British artist Thomas Lisle has long explored the frontier where painting meets digital media, creating a compelling fusion of tradition and innovation. With a career spanning over four decades, his work seamlessly integrates analog techniques with immersive digital processes. Currently, Galeria Maior in Pollença is presenting Lines of Thought, a solo exhibition curated by Pau Waelder. This body of work is complemented by an artcast on Niio, offering audiences a deeper insight into Lisle’s hybrid practice of “time-based paintings” and dynamic compositions.
We spoke with the artist about his creative process, the interplay between digital and physical media, and how his works evolve across dimensions and time. This brief three-question interview offers readers a quick dive into Lisle’s work, which can be further explored in a longer interview and an essay by the artist, both published in Niio Editorial.
View of the exhibition “Lines of Thought” by Thomas Lisle at Galeria Maior in Pollença (Mallorca, Spain).
Your exhibition Lines of Thought showcases both physical and digital works. Can you tell us how these two forms are connected in your process?
In this series, the digital paintings came first. Using the 3D animation software, I painted a series of tubular shapes, similar to pencil lines but with volume. These I could edit, move around, and change in any way I wanted. When I was happy with these elements, I converted the tubular shapes into simulated liquids and set different parts of each of them to have different values of mass, viscosity, and so on.
The pencil lines thus became a liquid simulation (using complex mathematics developed by others). I turned the gravity to zero in most pieces but not all: in some of the pieces several paint strokes have gravity and others don’t. Then in some of the artworks I animated a brushstroke over time, moving across the virtual canvas and interacting with other paint elements. The main themes of this series of artworks are about dynamic compositions and forms, as well as contrasts of colour, forms, mass, and movement.
Thomas Lisle. Currents, 2025
The next step was the animation of the liquid paints: to do that I built complex invisible forces that push the liquids around. I spent a lot of time trying out different combinations of forces and the settings controlling the liquids, until I got the results I aimed for, that have a visual, painterly meaning to me. I think about these compositions in terms of relationships and abstractions that I think could make either a great painting and/or a good animation.
For the paintings I took specific moments of the animation where I felt that the composition, colour, and forms are the best and then I used that image as the basis for a painting. So all the process that I described above has also been carried out considering this last stage in which the animation can become an oil painting on canvas.
Thomas Lisle. Flotsam, 2025.
You describe these animations as “time-based paintings.” What makes this digital approach painterly in your view?
What makes them painterly is the visual language they inherit from traditional painting—color, composition, gesture—but reimagined in motion and time. Each animation is a dynamic abstraction, shaped by invisible forces I program to manipulate the virtual paint. I spend a lot of time adjusting these forces and liquid parameters to create meaningful visual relationships—whether it’s through tension, mass, or movement. These aren’t just technical effects; they’re part of a painterly exploration, extended into the temporal realm.
“In the digital 3D space, lines evolve; they can be manipulated in ways unimaginable even 20 years ago.”
What does the idea of a “line” mean in this body of work, especially given the title Lines of Thought?
The line is foundational here—both as a visual element and as a metaphor. Traditionally, lines have been the building blocks of drawings and paintings. In the digital 3D space, lines evolve; they can be manipulated in ways unimaginable even 20 years ago. In my process, lines are the genesis of everything: they become forms, masses, and ultimately, flowing simulations. Conceptually, the title Lines of Thought speaks to both this visual structure and the algorithmic logic behind digital creation—almost like thinking made visible.
Lines of Thought is on view at Galeria Maior, Pollença, throughout June 2025. A curated selection of Lisle’s digital works is also available on Niio as part of a special artcast accompanying the exhibition.
Born in Osaka in 1976 and trained in post-production editing after graduating from the University of Fine Arts, Eisuke Ikeda has developed a distinctive visual language that seamlessly weaves analog sensibility into digital precision. His works are marked by an intentional embrace of imperfection—subtle distortions, organic pulses, and delicate fractures that bring a surprising tactility to the virtual screen. Central to Ikeda’s practice is a deep trust in the viewer’s intuition. He eschews overt symbolism or narrative structure, focusing instead on the phenomenological act of seeing. Subtle distortions, organic fluctuations, and textural echoes mimic natural erosion and evoke the tactile essence of physical matter, despite being rendered entirely in the digital realm.
Niio has recently launched the solo artcast Eternity of the Ephemeral, which features five artworks that, more than just moving images, unfold like ambient states of consciousness. These are not works to be watched in the conventional sense—they are to be dwelled in, felt, and absorbed. Each composition becomes an experiential landscape where the viewer’s perception becomes the true medium. In the following interview, the artist elaborates on his creative process and the concepts that underlie his artistic practice.
Eisuke Ikeda. EXoC 2681257 | 2025 Remix |, 2025
You have worked as a post-production CGI specialist for film productions. How does this background influence or nurture your artistic production? What have you learned in terms of software usage and image production that you are now applying to your artistic projects?
When I worked in post-production, my duties ranged from assisting with television editing to creating CGI components and producing opening visuals for music events.
What impressed me most during that time were the veteran craftsmen at the Kyoto film studios. Cinematographers, editors and script supervisors—professionals who, in other careers, would already be retired—devoted themselves to finishing each project, working through the night without hesitation. Their approach to filmmaking was more than technical skill; it was a way of life. The blend of boldness, precision and pride they embodied remains vivid in my memory.
Those experiences still shape my practice today. Although my methods have evolved, the resolve to “communicate through moving images” and the quiet sincerity with which I face each work are values I inherited from them.
“The interweaving of nature with daily life and the presence of temples and shrines in Kyoto have formed my aesthetic foundation since childhood.”
My sensibility is also rooted in Kyoto’s environment. The interweaving of nature with daily life and the presence of temples and shrines have formed my aesthetic foundation since childhood. From art-school days to the present I have been drawn to contemporary art, Japanese Zen, Buddhist art and classical arts; the decorative and symbolic qualities of hanging scrolls, folding screens and esoteric Buddhist implements continue to influence me spiritually.
