Julian Brangold: the computer error as a great revealer

Pau Waelder

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.

Coinciding with the launch of his solo artcast Observation Machines, which brings together a selection of four artworks from a recent series exploring classical sculpture and computer glitches, we sat down to discuss his work and views on the digital art scene. 

Julian Brangold, Observation Machine (Bifurcation), 2022

Every artist studying Fine Arts is confronted with classical sculpture as a model and a source of inspiration, to the point that this particular period in the history of sculpture has become intrinsically associated with the concept of Fine Arts and academia. Is it correct to see in your work a reaction to this?

I see the aesthetic territory of Greco-roman classical statues as a marker for how contemporary imaginaries are constructed today. Our cultural identities are shaped by this legacy, and my interest resides in a sort of ontological anchor to this node, and how it connects with the now, how it has an impact on our collective cultural memory. More specifically, I am fascinated by how information storage technologies today shape our relationship to that legacy that exists in the form of data, and how it makes us connect to that information so differently from how we could in the past. 

“My approach is mediated by error aesthetics, the computing error as a sort of visualizer of the hidden side of technology, of a great revealer of what commercial technology tries to hide.”

My bond to this imagery began when I came across an overwhelmingly enormous Russian database that stored hundreds of thousands of photographs of ancient Greco-roman culture (art, architecture, ornaments, technical objects). I wanted to explore how appropriating this complete sea of information as a subject matter would look like. The first exploration came from creating a data scraper that stole all the images of sculptures from the website and then grabbing small bits from that huge span of data and developing an intimate relationship with just one cutout to create something very human, very handcrafted and detailed. In this case a drawing, or a series of drawings. In the process, I also explored how technological tools would facilitate a sort of mishmash of the aesthetic “trigger” of these classical imaginaries (we know immediately what we are seeing when we come across these images) with modern computer aesthetics. 

Physical mixed media artworks such as the Anonymous Elements of Cultural Memory (2019) series already show an interest in classical sculpture, a form or rendering (as a drawing) and duplication. These elements are clearly present in your digital artworks, what does working with 3D rendering bring to your original intentions in these series?

This is a very interesting question because for years I worked with flat images, as you mention, in drawings, and then translated them to physical large-scale collages where the process of printing and then hand-pasting the different parts of the composition was part of the work itself. The jump to 3D was in the same line, a large database of 3D scanned classical sculptures (in this case one that is meant for people to be able to print out their own versions of this classic statuary), but I became very enticed with the idea of manipulating these object in 3D space because the visual possibilities expanded enormously. My approach is mediated a lot by error aesthetics, the computing error as a sort of visualizer of the hidden side of technology, of a great revealer of what commercial technology tries to hide. So error was a big part of the transition from 2D to 3D, in the sense that the manipulations were about destroying these 3D models, breaking them, bending them, and then seeing what happens when I tried to put them back together. 3D models have a lot more potential for destruction, at least in my mind, because there is simply more data to work with, more possible iterations of the same object when, for example, you can rotate 360 degrees. 

Julian Brangold. Observation Machines. A Song of Rubble, 2022 (detail).

Your digital drawings bring to a tangible medium (paper) a single fixed composition that stems from your exploration of 3D models. How is the process that goes from the 3D model to the drawing? Do you build the composition “manually” (intervening in every step) or do you let the software decide on certain aspects of it?

I love to use randomness in my work. I am very fond of serendipitous findings in the process of building an image, especially when working with computers, because this error aesthetic shines through. I use a lot of procedural tools in 3D to create the destruction and decomposition of these 3D models, and the outcomes are usually very surprising and accidental. The first explorations based on photographs from 2019 and 2020 were digital but hand drawn, because I was looking to convey a more intimate relationship with the material. Even the return to the physical outcomes (the printing and then collaging these drawings on a canvas) was also related to that same intention. The later 2021 and most recent drawings are created with 3D shading tools that imitate a flat style, a technique called “Toon Shading”, mixed with a tool in Blender called “Freestyle”. I find it funny to go back to 2D using 3D tools, it’s like the flat, drawing aesthetic is somehow calling me. 

