generative art Archives

Jaime de los Ríos: sculpting infinity

Pau Waelder

Jaime de los Rios (Donostia/San Sebastian, 1982) is a visual artist and programmer, founder of the open laboratory of art and science ARTEK[Lab] (2007). An expert in free software and hardware, he has developed over the last decades a body of work that blends contemporary art, science and technology, creating immersive environments and generative works, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers.

On the occasion of his solo exhibition “El problema de la forma” at Arteko Gallery, we present in Niio a selection of his recent digital works and conduct this interview in which we delve into the career, work processes and inspiration of the Spanish artist.

Explore a selection of artworks by Jaime de los Rios in On The Problem of Form

Open artcast

Jaime de los Ríos. LeVentEtSaMesure I, 2024

As a visual artist and programmer, you unite the two essential aspects of digital creation. What led you to develop your career in this field? Which aspect tends to prevail, the one that seeks a particular aesthetic expression, or the one that seeks to experiment with new technologies?

I consider that creation is intimately linked to the paradigm that the artist inhabits. In my case, different contemporary aspects intersect that have led me to use new technologies, as well as the aesthetics of these technological times. I did my studies in electronic engineering and I was educated to successfully manage the technical capabilities of my time. However, in the process of learning, certain desires and results have come in the way. These were not initially desired, but they responded to a philosophy or a concern. I remember well when I had to program an automaton that controlled a traffic light and I forced it to make a certain error that made the three lights blink in a randomized cycle. This reminded me of the famous movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (Steven Spielberg, 1977) and how it used the language of sound and color, with the notes Sol re Sol. There I realized that to control the technology of the moment was also to be able to use the best tools in a critical and aesthetic way and that in such a technologized society artists have an important role to reconfigure or offer a political view of the situation.

I work mainly with algorithms. I don’t always do it from a programming language but the logic is the same. I compose simple systems that are governed by different equations: these combinations make the system complex, quantum we could say. In its infinity I cannot know how the system will behave at a given moment but I can frame its behavior. It is like sculpting infinity. When handling these systems, I navigate among the mathematics themselves and it is these that make the possibilities emerge that perhaps would never have been in my head if I had thought about it from the beginning, so aesthetics and technology are absolutely linked to each other.

In your work there are influences of geometric abstraction and the work of pioneers such as Manfred Mohr. What references have marked the visual vocabulary of your works?

Of course, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake…. And also the whole ecosystem of the Computing Center of Madrid, including artists such as José Luis Alexanco or Elena Asins. At the moment when these artists became acquainted with computation through the computer there is a moment of singularity that is very inspiring for me and can be appreciated in my last exhibition. The precarious resources, such as simple geometries, and yet the great capacity for resolution are undoubtedly a great metaphor for the work of these artists in their time. It is the first painting made using a computer, but it has immense poetics.

I have arrived in my work to these artists that I already knew but I have done it at a later time, after exploring the history of painting itself and activating algorithms in a pictorial way. In recent years I have wanted the work to speak of its own support and its own algorithms in a transparent way and that is why the elements I use are precisely reminiscent of that synthetic painting.

Jaime de los Ríos. FlyTheProblem, 2024

A main aspect of your work lies in the use of generative algorithms to create constantly morphing compositions, with each work being what Frieder Nake once defined as “the description of an infinite set of drawings.” What attracts you to the possibilities of generative art? What is it like to conceive of a work that does not consist of a finished visual composition, but rather a set of instructions and behaviors?

It is undoubtedly one of the great differences with respect to plastic art. Algorithms allow us to think and develop artworks that change endlessly. We work with movement, fundamentally, let’s say that so far we have a new characteristic which is rhythm and we leave behind, as if it were a curse, the texture and smell of painting.

Here there are also two types of digital artists, those who direct their creation to something they have previously thought of and others like me who navigate mathematics and in the dialogue with the algorithm itself we let emergencies flow, but then both types of artists need to conceive the work as a system, a framework of possibilities. The work is never solved but it is enclosed in a space of freedom.

The most exciting thing about this technique, I would say, is to reach the infinite in a poetic way that enables contemplation. To do this, and knowing that it is a post-editing technique, that is, it does not begin or end, we only have to look at nature, the largest infinite system that can be known. From there it is trapped into mathematics and transferred to aesthetic systems. Some artists do it in a very direct and figurative way, others use a system of color and a rhythm that we can perceive as human beings, everyday phenomena such as the reflection of the light in the sea, the shoals of fish or the choreography of birds.

“The work is never solved, but locked in a space of freedom.”

