Tag Archives: identity

Katsuki Nogami: exposing identity

Pau Waelder

This interview is part of a series dedicated to the artists whose works have been selected at the SMTH + Niio Open Call for Art Students. The jury members Valentina Peri, curator, Wolf Lieser, founder of DAM Projects/ DAM Museum, and Solimán López, new media artist, chose 5 artworks that are being displayed on more than 60 screens in public spaces, courtesy of Led&Go. 

Katsuki Nogami is a Japanese artist who studied at Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin and graduated from the Department of Imaging Arts and Science Musashino Art University in Japan. He has also studied at the Interface Cultures program at University of Art and Design in Linz (Austria) and is currently a residency artist at Cite des Arts in Paris. This extended international experience, alongside his public art works permanently installed in several cities in Japan, has given him a particular angle about identity and belonging. Exposed to discrimination in this studies abroad, he has decided to focus his work on how our facial features determine our identity in relation to those around us, and how technology mediates our interactions with each other.

Katsuki Nogami, Image Cemetery, 2023

You state that your work stems from the experience of feeling discriminated against during your time studying abroad. While the Internet and globalization promised a more closely connected and shared world, it seems that xenophobia and discrimination against those perceived as “others” has only increased. Would you say that social media and digital technologies have contributed to this situation?

I think the internet also enhanced localisation like a small community at first. Then it also made a closed environment and separated world, too. Actually I liked it. On the other hand, Twitter (X) is really boring currently because of its openness nowadays. Their openness only led to contentless eye-catching stuff because of Elon’s monetization. Because of this tendency to reward eye-catching content, streamers can end up performing seriously racist or controversial actions, like the person who said “I would do Hiroshima again,” or the model who has been accused of blackfishing to get brand endorsements.

I feel that the freedom and the inspiring movement of the early internet are gone. And it’s just a business society now. So my answer is that digital technologies helped us to communicate well, but social media is linked to xenophobia and discrimination.

Katsuki Nogami, Yamada Taro Project, 2014-2021. Photo: Rakutaro Ogiwara

In the Yamada Taro project (2014-2021), you carried out an interesting experiment in establishing a dialogue with passersby and questioning identity as it is mediated by digital technologies. Can you tell me a bit more about this experience? 

On the internet, there is no responsibility since you can be anyone. I think this leads to a loss of identity. So I wanted to express this tendency to anonymity without responsibility. At first, the reaction was just like drawing a card. Then I felt it was weird because I wanted to troll. Unlike the internet, you need to talk to people to get a face picture in person. After it, I tried to steal faces without talking and took faces from the Facebook event page of the opening. It was also when politicians acquired the right to use their accounts on Twitter in Japan. Some people imitated it before and had a bunch of followers, sometimes fake accounts are much more famous than real accounts. Now I also hide myself inside the hoodie for the performance, not as an artist. I wanted to be hidden from society since that was my initial intention.

“On the internet, there is no responsibility since you can be anyone”

In Heartfelt Spam and Monologues, you address the dark aspects of our online communications, somewhat playfully, but drawing attention to serious issues that affect people’s wellbeing and can have fatal consequences. It is telling that you create situations which invite viewers to participate and communicate as they wish. What has been their reaction? From this experience, do you think that we are aware of how technology is affecting our way to communicate with each other?

Both artworks deal with artificial conversations. Sometimes I don’t know if this person who chatted with me exists or not. There are 8 fake accounts of me on Twitter. I feel that social media has deeply changed our way of communicating with each other. The messages we post are intended for a large group of anonymous people, not for just one person, as in a conversation. This should be clear and understandable to everyone. Social communication tends to be public, so you shouldn’t open a dialogue with a specific person, because it leads to a closed community. I feel that this is the main transition of the internet: at first it was closed localisation but now it’s globalization which has lost its identity. Talking directly to one another, or expressing yourself in a unique way is no longer expected, you should be addressing a wide audience in a language that is closer to a marketing pitch or a press release than to your individual voice. Even when this communication takes place visually, as it happens on Instagram or Tiktok, all posts look similar, don’t you think?

Katsuki Nogami with Taiki Watai, Rekion Voice, 2015-2017. Photo: Rakutaro Ogiwara

Rekion Voice (with Taiki Watai) is a particularly critical take on technology, showing also a dark side of machines, that reminds of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic installations and Norman White’s robots. How would you contextualize this installation and performance in relation to your other artworks about human communication and identity?

It’s part of the Japanese dark side, I think. In Japan, they try to make robots cute, like your pet. In ​​nursing facilities or elderly homes, there are some people who use friend robots or nurse robots. Normally robots imitate animals to be used as pets. Jean Tinguely’s kinetic installations and Norman White’s robots are helpless machines, just a mechanism. In Japan, there is Animism, which is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. However, if robots are pets, they ought to be treated as slaves: they are there to serve us. That was my inspiration in this installation, showing machines as servants but also as menacing creatures. And this is the difference between my work and Tinguely’s or White’s approach to machines. At the same time, I consider that robots become a mirror of ourselves. Watching a robot is like looking at oneself, and at the same time feeling that the robot is in itself a being with its own identity, that is returning our gaze.

“Watching a robot is like looking at oneself, and at the same time feeling that the robot is in itself a being with its own identity, that is returning our gaze.”

As a student in the University of Linz and Paris 8, you have had the opportunity to discover the many aspects of digital art at the Ars Electronica festival and other events happening in Linz and Paris. What has the education in these universities brought to your artistic practice? How would you compare your experience in Linz and Paris, also in terms of the feelings of discrimination you have expressed when studying abroad?

I attended the Ars Electronica festival in 2014 for the first time. Then I got a prize in the Sound Art category in 2017. I participated in the Ars Electronica festival many times, so I felt the transition from the event being a host to individual artistic projects like the ones I exhibited, to focusing on larger trends in society. I also feel that the whole digital art community is moving closer to the structures of the contemporary art world and its attention to production studios and market trends.

The most notorious thing I have noticed in the education system is the fact that in the EU, the atmosphere is very different and less competitive than in Japan. In most European universities, you don’t need to pay directly to get into the university. The art school in the university where I studied in Japan costs 10,000 € per year, plus an entrance fee of 10,000 €. Also, in Japan we don’t have a gap year and entering a company is only for new graduates. So students in Japan are really competitive and eager. Between Linz and Paris, the finance difference was notable for me, since Media Art needs a lot of equipment… Paris 8 lent me 3 PCs at the same time for daily creation. Of course strong discrimination is everywhere. But I feel invisible or micro aggression against Asians is more familiar and I’m struggling from it. When you are part of a minority, you always need to plan and think well. Young people learned they shouldn’t offend others because of their race. So then, they stopped interacting with people from minorities to avoid dealing with their racism and discrimination. This is what I feel when people ignore me.