Julian Brangold, Fade, 2022.

In your video works there is often an atmosphere of decay and decomposition, the latter being also present in Observation Machine, albeit as something fluid and reversible. Is this a comment on our society, or rather on the ephemeral nature of 3D renderings, despite appearing “real” and “solid” to the eye?

It is definitely more related to the ephemerality of 3D objects. It has to do with this notion of “showing what is behind”’ the tools we are using, of using technology to reveal more than what we try to hide. I use industrial and commercial tools that always invite us to orbit closer to streamlined aesthetics that tend to deny the fact that they are being used, to “cheat” the eye into realism, or hide the process happening behind. This is a constant in all artistic disciplines. Film montage for example works very hard to hide itself, to give a feeling that you are “not watching a film”. I think (and this is not a very new notion) that there is a form of subversion in using the tool in ways it is not intended to be used, and thus the outcome is not about cheating the eye, but more about revealing what hides underneath. This is where error, destruction, decay, and “untidiness” come to play.

Julian Brangold, Observation Machine (Bifurcation), 2022

In the Observation Machine series, we see several classical sculptures that are used as raw material for digital manipulation. Which sculptures did you use for these artworks? Are these 3D scans that you made yourself, or that you took from an online library? If so, which one? Is the iconography or original placement of the sculptures relevant to you, or have you chosen them mainly for their aesthetic appeal? 

The 3D scans come from an open-source library called “Scan The World”, as I mentioned before, meant for people to be able to print out their own versions of classical sculptures. The process of selecting which sculptures I use for each work varies from series to series. In this case, I wanted to explore different possibilities of the 3D tool I’m using (Blender), and ended up choosing the sculptures using very visual parameters (scale, shape, amount of information). Sometimes I like to empty the sculptures of their cultural meaning and just look at them as pure subject matter, almost like an abstract object, particularly to see what happens if I do that, what happens to the archival baggage. It is kind of paradoxical, but I like that it’s all intertwined in the same process.

A common trait of the artworks included in this artcast is that, unlike previous works, they play shadows and contrast to appear flat, going back and forth between what could be seen as a digital painting and a 3D object floating in a virtual space. Color also plays an important role in creating this perceptual effect. Can you elaborate on these aspects of the artworks? 

“Observation Machines” is a series of time-based works that present an emulation of a machine learning process being operated on these sculptures. The movement and sound are inspired by a machine’s logic of movement. It is an imagination exercise: what would it look like if a machine were trying to study this object? In the works included in this artcast (a subset of this series), I wanted to explore how when using color alone within the 3D software the image would transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. The only thing changing in these pieces besides the sculpture is the color of the background, which makes the shadows and the textures react differently and thus reveals the depth of the object being observed.  

Julian Brangold, Observation Machine (Iteration), 2022

You have come to prominence in Argentina as a leading figure in the contemporary art scene linked to NFTs. Can you tell us how this scene is evolving and how do you participate in it? What have NFTs brought to digital artists in Argentina, and is it different from other art scenes, as far as you can tell?

I have a background in the traditional art world, where I spent almost 12 years, so for me entering the crypto art world had a very strong influence on how I see my practice and my career. Argentina hosts one of the largest, more organized communities of crypto artists in the world, called Cryptoarg. I was part of the conception of this community from the start, and the relationship with other artists that came from very diverse backgrounds in art and the creative industries, intertwined with a novel art world that had very new dynamics and potentials, was a very impactful experience for me. Argentina already has a very close relationship with crypto technologies, being one of the “capitals” for Ethereum development, for example. I think we are very prone to adopting alternative means for the distribution of labor, information, and capital management, mostly because of our very precarious economic conditions. 

