickbait,” can you elaborate on that?
Yes, the dark dots and solid-colored shapes (lines, rectangles, circles) that appear in some of the paintings are what I call “clickbaits” for one’s eyes. Seen from afar these canvases look pretty white and empty, but these dots stand out and catch your attention. They work similarly to how advertising plays with colors, double meanings, and impressive images to stand out in a visually saturated landscape.
They also remind of the so-called “dark patterns”, which are interface design strategies quite common in e-commerce pages, that are meant to fool the user into doing what the vendor wants them to do, such as sign up for a newsletter, add an extra service, or choose the most expensive option among several choices. In my paintings, the shapes intend to lure you into looking closely at the painting and finding what it is actually about. However, I would say that while clickbait is content that over-promises and under-delivers, in my paintings I under-promise and over-deliver 🙂
Carlo Zanni, Save Me for Later (2022)
Save me for later (2022) is also an intriguing artwork in the sense that it is not what it appears to be, and it connects with a concept you have explored over the years, which is the computer screen as a landscape
“Save me for later” is actually a bot browsing Amazon.com, continuously adding products to the cart that is visible in the right sidebar. When the cart reaches its limit, it automatically moves products to the “saved for later list”, making room for the new freshly added ones. The bot embeds a floating window with the webcam stream framing me while performing. This repetitive and almost hypnotic performance, with apparently no beginning and no end, speaks of the type of procrastination we all carry out while browsing e-commerce sites, looking for products that will bring us happiness and make our lives better.
As with the paintings, the experience of isolation during the pandemic was key to conceiving this artwork, in which the computer screen becomes a landscape, a place of escapism and daydreaming. The performance is consciously slow and cryptic, and as it is playing out in real time, in the real Amazon website, the items that appear reflect our present time just as the subtle writings on the paintings take us back to the world we are living in. For instance, when I first ran the program, the bot frequently picked up COVID-19 self-tests, which at some point were very much in demand and right now are almost forgotten.
“This repetitive and almost hypnotic performance speaks of the type of procrastination we all carry out while browsing e-commerce sites, looking for products that will bring us happiness and make our lives better”
I see this project also as a vehicle for meditation, an attempt to alienate ourselves momentarily from our daily lives and our anxieties (so the title “Save me for later”). And behind the activity itself, what you see on the screen that is apparently me browsing the Amazon site but is in fact an automated process carried out by a computer program, is an interesting exchange of data. Data collected by the Amazon site about this meaningless routine (constantly adding items to the cart without ever checking out), data displayed by Amazon about the articles on sale, data that is processed by Amazon’s algorithm to display new items related to previously selected products.
See a two-hour excerpt of Zanni’s endless automated performance on Amazon
Data is for me what gravity probably was for Bas Jan Ader. “The artist’s body as gravity makes itself its master.” These mysterious words were used by Bas Jan Ader to describe his short films Falling I (Los Angeles) and Falling II (Amsterdam) when he showed them in Düsseldorf in 1971. He was playing with gravity, he was becoming gravity, accepting its outcome: failures, fragilities, spiritualism, poetry, meditation, ascension.
I feel that I use data in a sort of similar way, accepting the fact that most of my works will cease to exist quite soon after their birth. By using data from media outlets such as CNN, tools from Google, data collected from users, and so on, I consciously open my work to a vulnerability as the price to pay for creating a work that is always connected to the present and fed by data that circulates online. Then, an API is changed, a tool is discontinued, and the artwork cannot exist anymore. Sometimes you can fix them, sometimes you just don’t want to do it.
Other times you start again from scratch as recently I did with Cookie Portrait (2002-2022), a work about online identity and privacy that had to be rewritten when it was launched at OPR Gallery last year, 20 years after it was first created. This work is based on the same cookie technology that is used – for instance – for the internal session management of an eCommerce site and more generally for user profiling and marketing activities. This work reminds us that, in our online existence, we are made of data. The body is thus the sum total of your data, the artwork is a temporary and transient experience of something elusive, like our own existence is.
Composite photo of the artists (left to right): Dagmar Schürrer, Snow Yunxue Fu, Marina Zurkow, Claudia Larcher, Alexandra Crouwers, Tamiko Thiel, Claudia Hart, Sasha Stiles, Yuge Zhou, and Chun Hua Catherine Dong.