Katsuki Nogami, Image Cemetery. Public art, 2021. Photo: Yoshiro Masuda

You have taken your work to dialogue with people on the street and outside of art exhibitions and institutional spaces. What do you think of the opportunity to display it now in 30+ screens on shopping malls in the context of the SMTH + Niio open call?

I like public art because it can be freely approached by a wide audience. Museums are closed spaces. When I mention the internet, everyone knows that context for now, but it doesn’t have a constraint like the theater. It’s the conflict but we just need an interesting topic. When I got a prize to show my video in similar conditions in China, I was denied the opportunity to display it in public, even though I was selected. So I’m relieved that I can show my video at this opportunity.

“I like public art because it can be freely approached by a wide audience. Museums are closed spaces.”

Katsuki Nogami’s Image Cementery at CC Plenilunio (Madrid) as part of the SMTH + Niio Open Call. Photo: SMTH

Image Cemetery, your winning artwork, is an intervention in the public space in which you integrate your image on rocks and stones, something that evokes primitive cultures and ancient rituals rather than digital technologies. What is different about this project from previous works in terms of exploring the notion of identity? 

It started when I did my residency program in Kyoto during COVID-19. I was sick of the internet interactions with other people via zoom. When the internet became so convenient, everyone tried to escape from it. Zoom was like a jail to keep us in front of the desk. So I tried to go outside and find nature. I printed my face almost everyday. It’s because I wanted to see my differences and check that my body is growing. Stone is representative of this world in Buddhism. Kyoto is a very ancient city which connects to the after world everywhere. It reminded me of artworks after my death as evidence of living. Now everyone is a photographer with a smartphone, but they don’t print it. It’s difficult to throw away your grandparent’s heavy album. I thought this is a kind of art with an aura. So I wanted to create this. Image is very high resolution to show raw faces in public since it’s normal to put filters to get rid of stains or acne from the skin.

Katsuki Nogami, Image Cemetery. Public art, 2021. Photo: Katsuki Nogami

Actually, it was a very good change since I could find my possibility to create real material. It’s not a new technique, but I felt artists can invent when they learn. NFT is kind of a big representative of the internet in COVID-19. After that, that trend is gone. And many artists have also focused on natural materials.

Viewers thought it was weird, and they also felt it was alive, somehow. So I feel that my objective was achieved. But I was a bit sad when the river washed away my stones. And someone stole some of them, too. Also, a person from Iraq told me stones are tools of warfare. It was inspiring because nature is different based on each person’s beliefs.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: “My body is a material for my art”

Pau Waelder

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Meet Me Halfway – part 1, 2021

A performance and conceptual artist whose work spans different media, Chun Hua Catherine Dong successfully navigates the space between an artistic practice characterized by the physical, bodily presence of the artist in the same space and time as her audience, and another one based on the mediation of digital technologies and a distributed and almost immaterial existence. Dong has taken her performance artworks worldwide, combining action with documentation in the form of photographs and videos that often become artworks on their own. She is also exploring the creative possibilities of VR, AR, and Artificial Intelligence in a series of artworks that are still deeply rooted in her research on gender, memory, identity, body, and presence.

Dong has exhibited their works at The International Digital Art Biennial Montreal (BIAN),  The International Biennial of Digital Arts of the Île-de-France (Némo), MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Kaunas Biennial, The Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in France, Quebec City Biennial, Foundation PHI for Contemporary Art, Canadian Cultural Centre Paris, Museo de la Cancillería in Mexico City, The Rooms Museum, Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, DongGong Museum of Photograph in South Korea, He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, Hubei Museum of Fine Art in Wuhan, The Aine Art Museum in Tornio, Bury Art Museum in Manchester, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Varley Art Gallery of Markham, Art Gallery of Hamilton, among others. She is represented by  Galerie Charlot in Paris.

The artist recently presented the artcast Meet Me Halfway, which collects four videos from her multi-channel VR video installation that explores the perception of time and space in virtual reality and the inability to return to the present from searching the inner world.

Experience Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s immersive VR spaces in Meet Me Halfway

Open artcast
Chun Hua Catherine Dong, The Lost Twelve Years (2015)

As a Chinese-born, Montreal-based artist, the issues of identity, culture, belonging, and distance are present in your life and your work as well. In our globalized world, these issues can sometimes be overlooked, or else exoticized and clichéd, even demanding of an artist with a mixed cultural background to address them. Would you say that there is still a dominant Western perspective on multiculturalism, and if so, how do you address it in your work? 

This is a very interesting question. I can’t speak for others, but it’s natural for me to explore these topics. Living in a different cultural context often prompts questions about one’s identity.  If I lived in China, I would probably never feel the need to deal with these difficult issues. But I immigrated to Canada a long time ago. I need to reconnect with my roots because I feel that something that nurtured me has faded and been forgotten. It is important for me to renew it from time to time. I addressed this issue in my earlier performances. For example, in my performance The Lost Twelve Years (2015) I use a Chinese teapot to pour ink over my head and a squirt gun to shoot ink to my heart and head, which are actions that force me to remember who I am.  

“After living as a «living sculpture» for a long time, I came to the conclusion that it is wise to keep life and art separate.  Now, I state that «I use my body as my material in my artwork» rather than «my body is my artwork.»”

Your body is a key element in your work, both as “the body of the artist”, representing you as an individual and your personal experiences, and as “a female body,” addressing issues of the representation of women in a patriarchal society. When you conceive your performances, how do you weigh these two possibilities?

As a performance artist, my “body as an Asian woman” and my “body as an artwork” frequently change. When I first started doing performance, I considered performance as an attitude, and that “life is a performance, performance is life.” The two were inseparable; thus, my life was always in a performance/artwork mode, or “living sculpture” mode. But I realized that I was quite weary of being my own artwork. It is also harmful to one’s mental health and sanity because the concept “life is art and art is life” could mess up your life. After living as a “living sculpture” for a long time, I came to the conclusion that “Life can be a performance, but performance is not life—at least, not my entire life.”  It is wise to keep the two separate.  Later, I use the statement that “I use my body as my material in my artwork” rather than “my body is my artwork.”