The software skills I acquired by self-study at university became my technical base. I entered the field just as digital tools were being introduced, and programs such as After Effects, Photoshop and non-linear editors proved indispensable in both commercial and personal work. Those skills still underpin my art today. More recently I have expanded my toolkit—again self-taught—to include TouchDesigner and Ableton Live.
Thus, beyond any single CGI technique, it is the mindset and sensibility cultivated in post-production, together with my exposure to diverse art forms, that define the core of my creative work.
Eisuke Ikeda. EXoC 2681257 | 2025 Remix |, 2025
Can you briefly describe the process of elaboration of your artworks? Despite being abstract compositions, what are the experiences, images, or ideas that trigger their creation?
I currently rely on TouchDesigner and Ableton Live to pursue abstractions in which sight and sound intertwine. Although I once produced 3-D character animation, I gradually became more attracted to abstraction—forms that leave interpretation to the viewer rather than imposing narrative or figuration. I am drawn to structures with no beginning or end, no fixed centre, in which spiritual resonance can reside.
My process is improvisational. Instead of following a strict concept, I trust “moments of visual delight.” As light, motion and colour shift, I adjust elements in real time, responding with my emotions and bodily sense—an approach akin to musical improvisation.
The five works uploaded to Niio focus on delicate particle movements, yet my style remains fluid. Depending on my state of mind I may move toward flat compositions, high contrast or rapid motion. In every case I seek to evoke pre-linguistic emotions or fragments of memory, rather than convey explicit meaning.
“I am drawn to structures with no beginning or end, no fixed centre, in which spiritual resonance can reside.”
In your artworks, you avoid any rigid interpretation or meaning. In fact, the title of each video is mostly a reference number, with no intention of providing any narrative. Yet the descriptions are quite poetic, with references to memory, silence, the soul, or eternity. How do you balance the purely abstract and rational with the more evocative and narrative aspects of your work?
Titles such as EXoC or abCnW are deliberately cryptic: abbreviations of words that interested me at the time. They preserve ambiguity and poetic space, encouraging open interpretation rather than prescribing it.
Ultimately I want to offer a “purely visual experience” that quietly expands awareness. What I call a “tactile sensation beyond the screen” is this spiritual and sensory resonance—one that connects, for me, with the animistic quietude in traditional Japanese aesthetics.
“Ultimately I want to offer a purely visual experience that quietly expands awareness.”
Ephemerality is a key concept in your work, expressed in fleeting elements, bursts of light, and also darkness. Is the search for the expression of the ephemeral what led you to work with digital media? How do motion, light, and darkness play a role in your work?
Creating art has always been a digital act for me. Since my student days I have worked on a computer; I have never painted on canvas. Thus expression and digital media are inseparable in my practice.
I did not adopt digital tools because I sought ephemerality; rather, I have long explored how to express ephemerality within the digital environment I know so well.
That sense of impermanence appears in flickers of light, bleeding shadows and formless tremors that rise and vanish. These overlap with memory fragments and emotional echoes, permeating the viewer as a subtle perception of time and space.
Motion, light and darkness are indispensable to this. They remain understated—quivering softly inside the frame, leaving a quiet trace. Only digital media allow the fine-grained accumulation of change that produces the fragile texture I seek.
Eisuke Ikeda. EXoC 2681257 | 2025 Remix |, 2025
Each artwork in this series features a meditative soundtrack. How does music support the visual experience? Does it introduce a narrative, or convey a certain emotion?
For every piece in this series the soundtrack was composed after the visuals were completed. The music introduces no explicit narrative; its purpose is to support atmosphere and mood.
Sound and image function symbiotically: audio flows with the rhythm of light and movement. Rather than directing viewers toward set emotions, the restrained soundscape leaves room for personal reflection and sensory introspection.
“Only digital media allow the fine-grained accumulation of change that produces the fragile texture I seek.”
The use of Artificial Intelligence models is gaining widespread use in artistic creation. Are you interested in applying AI to your creative process in any way?
Advances in AI have opened a new perspective on my work. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT gained wide attention a few years ago, its potential struck me powerfully. For an artist rooted in digital expression, AI’s arrival echoed the shock photography once delivered to painting, prompting artists to reconsider their medium.
Many creators now collaborate with AI. I have begun tentative experiments in TouchDesigner, exploring AI-driven possibilities. My use is still preliminary, but I am gradually looking toward deeper integration—generating code and widening the scope of interaction.
Jinsil Lee is a visual artist based in Seoul, South Korea. She earned a BFA degree in 2019 from School of Visual Arts, New York City, where she initially developed her photography work. She later on moved to Seoul, where she continues her career as an artist while working as a content specialist at Tesla Korea. Her work has been featured on the Samsung US website and Samsung Mobile USA social channels, and she has also participated in group shows such as the Naver Z Metaverse Exhibition (2022), Pulse Art Fair in Miami (2019), and School of Visual Arts Mentor Show (2019).
On the occasion of her first solo artcast on Niio, Transcendence, we talked with Jinsil about her creative process and the way she transforms scenes captured in her daily environment into mesmerizing abstract compositions.
Jinsil Lee. Dream of a summer night, 2019
You studied at the NY School of Visual Arts and currently live and work in Seoul as a visual artist and content specialist. Both New York and Seoul are vibrant cities, each with their own pace and culture. What has been more inspiring to you from your experience living and developing your career between the US and South Korea?
New York and Seoul are very similar and different cities. Both cities are full of their own charm, and both have been very inspiring to me in different ways. I grew up in Korea, so I’m more influenced by Korean culture in terms of the way I think and the language, but it was in the US where I really started to pursue art. I was able to explore art more freely in New York with its huge art scene, various art fairs, galleries, and artists, and this has greatly influenced my work today. Both cities have influenced me in different ways. Seoul has influenced me as a person, and New York has influenced my artistic work.
