Tag Archives: digital art

Valentina Ferrandes: Reshaping Icons

Niio Editorial

Valentina Ferrandes is an artist working across moving image, installation, and digital world-building, whose practice weaves together ecology, mythology, and the lived experience of place. Grounded in research and a documentary sensitivity to landscapes, archives, and historical traces, she shifted from filming toward constructing sensorial 3D environments, using scans, procedural tools, and real-time engines to let forms drift, fracture, and evolve. Classical sculpture and ancient narratives become both emotional anchors and critical material in her work: icons that carry through time, re-shaped through contemporary technologies into atmospheres of beauty and tension where political rupture can be felt indirectly through light, motion, and sound.

On the occasion of the launch of her solo artcast Metamorphoses: Myth, Body, and Code, we had a conversation about her work and creative process.

Valentina Ferrandes. Aurea, 2023

You describe your practice as connecting ecology, mythology, technology, and post-human imaginaries. When you start a new project, what drives it, the research, the story, or the technique you have chosen to produce it?

I normally start with research.

I’m interested in the way we live through environments and the stories that shape them. Myths, landscapes, architectures, archaeological traces. At first, these things appear separate; when you sit with them long enough, they begin to echo one another.

Only then do I choose the technique, the choice is never neutral.

Lately, I’ve been working with 3D motion, procedural tools, real-time engines, and 3D scans,  not to represent the world, but to build systems that can behave like it. Tools that allow things to drift, mutate, and occasionally slip out of control. Sometimes a project expands from a single shape, a scanned object from an archive, or material gathered through direct observation. That form becomes a world. Using game engines and procedural workflows, I stretch it, repeat it, let it evolve.

Ultimately, I’m trying to immerse the viewer in a mood, mostly driven by aesthetics, fragments of stories, and sensory tension, rather than by purely documentary logic.

Valentina Ferrandes. Still from Travelogue, 2018

You made experimental documentaries for years, then moved into CGI and real-time worlds. What changed for you around 2020 that made 3D the right language?

Around 2018 I made a film called Travelogue. It was a visual diary of a journey I took to Izmir in Turkey and then to the island of Kos, shot in a documentary register a couple of years back, right at the height of the Mediterranean migratory crisis. It followed my previous work Other Than Our Sea, where I used montage to collapse fragments of Mediterranean mythology, classical literature, ethnographic film, archival material, and glimpses of contemporary newsreels of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean into layered visual narratives.

But shooting Travelogue felt tougher as it touched something much closer. My family has a history of forced migration. Although Italian citizens, my father’s family had long-standing ties to Libya and Tunisia. After decades of living in Libya, they were compelled to return to Italy as refugees in the late 1970s. That sense of loss, of having to abandon an entire world to rebuild another, was something I grew up with. Filming along the semi-illegal routes in Turkey and Greece that many migrants were taking toward Europe, witnessing those crossings and the weight they carried, made me realise that documentary language had reached its limit for me.

Depicting reality no longer felt feasible. I didn’t want to record crises anymore but construct worlds that could allude to moments of rupture, holding some emotional truth but without reproducing their images directly.  I needed a medium that could be more sensorial, more abstract, and more heartfelt than documentary realism.

I had no language for it, so I stopped making films for a while.

“Depicting reality no longer felt feasible. I didn’t want to record crises anymore but construct worlds that could allude to moments of rupture.”

Then, around 2020, I turned to 3D. I began experimenting with scanned classical sculptures that had shaped my imagination growing up in southern Italy, fragments of classicity that, for me, functioned as emotional anchors. They were beautiful, but also quietly critical: stabilising forms in times of uncertainty, grounding while still provoking thought and aspiration. At the same time, I was going through a period of personal losses. Working in 3D allowed me to move away from documentation and toward construction: creating works driven by form, light, and colour rather than evidence.  Real-time worlds and CGI offered that kind of a-political space, a way to build beauty and tension, and to think about crisis indirectly, through atmosphere, motion, light and colour.

From that point on, my work shifted toward 3D hybrid forms.

