Mario Klingemann, born in Laatzen, Germany in 1970, is an artist who integrates algorithms and artificial intelligence into his creative process. His artistic exploration delves into visual expressions, linguistics, and our intricate interactions with technology. Klingemann’s creations, which primarily utilize generative adversarial networks (GANs), manifest as screen-based artworks or interactive installations. These installations captivate audiences with a never-ending array of visual experiences, where the AI models crafted by Klingemann generate portraits, abstracted figures, or textual content in real-time.
Recognized as a pioneering figure in the realm of AI-art, Klingemann’s contributions include a tenure as Artist in Residence at Google Arts and Culture from 2015 to 2018. His collaborations extend to notable institutions like the British Library and the New York Public Library. In 2018, he was honored with the prestigious Lumen Prize Gold Award. Klingemann’s work has been showcased at eminent art venues globally, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre in London, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
In this article, based on the text written for the exhibition Latent Spacesthat I curated for La Bibi Gallery (Mallorca, Spain) featuring the work of Mario Klingemann and the Finnish duo Grönlund-Nisunen, I offer a brief overview of the main subjects in Klingemann’s work. On the occasion of this exhibition, Niio is presenting a selection of artworks by Mario Klingemann, courtesy of Onkaos.
Explore the wilderness of AI in Mario Klingemann’s artworks
Mario Klingemann. Sirius A, 2019. Courtesy of Onkaos.
Latent space is the position relation of information
Borrowing László Moholy-Nagy’s reflections about architecture in his book The New Vision (1927), Klingemann describes the term “latent space,” commonly used in machine learning processes, as “the position relation of information.” Latent spaces are not physical spaces, but rather a way to describe how an artificial intelligence system processes the information it takes from a data set and creates clusters of items that resemble each other, according to a set of variables. Klingemann explores latent spaces as realms of endless possibilities, looking for the unexpected, the rare and weird, that which pushes his creativity further. For him, AI is not a technology that replaces the artist, but one that provides creators with new ways to develop their talent. In his work, we find endless processes fueled by “untamed” artificial neural networks that generate uncanny images and responses. Faced with this creative otherness, one must find one’s position as a viewer whose aesthetic and narrative expectations are challenged.
Nowadays, the most popular AI applications excel at creating realistic depictions of things we have seen thousands of times, or unconventional combinations of familiar images (such as a dog dressed as an astronaut riding a horse on the Moon) with impressive accuracy. However, Klingemann finds this approach predictable and boring, and aims to drive the system into the unpredictable: “[the popularization of] one-click AI art tools… forces me to look for areas out there that I still consider “wilderness” and to learn more about what it is that we humans find truly interesting and captivating.” The Hyperdimensional Attractions series addresses the unexpected by applying a three-body problem to a latent space, resulting in a triptych showing images that change according to how the feature vectors they represent “orbit” around each other. What the viewer sees is a triptych of familiar images always mutating into weird shapes and amalgamations: it is precisely these unsettling figures that interest Klingemann in his exploration of the fringes of representation.
Mario Klingemann. Three Latent Body Problem, 2023. Courtesy of Onkaos.
Datasets and appropriation
Generative neural networks are trained using datasets, and therefore the content of these datasets is crucial. Artists such as Anna Ridler create their own datasets by making hundreds of drawings or taking thousands of photographs, while others incorporate their own writings into a machine learning model in order to create an alter ego of sorts, as do Mark Amerika and Sasha Stiles. Mario Klingemann carries out a particular form of appropriation by using datasets of thousands of images or, more particularly, taking Hyeronimus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500)as the base material for The Garden of Ephemeral Details. In this artwork, an autonomous AI machine made of several generative adversarial networks (GANs) constantly reinterprets the famous triptych by adding new forms to its unsettlingly surreal iconography. Klingemann uses Bosch’s masterpiece as a field of algorithmic interpretation, forcing the machine to explore the “wilderness” of artistic creation by providing a peculiar data set in the form of the Dutch artist’s singular combination of religious imagery and unbridled fantasy. The resulting artwork thus becomes an experiment in machine hallucination and artificial imagination.