It is a well-known fact, although not properly acknowledged, that over the course of history women artists have been underrepresented in the art world, and in general have been undervalued and underpaid at auction houses, galleries, and museums. As the art historian Katy Hessel, author of the celebrated book The Story of Art Without Men, points out: “it’s actually down to who has been able to tell the story of art history.” Women artists have been routinely erased from art history, or included in relation to male artists, their talent minimized as they were portrayed merely as lovers or muses. In the art market, women artists have not fared better. Traditionally, art galleries have represented far more white men than any other group combined, and as recent reports indicate, the situation hasn’t improved: the Burns-Halperin Report on equity and representation in US museums and the art market, presented in December 2022, indicates that auction sales of works by women artists represent only 3,3% of total sales worldwide, and that only 11% of acquisitions and 14,9% of exhibitions in US museums feature artworks created by women.
The introduction of the digital arts and the emergence of the new media art scene have given women artists the opportunity to become early adopters both of photography and of alternate digital technologies such as VR as these novel mediums also allowed for political and artistic provocation of the accepted norms. Today in general there is also greater awareness towards this unequal tendency, and so different organizations focus on balancing out the different groups of artists which they represent. At Niio we have made it our mission to focus on presenting and promoting the works of women artists whether through the content distributed on our apps or in our editorial section. In 2022, the gender balance of our artist solo shows amounted to a total of close to 60% by women artists. This month, we are honored to showcase the artworks and art practices created by the women artists, and to present this brief survey among ten outstanding artists who have generously answered our questions.
Would you say that the digital art community behaves differently than the contemporary art world in terms of gender balance and visibility of women artists?
Alexandra Crouwers: not really – although my personal field of view in the ‘digital space’ is taken up by a generally much, much more diverse constellation of artists than the ‘traditional’ contemporary art scene I’m embedded in. Likely, the global accessibility and distribution of digital art plays a role. I do suspect museums and other art institutions working with digital media are, perhaps because of the reason above, a bit more aware of adding more women artists in exhibitions compared to the ‘traditional’ art world.
Alexandra Crouwers is an artistic researcher working in the digital realm, and oscillating between escapism and activism.
Claudia Larcher: I don’t have numbers for that, but no, I think that the visibility of women in the art world in general is still unbalanced, be it in the art world or digital art. More attention is now being paid to the issue, but the big solo shows are almost always given to the men.
Claudia Hart: Yes, although strides have been made, I would have to say that the contemporary art world is still way out ahead of the digital space. The engine running digital is innovation culture. I would even go so far as to say that digital art culture functions more as beta testers for new products. It’s a culture of next new things, so it suffers from extreme ageism. The lowest ranked players in the digital art world are older women – not news not now, not glamorous. It’s a cute young world.
“The lowest ranked players in the digital art world are older women. It’s a cute young world.”
Claudia Hart
Dagmar Schürrer: Talking from my own perspective I feel that female identifying artists are quite present in the digital art community. I am based in Berlin, and I am very lucky to be surrounded by a network of strong women creating and researching in the digital art scene. Digital and new media is still kind of uncoupled from the classical art market and rather conceptually driven. It often tackles issues that are closely linked to female politics – like embodiment, social hierarchies, identity, or bias of new technologies. For example, the scene working with XR technologies is very experimental and constantly developing, and is open for fresh and unusual perspectives, which might be resonating with a female experience of a changing society. Nevertheless, it is a sad fact that women in the cultural sector are still outrageously underpaid. Statistics of the German Künstlersozialkasse (artists’ social security fund) show that in 2022 female artists earned an average of 24% less than their male colleagues, the Gender Pay Gap is therefore significantly above the German national average!
“I feel that female identifying artists are quite present in the digital art community. Nevertheless, it is a sad fact that women in the cultural sector are still outrageously underpaid.”
Dagmar Schürrer
Tamiko Thiel: Until recently, fame in the media art world was driven more by academic voices and the few institutions that showed media art, because the art market was not interested in media art at all. This was primarily Ars Electronica due to its prestigious Golden Nica award, the ZKM because it was the primary institution with an archive and collection of media art, the festivals Transmediale and ISEA and the art gallery at SIGGRAPH.
It was always my impression that these media art institutions however tended to focus very heavily on hardware technology, “boy toys” and a very male view of what is interesting in media art, rather than taking a wider view of the value of media art. I personally was told in a private conversation by a (male) member of the Ars jury, perhaps a decade after I had submitted my VR projection installation Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand) to the Interactive Art category at Ars, that the others on the jury insisted it was not innovative because it only used a simple joystick as an input device. That is to say they focused exclusively on the hardware, without considering the complex interactive narrative of 13 scenes interweaving the historical Japanese American incarceration in WW2 and similar threats to intern Iranian Americans during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979-1980, and how we had constructed an interactive structure in which the user’s agency led them to be complicit in their own incarceration.
Tamiko Thielis a pioneering visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence art.