Valentina Ferrandes. Victory, 2020


“Victory” treats Nike of Samothrace as something that can be algorithmically decomposed and rebuilt. What does computation allow you to “see” in sculpture that a camera cannot?

A camera can only register what is visible. It freezes what is already there. Computational tools do something else: they open the parameters to make instability visible and let you play with latent forms. Even the most solid material, like marble, is in reality energy in motion, atoms vibrating, matter constantly becoming. We just can’t see it.

In Victory, computation allows me to see sculpture as movement rather than image. When the Nike of Samothrace is translated into a 3D motion system, it stops being a fixed surface and becomes a fluid field of forces, basic geometries, vectors, and polygons that can shift, fracture, and reassemble.

“Even the most solid material, like marble, is in reality energy in motion, atoms vibrating, matter constantly becoming.”

In the Athena works, you connect a local pre-Christian cult, the olive tree, and the long chain of copies from Greece to Roman times and beyond. What does that continuity mean to you inside a digital artwork today?

We often think of digital media as something entirely new, as if it belongs only to the future. For me, however, digital tools are a means of reshaping icons that are already deeply ingrained in our collective memory.

In the Athena works, bringing together a local pre-Christian cult, the olive tree, and the long chain of copies creates a sense of continuity rather than rupture. Using a hyper-contemporary medium to work with ancient mythology opens up a different timeline, one where past and present coexist instead of replacing one another.

Classical icons are solid, almost a-temporal structures, narratives that can be applied to any moment in history, much like religious icons. They carry ethical, emotional and symbolic lessons that can stay legible across centuries.

“For me, digital tools are a means of reshaping icons that are already deeply ingrained in our collective memory.”

At the same time, I want my works to remain open. A digital artwork can be interpreted in various ways, ranging from a purely aesthetic encounter driven by form, light and rhythm to a more layered and reflective interpretation, depending on the viewer’s sensitivity and cultural background.

Digital tools don’t need to reject this legacy in favour of futuristic expectations. They enable us to revisit these foundational forms, reshape them, and discover new meanings within them. 

Valentina Ferrandes. Daaphne, 2022

You revisit Apollo and Daphne in both “Daaphne” and “Aurea.” Why return to that myth now, and what feels ethically or emotionally at stake in reanimating it with AI and procedural CGI?

This myth, at its core, stages a clear opposition: Apollo as a rational, male-driven force, mathematical, controlling, and oppressive, and Daphne as a figure bound to nature, freedom, and transformation. The moment of rupture between them could not be more explicit and in my work, I used AI to push that rupture even further.
I worked with an AI writing tool trained on game narratives and powered by a rudimentary version of GPT-3, fed it the story of Daphne as written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and asked it to imagine what this nymph might wake up as after a set time as a laurel tree.

The AI imagined Daphne re-emerging as a post-human, hybrid being, part human, part aquatic, drifting in an underwater world, without language or memory, completely disoriented. I loved that the story had a hallucinatory, almost comic tone, like a futuristic fiction gone off-track.

“Daphne’s transformation is survival, a reminder that neither nature nor the systems we create can ever be fully governed by pure rationality.”

From there, I worked with 3D motion to animate forms suggested by the AI’s text. The work became a meditation on rupture at multiple levels: between human and nature, between rationality and excess, and between control and unpredictability. AI, in this sense, operates like an alter ego, a parallel intelligence that accelerates extraction, mutation, and instability.

In that way, the myth of Apollo and Daphne can be uncannily contemporary as it speaks to an enduring conflict: nature versus culture, rational order versus metamorphosis.  Apollo’s loss of power in the face of nature, something fundamentally uncontrollable, mirrors our relationship with AI today. We are building a system that behaves like a subconscious, one that evolves beyond our control, driven by its own form of self-preservation.

Daphne’s transformation is survival, a reminder that neither nature nor the systems we create can ever be fully governed by pure rationality.

Valentina Ferrandes. Midday Muse, 2022. Site-specific installation, META London Headquarters.


A lot of your work sits between fiction and documentation. How do you decide what must remain “true” and where you allow speculation to take over?