“I’ve lived in cities all my life, so I have a longing for nature.”
Your work is based on photography, yet it becomes a moving, abstract image. Can you explain to us your creative process? How does the transition from the captured image to the final composition come about?
I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. In my teenage years, I mostly painted in oils, and I loved the freedom to express whatever I imagined on the canvas. Then I started photography and applied my painting style to the medium of photography. I took a series of photographs and used tools like Photoshop to create short videos, and then I moved on to working with footage shot in video format.
Jinsil Lee. Sunset Town, 2018
Scenes from daily life and natural landscapes are sources of inspiration in your work. What are you most attracted to? Do you consider the scenes in front of you in terms of their aesthetics (colors, light, movement) or do you also consider their context, the meanings and stories that underlie the image you are capturing?
I’ve lived in cities all my life, so I have a longing for nature. I work and live in a big building in the city, but I question every day whether this environment is right for our bodies and minds, so when I’m close to nature, I feel an indescribable sense of awe. I think about this a lot, especially when I’m at the beach and I’m looking at the water moving like it’s breathing and the sunlight shining on it, and I realize that it’s so much like a human being, and I think about how long they must have traveled to get to where I am, and I think about how the moment that I’m in with them feels like a miracle, and it’s amazing. The visual beauty in front of me inspires me, but I think it’s probably the backstory that has a bigger impact on me.
Jinsil Lee. 20 18, 2018
Abstract art seeks the essence of things and at the same time removes the viewer from any reference to a specific time or space. What do you find most interesting about focusing on abstraction? What do you think that might be missing from the first-hand experience you get while capturing the original images?
I think there’s a lot of power in abstract art, and the reason I loved painting as a kid was that I was free to express my thoughts on a white canvas. I think abstract art, similar to the experience of painting, gives the audience a bigger room to run around in by removing the boundaries, and that’s the power of abstract art, that other people can see what I’ve imagined and they can develop their own imagination. That’s how we connect through art, and I think it’s very similar to nature, where everything is connected organically. So I try to make the forms as minimal as possible, and then I use the power of color to replace them, so that the audience doesn’t see them in their rawest state, but on the other hand, they see them in their most basic, unclothed form.
”The power of abstract art is that other people can see what I’ve imagined and they can develop their own imagination.”
Water, oceans, fluids, are common elements in your work. This is often combined with symmetrical structures, creating a certain tension between order and chaos, staticity and fluidity. What do you find most interesting about this tension between opposites? Could there be one without the other?
I love the book White by Hara Kenya, and there’s a quote in it that goes something like this. “The black color of type is only truly valuable when it is paired with the white it is based on.” I believe that two opposites are more valuable when they coexist, like you can only feel joy when there is sadness, and that’s why I like to play with this idea. In fact, my biggest inspiration is nature, but capturing it as a pixel-based digital photograph and editing it through digital tools, I think this process is very similar to human life. There are quiet people and there are loud people, there are people like me who are good at drawing but not so good at talking, and there are people who are better at expressing themselves through words than through drawings. I think my artistic process is a lot like our lives, where we have these opposites living together.
Jinsil Lee. 4AM, 2019
While your compositions are abstract and rationally geometric, the titles of your artworks suggest a narrative, which in some cases is expressed with words, as in These Foolish Things. Can you elaborate on the use of narrative in your work?
One of the most important things in my life is music. I feel unimaginable happiness from a favorite song and can be immersed in that emotional state for long periods of time. So when I start listening to a song, I usually memorize the lyrics from start to finish, and then I take those lyrics and rearrange them or turn the words into something that expresses my thoughts and use them in my artwork. I think it’s interesting that in this process, I’ll be thinking about the song while looking at my work, but I’m taking the audience into a world that I’ve “recreated”.
“My artistic process is a lot like our lives, where we have these opposites living together”
Sound and music also play a role in your work, which is sometimes silent, and sometimes features a music score or the sounds of the environment you recorded. Can you tell us a bit more about the connection between images and sound, and what leads you to choose whether the piece will be silent, with music, or ambient noise?
I often meditate, and sometimes music helps me to focus, and sometimes I’m able to focus more deeply when there is no sound at all. When I work on my art, I feel similar to when I meditate, sometimes I work with music and sometimes I work in a silent environment. For each piece, I choose sound to support the audience’s visual experience, and sometimes I choose silence so that the audience can focus on the visual experience alone.
Jinsil Lee. In Your Orbit, 2019
The growing influence of AI in the visual arts offers artists the possibility to work with source material that doesn’t exist, but is created by a prompt. Are you interested in incorporating this technology into your work, for instance to start with an AI-generated video and then turn it into an abstract composition, or else use real footage and transform it with the aid of AI tools?
100%. I consider my work to be a 3 way collaboration between nature, myself and digital technology. I am quite interested in how digital cameras capture and read moments. For example, the actual color I remember is often not the same as the color the digital camera reproduces, but I find the process and how it works fascinating, so I use it as it was captured. In this context, the idea of AI generating an image based on the data it has stored over the years, with prompts from me, is very interesting.
“I want to create a work of art in which I and the AI imagine a universe that I can’t actually photograph.”
It’s a vague idea, but I want to create a work of art in which I and the AI imagine a universe that I can’t actually photograph. If so, I’m very excited to see where that AI’s data comes from and how amazing it would be to see how it came to meet me.
Carlo Zanni DAN banquet gallery, Milan 12.12.2024 – 1.3.2025
Carlo Zanni, DAN. Solo exhibition at banquet gallery, Milan. Photo: Pau Waelder
Browse by category. See more products based on your recent purchases. Enjoy free shipment for a limited time only. Buy now. Our daily interaction with e-commerce sites is a delicate balance of seduction, anxiety, submission, and intrusiveness. While we eagerly look for the product that will finally make us happy, a code runs underneath the interface, collecting our preferences and feeding a system that increasingly succeeds in predicting our wants and needs, and even shaping them to benefit vendors. We know this, but we keep buying anyway.