In 2016 Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Addie Wagenknecht started the “Kiss My Ars” hashtag after noticing that in the 37 year history of Ars Electronica, 9 out of 10 Golden Nicas had been awarded to men, putting a hard number on my more vague impression of an unconscious gender bias in values.
In 2012 the new director of the Transmediale, Kristoffer Gansing, shut me down when I responded to panelist Kathy Rae Huffman’s invitation to talk about my AR artwork during what was billed as “open conversation about video art and net culture, media collectives and counter-publics”. (See this webpage for a detailed description and audio recording). This was all the more odd because the festival’s theme “in/compatible” explicitly celebrated 25 years of art interventions and proclaimed in Gansing’s curatorial statement that: “Contrary to the fear of the incompatible, so prevalent in the age of cloud-computing, the festival raises the question of what happens when incompatibility is brought to the fore rather than hidden away in the dark underbelly of digital culture?” Kathy Rae and I of course asked ourselves, if a male curator on the panel had called on a male artist to describe their work, would Gansing have shut them down, as he did to us? It was painful for us as well that no one in the audience, not even the several famous feminist artists present, said anything at all during these encounters. Gansing had just taken over Berlin’s most prestigious media art venue, and I assume no one wanted to get on his bad side.
“In 2021 the art market became aware of digital art for the first time when Beeple sold a NFT for the equivalent of $69 million. The fact that this was roughly 35x the price of the highest selling work by a female artist, ixshells, speaks for itself.”
Tamiko Thiel
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: I think the digital art community and the contemporary art world are very similar in terms of gender balance. Gender imbalance exists within the digital art community, especially in technical and coding writing. Women also are underrepresented in the field of game development and software engineering.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong‘s artistic practice is based in performance art, photography, video, VR, AR, and 3D printing within the contemporary context of global feminism.
Do you work with code-based art? If so, do you write the code, or work with collaborators? What is your experience with the community of coders and engineers?
Sasha Stiles: I’m a lifelong poet who’s always been very interested in science and technology. Though I don’t have a computer science or coding background, I’ve been writing with AI-powered large language models since 2018, and have learned basic coding to fine-tune text generators and experiment with generative visual poetics. I’ve also had a hands-on role for many years now as poetry mentor to the AI androidBINA48, built by Hanson Robotics and the Terasem Foundation. I’ve frequently been in the minority at meetings and conferences, but I’ve also found a lot of support for my work in places where I didn’t expect to.
Alexandra Crouwers: I AM A SUPERUSER! We’re being overlooked, but that’s another story: there’s such a focus on code and generative abstraction at the moment, people forget most of us use those techniques too, but then as part of more encompassing works (this does not answer your question at all, haha).
Marina Zurkow: I work with coders, usually as an equal collaboration (not with teams). In my intimate work world, at present, I have an even split between male and female identified technologist collaborators.
Sasha Stiles a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art.
Claudia Larcher: I have limited skills in coding but try to do everything by myself, as I had some bad experiences with male coders. Which was also a kind of empowerment. Actually I don’t know any female identifying coders, which is a pity. The coding community as I know it, is a male-only community. Hopefully it will change in the near future.
“The coding community as I know it, is a male-only community. Hopefully it will change in the near future.”
Claudia Larcher
Claudia Hart: I’ve just produced my first Art Blocks. I was part of a group of women invited to develop a project. I went to a meeting for the newbies, and I was the only woman present, The rest were guy coders. I’ve also collaborated with my friend Andrew Blanton, a cute young coder, because I can’t do it for myself. Not sure I would ever do this again.
Claudia Larcher’s work explores video animation, collage, photography and installation with a cinematic approach to storytelling, extracting narratives from nondescript, everyday spaces.
Dagmar Schürrer: I am working with XR technologies in my own artistic practice as well as a project assistant at the research group INKAat the HTW Berlin – University of Applied Sciences. INKA is an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists and cultural workers like me, producing and teaching XR projects in the cultural field at the Institute for Culture and Computer Science. In the group there are slightly more female developers, but I would say that is rather unusual and a conscious decision to support women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which is of course great! This is not reflected in most of those degree programs, where women are significantly underrepresented, so there is still a lot to do to make these fields more attractive for women. This is also similar in the freelance sector; I have the impression that here female developers are very rare.
“My VRML artworks are all code based, and I wrote all the code myself. I have had a lot of support and no problems from the community of coders and engineers.”