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Skin Deep (2014-2020). Photographs with Augmented Reality

In your work, we can find on the one hand a direct approach to the body, naked, as a canvas or an object, and on the other hand the body veiled by masks and disguises. What do you find more interesting about playing with the different levels of displaying and hiding the body, maybe also seducing or unsettling the viewer’s gaze?

This is a very interesting question. Yes, there were naked bodies in my early performance work. For me, the body is a blank canvas, and any type of clothing or even makeup can give “identity” to it. Perhaps viewers perceive me as vulnerable when they see me naked, but I don’t feel that way. Being naked doesn’t challenge me but rather challenges the viewers. The power of the naked body in performance art lies in its rawness, it’s a pure form of art. Anyway, who isn’t born naked?

“For me, the body is a blank canvas: any type of clothing or even makeup can give “identity” to it. Being naked doesn’t challenge me but rather challenges the viewers.”

In the digital world, physical distance, the presence of the human body, and even identity tend to be blurred or seemingly erased. For instance, your work Meet Me Halfway is strikingly different from your performance work in both aesthetics and the presence of the body, yet you have incorporated your body in the form of camera movements. How do you navigate the differences between an immaterial digital environment and the materiality of your performances?

Meet Me Halfway (2021) was created during the pandemic. According to reports, many Asian people were attacked in public places during the pandemic. I was afraid of going out. If I had to go out, I wore a big hat and mask to cover myself because I didn’t want to be recognized. This situation subconsciously influenced my work Meet Me Halfway, which is why my body is absent in this work but just camera movements.  I became interested in VR during the pandemic as well because I discovered that VR can help me to escape from reality. VR space is less political, at least, you won’t get physically attacked. You can build your own virtual world in VR and visit it from time to time whenever you want. It is interesting that you mentioned immateriality in the digital environment. Actually, performance art is often regarded as an immaterial practice as well. Because of its immaterial nature, it is very easy for me to shift my practice from performance art to digital art.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Mulan (2022)

Following with the previous question, Mulan addresses gender identity through a folk heroine placed in an underwater landscape. What seems at first a scene of pure fantasy contains numerous symbolisms. How would say that a viewer immersed in this VR space can connect with the message you want to convey? 

Gender is an important component of my work. Mulan (2022) was inspired by Beijing Opera. You are right. “Mulan” depicts a pure fantasy scene because Beijing Opera is my fantasy. I used to dream of wearing the Beijing Opera costume and performing on stage when I was little. But Beijing Opera is a form of high art, not many people have a chance to access it. For me, art provides a space for asking questions and discovering; I’d be very happy to see that people have questions when they experience Mulan, such as, “Why Mulan? Why are there two Mulan? What outfit does Mulan wear? What are the names of the sea creatures surrounding Mulan?” If people ask questions, they will find answers.  Sometimes I realize that I am more interested in how viewers feel and think about my work rather than telling them what my work is about. Viewers’ different interpretations enrich and expand the artwork itself.

“I am more interested in how viewers feel and think about my work rather than telling them what my work is about. Viewers’ different interpretations enrich and expand the artwork itself.”

The mise en scène is an important element in a performance, which in your work translates to carefully set up photographs, installations, and VR environments. What is the role of space in your work across the many different media you use?

Mise en scene is a stage. Most of my works are staged. In performance, “mise en scene” can be in any place, including public, private, virtual, or imaginary spaces. Camera frame is a type of stage too because activities must occur within the frame in order for the camera to capture them. If we apply this concept to traditional art, a plinth is a stage for sculptures, and a wall serves as a stage for two-dimensional artworks.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Meet Me Halfway (2021). Four-channel VR video installation. Exhibition view at Foundation Phi.

You have stated that you initially wanted to become a painter, but found that performance was more expressive. Yet there is a painterly quality to much of your work, particularly in photography and digital art, besides the use of paint in some of your performances. Which would you say is your approach to painting nowadays? 

Yes, I wanted to be a painter before. But painting has its own limitations because you work in a two-dimensional space, and you must sometimes wait for it to dry before applying another layer. Performance is an expressive medium, I never wanted to go back to painting after I fell in love with performance. My work does have painterly quality, I guess it is because of my painting background. Regarding how I approach painting nowadays, I think it is VR drawing/ painting. It doesn’t limit you in a 2D space like traditional painting, but rather you work in a 3D space. When you draw a line in VR, it is a 3D line, and you can zoom in and out to see your drawing/painting in 3D perspective, which fascinates me.

“I approach painting through VR. It doesn’t limit you in a 2D space like traditional painting, but rather you work in a 3D space. When you draw a line in VR, it is a 3D line, and you can zoom in and out to see your drawing/painting in 3D perspective, which fascinates me.”

In your recent work Out of the Blue, you address your childhood and feature a teddy bear character that has been present in your work over the last three years. Can you tell us more about this character? You frequently use 3D printing techniques to create sculptures, why have you chosen this technique over more traditional forms of modeling and sculpting?

The teddy bear is a symbol of childhood.  With its eyes closed, the bear refuses to look at the world, rather prefers to dream. In my digital art practice, I began with AR and VR, and then 3D printing. It is very natural for me to use 3D printing to make sculptures because 3D printing is a type of digital fabrication. 3D printing is also a practical choice. Traditional sculpture requires a large studio space and special tools, which I don’t have. On the other hand, 3D printing doesn’t require much space; simply having a table or a desk at home is sufficient. Traditionally, 3D printing has been used to make molds or prototypes for further work. However, I embrace its rawness. I use 3D printing as the raw material for my finished artwork, with no additional touches such as sanding or painting. The unpolished raw nature of 3D printing fascinates me because it captures the essence of the technological and digital process, demystifying how artwork is made.

Chun Hua Catherine Don. Solo Exhibition: At the Edge of Two Worlds. TRUCK Contemporary Art, 2022

You have recently started experimenting with AI, first in the photographic series For You I Will Be an Island, and lately creating animations of what appear to be underwater creatures. Can you tell me about your experience with this technology? Which are your objectives when using AI programs? How does working with these programs differ from your VR and 3D animations?