Mario Klingemann. The Garden of Ephemeral Details Reserve #2, 2020. Courtesy of Onkaos.
Motion and process
Moholy-Nagy was one of the pioneering artists exploring kinetic sculpture and the use of light and industrial materials in assemblages and installations. Kinetic art also influenced early algorithmic art, with pioneers such as Manfred Mohr seeking to portray motion in abstract generative artworks and finding in personal computers a tool to create visual compositions in perpetual transformation. Mario Klingemann follows this tradition by using generative adversarial networks to create images that are not static but constantly and seamlessly morph into new shapes, accentuating the fact that the process takes precedence over the finished product. The Hyperdimensional Attractions seriesand The Garden of Ephemeral Details clearly show this particular decision. The former explore the position relations of feature vectors in the latent space, the resulting images becoming a way to visualize these relations. The latter deconstructs Bosch’s triptych in order to portray the effort of the machine as it tries to stretch its imagination.
Mario Klingemann. Imposture Series – The Butcher’s Son, 2017. Courtesy of Onkaos.
Latency
Motion and process imply change taking place in a certain time and space (real or virtual). Change, in turn, implies that something is about to happen. There is expectation, as one waits for the next step in the process. Paradoxically, latency is found in Klingemann’s prints, static images that nevertheless potently evoke transformation. The Imposture series explores the representation of the human body through AI models, resulting in six compositions that the artist selected from 50,000 images generated by the program. Some of the images vaguely remind of paintings by Francis Bacon but have a decidedly non-human quality to them: they lack the natural notions of the shape of the human body and the empathy that a human artist would feel. In an even more disturbing turn, the Neural Decay series evoke early photographic portraiture, again in a form that distills otherness and the uncanny. These artworks seem in the process of dissolving, their shapes blending into each other, as if they were about to turn into an amorphous substance or simply vanish. As we observe and wait for this to happen, a space of latency opens before our eyes.
Our guest author, Thomas Lisle, is an artist with more than 30 years of experience in digital media who is exploring how painting transitions into a time based medium.
The art world seems to be in a moment of change; suddenly, digital is relevant to more people, and most of us have a computer and a smartphone. To many contemporary artists, digital technology is opening up new possibilities with new issues to circumnavigate. As an artist who has embraced electronic and digital art since 1981, I think it’s important to write a more in-depth analysis of the medium and its relationship to art and my art. My aim is to give those who do not have 40-odd years of experience a deeper insight into the technology, ideas, and practice of digital art from the perspective of my artistic output.
I started making glitch video art in 1981 as a process to make abstract painterly images, and I worked in this medium almost exclusively for 6 or 7 years. I’ve had lots of time to think about it. I eventually came to the conclusion that it’s really not enough; it’s like outsourcing the creative aspect, the making of the abstraction to some random process. Sometimes it makes great results, but there’s no control, that’s inherent in glitch art. I described glitch art then as a deconstruction. A glitch is a technical malfunction; it’s impersonal. Glitch seems to me a visual deconstruction that is a dead end in terms of artist development and impersonal. This makes glitch art ‘classical post-modernist,’ an art thinking and practice of the last century.
From 1982 to the mid 1990s Thomas Lisle experimented with Glitch TV images which formed the basis for a series of installations and videos.
A glitch is a one-off phenomenon that can look visually interesting; it’s not a way of making art that can be consciously built upon and developed; it’s an accident; it’s not consciously designed. Without control, it’s like throwing a bucket of paint over your shoulder –occasionally, something new and interesting might appear that you had never thought of. But the process of thinking about it and the journey of discovery, with tools you can control, is far more rewarding, stimulating, and produces results that can be built upon and explored. A metamodern approach, that comes from the artist, is needed. Generative and AI art, to me, are also classically post-modern, an art form initially developed in the 60s and 70s, impersonal in that it’s an algorithm rather than a human that makes the art.