In addition to pictorial references, in your work you have explored the relationships between digital art and film, using Gene Youngblood’s concept of “expanded cinema”, and also with the electroacoustic music of Iannis Xenakis, as well as jazz. What do these connections with film and music bring to digital art, and especially to your work?

My work is an incessant search for pictorial, tactile, and sound systems. However, I rarely generate my own sound, so I use the mathematics of music to apply it to the artworks. Many of us electronic art artists work transcoding data, that is, a work can be silent and at the same time have a lot of musicality as is the case of my work on Iannis Xenakis, where I use his famous equation, the curve, which he applied on the one hand in architecture but also in sound composition, to move a series of kinetic artifacts that are like windmills. By activating a movement directly proportional to this curve and also generating a very powerful rotational sound, the whole immersive work, which is also projected, forms a universe that evokes the work of Xenakis. It is almost a scientific experiment: what would have happened if we human beings did not have the sensors to hear, and had to translate those frequencies in the form of color, for instance.

Jaime de los Ríos. pixelsunshine, 2024

Telepresence is a concept you have worked with in several projects, which have notably incorporated a complex interaction between devices, people, and spaces. What attracts you to the possibility of creating these remote connections? Based on your experience with these projects, how do you see the ubiquity of digital art through platforms like Niio, which make it easy to integrate artworks on any screen?

The telepresence I worked with is situated in time between the utopia of net art, the rhizomatic connection, and the quantum era of entanglement. It is one of those concepts that are human aspirations and that Roy Ascott and Eduardo Kac, of course, talked about and developed a lot. In the days of the Intact collective we did teleshared actions between many places around the world. The most interesting thing is that they were not based on video as in our new tools, but given the precariousness of the Internet connection what we sent was mostly mathematics. So I became an interactive beacon of light to the music coming from the SAT in Montreal thanks to the data flowing through the fiber optic cables.

Niio is a revolution for digital art, it takes advantage of the nature of the medium and takes art out of the black box. One of the big problems of art today is that it has not changed at the pace of society, today we must be accessible and in the pockets of the user, the art lover and not exclusively in centers or institutions and galleries, which of course provide a great value to the work but limit access. Likewise, one of the characteristics that most interests me about Niio is to be able to enjoy the works in privacy, at a contemplative pace and in a space of one’s own without the pressure of contemporary daily life. Enjoying the work during different times throughout a day, a week or as long as you wish, that is the way in which art becomes great and we truly understand it.

“One of the features that interests me most about Niio is being able to enjoy the works in privacy, at a contemplative pace and in a space of one’s own without the pressure of contemporary daily life.”

Your works have occupied the facades of large buildings such as the Etopía center in Zaragoza or the Kursaal in Donostia. What are the challenges of creating a work for the public space and in large dimensions? How would you say they contribute to raising awareness and appreciation of digital art?

Besides the technical complications, because each digital facade has its own nature, what I am most interested in is to dialogue with the space, to reduce the gap between art that people feel safe with and is part of their history and digital art. Of course this is not the same everywhere. For example, in the city of Zaragoza, which is closely linked to classical art, I created a work called Goya Disassembled. It was the first work made for the facade of the art and technology center Etopia and the result of an artistic residency in this cultural institution. It was an infinite work in which the artist’s entire color palette was displayed, based on all his paintings and drawings. In most of the cities of the world this work would be a rhythm of colors, however in the Aragonese city it spoke of its history and the people who saw it knew perfectly well that these are the colors that in one way or another inhabit the city: dark, strong colors, just like the paintings that they know and love so much of Francisco de Goya.

Jamie de los Ríos. Crimson Waves, 2021. Kursaal, Donostia/San Sebastián. Photo: Sara Santos

Much of your work is characterized by collaborations with other artists or collectives. What have these collaborations contributed to your work? How does the creative process differ when you work on a piece individually from when you work as part of a team?

My artistic work has always been linked to collaboration, and I think that in general all artists working with new technologies are constantly busy! In my case I think that for better or worse I have developed a more personal line and when I have the opportunity to work with other artists in the creation, being a very hard and difficult process, it allows me to get out of my more personal line and activate other issues. If I look back, I’d say that when I work in a collective I am much more political and semantic, while when I work on my own I’m more romantic and liberated.

In any case there are different types of collaborations. When you work with different disciplines, for example in my case I have worked with musicians, we allow ourselves to be ourselves and reach something common. When you work with other digital or plastic artists you have to create a whole new space, that’s why many times you start from discussions and it’s more complicated to speak from the heart.