I like AI. For me, AI is more than simply a tool; it’s like having an assistant. I understand that people have concerns about AI. I completely respect that. However, as an artist with limited resources and financial assistance, AI helps me save time and money when creating artwork.  For example, in For You I Will Be an Island (2023) I printed 23 pieces of 2.5 m x 2.5 m AI generated graphics; I can’t imagine how I would do this without AI. I could paint 23 pieces of 2.5 m × 2.5 m paintings, but how long would it take? Or I could use photographs, but where would I find such locations to photograph? I probably can find them if I have the financial freedom to travel around the world to look for them, but how long would it take?  Now AI is able to create animation and 3D objects, although it is not there yet, it is still very exciting. Animation and 3D modeling are often very time consuming and costly. If I have a budget, of course, I prefer to work with creative people, but if I don’t, AI is a good way to go.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, For You I Will Be An Island (2023)

As we are starting the year (in the Gregorian calendar, and soon the Chinese New Year), it begs the question: what are you currently working on, and which projects do you have in store for the coming months?

Thanks! I am very excited that the Chinese New Year is coming soon. This is the year to celebrate the dragon. I am currently working on a public art project with 35 video displays at Place des Arts in Montreal. I am also working on an upcoming solo exhibition at Galerie Charlot in Paris in April. And I will participate in Montreal’s International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) in May.

“If I have a budget, of course, I prefer to work with creative people, but if I don’t, AI is a good way to go.”

Carlo Zanni: e-commerce, identity, and the epic of our times

Pau Waelder

An early practitioner of net art, Carlo Zanni is among the first artists to explore the nascent opportunities for the online art market and reflect on how the web would impact on our sense of identity and privacy. With a painter’s vision, he has seen in the development of online platforms and graphical user interfaces a space of visual compositions in which the computer desktop becomes a landscape, and everything in it is a fiction. 

He has also developed new forms of storytelling through web-based projects such as the “data cinema” trilogy: The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success (2006), My Temporary Visiting Position from the Sunset Terrace Bar (2007), and The Fifth Day (2009). In these online films, he combined a pre-defined narrative with data collected in real time from the same users who were watching the film, or from a distant webcam, or from different sources describing the social and political conditions of Egypt. 

Carlo Zanni, The Fifth Day (2009)

Explore Zanni’s data cinema artworks

Open artcast

Embedded in his work as an artist, his research on alternative models to sell digital art has led to pioneering yet unrealized projects such as P€OPLE ¥ROM MAR$ (2012), an online platform dedicated to selling video art and fostering a community of creatives based on shared revenue, or ViBo (2014-2015), a “video book” aimed at facilitating the sale of video art at affordable prices in unlimited series. He collected his experiences with these models in the book Art in the Age of the Cloud (Diorama Editions, 2017).

Niio is proud to present two selections of artworks by Carlo Zanni: Data Cinema Anthology, which brings together the Data Cinema trilogy and an additional artwork, and Save Me for Later, a code-based artwork recently presented at Zanni’s solo exhibition Accept & Decline at OPR Gallery in Milan. In the following interview, the artist discusses the artworks presented in this exhibition, which can be visited until April 28th.

Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings, 2022. On view at OPR Gallery, Milan.

In this latest series you have come back to painting as a medium, after a long career focused on web-based art, but you keep exploring the same subjects. Can you take me through the main ideas in the Check-Out Paintings?

This cycle of paintings is part of a long-term investigation of the social and psychological role of eCommerce in our society. It stems from the memories of the eCommerce check-out pages: a final destination we all are funneled to, in every online buying process. The check-out pages of eCommerce sites represent a highly symbolic limbo that precedes the dopamine rush where we all hope to find shelter. A form of addiction, but as shown during the pandemic, also a lifeline. 

“Our identity bounces between the happiness for buying, and the sense of guilt for having bought.”

Buying online is both a sort of pursuit of happiness as we have been taught by our society, both a way to escape reality, procrastinating any possible confrontation with ourselves. Our identity bounces between the happiness for buying, and the sense of guilt for having bought. Between the satisfaction of an increasingly frictionless, user-friendly, fast, and on-time experience; and the anxiety, and also the shame, for what this transient fake happiness often entails on a social, work, and human level for thousands of people: directly (shifts and working conditions, small local businesses), and indirectly (tax evasion of mega-corporations and environmental impact).

Unlike early works such as DTP Icons Paintings (2000), here you do not look for a realistic representation of the interface, but rather create almost abstract compositions, why is that?

True, because here is more about inner feelings than simple representation. It’s not witnessing from the outside but feeling from the inside, then trying to show a glimpse of it, if possible, in the real world.  So the rationalist layout, typical of these pages, fades into memory, it turns into a dreamlike experience, into a psychological post-image, while some details of the transaction, such as measures, prices, and quantities, emerge from the background when one gets closer to the surface of the painting: they bring us back to reality.

The subtle color fields of these paintings make them very difficult to be mediated or “seen” online (e.g. on Instagram, or on a PDF), instead they open up and expand in front of the viewer when experienced for real. While our society continues to demand fast, easily communicable images, these paintings are slow, almost invisible, non-existent images, and they ask for something very precious: our time.

Carlo Zanni, Check Out Paintings, 2022. On view at OPR Gallery, Milan.

How did you achieve this faded effect in the canvases?

The color used in these works is acrylic mixed with water and in some cases acrylic medium. This way tones are soft and they mesh one into the other when seen from a certain distance, vaporizing the memory of the whole picture. I take advantage of the cutting plotter to write numbers and other “technical” details. I cut the letters in vinyl (negative) with a size that allows me to draw inside them with a sharp pencil without touching the vinyl edges. This way the sentences and the lettering look “straight” and “guided” from a distance, and handmade from a closer inspection.

“When you stick your nose onto the canvas, the work transforms from an abstract field into a condensed epic of our times.”

Formally speaking, the style of these paintings was born in response to a period of social isolation due to the pandemic, during which, as a balance, we have tried to mediate all the possible human activities: meetings, purchases, employment, leisure, study, culture… I felt the need to go the other way, working on something that could be only appreciated when seen in person.

If you want to find some roots, these works echo the mature practice of artist Agnes Martin, in the use of pencil and subtle water-based colors, but here all the “modernist” and “minimalist” values of the time are almost gone. So all the pencil details and most of the color fields are only visible when you stick your nose onto the canvas, and the work transforms from an abstract, almost white, field, into a condensed epic of our times touching themes such as anxiety, desire, happiness, fear, gender identity, pandemics, politics, tragedies, wars.

While the paintings look almost abstract, they also contain references to the present, as is frequently found in your web-based artworks, what role do these references play?