“The crypto art scene is very different from the traditional art scene. The tools for the experimentation, collaboration, and distribution of art make it a very fertile landscape for exploration and experimentation.”

The crypto art scene is very different from the traditional art scene. The tools for the experimentation, collaboration, and distribution of art make it a very fertile landscape for exploration and experimentation. Honestly, I find the traditional art world quite stagnant in its approach to technology. It is almost as if traditional art curriculums turn their back to our contemporary technological realities, and if they adopt some sort of look or introspection that relates to technology, it is usually quite a few years late. It is crazy to think it is still hard in some traditional circles to have technological art considered a valid art form. This is why, for me, the crypto art environment is interesting, it is very technology-native, and so the attention to what is happening with technology is very novel and updated, it is fast-paced in the same manner that technological development is, and it provides an honest, accurate look at contemporary culture, in a way that the traditional art world can’t keep up with because of its interests and scale. I don’t renounce the traditional art world, I’m very much interested in a lot of things that it has that the crypto art scene doesn’t, so I keep advocating for a cohesive intertwinement of both, a mutual nurturing. Even the distinction between both feels a bit silly sometimes. It’s all art we are talking about in the end. But the crypto art world developed so fast and came out of the underground so quickly that I feel it missed a bit of depth in its contextualization and organization. 

Julian Brangold, Observation Machine (Fragmentation), 2022

You are now director of programming at the Museum of Crypto Art. Tell us about this entity and your role in it. How do you define crypto art, and what do you find more interesting about it?

The Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA) is in my mind the very first web3 native proper art institution project. It began as one of the largest crypto art collections and became a space for empowering, contextualizing, and displaying digital art in experimental new ways that were in tune with web3 technologies. Decentralization plays a very important role in the museum’s ethos, and so my role as director of programming is to create a cultural output curriculum that follows that ideology. This is why, beginning next year, we will begin to experiment with the museum’s DAO and have the community of art enthusiasts, collectors, and artists participate in the construction of that curriculum collectively. 

We are looking into ways of creating an art program that escapes the top-down dynamics of traditional institutions, which are inescapably mediated by political and cultural bias, without losing the paramount power of cultural resources such as expert curation, historicization, critique, archiving, and the creation of artistic experiences. It is a very challenging project and holds a great deal of responsibility, but it is one of the most exciting ones I’ve ever been involved with. 

“The fact that an artwork can be sold as unique to one individual at the same time that it is readily available for anyone to experience in its native form is very powerful.”

I find the definition of crypto art as challenging as the definition of art itself. I am a big advocate of definition by context, both in the notions of art and crypto art. So, I guess I would define crypto art as whatever art exists in the context of blockchain technologies. The same goes for art in general, which for me is whatever exists within an “art-appointed” context. As an artist, I find crypto art interesting in its nativeness to technology, and in its potential for experimentation and the exploration of distribution and commercialization. The fact that an artwork can be sold as unique to one individual at the same time that it is readily available for anyone to experience in its native form is very powerful.

As an Argentinian, I’ve struggled a lot with the accessibility of art (my artistic idols had exclusive exhibitions in London and New York all the time, so I simply didn’t have, and still don’t have, access to their works), so the fact that crypto art is an ecosystem that hosts art that is naturally networked and accessible to anyone with access to the internet is very captivating to me. The problematizing of certain arbitrary boundaries established by the traditional art market, between “the high arts” and other creative disciplines, is also something I find quite appealing. In general, I have to say that the disruptive nature of crypto art, and the fact that it challenges an art world status quo, is one of the most interesting things for me. It kind of fucks things up a bit, and I find that quite exhilarating, and honestly, quite necessary too. 