Our daily interaction with e-commerce sites is a delicate balance of seduction, anxiety, submission, and intrusiveness.
While we engage in this narcissistic and Sisyphean task, the world keeps turning, and not always for the best. Innocent people are massacred in wars, terrorist attacks, and deranged shootings; migrants die trying to reach a better shore; people suffer under corrupt and authoritarian systems. This undercurrent of daily violence is hidden below the glossy interface that constantly presents desirable products for our consideration. We seek comfort and self-improvement, while others seek shelter and food. We zoom into the images to appreciate the product’s features and look away, or only briefly glance, at harsher realities. We eagerly follow the route of our purchases as they are shipped to our home, when others check alerts of incoming missiles, floods or fires, or see themselves sent away from countries that reject them.
Carlo Zanni’s artistic practice has, for many years, focused on the “shared landscape” that digital devices and the internet have created, enabling us to contemplate this virtual space as a territory that is at the same time familiar and distant, intimate and public. He has explored digital culture with the eyes of a painter, creating new forms of portraiture for computer desktops and landscape compositions made of pixels and real time data extracted from online sources. The artworks he now presents at his solo exhibition DAN at banquet gallery in Milan can only be understood from his decades-long exploration of internet culture, consumer society, identity, politics, programmed obsolescence, automation, and the way that art can address these aspects of our contemporary reality.
Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings, 2024. Photo: PW
Check Out Paintings
One of Zanni’s earliest works is DTP Icons (2000), a series of oil paintings depicting desktop icons of the software that was shaping digital culture in the late 90s and early 00s, like Napster, Shockwave, Illustrator, or Photoshop. He also painted desktop backgrounds commonly used in Windows and MacOS operating systems, based on the idea that “the desktop is the landscape and the cursor is the horizon.” Here, painting became the perfect medium in an attempt to both elevate the cultural status of a piece of software or a decorative element (by making it part of a work of art), and to fix its existence for posterity. Today, many of the elements he painted, the desktop images and the software, are no longer in use, obsolete, forgotten –just as last year’s news. The social and political reality underlying this booming internet culture (in the midst of what would later become a market bubble) is also referenced by Zanni in other paintings that point to the cracks in the system and look at the underbelly of the beginnings of e-commerce and millennial fascination with digital media: the online black markets, computer viruses, and hacker culture. The artist painted placeholders of missing images related to search queries, and later on explored the iconography used by hackers, often depicting monsters and satanic symbols to underscore their deviation from accepted standards.
Many of the elements that Zanni painted in the early 2000s, the desktop images and the software, are no longer in use, obsolete, forgotten –just as last year’s news.
Painting, which later became more of a conceptual framework in Zanni’s digital art practice, comes back as a medium in an evolved form that synthesizes what the artist has learnt and developed over the last two decades. Check Out Paintings(2022-2024) is a series of canvases that paradoxically (for a painter who depicts our digital landscape) cannot be properly viewed on a website. No photograph can actually capture the nuances of these almost abstract paintings that require the viewer to be physically present in front of the artworks and to pay special attention to their subtle details. The paintings depict elements of e-commerce sites’ check out pages, such as dropdown menus, buttons, quantity selectors, and so on. Unlike Zanni’s paintings from twenty years ago, depicting these elements is not the main subject of the artworks. Rather, they become part of a visual vocabulary with which the artist plays freely to create compositions that cannot possibly be perceived at a glance, as is so frequently demanded of contemporary painting. Using muted colors and thin, faintly drawn details, Zanni forces the viewer to look closer and read the texts that replace the usual messages found while shopping online. Some of these texts clearly refer to specific news, such as the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, a flood in the city of Faenza, or Brexit. Others more cryptically refer to the number of migrant men, women and children that died while trying to reach Europe by boat, or the GPS coordinates of a missile strike.
Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings (detail), 2024. Photo: PW
One may choose to inquire about these references in order to learn what lies beneath the surface of the canvas, or simply observe from a distance what seems to be yet another abstract composition. The interface elements of e-commerce sites operate here like a veil, that in turn serves as a background for a colorful, detailed emoji or a series of black shapes extracted from the Amazon logo. Zanni refers to these elements as “clickbait,” in the sense that they attract the viewer’s attention and give them something to look at. But this is just a distraction, for the content of these paintings lies somewhere else.
Carlo Zanni, DAN. Exhibition view at banquet gallery, Milan. Photo: PW
My Shameful Sweet Spot Between Distress and Hilarity
Two decades ago, Carlo Zanni started using long, evocative titles for his internet-based artworks with live data. Works like The Possible Ties Between Illness And Success(2006) and My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar(2007) introduced a dominant narrative that invited viewers to watch, listen, and interact with the artwork as a film rather than contemplate it as a landscape. This shift had already been initiated in the videogame artwork Average Shoveler(2004), which in turn builds on previous digital landscape compositions with real-time data such as Skyman(2003) and eBayLandscape(2004), adding a beautifully crafted intro scene that clearly marks the debut of Zanni’s exploration of the cinematic. Cinema, documentary, and other forms of audiovisual content, such as music videos, YouTube clips, and videoart, have shaped over the last decade how the artist confronts reality (both on the global, socio-political scale as well as in a more intimate level as a creator) building semi-fictional narratives that speak of a consumer society immersed in data.