Usually, I decide on a set of rules, fixed conditions and boundaries for a given project.
I tend to ground a new work in real elements, a place, a historical fact, a piece of storytelling, a dataset, a myth that already exists, a landscape I’ve walked through. It’s almost a forensic layer to start building upon. This documentary approach anchors the work to the world as it is, while I use fiction to open a door to how it might feel, how it might mutate, or how it could be remembered in the future.

The balance is intuitive more than anything. What remains “true” is the research spine and the ethical position. Form, narrative, and atmosphere can drift in fluid ways.

Valentina Ferrandes. The Beautiful One Has Come, 2021.

Sound shows up as a structural element in several projects. Do you think of sound as world-building, as evidence, or as emotion?

When I began working on Daaphne, it was 2022, and the war in Ukraine had just started. One of the first elements I used in my soundtrack was a Russian lullaby,  a song meant to put children to sleep, but sung as an eerie horror story. I layered it with voices of phone calls from Russian mothers trying to find out where their sons had disappeared on the battlefield.

These sounds were among the first field recordings to surface from the conflict. They weren’t yet shaped by long-form reporting or political framing. They were raw, deeply human, and I knew they would soon be buried under 24h news coverage. I wanted to hold onto them before they disappeared. I’m drawn to these small, fragile fragments of reality, pieces of evidence that are emotionally charged but not always fully legible. They speak of a specific moment in time, yet they slip away easily, like trying to remember a conversation heard in a dream just after waking.

Much of the sound material I work with also comes from evidence: archival recordings, field recordings I collect myself, binaural sound, fragments of voiceover. But it’s almost always assembled as a collage. Sound often becomes the backbone of my work but it does not demand that everything be decoded. If someone wants to sit with it and trace the details, that’s possible. If not, the surface remains open.

Valentina Ferrandes. Bloom, 2024. Site-specific 3D animation, Night Lights Denver

In “BLOOM,” classical iconography is projected onto a city landmark. What draws you to public architecture as a screen, and what do you want viewers to feel at that scale?

Public architecture is interesting because it operates at a scale where meaning turns physical. Facades, towers, and landmarks are symbols of power, progress, and permanence. Using them as screens immediately creates a shift in perception.

In BLOOM, projecting classical iconography onto a hypermodern skyline for Denver Night Lights meant staging a clash of meanings. On one side, you have contemporary architecture, on the other, a classical image that many viewers may never have encountered directly, unless they’ve visited the museum that houses it. That displacement is intentional.

“Classical iconography carries a quiet power because it transcends specific cultures to communicate through beauty rather than explanation.”

At that scale, the work isn’t meant to be fully legible. It’s meant to interrupt routine, to slow people down, and to create a brief moment of disconnection from the everyday flow of the city. Ultimately, to leave space for a  few minutes of awe.

Ultimately, classical iconography carries a quiet power because it transcends specific cultures and historical knowledge to communicate through beauty rather than explanation. When placed on an urban skyline like Denver’s, it opens up a small pocket of dreaming,  a moment of wonder appearing where it doesn’t quite belong.

Saeko Ehara: filling the world with Kirakira

Yui Taniguchi and Pau Waelder

An artist and VJ based in Tokyo, Saeko Ehara’s work is deeply influenced by kirakira, a Japanese term that can be translated as “sparkling” and defines a peculiar visual language. Glittering objects, flowers, and shiny clothing express joy and playfulness in Manga, popular culture, music, fashion, and contemporary art. It is one of the many ways in which Japanese artists overcome the distinction between “high” and “low” culture, by introducing elements from popular culture into their artworks and making them an integral part of their œuvre. Well-known artists such as Takashi Murakami or Yayoi Kusama have popularized this characteristically Japanese approach to contemporary art, which in Ehara’s work takes a new dimension in the form of immersive 3D animations, sometimes created from real environments and objects. 

Saeko Ehara aims to inspire positive feelings and provide a space of contemplation and recovery through her kirakira artworks, gradually feeling the world with joyful visual experiences. Following the recent launch of her solo artcast Kirakira World, the artist shares with us some insights about her work and the creative process behind it.