Disrupting flows: Museum of Glitch Aesthetics

Pau Waelder

Mark Amerika’s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), commissioned in 2012 by Abandon Normal Devices for the London Olympics, brings together a series of artworks created between 2005 and 2012 that explore the creative and aesthetic possibilities of glitch through various media. Amerika, with a group of collaborators that included Aaron Angello, Saoirse Crean, Mary Fé, Will Luers, Ruth McCullogh, Chad Mossholder, Julie Rooney, Rick Silva, Joel Swanson, and Steve Wade, among others, set up this fictional institution devoted to the work of The Artist 2.0, an equally fictional character whose oeuvre is profusely described and analyzed in a 73-page catalog that not only elaborates a complete profile of the artist, but also suggests critical reflections on digital culture, the IT industry, and the art world.

Ten years after its creation, MOGA comes to Niio in the form of a selection of six key artworks from the museum, and the following review of the work of The Artist 2.0, which participates in the fiction created by Mark Amerika and his collaborators.

Still from Lake Como Remix (2012)

Image compression

In 2005, The Artist 2.0 presented in an exhibition titled Pixelmash, in the Northwest of England, a series of animated GIFs, a (now lost) internet art work, and a digital video projection, all of which referred to the practice of appropriation and remix, so dear to early net art practitioners. The GIFs, part of the .gif(t) economy series (2005-2006), featured pixelated excerpts of early works of video art, photographs of pop stars, and paintings by Goya in dizzying loops that some would now identify as the work of a post-Internet artist or a cryptoart OG. These works already spoke of The Artist 2.0’s interest in the condition of the digital image in its online distribution: the image as a file that is constantly reused and re-contextualized, and more importantly, compressed. 

Image compression formats were initially developed for the first digital cameras, but became crucial to the development of online content in the 1990s and have been popular ever since. Even recently, in 2021, Beeple’s infamous artwork Everydays: the first 5,000 days, which was sold at auction for $69.3 million, has been criticized for using the lossy compression format JPEG instead of the lossless PNG. While file formats can be said to have become part of our digital culture, they were particularly important for artists putting their work online in the 1990s, as they had to deal with the limitations of a 56kbps dial-up modem and create highly compressed images and 256-color animated GIFs. Pixelated images and fast-paced loops of grainy photographs or video sequences became an integral part of the aesthetics of early Internet art. 

“I was one of the first artists of my generation who self-consciously bought a shitty mobile phone with first generation video recording technology embedded in it and just went, «Wow, that looks totally fucked up and I love it. This is better than painting.»”

The Artist 2.0

Before the dot-com bubble and the fascination for the new millennium brought a fleeting attention to Internet art that had major art institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, or TATE Modern acquiring web-based artworks, net art was identified with a renegade attitude towards the art world. It proclaimed the possibility of bypassing the gatekeepers and hierarchies of the art world 1.0 by using the web as an uncharted territory in which everything was possible and the roles of the actors could be reimagined. However, its proponents knew of the utopian nature of this proposition, as they knew that the art world 2.0 would still be ruled by institutions, corporations, and institutional corporations, and dominated by ever more sophisticated technologies and systems of data transmission. The pixelated image, in this sense, was also a form of rebellion, as well as a nostalgic reminder of a time when the resources were limited and the web was free, as in free speech and free beer.

Mobile Beach, 2007

Better than painting

It is believed that The Artist 2.0 studied art in the Northwest of England, probably at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Lancaster. There he created his first mobile phone videos, taking images from his surroundings in industrial zones and the Morecambe bay, and posting photos in a primitive blog. Both the photos and videos presented glitches, consciously created by recording while performing violent movements or riding a vehicle, in order to overwhelm the device with too much data to process. The result, as can be seen in Mobile Beach (2007), presents interesting similarities with color field painting, which The Artist 2.0 surely noticed as they titled some of the photographs obtained with this technique “A Painting that Speaks for Itself.” The Artist 2.0 was also interested in linking these glitched images to street art, as can be seen in several photographs of walls, addressing a reiterated connection between digital art and street art as those rogue practices that do not have a place in mainstream contemporary art. “I was attracted to much lower tech versions of glitch before anyone was really paying attention to it,” states The Artist 2.0, asserting their pioneering role. “I was one of the first artists of my generation who self-consciously bought a shitty mobile phone with first generation video recording technology embedded in it and just went, «Wow, that looks totally fucked up and I love it. This is better than painting.»”