The paintings dig into our daily culture and politics, for instance by discreetly showing disclaimers referring to the current Ukraine war. (Since February 2022, many eCommerce added such disclaimers for multiple reasons: from giving updated shipping info to giving their support to the Ukrainians). I see these paintings as a vehicle for meditation, an attempt to temporarily alienate ourselves from this endless moment of upheaval and unrest; while being violently dragged back to reality when we get closer to the surface: they are a way to extract some time from our hectic lives to sense the delicacy and fragility of our body and the transience of happiness while diving into our time.

While they are very different artworks, I would point out to Average Shoveler (2004) as having a similar approach in terms of its meditative aspect and the connection to real life events. In that work, which was commissioned by Rhizome, I created an online video game in which the player controls a man who has to shovel the snow falling on the streets of New York. Each time he does, several images taken from CNN and other news outlets in real time pop up and disappear. Additionally, some non-player characters stop and speak out news headlines. The main character invariably ends up dying of exhaustion, unable to shovel the incessant amount of snow. But the game also includes some secret spaces meant for the player to relax and just observe the scene, distanced from the gameplay. In a way, these paintings also provide that distanced space of observation while having these subtle hooks to reality.

Carlo Zanni, Average Shoveler (2004)

Talking about hooks, you describe some elements in the paintings as “clickbait,” can you elaborate on that?

Yes, the dark dots and solid-colored shapes (lines, rectangles, circles) that appear in some of the paintings are what I call “clickbaits” for one’s eyes. Seen from afar these canvases look pretty white and empty, but these dots stand out and catch your attention. They work similarly to how advertising plays with colors, double meanings, and impressive images to stand out in a visually saturated landscape.

They also remind of the so-called “dark patterns”, which are interface design strategies quite common in e-commerce pages, that are meant to fool the user into doing what the vendor wants them to do, such as sign up for a newsletter, add an extra service, or choose the most expensive option among several choices. In my paintings, the shapes intend to lure you into looking closely at the painting and finding what it is actually about. However, I would say that while clickbait is content that over-promises and under-delivers, in my paintings I under-promise and over-deliver 🙂

Carlo Zanni, Save Me for Later (2022)

Save me for later (2022) is also an intriguing artwork in the sense that it is not what it appears to be, and it connects with a concept you have explored over the years, which is the computer screen as a landscape

“Save me for later” is actually a bot browsing Amazon.com, continuously adding products to the cart that is visible in the right sidebar. When the cart reaches its limit, it automatically moves products to the “saved for later list”, making room for the new freshly added ones. The bot embeds a floating window with the webcam stream framing me while performing. This repetitive and almost hypnotic performance, with apparently no beginning and no end, speaks of the type of procrastination we all carry out while browsing e-commerce sites, looking for products that will bring us happiness and make our lives better.

As with the paintings, the experience of isolation during the pandemic was key to conceiving this artwork, in which the computer screen becomes a landscape, a place of escapism and daydreaming. The performance is consciously slow and cryptic, and as it is playing out in real time, in the real Amazon website, the items that appear reflect our present time just as the subtle writings on the paintings take us back to the world we are living in. For instance, when I first ran the program, the bot frequently picked up COVID-19 self-tests, which at some point were very much in demand and right now are almost forgotten. 

“This repetitive and almost hypnotic performance speaks of the type of procrastination we all carry out while browsing e-commerce sites, looking for products that will bring us happiness and make our lives better”

I see this project also as a vehicle for meditation, an attempt to alienate ourselves momentarily from our daily lives and our anxieties (so the title “Save me for later”). And behind the activity itself, what you see on the screen that is apparently me browsing the Amazon site but is in fact an automated process carried out by a computer program, is an interesting exchange of data. Data collected by the Amazon site about this meaningless routine (constantly adding items to the cart without ever checking out), data displayed by Amazon about the articles on sale, data that is processed by Amazon’s algorithm to display new items related to previously selected products. 

See a two-hour excerpt of Zanni’s endless automated performance on Amazon

Open artcast

Data is for me what gravity probably was for Bas Jan Ader. “The artist’s body as gravity makes itself its master.” These mysterious words were used by Bas Jan Ader to describe his short films Falling I (Los Angeles) and Falling II (Amsterdam) when he showed them in Düsseldorf in 1971. He was playing with gravity, he was becoming gravity, accepting its outcome: failures, fragilities, spiritualism, poetry, meditation, ascension. 

I feel that I use data in a sort of similar way, accepting the fact that most of my works will cease to exist quite soon after their birth. By using data from media outlets such as CNN, tools from Google, data collected from users, and so on, I consciously open my work to a vulnerability as the price to pay for creating a work that is always connected to the present and fed by data that circulates online. Then, an API is changed, a tool is discontinued, and the artwork cannot exist anymore. Sometimes you can fix them, sometimes you just don’t want to do it. 

Other times you start again from scratch as recently I did with Cookie Portrait (2002-2022), a work about online identity and privacy that had to be rewritten when it was launched at OPR Gallery last year, 20 years after it was first created. This work is based on the same cookie technology that is used – for instance – for the internal session management of an eCommerce site and more generally for user profiling and marketing activities. This work reminds us that, in our online existence, we are made of data. The body is thus the sum total of your data, the artwork is a temporary and transient experience of something elusive, like our own existence is.

Expanding formats: NFTs at Art Brussels

Pau Waelder

The 38th edition of the Art Brussels art fair, which took place between the 20th and 23rd April, featured for the first time a dedicated space to NFTs and a selection of works sold as non-fungible tokens by participating galleries. This was made possible through a partnership with Parallel, a production and advisory platform dedicated to contemporary art and Web3 technologies. Parallel worked with the galleries to showcase a selection of the NFTs hosted on the online space JPG, a platform that has developed a curatorial protocol for the presentation of this type of artworks. Additionally, Parallel built a booth that served as an information desk, a meeting point for guided visits, and also hosted an augmented reality artwork. To complement this educational task at the art fair, the team also organized a series of talks about NFTs in collaboration with iMAL, the leading New Media Art Center in Brussels. 

As a guest to both the talks and the visits to the galleries, I had the opportunity to observe the different forms of presentation of the artworks, some combining an online and physical presence, and to discuss with gallerists and visitors the options that NFTs and blockchain technologies present to collectors of contemporary art. 