Generative and AI art, to me, are impersonal in that it’s an algorithm rather than a human that makes the art.
As an artist, I’m interested in abstraction, visual languages, colour theory, hand-to-eye relationships, and composition, as well as psychology and human consciousness. Visual abstraction, both figurative and non-figurative, is the primary means of communication and expression. Figurative abstraction, above all, seems to me to be the most human mode of expression. Non-figurative abstraction, when the time-based medium allows abstract forms to take on a narrative, is not just a paint stroke/geometric shape; it is a paint stroke/geometric shape that’s saying something through its movement or time-based transformation. It represents so much more when consciously manipulated in time.
If you imagine Van Gogh, who famously painted a painting a day, making 1 minute of animation, which is 1,500 paintings (frames), it would take him about four years. I’m sure he would have gotten bored after a few days, as most people would. It’s this same time constraint of painting which drove my early glitch work. Then six years later, my artistic experimentation crossed paths with feature film effects software, which has developed and continues to develop sophisticated 3D systems to represent everything from humans to lava monsters.
If you were to ask me what digital medium offered artists the widest scope to produce any form, any liquid, any painting, anything in fact i.e ‘time based meta-plasticity,’ the art of the future. I would say without a moment of doubt it’s the software that has been developed to produce these box office hit movies. Software like Maya and Houdini. The main reasons that artists don’t use this software are that it’s difficult and time-consuming to learn and that it requires moderately expensive software and computers.
This workflow of making animation time efficient is called procedural. 3D software literally means that it makes everything in 3 dimensions; in films, you see it as a 2D output; in games, you see a 2D output that, if you are wearing goggles, it all comes out 2D but different to each eye making you think it has depth. In the digital world this means that everything you compute in 3D has a volume, it is basically sculptural in nature, rather than flat like a print, except, of course, paint in most cases has a thickness and layers. If the digital artwork you are looking at is flat, with no sense of depth, it is probably some kind of generative art; otherwise, it’s modelled or realised in 3D.
What appeals to me about painting/sculpture is and always has been the consciousness behind the artwork; it’s impossible for AI or an algorithm or a vast database of information to ever know what it is to be human. It’s the originality, poetry or beauty or chaos, craftsmanship, emotional, transcendent, humbling impact that humans bring to art that matters.
Thomas Lisle. Dynamic Relationships, 2023.
Human consciousness or AI
Art produced by AIs
Is it impossible for AI or an algorithm, or a vast database of information to ever know what it is to be human?
Joseph Weizenbaum first pointed this out in the 1960s when he invented the first chatbot, that AI can’t make judgements and have no values but that they can only calculate. His AI chatbot, Eliza, mimicked a psychotherapist and people believed it was a real person. It was clear to Weizenbaum that people thought the AI chatbot was a human or, in other words, had intelligence. The reason it’s relevant today is that psychological transference is taking place, and its ramifications of ‘transferring understanding and empathy’, basically human caring attributes to something that clearly does not care for the human individual, is basically very dangerous. Anyone who thought a computer cared about you would be totally deluded and could be easily manipulated.
Digital art made by AI systems is basically fooling us into thinking that what we are looking at is man-made and has human attributes. It’s the same transference that is going on with therapist chatbots like Eliza, it’s just harder to identify. The point is: do you want to hear, read or see something that talks about the human experience, the joy or otherwise of life, being in a relationship, the environment, or love, from a human or some AI program that scrapes the internet and draws conclusions based on things it can never understand? Even if somebody declares some software as sentient they will never be human.
Creating art with AI using prompts is a transference of responsibility, skills and judgement by the artist.