“When I work with a collective I’m more political and semantic whereas when I work on my own I am somewhat more romantic and liberated.”

You have a long experience in the design and technical coordination of digital art exhibitions and events in Spain, such as the Art Futura festival or the exhibition “Sueños de Silicio,” among many others. From this perspective, how have you seen the presentation and reception of digital art in Spain evolve? What successes and missed opportunities would you point out, globally?

This is a complicated question and at the same time essential to understand the contemporaneity of electronic art. I will begin by talking about the artists themselves and how they have been affected by the way of exhibiting this type of art, which is often related to spectacle and the possibilities of the future of art. Electronic, digital and new media art has been closely linked to the exhibition of new technologies and this has generated a precarious business model for artists who, by collaborating with more people, generate grandiloquent and very expensive works. The spectacularization of the medium has not served to professionalize the artists but rather the other way around, we have festivals in which we seek to be impressed by the use of new technology, and this has caused us to generate a niche, a place apart from contemporary art.

This is not bad per se, but we must enable new paths, encourage professionalization and the labor of art, with works in a smaller scale but also more linked to a personal production. This may sound a bit classical but I had the opportunity to work with the Ars Electronica archive some time ago for the curatorship of a small exhibition in Bilbao. The vast majority of artists who participated in this festival throughout its history do not create art anymore. Perhaps it is still a very young art.

Finally, I would like to add that I work at the New Art Collection and I study the work of artists in the technological field. In recent years there has been a great step forward in the field of collecting, with serious proposals from the creators that will allow new generations to enjoy this art.

Jaime de los Ríos. Scintillant, 2019. Collaboration with IED Kunsthal Bilbao and Susana Zaldívar.

Over the last two decades you have been active in the training aspect of digital art, running workshops and being part of teams in medialabs, notably as founder of ARTEK [Lab] at Arteleku. Can you give me an overview of the genesis and development of the maker and open source communities in Spain? How have the collaborative and training spaces in which you have participated influenced the development of a digital art scene in Spain? How has the reception of digital art that you mentioned in the previous question affected these spaces?

I have great memories of the first digital artists I met in Spain. They were linked to centers like medialab Prado. They were collectives like Lumo, which lived in a space of open creation, where they worked in the technological field from a political position of open source but also aesthetics. Not to beat around the bush, I will say that all this changed with the arrival of the maker movement. Being interesting and positive in the first instance, this movement took the political facet (open source, collaboration, etc.) and turned it into its emblem but left behind the aesthetic and even critical field. It linked creation to a certain machinery and it can be said that it made us almost slaves of those machines.

I lost many people along the way who, from being free researchers, turned exclusively to machines and the machinery of the market. I would say that here there is a first stage which is the hackmeeting, hacktivism as epicenter and hybridization of new ways of thinking in terms of technopolitical, cosmovisionary feminism, and then maker culture, a reductionism with neoliberal tendencies, oriented to generate a third industrial revolution linked to new economies.

“We have festivals where we seek to impress ourselves by the use of new technology, and this has caused us to generate a niche, a place apart from contemporary art.”

You are currently working as advisor and technical coordinator of the New Art Foundation, the largest collection of digital art in Spain. What challenges does the preservation of digital art pose, and how do you see the future of this type of artistic creation in terms of its permanence in institutional collections and the knowledge of its history?

Indeed, I am the technical director of the collection and I am passionate about it. We work with more than one hundred and fifty works, 95% of which belong to living artists. From the first thoughts on cybernetics in the video art of Peter Weibel to the generative art of Alba Corral. All the works are of a different nature and this implies a maximum challenge, a knowledge of thousands of sub technologies, different operating systems and different interfaces. It is still a path that is being generated thanks also to the support of all the artists, but it is certainly a collective challenge that we face and we want our works to survive in the future.

If I have to give some advice, in order for our works to be enjoyed in the future, I would comment that it is important that we work with tools that we know very well, that we make them our own and little by little we feel that we control those supports absolutely. Our lines of code are our paint strokes and the screens, our canvases, appropriating their colors and their movements. This may sound a bit unpopular, but the field of collecting requires a certain security when it comes to a work working or being restored. We are also developing protocols for the collection that make it possible to arrange the craziest works, of course!

Jaime de los Ríos. Vortex, 2024

In “The problem of form”, your current exhibition at Arteko Gallery, from which we present a selection of digital pieces in Niio, you recover the connection between painting and algorithmic creation that underlies much of your work. The exhibition combines digital works with pieces on paper and digital printing on aluminum. At the current moment of maturity in your career, how do you conceive the role of digital art in relation to other forms of contemporary artistic creation? How has the exhibition been received in the context of a contemporary art gallery?