While The Artist 2.0 refers in this quote to the radical and controversial proposition of presenting a glitched image as equal or even superior to a color field painting, there is actually something more interesting taking place in the creation of glitch art. As philosopher Boris Groys once stated, a digital image does not exist by itself, but needs to be performed, to be seen, just as a musical score must be played to be heard. The image file contains information that the device interprets to display it as a visual output, and here Groys points out that “every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a betrayal, a misuse.” Therefore, the way we perceive digital images, as the equivalent of printed photographs, celluloid negatives, or paintings, is misleading. The digital image is always the result of an interpretation, and glitched images reveal this hidden truth. Ironically, in this manner the glitched photos taken by The Artist 2.0 do have a lot in common with color field painting, as both types of artworks deny the image its role as an illusory reality.  

Lake District Walks: Code Mosh, 2007-2008

Walk the walk

The Lake District Walk series represents a later phase in The Artist 2.0’s work that stems from their early experiments with a shitty mobile phone. Here the mere recording of a video while walking in the countryside becomes an act of artistic creation as the device is once again overwhelmed by the amount of data to be processed, given the combination of movement and the varied and complex shapes that a natural environment has to offer. Several other elements come into play: the egocentric nature of recording an uneventful moment in one’s life, so much in line with the self-centered attitude that was starting to become the norm in early web 2.0 society; the first-person perspective, made popular by FPS video games; and finally the antagonistic relationship between nature and technology that has lead a growing segment of the world’s population to abandon the countryside and live in cities, where there is abundant wifi and plugs to charge their mobile devices, only to return during weekends to record boring videos and share them on social media. 

“The flow of data, the water of information, is continuous, and I am a multilayered part of the mix. The flow does not ever really need me, but I totally need it. It roots me. It channels my creativity in ways I have no control over.”

The Artist 2.0

Videos like Lake District Walks: Code Mosh (2007-2008) illustrate this phase with a combination of the “color field painting” effect of previous works and a new and more interesting “dragging” effect which takes place when a camera movement forces the device to quickly refresh the image, resulting in a delay that has portions of it frozen and awkwardly dragged to a new position. This effect, crudely achieved in this manner, will inspire future generations of artists, such as Davide Quayola, who has achieved it in a controlled manner through sophisticated image recognition techniques. As will be discussed further, the Lake District walks are by no means a simple method to generate glitches through camera movements and a highly textured environment: the act of walking and the exploration of a non-urban space have a particular meaning that will be made apparent in The Artist 2.0’s later work.

It is worth mentioning in this phase a rara avis, a mysterious undated video whose authorship might be questioned, were it not for its undoubtable similarities with Mobile Beach and its clear influence in the following phases of The Artist 2.0’s oeuvre. Glitch Lake is a separate work that does not consist of recording a walk, but staying put while pointing the camera at a mass of water bathed in the afternoon sun. The gentle ripples caused by the waves and the scintillating reflection of the sun are enough to cause a wide variety of glitches in the otherwise static image. This is a smart move by The Artist 2.0, who finds out that it is not necessary to move the camera around. It is enough to choose a subject that is in constant motion, yet not changing its position: water becomes an ideal generator of glitched videos.