Tamiko Thiel
Tamiko Thiel: My VRML artworks (Beyond Manzanar, The Travels of Mariko Horo, Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall) are all code based, and I wrote all the code myself. I have had a lot of support and no problems from the community of coders and engineers in terms of gender inequalities. Since 2018 my husband, the software developer Peter Graf, collaborates with me on some but not all artworks. Since he is a professional coder, he can code much faster than I!
In your experience, has the NFT market benefited gender equality in any way? Do women artists get better chances at selling their work?
Alexandra Crouwers: Not sure yet. Although in the very conservative contemporary art context I’m geographically in, I’d say I had at least a couple of disadvantages: being a women artist and working with digital media. It often felt the combination was just too much for people to handle. For me, the NFT space has connected my practice to a whole network of nodes of amazing fellow women artists, with similar experiences. On the other hand: I’ve never sold so much work in my artist life before, so purely based on that I’d say ‘yes’.
“The NFT space has connected my practice to a whole network of nodes of amazing fellow women artists, with similar experiences.”
Alexandra Crouwers
Snow Yunxue Fuworks with imaging technologies, such as 3D Simulation, AR, XR, and the Metaverse in interdisciplinary explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime.
Snow Yunxue Fu: I do think the NFT market has opened more opportunities for women artists and all artists in general, especially at the earlier stage of its developments and expansion. However, as the NFT market has a tendency to follow the historical art market, there are still many inequalities. It is quite important to have awareness for all parties involved and make efforts to give more support to women artists.
Marina Zurkow: Among niche digital art worlds, perhaps – but not at the high-price & high-profile level. Those “spots” are consistently and disproportionately going to men.
Claudia Larcher: I read that female artists are doing better in the NFT world than in the global art world but parity is still far away. I think that people see an investment when buying NFTs, and male artists still achieve higher re-sales.
Tamiko Thiel: The NFT market has a specific aesthetic that sells well, and I consider that aesthetic to be a very male gaze shaped by fantasy/science fiction/video games. Perhaps women artists who hide their gender do better, but as a woman artist who uses her real name, I think it helps me for intermediaries to call attention to my work and to tell potential collectors that my work is valuable. THANK YOU FOR HELPING! 🙂
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: This is a good question. I don’t get involved much at the NFT at this moment so I cannot tell whether the NFT market benefits more women artists. But the NFT market definitely is easier to enter while the traditional market requires years to build up one’s reputation.
What is your opinion about female-led NFT projects? Can you mention some projects that you find interesting?
Sasha Stiles: I’m proud to be part of theVERSEverse, a women-led poetry gallery that seeks to empower writers by bringing poets into the art world. Co-founded by Kalen Iwamoto, Ana Maria Caballero and myself, with advisor Gisel Florez and community manager Elisabeth Sweet, theVERSEverse is trying to do something that has never really existed elsewhere, on or offline. I’m constantly astounded by the vision and tireless work ethic of women in web3 and adjacent spaces: Sofia Garcia, Jess Conaster, Micol Ap of Vertical Crypto Art, Danielle King, Diane Drubay, Valerie Whitacre, Ariel Hudes, Raina Mehler, Nicole Sales Giles, Lydia Chen, Mika Bar-On Nesher, Elena Zavalev, Eleanora Brizi, Fanny Lakoubay, to name just a few. I love the FEMGEN initiative from VCA and Right Click Save, and the Unsigned project by Operator and Anika Meier, and I’m represented by such women-owned galleries as Annka Kultys Gallery in London and Galerie Brigitte Schenk in Cologne.
Marina Zurkowis a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and fostering intimate connections between humans, other species, and planetary agents.
Marina Zurkow: Christiane Paul’s curated exhibition Chain Reactionon Feral File is a good example of highly rigorous, thoughtful NFT projects that are female-led or in collaboration. I think very highly of the works of Stephanie Dinkins, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Sara Ludy, and the McCoys because their work has not only deep logic but they are concerned with what the blockchain can DO; it’s not just another white wall in a white cube gallery.
Claudia Larcher: I appreciate the work of the Austrian artist LIA, who is a pioneer of software and net art. I think that with producing NFTs she was really compensated for her artistic work in an appropriate monetary way.
Dagmar Schürrer: I want to mention the project Unsigned by Operator and Anika Meier. It is a collection of 100 signatures from women and non-binary artists to highlight the fact that a female signature on an artwork can devalue it. Turning the signatures themselves into artworks is a very clever and strong gesture, and I love the focused and minimal realization, both conceptually and aesthetically. It is positively simple, to the point and potentially iconic.