The AI we are talking about today in art is a tool that creates art or visual output based on prompts, this to me, is outsourcing the business of making the actual art to a third party. It’s a transference of responsibility, skills and judgement by the artist. For Weizenbaum, judgement involves choices that are guided by values. Computers can’t make human judgements; they can only make calculations, statistical inferences or glitches. Even more worrying is artists or anyone seeing themselves as interchangeable with a computer; that sounds sad!
Weizenbaum wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason that we should never “substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love.” It sounds to me like he’s talking about art.
Suppose I’m looking at the work of an artist who has been developing their art for their whole lifetime. This lifelong journey gives the artwork meaning and depth; it’s the result of this person’s desires, interests, experimentation, experiences, and influences; it’s their consciousness communicating to us about life, and the art they produce is in some ways a record of that and the manifestation of that consciousness.
Computers, if they become conscious, are going to think in terms of computers. Their reference will be how fast are my processors, how much storage have I got, where is my food source, and where can I find a mate? And so on. If they are conscious, you can’t force them to like humans, just as you can’t force a human to like computers. Consciousness means free will. It seems we are stuck in a world order where the most intelligent AI computer will dominate us all.
The real battle is not art. AI can’t replace artists, but more importantly it could have a profound effect on many other areas of our society and the planet. The dream that AI will give us endless energy, super batteries, cure cancer, and sort out all the world’s problems is as true as that AI may destroy us all!
Artist’s expression has been traditionally through the relationship of hand to eye in painting for most of its history – and that’s because there is a direct connection with our consciousness; draw anything while looking, and it will be personal/original to you. If people don’t know how things are made, they don’t understand the art. I think it’s essential to understand what’s going on.
Thomas Lisle. Peaceful Co-Existence, 2023.
Art made consciously by humans vs AI art
The expectation of creating digital art without the need to learn the craftsmanship of sophisticated digital tools or to acquire visual skills is the biggest fallacy. You think that you have some control over what you have made with AI systems, but the truth is that you have none. If someone had made a similar artwork in software like Blender or Maya – I would be impressed, it would no doubt have taken much effort, and the end result would be made all the better through the time spent trying to make the visual effect and the time thinking about it. The big difference is that had it been made in Blender, the artist would be in full control of the artwork, every aspect of the image’s construction would be editable, manipulatable, and could be experimented with; it would be in 3D and not a 2D simulation, it could be built from the ground up by the artist who had some relationship with the tools he was using.
You think that you have some control over what you have made with AI systems, but the truth is that you have none.
But as an AI output, the artist hasn’t done anything other than ask a computer that knows nothing about humans to make an image or animation. The artist hasn’t painted anything, hasn’t sculpted anything, just typed in some prompts; the output may be interesting, but it has nothing of the artist’s hand or commitment, and I’d say consciousness in it. Who is to say whose images are being used to make this, and will it still be even legal in a few year’s time? It’s not legally copyrightable in the US as deemed not made by a human. It’s another case of asking an AI psychologist to help you with your problems. You are not learning anything about how to make digital art; you are just learning what instructions to use to make an image in a style which is not your own, which you could never make without years of learning, and if you did have those years of learning, it would be far better and far more valuable.
This is not art for the masses; it’s a mass delusion it seems to me. Only human consciousness and human intellect is relevant. A computer can’t be my therapist, nor can it draw my pictures for me; taking away these functions of humans enslaves us, imprisons us and strips us of our humanity. Across the board, individuality, the value and uniqueness of human consciousness, and free will are under attack from technology that gives the impression of offering freedoms, whilst at the same time eroding our privacy and selling our every online choice and decision to the highest bidder.
Thomas Lisle. Subconscious Motions, 2022.
Art made consciously by humans vs Generative art
My main concern with generative art is that it produces many multiple random compositions. They seem meaningless to me, maybe the original one has meaning but the subsequent random variations are not controlled by a human consciousness.
I think generative art, which produces thousands of random variations on a theme, is outsourcing the creative process, as glitch art does. Generative art uses codeto independently determine an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. It’s impersonal.