Glitch Lake

Dérives

Before we get to the title of this article, let’s take a detour, or better a dérive. The Artist 2.0 took a turn in his artistic research, caught by the unavoidable appeal that Google products have had on digital artists over the last two decades. Interested in the creative possibilities of Google Earth, he created several artworks, among which the popular Lake Como Remix (2012), a recording of a live VJ session in which The Artist 2.0 explored a road that runs along Lake Como in Italy, exploiting the glitches produced by their erratic navigation. In this virtual dérive, The Artist 2.0 enacts a “walk” in a virtual space composed of a 3D model mapped with photographs and drawn in real time by a software collecting data from the Internet. An obvious, and endless, source of glitches, it becomes an ideal tool for visual experimentation while suggesting a critique of the way our perception of the world is now mediated by the products of a large corporation. Unlike other artworks that address similar glitches, such as Clement Valla’s also widely popular Postcards from Google Earth (2010), the Lake Como video can be logically connected to the Situationists’ practice of dérive, which can be described as aimlessly walking through the city in order to understand its structure and “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain,” as Guy Debord would put it. The Artist 2.0 consciously goes in circles, explores the tunnels and abruptly turns the camera towards the lake to reveal the visual tricks created by the software and the fragile scaffolding on which the whole virtual environment depends. 

Lake Como Remix, 2012

The importance of this dérive, or the act of moving, particularly when comparing this work to those of Valla and others, will be even more relevant in later works by The Artist 2.0. At this point, it is important to mention that Google Earth brings in an even more effective way of using the glitch to question the validity of the image as an illusion of reality. The landscape of Lake Como never succeeds in fooling the viewer: unlike previous videos in which a real image is glitched, here there is no reality to start with. “[T]he image never really has time to become an image in this environment,” states The Artist 2.0, “It’s more like what I call image information or visual codework. It’s something that’s always in process and always being processed by the receiver.” The Artist 2.0 forces Google Earth to veer off its path and participate in a dérive that will never take it to its intended destination. Lost in a cul-de-sac, the software reveals the process behind a simulation that has become powerless.

Disrupting flows

Glitch Lake had shown how water created glitches, but there was more to extract from the idea of flows. The HD Streaming series plays with the requirements of a high definition video, so common in our daily consumption of news and entertainment, which has in turn created the need for higher bandwidth connectivity, wherever we are. The videos are again captured in natural environments and in some cases streamed over the Internet from the mobile phone, conceptually connecting the water streams with the flows of data that enable reproducing the video somewhere else. The Water of Information (Data Flow Capture #36) is an outstanding example of this series: the camera is fixed on a small stream, water flowing down between ferns and bushes. The scene reminds of the view from a public webcam or the fake flowing river photographs one might encounter in certain restaurants. As a video, it is only interesting because the glitches caused by the water disrupt the whole image: it trembles and stretches, and at times it becomes a cascade of pixels, an abstract composition of vertical green lines. As The Artist 2.0 themselves put it, the concept of flow is central to their work: “The flow of data, the water of information, is continuous, and I am a multilayered part of the mix. The flow does not ever really need me, but I totally need it. It roots me. It channels my creativity in ways I have no control over.”

The Water of Information

Adrift in this flow, The Artist 2.0 escapes our gaze and his brief but seminal contribution to the History of Art in one last dérive. Circling back to their origins, The Artist 2.0 remixes a previous artwork, one of the Lake District Walks, which now appears in a split screen next to a virtual recreation of the same video, rendered in a 3D game engine. Titled Getting Lost (The Long Dérive) (2012) this last artwork is an obvious reference to the work of artist Richard Long and the Situationists, in what can be considered typical of a phase of maturity in an artist’s work, when one looks back at the old masters not to kill them, but to acknowledge them. Notably, in this artwork the video is not glitched: technology has now achieved a stable and reasonably well-defined moving image. It is, however, the 3D rendered space that is still glitchy, the camera movements causing a “dragging” effect of certain background elements and simulated objects. It seems, then, that The Artist 2.0 is suggesting that just as digital video has achieved the means to remain an illusion, so will virtual environments, which are currently suffering from a limitation of resources similar to that of online imagery in the 1990s. 