Since the early 2000s, Carlo Zanni has been interested in the art market from the perspective of an artist creating digital art online. He pioneered talks about the possibilities of selling art online, and over the following two decades has experimented with different forms of presenting digital art for sale aimed at mass distribution, such as the ViBo(2014-2015), a paperback publication with an embedded video player and screen, or the unrealized online art platform P€OPLE ¥rom MAR$(2012), which prefigured many elements later found in NFT marketplaces. Precisely, the NFT boom marked another shift in Zanni’s work: from seeking a solution for the distribution of digital art in the contemporary art market to addressing this market, and more widely e-commerce and consumerism, as a subject. While ZANNI (Ẓ)and Boil the ocean. Cook the books. Eat your own dog food, both from 2018, address the early culture surrounding cryptocurrency, after the record sales of NFTs at auction and the market bubble that ensued in 2020-2021, his work returns to a more sober and refined attention to painting and e-commerce. As previously discussed, this is made evident in the Check Out Paintings series.
Carlo Zanni. Save Me for Later, 2022
Connected to the paintings, the live internet performance Save Me For Later(2022) builds on the concept of “the desktop is the landscape and the cursor is the horizon” to create an automated narrative in which we seem to be witnessing the artist himself endlessly browsing the Amazon website and adding random products to the shopping cart. In fact, it is a bot that browses the site, while a recording of Zanni’s face staring at the screen creates the illusion that it is the artist who is engaged in an endless cycle of shopping. However, the browser window is placed in such a way as to reveal another window below, which displays the code that runs the bot. This artwork, whose video edition is featured on Niio, confronts us with our own browsing and shopping habits, trapped in a cycle of endless pursuit of satisfaction. If a viewer dedicates enough time and patience to observe this apparently banal scene, they will gradually realize that the Amazon marketplace is actually an everyday landscape they know too well, and probably start to feel a twinge of curiosity or desire after seeing some of the products selected by the bot.
The Amazon marketplace is actually an everyday landscape we know too well.
Whereas Save Me For Later depicts a landscape and addresses our consumerist habits, My Shameful Sweet Spot Between Distress and Hilarity(2024) develops an underlying socio-political critique and has stronger ties to painting. Also a live internet performance (currently taking place in the basement of banquet gallery), this artwork uses as its canvas the website of the Parisian haute couture house Maison Margiela. The luxury fashion items sold by the prestigious brand are used by the artist as elements of a visual composition, as the bot not only clicks through the site but also zooms into the photos until they become textures that fill the browser window.
Carlo Zanni. My Shameful Sweet Spot Between Distress and Hilarity, 2024. Photo: PW
Again, Zanni’s face is displayed on a floating window, keeping the illusion of a conscious human activity, while the screen leaves room for another window beneath, that shows the program running the bot. Here, the code reveals that the bot is culling headlines from the news outlet AlJazeera, which from time to time are used as search queries on Maison Margiela’s site. The incongruence of this automated action brings forth the tensions and contradictions in our layered society, in which everything is traversed by flows of information. One may thus wonder, for instance, what does the fall of the Assad regime in Syria has to do with a Glam Slam hobo small bag crafted from quilted nappa leather. Zanni is able to connect these two distant realities by transferring data from one system to another, letting the website of the luxury fashion house interpret the query according to the information in its own database.
As in the Check Out Paintings, this artwork plays with the layering of separate realities, which is not immediately apparent and goes beyond the representation of the interface to create its own visual language. As the screen is covered by the texture of one of the items on sale, the artwork hints at the possibility of simply being an abstract composition, therefore providing the soothing distance from reality that art can deliver so effectively.
Carlo Zanni. DAN, 2024. Photo: PW
DAN
The dissonance between the experience of someone (anyone of us) shopping online and that of someone trapped in such a horrible situation as to make it to the headlines of a news agency can be expressed in terms of distance. Not only social, political, or economic distance, but also plain physical distance. We can observe events happening around the globe from our screens with some level of concern, but also detachment, since they are not happening at our doorstep. The pandemic showed how oblivious we can be to the fact that an outbreak in a country far away could have implications at home. It can be said that our online life has created an intimate distance between us and the content on our screens, while expanding the distance between us and our immediate surroundings. Our online shopping experience is a good example: we search for the product we crave, staring at a screen very close to our face, browsing, examining the product in detail, zooming in. If it convinces us, we press the “buy now” button, and wait. The wait must be as short as possible: one-day, same-day delivery. It was so close to me on the screen, why must I wait to have it in my hands? The physical distance must be erased as much as possible. The process taking place from order to delivery is obliterated, or at most expressed in a somewhat abstract form as a progress bar, as if the product were downloaded from the cloud into our home. When this process concludes, what we get is a cardboard box that will be joyfully opened and then thrown away.
Our online life has created an intimate distance between us and the content on our screens, while expanding the distance between us and our immediate surroundings.
The brown cardboard box has been popularized by Amazon and is now so strongly associated with the online marketplace as to become part of its brand identity. The smiling box symbolizes the happiness of the consumer in a sustainable planet that uses recyclable materials. Obviously, this message obscures the working conditions of those involved in packing and shipping, the damage to local stores, and the carbon footprint of a system that transports and delivers products individually to customers. In DAN, Carlo Zanni explores the dark side of Amazon, and e-commerce in general, in a series of sculptures that represent cardboard boxes with hidden messages inside. Built from MDF panels, the sculptures display laser engraved symbols on their outer faces, reminiscent of the Amazon logo. Inside, one finds weirdly drawn images of demons, partly hidden on the bottom of the boxes. The artist generated these symbols using an early version of DALL-E, an artificial intelligence software that produces images from text and due to its limitations at the time, often created ghostly, incoherent shapes. Zanni prompted the AI model to create versions of an “evil Amazon box,” which resulted in the somewhat amateurish and uncanny symbols engraved on the sculptures. Interestingly, the devil-like creatures that populate the boxes bear some resemblance to the imagery used by hackers that the artist explored two decades ago, thus connecting the dark side of e-commerce to the underbelly of digital culture.