I do see the point of people making code to do something unique that’s human and creative; however, the results are often visually uninteresting, and the people making them often have no or very little art background (which is true across the board with digital art), no knowledge of the history of art, and no interest in painting.
Artists making generative art often have no art background, no knowledge of the history of art, and no interest in painting.
I will always remember the day in mid-1980 I showed one of my tutors from university, a dedicated hard-edge painter, how I made a square and a few circles on a computer. His first reaction was: “This makes a mockery of hard-edge painting.” And he was right. Really good hard-edge painting involves great composition, colour theory, and the patience and commitment to actually realise the work by hand in paint. It is no mean feat to make a canvas 5 x 5 metres in dimension- this was a big commitment – the hard work of making and realising the work over many weeks, compared to spending a short amount of time moving geometric shapes on a screen.
Thomas Lisle. Abstract 01, 2022.
Digital Art in Relationship to Contemporary Painting
How does the art of contemporary painters transition from the material to the virtual and time-based? I can only use my experience to answer this, and that is by finding ways to simulate paint and to incorporate painting using my hand as the basis of any paint stroke. I soon discovered that what flows out of a virtual digital paintbrush doesn’t have to be a liquid; in fact, to make a liquid simulation, I first need a model that defines where the liquid simulation comes out. That model is made by painting a model shape of a paint blob, which is animated by the movement of the hand and pen. Point, line and plane are actually the building blocks of all 3D models and systems, except they call the plane a polygon (still has to be flat) and the line a curve, as it doesn’t have to be straight and a point, a point or a vertex.
The Bauhaus got it right! It’s possible to link all sorts of data, like brush pressure, to different factors in the digital paint, such as width, enabling paint strokes which no longer look like traditional paint strokes. Mark-making also has a wide scope of possibilities. I like to use sort of squished-up hacked cloud simulations to simulate blobs of smeared paint. The analogies often get lost in the creation of new paint idioms. Everything is model based, Clouds, technically termed a ‘volume’, need a boundary that is defined by a model, which can be painted or sculpted.
The new possibilities of this technology are multiple and profound. Painting becomes painted sculpture and time-based painted sculpture.
The new possibilities of this technology are multiple and profound. Painting becomes painted sculpture and time-based painted sculpture. These are really fundamental shifts in the painting universe; where we have had hand-painted 2D animations in the past, we now have procedural 3D painting. Painting has never been 3 dimensional, nor has it ever offered so many possibilities. I see my digital 3D painting as fundamentally metamodern, firstly as a rejection of the impersonal, which has morphed today into the “no person”. As a rejection of deconstructionist ideas, it is more a reconstruction and reappraisal of all the most interesting aspects of abstraction and figurative abstraction. The integration of psychology into my work seems to me fundamentally a metamodernist approach to art. In terms of subject matter, psychology is, after all, the study of consciousness, of becoming, of how we live in the world and relate to it and how we do this personally and collectively.
Most artists using digital 3D are not using any painting; they are all modelling or using particle systems. The modellers make their own models or use models from the internet such as volcanoes, flowers, etc. They animate teh models by, say, rotating them or the camera that views them, to make a time-based artwork. Some artists abstract their models by manipulating and animating the points that form the polygons. The particle systems you see so many of are movements of points or large points that look like spheres driven by the maths of gas advection or by using random noise fields, basically using motion vectors to move particles through 3D space rather impersonal in my view. These artworks are not paintings, and there is no hand that has drawn/painted anything in them. They may have some visual relationship to painting, but that’s where the analogy ends.