Getting Lost (The Long Dérive), 2012

Getting Lost ends with the camera pointing towards a cloudy sky, as if searching for an answer or a way to continue wandering about. It may also hint at the metaverse, that ill-defined space or accumulation of spaces that seem to reside in the clouds, or nowhere. Notably, online virtual environments are also prone to glitches, as Gazira Babeli, the rogue Second Life performance artist, can attest. The Artist 2.0 has shown that our devices are shaping how we see the world, even before virtual and augmented reality turn real spaces into mere point clouds meant to be covered with perfectly rendered 3D illusions from which we cannot escape. But even then, there will be glitches, and the glitches will reveal the truth. 

Yoshi Sodeoka: human audio visualizer

Roxanne Vardi and Pau Waelder

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.

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. His projects, developed individually or in close collaboration with other artists, materialize in fields as diverse as music (Psychic TV, Tame Impala, Oneohtrix Point Never, Beck, The Presets, Max Cooper), illustration (New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, M.I.T Technology Review) fashion (Adidas, Nike), and advertising (Apple, Samsung). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Deitch Projects, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Museum of Moving Image, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Laforet Museum Harajuku.

In the following conversation, Sodeoka discusses his work and influences, focusing on the two artworks from the series Synthetic Liquid recently commissioned by Niio.

Could you elaborate on how your background in music influences your artistic practice when creating new media artworks?

At the beginning of my abstract video art projects, music and sounds usually come first. I guess in a way, I’m trying to be a human audio visualizer. I usually start by picking up some interesting sounds that I want to work with. That could either come from a friend or from myself. It really depends on how I feel. I’ve been a long time user of Logic (a MIDI sequencer software) so I usually cook up something quick in that. I’ve always played electric guitar since a young age, and I still have a collection of synthesizers and instruments. I’ve been a big fan of experimental noise and ambient music. I am lucky to have some really talented music friends that provide me with the exact sounds I’m looking for if I’m not in the mood to do my own. Anyhow, then I would try to come up with the idea of what sort of visuals go well with that sound. Experimental/Noise music is just a perfect fit with the videos I make.

Yoshi Sodeoka, Synthetic Liquid 7, 2022.

Why are you interested in glitch and noise?

I feel that everything is broken anyway, nothing is complete. In computer glitches, something interesting happens, in terms of color and composition. I am mainly interested in these colors and shapes. For me it comes from an aesthetic reason, I am not a conceptual glitch artist. I use it for everything.

However, these particular artworks I created for the commission look more organized, with more neutral colors. It relates to how I feel about the project or what influences me at a particular time, but I really can’t tell why.

“If you depend on the programs and machines you are using, then your creative process becomes shaped by the vision of the person who made that software or those machines.”

The neo-psychedelic style of both commissioned works from your Synthetic Liquid series with its kaleidoscope of colors resembles the aesthetic used by Futurist artists in the early twentieth century, and you have also mentioned your interest in Op Art. Would you say your work relates to these avant garde movements?

Yes, to some certain extent. I like Futurism, particularly in its more abstract manifestations. And in this particular work that I’m presenting in Niio, I should say I’ve been more influenced by Op art. I like the work of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, among others. I just like the idea of making video versions of Op art. I enjoy seeing those visual triggers: Op Art makes you question what you are seeing. The arrangement of colors and shapes make your brain think. I like the idea of trying to make animated Op Art, because when you see it your mind goes someplace else, and this is fascinating to me. When you look at a landscape, for instance, you feel calm, whereas with Op Art there is a different feeling.

Yoshi Sodeoka, Synthetic Liquid 8, 2022.

Can you tell us about your artistic process and about the different digital softwares that you use in the creation of your video works and the process of moving from analog practices to digital practices? 

Sound and visuals are strongly connected. My interest in experimental noise is that it does not have a structure, which goes well with abstract videos. I have been playing music since I was 12 years old, and at the same time I studied painting. Doing both at the same time from a very young age, when I discovered video art there was no question that I wanted to do that. 