The acronym “DAN” stands for “Do Anything Now” and refers to a “jailbreak” prompt that has been used by ChatGPT users since 2022 to bypass the limitations placed by OpenAI on the uses of its chatbot. The company limited uses of the AI program to avoid it being used to spread misinformation or create false images of real individuals that could damage their reputation or cause them harm. Over the last years, OpenAI has worked to limit the effectiveness of this prompt, in an ongoing effort that exemplifies that technological advancement will always face unethical or criminal uses. In a time of unprecedented developments in AI and robotics, DAN stands as a warning of the potential consequences of a race for AI dominance that responds to economic profit and geopolitical influence. As we seek to “do anything now,” to get what we want (or what we’ve been told we want) without delay, we are feeding a system that ultimately shapes our lives. Through the metaphorical language of art, Carlo Zanni invites us to look under the hood and read the code.
This year has been full of excitement, marked by both challenges and remarkable achievements. We have welcomed new partnerships and expanded our team, working hard to achieve new milestones in our commitment to bring digital art to everyone, everywhere. We are thankful for the continued trust of our partners and investors, and look forward to exciting new projects in 2025.
In this article, we offer a brief reflection on what 2024 has been for us at Niio, along with a heartfelt thank you to all the artists, galleries, collectors, curators, and art enthusiasts who share and celebrate art with us.
Our latest showreel video offers a glimpse into the many ways Niio works to facilitate the experience and appreciation of digital art.
Artcasts: your space to discover art
Artcast are our curated selections of artworks that any Niio user can play on the screen of their choice, turning it into a digital art canvas. We consider artcasts a space in which art lovers and collectors can discover new artworks and experience them as they would in an art exhibition: on a dedicated screen. Our curated art program welcomes the latest creations by the artists on our platform, enabling them to share both works in progress and finalized series, available for sale on Niio and through their galleries. This year, we are proud to have launched 23 artcasts featuring the work of outstanding artists, as well as collaborations with galleries, art centers, and universities.
Here are some of our favorite artcasts this year, but you can find many more by browsing the Discover area in our app.
Marina Zurkow. Elixir I, 2009
WITCHCRAFT
We celebrated Halloween with this artcast that showcases the work of women artists who delve into themes and realms of knowledge historically associated with witchcraft accusations, such as natural sciences, the human body, the nature of reality, and the critique of established gender roles. In their art, traditional symbols of witchcraft—like potions, enigmatic transformations, dark forests, full moons, and magical incantations—transcend their historical connotations to become vibrant expressions of these artists’ creativity and insight.
Tamiko Thiel. Unexpected Growth (Whitney Museum Walk1), 2018
DIGITAL BY NATURE
We celebrated our ongoing collaboration with DAM Projects by hosting this artcast curated by Wolf Lieser in which the artworks of four artists and artist duos represented by DAM Projects bring us views of nature mediated by technology. Driessen and Verstappen’s visualization of the pace of nature dialogues with boredomresearch’s approach to nature as a system, while Eelco Brand applies a painstaking recreation of natural environments as fictional compositions and Tamiko Thiel plays with the seductive beauty of nature to bring forth concerns about our role in the pollution of the oceans.
“I love what Niio is doing. It allows you to really get involved without having to pay a large amount of money to own a piece. And you have the opportunity to experience a lot of different art.”
Wolf Lieser
ZEITGUISED. Gem Forest, 2024
ZEITGUISED: HYPERREAL
We recently renewed our collaboration with ZEITGUISED, the studio founded in 2001 by Henrik Mauler and Jamie Raap, that has been a long time collaborator of Niio. ZEITGUISED has crafted a distinctive style of animation that serves as their hallmark, evident both in the elements they depict and in the flowing, organic movements of their characters, whether floating gemstones, a pink moon, phantasmagoric garments, or abstract, liquid forms. The artcast Hyperreal presents a selection of ZEITGUISED’s short films, progressively traversing the boundary between photorealism and abstraction. This collection features newly reimagined versions of select works, produced exclusively for Niio.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong. Meet Me Halfway – part 1, 2021
Artists: the core of creativity
Niio was founded with a core mission: to support and empower artists. Our platform provides them with a secure and efficient way to manage and showcase their portfolios, enabling seamless sharing with collectors, galleries, institutions, and art enthusiasts. Beyond this, we actively recommend their works to clients in our Art in Public program, feature their latest creations through our Curated Art initiatives, and build deeper connections by sharing their stories in the conversations published in our Editorial section. This year, we’ve launched more than 20 solo artcasts and a dozen group shows, as well as highlighted 41 selected artworks in our Artwork of the Week showcase on social media. We’ve also introduced the Artist of the Month post in our social media accounts, aiming to highlight the career of some of the most outstanding artists in our platform. In addition to this, we’ve published 15 interviews with the artists in our curated program, as part of our commitment to let our audience know the creators behind the art.
These are some of the artists we’ve showcased this year. We’d love to include them all here, but you can find them in our Discovery area.
MOONWALKER
Over the last two decades, the Brussels-based Colombian artist has carried out a consistent body of work in the form of interactive audiovisual installations and lThe creative duo Moonwalker (Dany Vo and Vy Vo) has its roots in the worlds of graphic design and illustration, where they honed their skills in creating mesmerizing artistic compositions exploring nature and fashion.
A contemporary artist, developer and an interaction designer, Ronen Tanchum has developed a body of work that explores the representation of natural phenomena and our perception of reality as it is mediated by the entertainment industry and digital media.
Polina Bulgakova is a digital 3D artist who has developed her practice since 2020. Working in the “surrealistic realism” style, Polina crafts visual narratives that challenge the constraints of real-world physics, inviting audiences to think beyond conventional limits and embrace the possibility that anything is achievable
Dev Harlan is a New York-based artist whose work in sculpture, installation, and digital media explores the interplay between technology, nature, and the impact of human activity on our planet.
Tahn (Taeyoung Ahn, born in South Korea, 1967) is a multifaceted media artist, technologist, writer, and art educator with an extensive career that spans multiple disciplines.
Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s Nethervoid 07 L 2116 showcased in one of the suites at the Tempo Times Square hotel in New York. Photo courtesy of Tempo by Hilton.
Public showcases: where art shines
Working closely with leading contemporary art galleries and establishing partnerships with premium business and hospitality venues is central to our goal of bringing exceptional video and digital art to top-tier spaces and seamlessly incorporating art into daily life. We are proud to have developed strong ties with leading digital art galleries bitforms (New York), Galerie Charlot (Paris), and DAM Projects (Berlin), as well as with many other professional art galleries, and to provide curated art selections to some of the most prestigious brands and properties, such as Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Tempo by Hilton, The Mondrian Hotel Seoul Itaewon, Aloft Hotels, and many others.
Below are some highlights of a very busy year with wonderful collaborations and promising partnerships. You can find more about our activities on our LinkedIn and Instagram accounts.
Niio x SMTH Open Call for Art Students showcase at Plenilunio shopping mall, Madrid.
NIIO x SMTH: THE WORLD(S) WE WANT
Niio partnered with SMTH in an open call for art students that brought the work of five selected artists to more than 30 screens in several shopping malls located in major cities in Spain. We were grateful to count on the collaboration of artist and researcher Snow Yunxue Fu and the jury members Wolf Lieser, founder of DAM Projects, Valentina Peri, independent curator, and the artist Solimán López. The five winning artists, Bruno Tripodi, Cruda Collective, Rolin Yuxing Dai, Cosette Reyes, and Katsuki Nogami, saw their work displayed in spectacularly large screens in the public space. Crucial to the success of the open call was the generous support of LED&GO, as well as Laba Valencia, ESDi, New York University, Université Paris 8, BAU, and Elisava, among other schools and universities.
Steven Sacks and Rob Anders at the Fireside Chat hosted by Ideaworks. Photo: Ideaworks
DIGITAL ART WEEK LONDON
Niio’s co-founder and CEO Rob Anders participated, alongside Steve Sacks, founder and owner of bitforms gallery (New York), in a fireside chat hosted by Ideaworks during the Digital Art Week in London. This highly successful event featured a pop-up exhibition of a curated selection of artworks by Refik Anadol, Quayola, Marina Zurkow, Claudia Hart, and Jonathan Monaghan, all of the represented by bitforms.
TALKING GALLERIES
Our Senior Curator Pau Waelder was invited to participate in this year’s edition of Talking Galleries Symposium in Barcelona, making this the third time he is featured in the program of this well-known event. Waelder moderated a panel talk on “Creating and Selling Digital Art in the Age of AI” with the speakers Anne Schwanz, from Office Impart gallery (Berlin), and the artists Carlo Zanni (Milano) and Daniel Canogar (Madrid).
ART BASEL WEEK, PARIS
Our co-founder and CEO Rob Anders gave an interesting talk about collecting digital art to a professional audience during the Art Basel week in Paris. The talk was hosted by DANAE and lead by curator Rachel Chicheportiche. This event was also a wonderful occasion to showcase the work of Quayola, Yoshi Sodeoka, Ronen Tanchum, and Jonathan Monaghan.
ANTHROPOSCENES
A digital art program taking place during the whole year at the facade of Lo Pati Centre d’Art de les Terres de l’Ebre (Amposta, Spain) has been a wonderful opportunity to showcase the work of six talented artists whose work is available on Niio. Marina Zurkow, Claudia Larcher, Diane Drubay, Kelly Richardson, Yuge Zhou and Theresa Schubert have produced audiovisual artworks that offer us, from different perspectives, scenes of life in the Anthropocene, particularly those environments and systems that we ignore but that play a determining role in life on Earth. From the ocean floor to the mines from which the materials that enable our digital life are extracted, from glaciers to atmospheric phenomena, from forest fires to crowded cities, these works lead us to reflect on our planet, the world in which we want to live and what we will leave to the next generations.
Articles: art in theory, art in conversation
This section forms a cornerstone of Niio’s work, offering a platform for documentation, reflection, and dialogue with artists, gallerists, and art professionals, while also serving as a hub for insights and discussions on key topics in contemporary art. This year, we learned a lot about the artist’s creative processes, and particularly the expectations of young artists who are still in the final phase of their studies.
Read some of our most commented articles this year and find many more by browsing our Editorial section.
📝 Jaime de los Ríos: Sculpting Infinity Interview with Jaime de los Rios, visual artist and programmer whose work blends contemporary art, science and technology, creating immersive environments and generative works, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers.
📝 Franz Rosati: The Collapse of Truth Artist Franz Rosati discusses his latest series DATALAKE: GROUNDTRUTH (2024) in which he worked with AI models to generate mesmerizingly fluid landscapes that evoke chaos and disaster, but also regeneration and impermanence.
📝 Niio x SMTH: The World(s) We Want A series of interviews with the winning artists of the Open Call for Art Students revealed the creative processes and expectations of young artists with a bright future ahead: Katsuki Nogami, Rolin Dai, Cruda Collective, Bruno Tripodi, and Cosette Reyes.
This is just a glimpse of what Niio has been in 2024. We look forward to doing much more in 2025, and we’d love to share our journey with you!
Polina Bulgakova is a digital 3D artist who has developed her practice since 2020. Working in the “surrealistic realism” style, Polina crafts visual narratives that challenge the constraints of real-world physics, inviting audiences to think beyond conventional limits and embrace the possibility that anything is achievable. Originally from Siberia and now based in Israel, Polina draws inspiration from the cultural contrasts she has experienced, integrating these influences into her work to create striking visual juxtapositions. Her expertise spans product visualizations, vision boards, and concept art in both static and motion formats.
Following her solo artcast Dreamlandson Niio, Polina Bulgakova elaborates on her practice and background in the following interview.
Polina Bulgakova. Sleep Tight, 2021
You were raised in Siberia but now live in Israel. How have your life experiences and cultural background influenced your work?