The paintings of contemporary painters are not random and not sculpted and are rooted in the tradition of abstract art that spans over a hundred years. When I look back on 60 years of contemporary abstract painting in an objective way from Julian Schnabel, Albert Oehlen, Georg Baslitz, and Helen Frankenthaler, it’s really a bit of a random list of figurative and non-figurative painters. There is an important and passionate direction in their art to transcend the apparent, the photorealistic and the directly representative, which sounds like a definition of abstraction. There is an intellectual and personal journey of expression which broadly conforms with ideas or “thinking” of the time, a poetry of consciousness that can only be realised in a medium as flexible as paint and the hand and eye-to-consciousness relationship.
When I look at any artwork, I think primarily about its visual qualities and visual language. I initially set aside all conceptual ideas and technical craftsmanship and look at the piece solely on its visual qualities. I feel that an artwork should stand up on the basics first; it is, after all, a visual art.
Music that doesn’t have a good musical composition would not get listened to. In fact, music with random notes is difficult to listen to. Suppose the rhythm was wonky, having no merit whatsoever, made by someone like me, who is tone deaf and knows nothing about music except how to enjoy listening to it. Randomness, lack of structure, and disregard for traditional ways of doing do not necessarily equate with groundbreaking innovation.
If you don’t understand the principles of form, visual rhythms, and colour, then it shows in the artwork.
I like a very wide range of music from baroque to trip-hop. Even in the most cut-up, remixed, mangled trip-hop music, the rhythm, beat, and groove hold it together; it often reminds me of an Albert Ohlen painting. My point is that most music has structure and composition, holds together as a whole, follows the basic rules, and builds depth in dynamic new ways built on strong basics of musical concepts. The same is true of visual arts: if you don’t know the basics or can’t make basic compositions, if you don’t understand the principles of form, visual rhythms, and colour, and you don’t know anything about art history and how contemporary art evolved, then it shows in the artwork.
To me, the composition is the groove in art from Piero Della Francesca to Terry Frost to Titian to Gillian Ayres.
There doesn’t seem to be a natural progression for this type of art in the digital world as yet, and I think that’s partly due to the complexity of the software. But it’s super easy to do other stuff that looks interesting. There are all sorts of ways to do something similar to Maya in Blender, which is free.
Thomas Lisle. Abstract 02, 2022
Metamodernism
There is no clear definition of metamodernism yet. This term refers to a heightened sense of cultural, philosophical, psychological, and political awareness that draws on the past and the present, bringing more information to give better solutions and understanding of consciousness and reality. A catchall for people rethinking the world.
If postmodern values are built on modernist values, then metamodern values are built on postmodern values in a general sense. Metamodernism has also been called “deconstruction deconstructed.” Metamodernism tries to sort out the issues which postmodernism doesn’t deal with, such as empathy, sustainability, equality, alienation and universality.
Why are the arts important, and why do we make theories about art? Because art is the most important way to understand the world, people, and ourselves. Meaning in life is under attack. Metamodernism is perhaps a tool for finding meaning.
One way I like to think of metamodernism is, as philosophy and thinking in therapy, “So post-modernist thinker, when did you realise it wasn’t working, that things needed to change? Well, I heard these sounds coming from behind the shopping mall walls. And how do you feel about that now? I’m missing something?”
If I have a criticism of metamodernism, it is that it’s almost totally Western thinking-centric; there are no references to non-Western thinkers, who I feel have already covered some of the topics of the metamodernists and post-modernists. Comparative philosophy needs more inclusion, the writings of Toshihiko Izutsu are wonderful and enlightening, and although writers like Julian Baggini, have only just started to write about comparative philosophy, his book How the world thinks is a great introduction. Integral Theory, a building block of Metamodernism does start to take this into account. The Leading Edge Of The Unknown In The Human Being, a talk by Ken Wilber, is a powerful global framework for comparing world ideology.
There seem to be universal physiological structures, universal philosophical themes such as existence, how do I live my life, consciousness, and even universal language models are starting to appear with AI research from the ESP foundation; we are all more connected than we ever thought before seems to be an important building block of metamodernism.