Tamiko Thiel: I find Auriea Harvey‘s and Nettrice Gaskin‘s work simply stunning, beautiful and meaningful. They create beautiful works of art like nothing I have ever seen before, and bring together incredible depths of art history and cultural history together from a very different viewpoint as the previous several thousands of years of art. All hail! I am delighted that ixshells‘ work is valued so highly, but such purely geometric abstractions are personally not so interesting for me.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: I appreciate projects that are not made specifically for any kind of markets, but rather for the artists themselves or for the sake of art itself. Maybe these kinds of projects will have the potential to go both into the traditional and the NFT markets eventually, but the idea of “art made for sale” doesn’t sound right for me. Artists such as Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, and Frank Wang Yefeng are very interesting.
In the 1980’s the feminist art movement began working mainly with photography and the newly available technological tools of the time. Do you feel that with the introduction of video art this even more so allowed artists to question older social models?
Sasha Stiles: Both my practice and personal life are implicitly feminist in that I embody taboo concepts of womanhood, from engaging in male-dominated fields to eschewing many of the social and domestic expectations that are prescribed to women. So when a large language model fine-tuned on my own work, developed to write like me, expresses misogyny and disturbing stereotypes, for example, it’s powerful. Creative AI as a new medium demands that we go beyond questioning older social systems to infiltrating them, building ourselves into them.
Claudia Hart has worked since the 1990s examining issues of identity and representation with 3D animation.
Alexandra Crouwers: Yes, Pipilotti Rist for me was the one who opened artistic doors by unapologetically using the idea of music videos as an art form, and showing how projections including audio can transform a whole space. This, again, is a very personal example, of course, but, to me, Rist provided a role model in an art education that for 95% was taken up by men.
Marina Zurkow: The number of brilliant, inspiring feminist video artists is staggering. Please don’t forget pioneers Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Howardena Pindell, Shigeko Kubota, and the following waves of the likes of Laura Parnes, Elisabeth Subrin, Mika Rottenberg, tackling very different aspects of life through a feminist lens.
“Creative AI as a new medium demands that we go beyond questioning older social systems to infiltrating them, building ourselves into them.”
Sasha Stiles
Claudia Larcher: I believe that video as a medium was new at that time and not yet occupied by men, like painting or sculpture. There was this window of opportunity for many female artists.
Claudia Hart: I am not sure, there have always been women painters, but they were written out of history. I’ve been working with 3d animation and VR since ‘96. I developed a program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called Experimental 3D, and my young women students have been institutionalized and awarded. I actually have never had an institutional exhibit, neither group or solo, nor have gotten grants or any kind of award of status. So case in point.
Dagmar Schürrerassembles found footage, digitally generated objects and animations, text, drawing and sound to form intricate video-sound-montages, often extended by Augmented Reality, evocative of painting, collage or poetry.
Dagmar Schürrer: I have the feeling there is a tendency, when new tools or technologies become available, that female and non-binary artists are fast to integrate those in their own artistic practice, before the methodologies enter the mainstream. It may offer a certain freedom and field of experimentation, without the pressure of capitalist art markets, and therefore a progressive opportunity to negotiate and reflect the topics of underrepresented groups.
“I believe that video as a medium was new at that time and not yet occupied by men, like painting or sculpture. There was this window of opportunity for many female artists.”
Claudia Larcher
Tamiko Thiel: Yes, at the beginning of a new medium there is much more room for experimentation, when the market is not established yet and therefore artists can experiment without the pressure to think about the sales value of the work. Initially there is the problem of access to technology – during which women also usually have more difficulty. Then there is a short interval in which anyone can access the technology because it has become commercial enough to be widely available. This is the time in which most innovation occurs. Then when the art market picks up a medium, its values impact directly on the work that is made, as artists try to live from their work.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: Using new media or incorporating technology in artwork has definitely changed the ways of how to make art. Video art offered artists the ability to create time-based works that could incorporate performance and documentation. The introduction of video art has provided a powerful tool for feminist artists to express their ideas related to gender and identity, and to create works that reflect their own experiences and perspectives.
“There is a female sensibility behind the lens. Even in subtle ways, this changes what the viewers see.”
Yuge Zhou
Yuge Zhou is a Chinese born, Chicago-based artist whose videos and installations address rootedness, isolation and longing within sites of shared dreams.
Yuge Zhou: Video art introduces the time element into social critique. In some way, video art has a huge landscape to mine and to reference with cinema and television and the internet videoscape. With a growing number of women behind the camera and in charge of the means of productions – what they shoot, how they shoot are opening up. There is a female sensibility behind the lens. Even in subtle ways, this changes what the viewers see. Nowadays, both men and women are going into the technological fields like editing and cinematography, and a lot of tools and venues are available to both make and show video art. But there’s still a long way to go in terms of equity both behind and in front of the camera.