I’m really excited about exhibiting at Niio, the exhibition has expanded in an unimaginable way. Now it travels through the networks and sneaks into screens all over the world. It is a very personal work that above all I have been able to exhibit in my homeland. After several exhibitions in the Arteko gallery, I can say, and this seems to me very important, that people have made my art their own.

In times of globalization and the tentacular capacity of the Internet, it is common to think that the number of “likes” is more important than the number of people around you. This is why the exhibition has been very successful, even in terms of sales! And nowadays I would say that digital art is already part of contemporary art. Both art lovers and people who are more distant from the medium are already more familiar with this movement that speaks of issues they are aware of, and uses the same tools they use in their daily lives.

“For our works to be enjoyed in the future, it is important that our lines of code are our paint strokes and the screens our canvases.”

Fabio Catapano: the beauty of simplicity

Pau Waelder

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

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221201, 2022

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

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

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

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

Working in iterations. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

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

Ideas lead to other ideas. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

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

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

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

Japanese inspiration. Images collected by Fabio Catapano.

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

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

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

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

Creating with a computer. Diagram by Fabio Catapano.

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

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

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

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221025, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fabio Catapano. Colorem 221207, 2022

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

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

Fabio Catapano. Colorem Fragments v1, 2022

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

Niio in 2022: the interviews

Niio Editorial

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

Five interviews from 2022

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

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

Steven Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery

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

Photo: Joanna Holloway

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

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

Marina Zurkow, artist

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

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

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

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

Daniel Canogar, artist

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

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

Tamiko Thiel, artist

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

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

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

Patrick Tresset, artist

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

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

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

Niio in 2022: the artworks

Niio Editorial

Five artworks from 2022

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

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

Yoshi Sodeoka. Synthetic Liquid 8, 2022

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

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

Driessens & Verstappen. Kennemerduinen 2010, scene H, 2011

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

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

Katie Torn. Dream Flower I, 2022

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

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

Julian Brangold. Observation Machine (Iteration), 2022

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

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

Julie Blackmon. New Neighbors, 2020

Courtesy the artist and Fahey-Klein gallery

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

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

Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s Ambient Art

Roxanne Vardi

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

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

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

How would you describe your art practice today?

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

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

Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Nethervoid 07 L 2180, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get to Know Shaun Gladwell: Moving image, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, VR & AR artist

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up in a small suburb connected to Sydney called North Rocks in the west away from the coast. It was mixed, lower middle class and solid middle class in other areas. I found it exciting at times and desperately boring at times as well. I now live in London and mostly spend my time in the Southeast of London.

Shaun Gladwell Studio

Where did you go to school and what did you study?

I went to a state school in North Rocks and then after graduating I went to an art school in Sydney called Sydney College of the Arts. I stayed there for a few years, got an Honors degree and then jumped to an another art school.

My Masters study was at the College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales. I studied painting although by the time I left Sydney College of the Arts, I was already experimenting with video and other technology so for my Masters degree I was mostly moving between lots of mediums.

What does your workspace / desktop / studio look like?

I’ve got a physical studio space in Southeast London that’s connected to a gallery space called the Drawing Room. It’s a medium sized space with a beautiful view of London. It’s very much a painting studio. It’s really messy, there are big unstretched canvas on the wall. There’s oil, acrylic, aerosol, it’s a real mess. I do work in VR through other studio spaces.

When did you start working creatively with technology?

A lot before officially studying video performance and installation. I was creatively using technology in my painting process. I was interested in taking reproductions of paintings and scanning them, altering their dimensions and then re-painting those manipulated images through Photoshop.

The Photoshop image of say a distorted Gainsborough or a Reynolds painting from British society portraiture going back to the 1700th or 1800th century would then become the proprietary sketch for a very detailed painting. So that’s probably when I started looking at this interface or this connection or somehow a conversation between technology and something more traditional.

Self Portrait Spinning and Falling in Paris, 2016 Single channel High Definition video, 16:9 (installed 4:3), colour, silent

In 2009-10 you were the official Australian War Artist and the first to use video for your project. Can you describe your experience working on the ground with the Australian military in Afghanistan and talk about the process of creating Double field/viewfinder (Tarin Kowt)?

This commission with the war memorial was very different for me. I was heading into a very difficult, unknown space and couldn’t control the elements around me like I do here in this studio or like I think I’m doing in this studio.