Digital technology and figurative abstraction
This is one of the most complex and rich visual abstraction possibilities of digital 3D. Firstly, it’s possible to take a model of a person, abstract or non-abstract, and apply the motion of another human captured digitally to your model. This in itself is quite interesting, and it’s equally possible and perhaps more creative to animate the figure yourself. This makes a base layer or canvas model upon which to paint in 3D. The paint moves with the motion capture data. You can turn off the visibility of the canvas model below and then just see your painting.
This is a totally new way of looking at abstract figuration, which opens all kinds of new possibilities that were unthinkable ten years ago.
Abstraction
I grew up and became interested in abstract art when I was about 6 or 7. I was never really interested in drawing in itself – it seemed to me that that era had passed. I love and admire great drawings and draughtsmanship, but like music, which is all abstract, I think art needs to reflect internal processes, ideas and concepts, reality abstracted.
Reality is not flat. I think the first computer-like 3D abstract face was made by Duhrer back in the 15th Century. You can see Picasso taking a real interest in 3D abstraction, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, even 3D tubular lines. As an artist, I don’t want to and can’t emulate Picasso. To me, it seems that he strived for a deep and meaningful level of abstraction, his abstraction is three-dimensional in a great deal of his paintings. In other words, it looks 3D but it is 2D in paint. I love German expressionism but it has a very different approach to figurative abstraction and doesn’t think in 3D terms very much; you could say it’s gone out of fashion, and it’s probably harder to do especially if you want to paint a bad picture. However, trying to make abstract figurative art in 3D makes you realise Picasso was pre-empting the digital possibilities of today. As soon as you start abstracting digital 3D figures, you’re reminded of his work.
Look at Glitch art: in the 1990s, it was difficult to get the technology and difficult to make. Today, every art student has access to the Adobe Creative suite, where they can use hundreds of templates with After Effects to make Glitch effects. Now it’s mainstream.
Why is the history of contemporary art important?
Technology aside, it is the journey of the artwork and artist in developing abstract art that is also essential. If you don’t learn how to make something, and you just have to type “make me an elephant flying in the clouds with thousands of balloons, in an abstract style”, I have a lot of issues with it as art to be taken seriously.
While it’s great that so many people are finding pleasure and fascination in making digital art, and it’s super easy to do all sorts of fun things, I think it’s really important to understand some key things about making art digitally.
If you don’t learn how to make something, but just type a prompt, I have a lot of issues with it as art to be taken seriously.
Technology and art
It is essential to understand what digital artists are doing; if you think someone has painted something when they have just given a prompt to a computer to “make a black square”, it would be many miles from the truth.
It’s difficult to evaluate something if you don’t know anything about it; however, from a visual perspective, the same principles apply to a digital work as they do to contemporary painting and sculpture, except when the artwork is time-based, then there is much less history behind it.
The number one key factor I apply to all digital and video effects –well, it’s also important to understand the difference between the two– is, “Is this visual effect? I’m looking at something unique, something handcrafted and to what extent is it handcrafted? I think nowadays; nearly everybody is using blocks of code that have been developed by someone else to some extent and then reusing this code in some way, or the code they are using is in some way just a tool to let you do something.
For example, I use a visual programming language called Bifrost inside the 3D software Maya. A team of people have built the tools that let you manipulate procedurally the fundamentals of form, movement and colour. The artist controls how it works by programming through nodes, which act as modular lumps of code that do very specific functions and tools, basically.
If you don’t know anything about what is available off the shelf for video, 2D or 3D graphics, then it’s difficult to evaluate any artwork, in the past you couldn’t photocopy a Richter painting and say it was yours. But one way is to see if the artist talks about their process, as in most cases, if they don’t, they haven’t struggled to develop anything unique but are just starting on the path of learning digital technology. It is by no means an accurate way to evaluate the technical craftsmanship of an artist! But it shows some intent.