Parallel NFT Touchpoint booth at Art Brussels

The galleries

It might be expected that NFTs are mainly sold by young galleries, or those already focused on digital art, but actually the galleries participating in the collaboration between Art Brussels and Parallel are quite different from each other. Veteran galleries with an outstanding record in the contemporary art market Michael Janssen (Berlin) and Nagel Draxler (Cologne, Berlin, Munich), have integrated sales of artworks minted as NFTs, alongside the younger contemporary art galleries The Hole (New York), Plus One (Antwerp), and Office Impart (Berlin), as well as others with a particular focus on local and national art scenes, such as Anca Poterasu (Bucharest), Sapar Contemporary (New York), and Green on Red (Dublin). An exceptional case among them is Galerie Charlot (Paris, Tel Aviv), which has been dedicated to digital art for more than a decade, and consequently presented the booth that most seamlessly integrated the languages of digital and contemporary art. 

There were interesting connections and similarities between the different artistic projects presented at the galleries, and for this reason I will focus on these connections rather than list the artworks displayed on each booth. 

Sabrina Ratté, Winter Garden (2016)

The lightness and solidity of 3D worlds

Artists Sabrina Ratté (Charlot) and Theo Triantafyllidis (Nagel Draxler) are known for their particular approach to building 3D worlds, the former creating architectural spaces that blend natural and artificial forms bordering abstraction, the latter fully appropriating video game environments and characters to create immersive scenes, some of which are dominated by the presence of a brawny female ork, the artist’s iconic avatar. Their works find a physical presence, in the case of Ratté, in prints that depict a selected view of her imagined worlds, and in Triantafyllidis’ work as an hologram that underscores the illusory aspect of the digital image. Artists Frederik Heyman (Plus One) and Louis-Paul Caron (Charlot), on the other hand, build their virtual worlds with a particular attention to the textures and physical qualities of each element, and while Caron emphasizes the artificiality of his compositions, Heyman skillfully reproduces every detail. Their works, by contrast, have no physical output: they live as images on a screen.

Antoine Schmitt, UkraineWar2022 (2022)

Generative art, back to the roots

In the current NFT market, generative art has become a favorite among artists and collectors due to the possibility of launching a series of works from a single program, each instance of the program being minted as a unique NFT. This allows artists, on the one hand, to create large series that are automatically generated from a single program, and collectors, on the other hand, to own a piece that is unique while also belonging to a series. However, generative art has also been about the artwork being a single program that constantly generates new compositions, ad infinitum. Since the pioneering work of algorithmic artists, this idea has been adopted by numerous artists in very different ways, sometimes as an autopoietic process and others fed by external data. The Net Art Generator (1997), a seminal web-based piece by Cornelia Sollfrank (Office Impart) offers a peculiar example, as it allows users to create a visual composition from a simple query on a search engine. Appropriating the outputs of anonymous users, the artist has minted a series of NFTs from collages of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints found online and recomposed by her net art generator program. In a similar vein, Thomas Israël (Charlot) creates an homage to the Dada movement through a collage based on a work by László Moholy-Nagy that is populated by visual elements resulting from automated queries for the term “dada” in an online search engine.

In contrast to Sollfrank’s and Israël’s additive practice, Antoine Schmitt (Charlot) and LIA (Office Impart) create generative artworks that are fully based on the elements of a visual language of their own. Schmitt presents a generative piece based on his War series (2015) that depicts the struggle of Ukrainian forces resisting the invasion of the Russian army. The subject of the artwork is made more inspiring by the fact that the pixels are actually elements following a set of instructions that lead them to perform the scripted action endlessly. LIA’s drawing machine develops a previously written program from which she has generated a series of 100 NFTs that illustrate the vast possibilities of visual composition with minimalistic elements and a set of instructions. 

Sarah Friend, Life Forms (2022)

Rules and smart contracts

NFTs are minted through smart contracts, which are sets of agreements or instructions that self-execute on certain actions or when certain conditions are met. For instance, a smart contract will automatically transfer a 10% commission of the sale of an NFT on the secondary market to the artist who created it. But smart contracts can be used for many other purposes, and artists are also exploring the possibilities they bring, alongside generative software, to establish interactions between the artworks and their collectors. Sarah Friend (Nagel Draxler) has created in Life Forms a series of digital entities linked to NFTs. The entities, as designed by the artist, require new caretakers every 90 days, and therefore a collector must transfer the NFT to a new owner before this period has passed in order to keep the entity alive. The artwork thus plays with the tendency to “flip” NFTs that is prevalent among speculators and translates it into a caring, rather than profiting, activity. Artists Kim Asendorf and Jonas Lund (Office Impart) also play with generative pieces that integrate the activity of their collectors. Asendorf has created a series of NFTs and an editor, allowing the owner of the editor to “sabotage” the compositions owned by other collectors. Lund updates a previous web-based artwork which displays the browser window sizes of all users who have accessed it and turns it into a generative abstract piece in which each collector can create their own style and color, and mint their piece until the limited series of 128 has been completed.

David O’Reilly, 4004 (2021)

Lingua arcana

An interesting aspect of NFTs and blockchain and cryptocurrency artworks is that they bring back the arcane qualities associated with digital technologies that had been dissipated by our frequent use of user-friendly devices and interfaces. Kevin Abosch (Nagel Draxler), one of the artists who addressed blockchain technology in his work some years before the NFT boom, presents a series of artworks that use cryptography to hide information in plain sight and extract from the combinations of letters and numbers a certain compositional quality. Eduardo Kac (Charlot) mints an animation based on a form of writing of his own, inspired by his influential bioart project GFP Bunny (2000). Here, the strings of indecipherable characters run wildly across the space, in a way that reminds of the constant activity on blockchains and seems fit for an NFT. Artist and filmmaker David O’Reilly (Green on Red) explores another aspect of the arcane in computer science by digging out one of the few remaining Intel 4004 CPUs, the first microcontroller to put a full computer in a single chip. This relic of the digital age is placed by the artist inside a block of solid resin, creating a sculpture that brings to mind the aesthetic of classic science fiction films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odissey (1968). The sculpture is sold alongside a video of the piece rotating, minted as an NFT and therefore permanently stored in the same digital environment that the chip contributed to create.