Saeko Ehara. KiraKira Sweet Pink, 2022

Kirakira is a major aspect of your work. You state that it connects with your childhood and also with the experience of escaping from reality. Do you think that kirakira is about escaping reality? Is it a way to avoid the darkest aspects of everyday life by finding a safe and joyful space in a fantasy world?

Kirakira is not an escape from reality. For me, Kirakira represents the most primal sense of awe I experienced in childhood, and I want to share that feeling with the world through my work. I’m not expressing it to escape from painful experiences, but rather, I hope it serves as a source of encouragement and recovery for myself and for viewers when faced with difficulties.

“I hope that Kirakira serves as a source of encouragement and recovery for myself and for viewers when faced with difficulties.”

In terms of its visual appearance, kirakira heavily relies on sparkling effects and reflective textures. How does that translate into your work with 3D animation? Is it challenging? Do you need many resources to create the elements you look for? Please tell us a bit about the making of the artworks.

Before using AI, I mainly used TouchDesigner and Houdini to create 3D animations. I focused particularly on materials and lighting, learning through numerous tutorials. In Houdini, rendering transparency and reflections takes a lot of time, so completing a single piece would often take a long time.

Saeko Ehara. Crystal Flowers, 2022

Flowers are also a common element in kirakira aesthetics that can be found in your work. What do you find most appealing about using flowers as an element in your compositions? Which flowers do you like to depict? Are they more connected to Japanese and Asian cultures (such as lotus or almond blossoms) or to Western tradition (roses, poppies, daisies)?

Flowers are a universal presence that can be enjoyed by people regardless of nationality or race, and that’s what I find so appealing about them. When choosing flower types, I focus on their symbolism and their relationship to the place of exhibition. Recently, as I often focus on everyday life as a theme, I’ve increasingly been incorporating flowers that bloom in familiar surroundings.

“I like flowers because they are a universal presence that can be enjoyed by people regardless of nationality or race.”

You often collaborate with musicians in VJ sessions. Since your artworks have the ability to transport viewers to a different world, how do you combine that immersive experience with the music? Do these artworks have a different pace or rhythm compared to those you exhibit in gallery or museum shows?

VJ sessions often last 20 to 40 minutes, allowing for a deeper viewing experience than static exhibitions. I usually research the musician’s music in advance and align my expression with their rhythm and worldview. I also take into account the venue size and screen shape when creating the visuals.

Saeko Ehara. Dreamy Creatures, 2022

Given that your work often depicts fantastic worlds and immersive scenes, have you developed VR or AR pieces? If so, how would you compare the experience on the screen with that of a VR headset?

I’m not currently creating VR or AR works. Personally, I prefer screen-based experiences that anyone can enjoy without needing a headset or installing apps.

“Platforms like Niio, which connect with the world, are wonderful and feel like a big step toward realizing my vision.”

You have expressed interest in art history when working with AI. What do you find appealing about the art of the past? Which art styles or artists are you most interested in? Apparently you work mainly with references from Western art, have you explored traditional Japanese art too?

Both 3D animation and AI are stimulating, but right now I find myself especially drawn to working with AI models. AI allows for some control, but its greatest appeal is the unpredictability of the outcomes. In the beginning, I created many works that re-generated Western and Japanese art through AI. Recently, I’ve become more interested in the idea of how past artists might express themselves using today’s tools. I’m also exploring how to train AI using public domain works to discover new forms of expression.

Saeko Ehara. Flower Garden, 2024

What would be the next step of “making the world full of kirakira”? Would you like to create more installation work, or live performances, or maybe widely distribute your work, with Niio or other platforms?

Platforms like Niio, which connect with the world, are wonderful and feel like a big step toward realizing my vision. I believe it will take time to fill the world with Kirakira, but I want to cherish each opportunity and build slowly. That way, little by little, I hope to fill the world with Kirakira.

Lines of Thought: painting across mediums

Niio Editorial

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.

A purely visual experience. The art of Eisuke Ikeda

Niio Editorial

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: Opposites living together

Niio Editorial

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: Do Anything Now

Pau Waelder

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.

Carlo Zanni. DAN, 2024. Photo: PW