I’ve used a lot of analog setups in the past. But I use less of it now. I still like a pure analog setup, but I’m just in a different phase. I like to keep it simple with fewer gears in my studio at the moment. I incorporate the ideas that I have learned from working on analog videos into the digital video-making process. One of the things that are fascinating about what I can do with analog video is video feedback. I try to simulate that in the digital setting. The exact process might be different. But the concept is the same either in analog or digital. 

 “I imagine that the future of computing will be more organic and fluid.” 

I still have a video analog setup in my studio. For me it started to get kind of boring, and to break out of it one of the solutions was to buy more gears. I feel that the parameter is very limited because if you buy gear, then your creative process becomes shaped by the vision of the person who made that gear. I don’t like that, so I use my own video feedback technique with After Effects, which not many people do, and therefore it feels like it is my own tool and my own technique.

I also randomize a lot of elements in my audio production, working with a set of parameters. I set a tone, add notes from here to here, and allow a bit of randomness. But that’s as far as I go. I don’t use a coding environment such as PureDate to make audio compositions, but I use audio production software and randomize it, which is similar in a way. 

“I like the idea of creating Op Art, because it makes you question what you are seeing”

When experiencing your works, one cannot help but think of the beginning of the creation of everything with the representation of fluids and water.

Ha, I’m not sure. When people think of computers and technologies, they don’t really think of liquids and water. Machines are always dry and hard things. But I imagine that the future of computing will be more organic and fluid. People are using liquid elements in computing and I am fascinated by it. My videos feel very organic, particularly because they have an analog component, so it is not only about zeros and ones. I want to make everything organic as much as possible. It’s not easy, but I take it as my challenge to make things look more organic.

You have recently also been active in the NFT space, could you please share your experience with us on these projects and how you imagine NFTs becoming part of the more traditional art industry as a whole?

It’s been such a crazy ride with NFTs! I’ve sold plenty of work as I’ve never had before. And I’ve made a lot of new friends, and I discovered a lot of great artists I’ve heard of before. Overall it’s been a good experience for me. But I’m not a big fanatic of it either. I’m staying pretty low-key about it. Things come and go and I have no idea where this is going, honestly. I just focus on making good art, which has always been my thing.

Niio @ Ars Electronica Festival: Linz, Austria

Ars Electronica Festival

Ars Electronica is a festival for art, technology and society. This year Niio will have a significant presence at the festival.

Together with our partner, Barco Residential, Niio will be powering a not-to-be-missed data art installation, ‘Wind of Linz’, by the talented Refik Anadol.

Winds of Linz by Refik Anadol

Commissioned by Ars Electronica, ‘Wind of Linz’ is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around the city of Linz into a series of poetic data paintings. By using a one-year data set, Refik Anadol Studios developed custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 10-second intervals throughout the year.

The resulting artwork is a series of three dynamic chapters, each using data as a material to create a unique visual interpretation of the interaction between the environment and the city.  Each chapter brings different aspects of the data sets to life with distinct and varied painterly, emotive aesthetics, making the invisible beauty of wind as a natural phenomenon visible.

More Places to Find Niio  At Ars Electronica

Niio co-founder, Oren Moshe, will be part of several discussions and our team will have a presence at the Collectors Pavilion where we will be demonstrating Niio. Please come find us and introduce yourself.

Talks:
September 7: 14:00 – 18:00
Media Art and the Art Market
Collection management, distribution and display tools for new media art.
(*Each speaker will have 30 min followed by 10 min of Q+A)

Round Table Discussion:
September 9: 14:00 – 15:00 @ Gallery Space
Media Art and the Art Market
New technologies for presenting, collecting and storing media art.

 

Learn more about the Ars Electronica conference.
Learn more about Niio. 

Featured image: Refik Anadol, ‘Winds of Boston’