Margret Eicher, POSTMODERN DANCE OF DEATH (2017)

Weaving the digital

Computing and industrial weaving find a common ancestor in Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s programmable loom from the early 1800s, which inspired mathematician Charles Babbage’s design of the Analytical Engine, a conceptual model for the modern computer, of which fellow mathematician Ada Lovelace was the first programmer. Nowadays, artists who create tapestries usually work on a digital image that is weaved by computer assisted machines evolved from the original Jacquard loom. This direct yet often overlooked connection between computing and weaving gives the resulting artworks a distinct quality, particularly when the tapestry does not intend to imitate a traditional, hand-woven textile, but replicate the complexities of a digital image. Megan Dominescu (Anca Poterasu), Ry David Bradley (The Hole), and Margret Eicher (Michael Janssen) present their work as tapestries that faithfully reproduce their particular visual styles, from Dominescu’s apparently naïve drawings, to Bailey’s deconstructed portraits, and Eicher’s elaborate compositions combining references to art history, the decorative arts, and popular digital culture. Here, the “original” work, akin to the cartoon, is a digital file, and hence minting it as an NFT offers collectors the ownership of the image as it was created by the artist before the production of the tapestry. Some artists may even decide not to produce the tapestry, which in this case would leave the digital image as the only output. In this manner, the NFT points to the origin of the artwork and to the fact that it exists even prior to its materialization in a physical format.

Jonas Lund, What You Get Is What You See (2022)

One format to encompass them all

The accelerated growth of the NFT market and the possibilities that minting on a blockchain gives to artists and creatives have understandably led to a growing interest in translating artworks in other formats into images than can be assigned a non-fungible token. Artists Victor Verhelst and Beni Bischof (Plus One), Chun Hua Catherine Dong (Charlot), Stepan Ryabchenko and WAONE (Sapar Contemporary), whose work is respectively linked to graphic design, collage, performance, video installation, and mural painting, but who, as most artists nowadays, also work primarily with digital images, have integrated NFTs into their practice. The minted artworks become in this case an extension of a work that exists in other formats but finds a way to be distributed and collected online. 

A look at the NFT offerings in the context of the galleries participating in Art Brussels provides a telling picture of the progressive integration of NFTs in the regular operations of the contemporary art market. Certainly, they are still a curiosity for most visitors and they raise many doubts, but the way in which they have become part of the work of some artists, one year into the NFT boom, indicates that the creators and their galleries have understood the possibilities provided by non-fungible tokens. As standalone digital artworks or combined with physical objects, NFTs in the context of professional contemporary art galleries seem on track to overcome the hype and contribute to expanding the forms of collecting digital art.

Mihai Grecu: Exploring Alternate Realities

Interviewed by Roxanne Vardi & Pau Waelder

NEO PYONGYANG I, 2021 a video work by Mihai Grecu is featured in our recent artcast Anticlimactic, a selection of works from the eco-friendly NFT art community a\terHEN. Born in Romania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last decade of dictatorship, Grecu’s works deal with investigations of catastrophes, both political and environmental, and the exploration of mysterious and subconscious beginnings through new technologies. Grecu’s visual and poetic trips mix several techniques and may be seen as propositions for a new dream oriented technology.


In your films and VR animations you create dream-like worlds that are simulated with precise realism, how do you balance the interplay between fantasy and reality and what does it bring to the narratives you intend to create?

I have always seen my art as glimpses of alternate realities, so realistic simulations are very important to me. The illusion must be perfect, the whole weight of the metaphor relies on the intertwinement between the real and the simulated.

Your work has developed from an attention to the behavior of materials and substances, introducing surreal visual effects, to an interest in building a narrative that speaks of climate disasters, the futility of war, and the insanity of the powerful. What drove you to address these subjects? How does using computer animation techniques help you speak about them?

I am specialized in representing chaotic phenomena such as smoke, dust, particles, using 3d digital simulations. I always thought of these simulations as the canvases for a new painting. They are part of my artistic language. I use them to create a digital moving canvas full of complex visual metaphors. Some are more politically oriented, others more poetical. My background drove me to work on these images: I grew up during the last years of Ceausescu’s dictatorship in Romania, when his personality cult was reaching its extremes.

Mihai Grecu, The Reflection of Power (2015)

The infamous photoshopped image of a missile launch test distributed by the Iranian government back in 2008 showed how image editing technologies had become central to political and media discourses, both increasingly sophisticated but also accessible to almost everyone. Nowadays, we tend to doubt all images while also trusting them as proof of a fact. How does your work on political allegories play with the perception of images as fakes?

Some of my works are centered around the concept of “post-truth”. The interest in post-truth comes from the idea of rewriting history, especially because we live in a world where post-reality has become at least as important as reality. We live in a world where fake news influence people at least as much as “real” news, so the question is: if there are more people who are ready to accept a false fact as “reality” than people who are willing to check the information from scientific sources, does that make the “fake” as “real” as a certified fact? New media makes it even easier, thanks to new technical achievements, like “neural networks” or thanks to collective human work, like “russian facebook trolls.”

My idea is that “post truth” is not an artist statement already by default, but it’s a media in itself, and I am willing to use this media in creating artworks. In the history of “happening”, performance art or documentary filmmaking, there are examples carrying already the “germs” of this post truth that we are living right now, the difference is that nowadays it has become so big that it’s taking over a big part of society and it’s not directly related to artistic creation. 

Coming back to the first idea, I’m interested in post truth because I think it has become easier to manipulate and rewrite history: maybe in 50 years some of this “fake news” that we have now will become historical facts.

For me, the fake news and post-truth somehow blend with the concepts of propaganda and one-sided history that have reached their climax in totalitarian regimes (like stalinism, or North Korea), just that now it has become global and multi-facetted. It is the perfect time to include these techniques into artworks.

How does the immersive quality of VR films such as Saturnism help you tell a story? What would you point out as the main appeal of using VR in your work?  

Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” is another image that has been haunting me for a long time. This particular work comes from my wish to make a virtual reality recreation of an “old masters” painting, so naturally I chose “Saturn”. I spent several months face to face with its reproduction. I tried to go beyond every layer of it and imagine what is going on in this space of the painting. Even if it looks like a very different work from what I usually do, I think it’s connected to my other projects on the conceptual side. Nevertheless I wanted to use the Virtual Reality medium as it should be used: as a direct environment to the viewer’s perception: I wanted it to be a raw and unsettling physical experience.

NEO PYONGYANG I is an excerpt from the film The Reflection of Power. Can you tell us a bit more about this project, and specifically what captured your interest in the North Korean regime? How do you conceive the idea of a flood, as opposed to other possible environmental catastrophes?   