It made my work very authentic and honest. I learnt how to embrace my differences and diversity, I learnt that it is ok to not fit fully and that my art can not fit to any defined style or niche. I realized that my art is a reflection of what is going on in my life, a reflection of my reactions to the environment or nostalgia, and the only way to be honest in my work is to actually be honest about who I am.
“My art is a reflection of what is going on in my life, and the only way to be honest in my work is to actually be honest about who I am.”
While having a background in more traditional forms of art making, you have found your medium of expression in 3D rendering and animation. Can you tell us a bit about the path that led to digital creation?
Before moving to Israel, my main medium was oil and a little watercolors, but a good part of my income was selling my oil paintings and oil commissions. Once I moved to Israel in 2017, I didn’t have proper space for that – oil is smelly and dirty, and I had to move to digital 2D. For 2 years I was painting in Photoshop, but it felt like something was missing, it felt like something flat – after you work with oil with bold texture, it was not “it”. In 2019 I moved to work from home due to COVID, and decided to learn something new, which was 3D. I fell in love instantly, and since then it hasn’t changed. I sometimes mix 2D and 2D, but both digital. Now if I take a real brush – it’s only for relaxation or if I want to fill a wall at my home.
Polina Bulgakova. Seated, 2024
You combine your artistic projects with professional 3D rendering and creative services such as product visualization and 3D models. How do your commissioned work and art projects influence each other?
There is a bold connection between those two. Commissions sometimes can be challenging, and sometimes I need to learn new techniques quickly to finish the work on time. But once I explore something new, it’s like a game with new levels – it sparks my curiosity, and I dive deeper into it in my art projects. And sometimes it’s the opposite – I find/learn something new that can be super useful in commissions and use it after I gave it a try in my personal projects.
“This is why I fell in love with 3D so quickly –there are literally no limits.”
An interesting type of commissioned work that you do are Custom Vision Boards, personalized scenes that you render in 3D from a brief that you send to your clients. Can you tell us more about these vision boards and your experience creating them?
I love making Vision Boards, it’s probably my favorite kind of commission. The first one I made for myself a few years ago – I read a lot about that stuff and thought “why don’t I use my favorite tools to make something that will help me reach my goals?”, and I had so much joy and fun making it. Then I started to commission VBs. It’s honestly a pure joy – to get to know a person, their dreams and desires, to see their eyes glowing while they describe their dream life, and then actually visualize it. It’s like a puzzle – I have specific pieces I need to arrange together to get a clear picture, while having certain creative freedom.
Polina Bulgakova. The Safe Romance. Custom Vision Board
Your work is characterized by a photorealistic surrealism that you achieve using 3D animation. What do you find most interesting about the tension between fantasy and reality? In terms of optimizing the work involved and computer processing requirements, do you have some “visual tricks” you can play with?
The most interesting thing about balancing fantasy and reality is that there are no limits and no boundaries at all. I have my patterns, of course, but in terms of the tech side mostly. And this is why I fell in love with 3D so quickly –there are literally no limits. Whatever I have in mind, the craziest ideas I can visualize. Sometimes I mix 2D and 3D, sometimes I animate textures in third party software in order to reduce render time, sometimes I combine those two.
Polina Bulgakova. Witchy Morning, 2022
The artworks we have presented in the artcast “Dreamlands” on Niio not only create imaginary scenes, but also evoke underlying feelings with which we can identify. What inspired you to work with these feelings in dreamlike scenarios, and how do you think they can convey their message to viewers?
“Dreamlands” is probably one of the most honest works of mine. I try to be as authentic as possible in my work, and these kinds of dreamlike scenes are pure reflections of what I was feeling and going through at these times. I hope that every viewer will get the message he or she actually wants to get – be it to reflect on the self, to embrace simple things in daily life, to feel alone but not lonely. My main goal is to encourage people to embrace their authenticity and their differences while looking at my art.
“My work can be viewed as a life graph – you can see what I was going through, and how it influenced me.”
It can be argued that your work is more painterly than cinematic, with peaceful, mediative scenes dominated by a single point of view and a carefully constructed composition. Would you agree with this statement? Do you see digital art as an evolution from the tradition of painting into a new form of creating images meant to be contemplated?
I have works that are dark and moody, works that are chaotic and rhythmic, works that are odd and evoke mixed feelings. It can be viewed as a life graph – depending on the period, you can see what I was going through, and how it influenced my work. The fact that during the last 1-2 years my works are mostly peaceful and calm shows that I’m pretty much in a stable calm period right now.
I don’t think that digital art is an evolution from traditional art. I think it’s a new tool, like a new set of brushes or a new kind of canvas. In the right hands of the right creator, everything can be used to embrace either revolution or traditions, there are artists that combine digital and traditional art tools and create breathtaking pieces.
Polina Bulgakova. Wood Morning, 2021
Your work is now available in several online platforms, including Niio. What opportunities do you see in these platforms, and what features do you find (or would like to find) in them that are most convenient for you as a digital artist?
Everyone knows how to make an income from traditional art – you sell an art piece from your shop or gallery, you get paid, you ship it, and you have a happy client. For digital art, especially animations, it’s different. From one side, we have this huge market on social media and the internet that we use to showcase our works, but from the other side – it’s not as simple to sell it as there’s nothing to pack and ship. Platforms like Niio provide us with an amazing opportunity to monetize digital art through licensing and digital editions, and it’s amazing to know your work is appreciated and displayed in someone’s home, office, building etc. I really like the way it gives me both exposure and profit. It can be argued for ages that “a true artist should only care for making great art”, but the truth is everybody needs to feed their family and pay the bills, even artists.
“Platforms like Niio provide us with an amazing opportunity to monetize digital art through licensing and digital editions, and it’s amazing to know your work is appreciated and displayed in someone’s home, office, or building.”