To work in an environment like that required a different kind of thinking. I wanted to explore ideas that I already had in my practice so that’s where Double field/viewfinder came from which was really me taking this technology into the theater of war but also knowing that technology was entirely integrated into that experience and supporting that experience and probably most of the technology I was using was actually developed through military objectives.

Video recording technology and digital video was so familiar to a lot of the soldiers because they are technologists. I decided to hand cameras over to them and let them record video. It ended up becoming quite intense because the soldiers took on the project as if their lives depend up on it. It almost was like a military drill so that was quite interesting for me and then letting the soldiers know that it was an experiment and getting their feedback after was equally important.

‘Double Field/Viewfinder’ by Shaun Gladwell (2009-10).Photo: Department of War Studies, King’s College London

In 2016 you co-founded an Indie VR Content Collective with producer Leo Faber called Badfaith. You’ve mentioned the name of the collective is a reference to the Sartrean philosophical concept. Do you believe VR can be an antidote to certain social forces that cause people to act in bad faith? How do these ideas factor into your practice?

Firstly, the name BadFaith is connected to the concept of Jean Paul Sartre as well as Simone de Beauvoir. Each philosopher or thinker has versions or signs and symptoms of ‘bad faith’ within their thinking or within their ideas around the concept so it can be quite nuanced and complex to talk about ‘bad faith’ depending upon who I’m footnoting or referencing but I think technology can also potentially generate bad faith as well just depending upon how the technology is used. Like any technology if it’s being used as a weapon or a tool for something else.

The same technology has very different outcomes and effects and I think that the fact that bad faith was always about simulating a kind of presentation of self or position even down to the occupation of the waiter as Jean Paul Sartre’s famous example goes, then that immediately becomes relevant to technology like VR which is a very powerful simulator that we all now have access to as consumers rather than it being locked up in university research labs or tech developers so we’re going to see all kinds of different forms of bad faith in a kind of hard boiled sort of I guess bare life to use Giorgio Agamben’s term in relation to VR.

Virtual reality pioneers Shaun Gladwell and Leo Faber talk Badfaith Collective

What projects are you currently working on?

Good question. I’ve got a few long term projects related to shows and a few little ones that are more like doodles. I do some sketching in video. I go out and ride my bike and follow the line on the street and it’s kinda like a video drawing. I’m really excited about doing more of those in London, really simple raw works. I still draw, still like to printmake and paint. But I love VR and AR.

I’m trying to run that full spectrum. I don’t want to lose out on the idea of working with materials and using substance and stuff and getting dirty. Like in VR sometimes I can feel like it’s just too much of a pure space which does not reference the gunk, junk and the abject reality of my body or the world.

Have you done any work in AR? Do you find VR or AR to be a more compelling medium? Why?

I’m developing an idea for a show in AR now.

The distinction between AR and VR is quite enormous. VR completely arrests your sense of sight and hearing and when you start to include kinetics and haptics then you aren’t given a frame outside of the frameless space you’ve been immersed within while AR still gives you the reference physically and optically and and conceptually to your immediate environment as it then starts to augment that space so you still have some reference to that space if it’s to be defined as AR. So I think they are so different for me given those kinds of boring different textbook definitions. Some ideas could be better wrapped up in VR and others in AR.

In a field where hardware and software can quickly become obsolete, how do you approach documentary and archival processes for your work?

Usually I’m sorta just hopelessly producing work that will very quickly be its own ruin because that sort of archival and documentary process has changed. I’m only just now bringing it all in to a central nervous system but then it would of course be better managed through you guys in terms of the digital phase which is great.

It’s amazing to start off in art school and go from prints to slides you put a in projector right through to this system that you guys are working on. I think it’s an incredible arc as to how I’ve used technology to archive my work or to document the way that it’s been shown from a slide projector to the cloud in the space of my professional life and student years.

Who are some contemporary or historical new media artists that you admire? What are some of your favorite works?

Caravaggio’s use of optics back in the day. Interesting to think of these early examples of people who have used technology. Galileo’s drawing of the moon after he developed the telescope are some of the most beautiful images I can think of from the sides of both art and science.

In terms of new media artists, I like everyone, Raqs Media Collective to Pipilotti Rist. I’m interested in why people are using technology and sometimes I’m also interested in the result but there is always some interest to me as to why people are picking up the camera and trying to make episodic TV series and calling it art or making a series of elaborate performances around their sculptures and calling that video. Probably the one artist who I really love is Stelarc the Australian guy who auments his body with technology.

Tag Archives: generative art