The NFT piece is not technically an excerpt: format and speed of the image are different from the film. The first “media ” images that I was in contact with consisted basically of 99 percent Ceausecu. Furthermore, he was hanging out with his “friends”, for example Mobutu or Gaddafi. Another state leader who had an important role in my memories of the time was Kim Il Sung, the contemporary Kim’s grandfather. After most of this stalinst type of propaganda personality cult imagery disappeared and was erased with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, I found myself attentively following what’s happening in North Korea, and getting more and more astonished that it keeps going on. It is like a “conceptual island” of the past that I remember from my early childhood, therefore I have a fascination for the Kim dynasty’s propaganda imagery and self-imagery. These aesthetics related to stalinist type propaganda are just a continuation of my previous works, as I want to create something like a complex universe with multiple pieces that are interconnected.

“we live in a world where post-reality has become at least as important as reality.”

How would you describe your experience in the NFT space and why did you choose to exhibit your work on alterHEN?

I decided to do NFTs because of my experience as a digital creator: I have realized that it’s a unique opportunity for creators to distribute and get rewarded for their art. I have extensive experience with festivals, art galleries, curators etc, and I know that for digital creators it was extremely difficult to sell and to show their work, and even if that happened, there would have been several intermediary parties which would take their own share in a more or less fair way. With NFTs, the creator is confronted directly to their audience and collectors, that’s why I decided to join in.

alterHEN is a collective initiative from many Tezos artists, started by Patrick Tresset and Diane Drubay. As part of this initiative, I want to say that alterHEN is working hard on bringing more and more people from the “traditional” art world into Tezos cryptoart, by inviting museums, collectors, artists etc. Big thanks to alterHEN for creating this! Besides these great initiatives, all the artists from the collective are amazing and each and one of them has their unique style!



Diane Drubay: Reconnecting with Nature

Interviewed by Roxanne Vardi & Pau Waelder

As Video Artist and Photographer, Diane Drubay investigates transcendental and psychoactive experiences exposed in representations of nature that expand the idea of the sublime. Drubay’s works draw attention to the climate emergency, extended realities, and community engagement. Ignis II, created in 2021, is featured in our recent artcast Anticlimactic, a selection of works from the eco-friendly NFT art community a\terHEN, in which four artists create a series of landscapes that depict the pressing reality and possible futures of our planet.

Explore Anticlimactic, a selection of NFT artworks from a\terHEN about climate change.

Open artcast

Your work is characterized by a very specific aesthetic in which the documentation of natural landscapes and atmospheric phenomena progressively give way to stylized, almost abstract compositions dominated by color fields and geometric shapes. What drove this progression and was it a conscious decision to evolve your work in this direction?

For years I have been using what I capture in nature, especially landscapes where the sun plays a central role in an emotional narrative. Whether through colors, geometric shapes or visual compositions, each scene is an emotion in progress or in motion. For example, the circle has harmonizing and soothing qualities, and the ocean, which can look like a gently moving rectangle, calls for benevolent transformation. Combining different colors creates a strong emotional story that is totally subconscious.

In each of my series, I use natural elements to write sensory stories that resonate through different emotions. This is also why I quickly moved on to video art, and now to gif. Each piece is a chapter in a book accompanying the viewer through a transcendental transformation.

Diane Drubay, Animae, (2018).


The concept of the Sublime is naturally present in your work; do you purposely introduce this notion as a deeper reading of what could superficially be understood as a soothing and contemplative scene?

The Sublime is indeed at the heart of my art. I am still as overwhelmed by the romantic artworks of the early 19th century, as by the spectacle that Nature offers us. Being able to embrace emotions and sensations, swaying between Ecstasy and Agony, is such a transformative experience.

Just as the Romantics appeared after the Enlightenment, I am part of this new movement of modern romantics committed to the environment and better futures. It is by valuing and reconnecting with Nature that we can respect it more and hope for a more harmonious future.

“For years I have been using what I capture in nature, especially landscapes where the sun plays a central role in an emotional narrative… It is by valuing and reconnecting with Nature that we can respect it more and hope for a more harmonious future.”

Some of your works have a painterly quality, in that sense, how much weight do you put on the artwork as a visual composition that stands on its own as such?

The composition is entirely part of the narration. You don’t tell the same story if each element is placed differently, or have another tonality. It could seem easy to (re)compose landscapes but it takes me such a long time to be able to express the right emotion.

Addressing climate change and the possible outcomes of our exploitation of natural resources can be a difficult and uncomfortable task. How do you think art can tackle this subject and possibly induce, if not action, at least reflection?

We need to reconnect with what surrounds us on a daily basis in order to better understand and respect it. Having grown up in the middle of nature but having lived in the city for the last 20 years, the only element that has allowed me to feel connected to the grandeur and sublime of nature is the sun. I, therefore, assumed that if everyone could reconnect with the sun in a subconscious and transcendental way, a new relationship between humans and nature could be sparked.

“Having grown up in the middle of nature but having lived in the city for the last 20 years, the only element that has allowed me to feel connected to the grandeur and sublime of nature is the sun.”

Scientific concepts play an important role in your work. How do you conceive of the relationship between art and science in your practice? Do you think that art can help in understanding scientific research, or should it be a way to build, as Roger Malina once stated, “a better science”?

No one can predict the future, but we can feel what a certain future story tells us. I use scientific stories to develop my emotional journeys so that emotion can be used as a lever for reflection. I am a huge fan of science-fiction from the 70s and the 80s, but I realized that only fact-based social science fiction literature created a lasting impact on me. Being able to base your art on science also provides a next step for the viewer after discovering the art, it is a door towards knowledge, and hopefully action.


How would you describe your experience in the NFT space? What drove you to become one of the founders of alterHEN?

I have been active in the NFT world for a year now and it has considerably changed my artistic practice. Hic et nunc appeared in March 2021, with all its values of disruption, openness, inclusion and commitment to the environment. Before that, I had already started to explore immersive works and 3D worlds to add a new narrative layer to my landscapes. But arriving in this community pushed me to explore even more and experiment with new formats. Since then, I have produced animated 3D objects and gifs and now find it hard to go back to 2D seeing how much the story is amplified. alterHEN was created very naturally. We followed our desire, without the pressure of time or ambitions. We wanted to experiment more, together. It is now a unique space where 20 artists invite other artists or cultural institutions to explore a new world.