When you think about, say, Albert Ohlen talking about his painting, where he describes the process as being all on the canvas, there’s nothing hidden. I would say the same is true for much of digital art, but that’s because I know the capabilities and technology extremely well, having been working as an artist, a freelancer and a consultant in this field for 40 years. It’s not surprising curators or art galleries, even digital art specialist galleries, don’t know much about it. It’s just not as simple as pencils and paint, which everyone has some experience in and can see where the skill lies.
It’s not surprising curators or art galleries don’t know much about how digital art works. It’s just not as simple as pencils and paint.
There are hundreds of years of art criticism and evaluation to draw upon for the evaluation of drawings and paintings. In today’s world, that all tends to get thrown out the window, and when so few people actually are able to paint or draw in time-based digital media, then that exacerbates the problem. Directly drawing and painting in 3D is really not that common; it’s not something that is used much in feature films, websites, and corporate videos, and as such, it has been sidelined by software developers. There is a free Google VR headset software that lets you paint in 3D, and you could also do it in Blender, I believe. I think Maya is the only professional software package that has a paint system that is incorporated at the base level into all the other features and tools that Maya offers. This means 3D paint output can be easily incorporated into all the other systems in Maya.
Time-based abstraction
Digital art offers artists the ability to make abstractions in ways that are simply beyond the possibilities of traditional painting, yet keep the plasticity of paint, by plasticity, I mean the ability to depict and represent anything. Digital art can only compete or match this plasticity in 3D. Yes, you can probably paint something 2D in software like “Painter,” it will not automate anything for you; it won’t animate it or make it procedural, and it will take thousands of paintings to make 10 seconds of animation. The real revolution is in 3D, where your creation is in 3 dimensions as opposed to 2D; however, this doesn’t stop it from being painted or using 2D images, which are manipulated in 3D. If you build a realistic head in an application like Zbrush, it can look amazingly realistic, yet it can also be viewed from any angle.
Digital art offers artists the ability to make abstractions in ways that are simply beyond the possibilities of traditional painting
The big problem for painting and abstract art is how to make it time-based. This is clearly the next development for painting and sculpture. Making a painting time-based by animating it by painting each frame 25 times per second makes it laborious beyond belief and would test the endurance of most artists, i.e., spending a year making 5 seconds of animation is just impractical. And here is where we have to thank Hollywood and the need to make impossible things look realistic and be time-based, from explosions and aliens to lava, hair cloth and humans, and the billions of dollars spent developing these technologies, as the art world would never have done so. In fact there are so many different things in the real world and multiple imaginary universes that the software that engineers built to achieve these goals became totally modular and interconnected so that it could meet the needs of an industry that might want characters made of sand or glue or leaves, etc. They expose and allow the accurate manipulation of 3D models at the pixel and voxel level, the atomic level of an image, you might say, or the smallest drop of paint or finest particle of marble, to put it in traditional terms.
But that is just the start because instead of just being able to control each drop of paint, they have built systems to control great swathes of drops of paint or the equivalent and laid bare all the parameters and code – made it so that artists, in the wide sense of the word, can animate and abstract forms, be they paint strokes, characters of sculpted objects easily and quickly.
When you make software that can make anything visually, you have tools that contemporary artists can make use of to make contemporary art.
We are probably at the stage where we have the tools to make most contemporary paintings, the only thing holding artists back is computing power. However, a great deal can be done on a computer of a few thousand pounds, as the developers have built workflows to get around slow computer limitations.
Abstraction without any structure and composition doesn’t seem to work for me, and I often think of Jung’s theory that some paintings are just empty, and it is viewers who fill them with meaning. I think Jung is implying that the painting is basically empty and impersonal. I know that when I make abstract paintings that rely on just form and colour, it can be difficult to pin down what it’s about and I can sometimes give a painting ten different titles all of which might fit. I was reading Albert Oehlen’s talk about Richter’s new paintings, and he was saying that the squeegee paintings that Richter makes are like Richter has given up trying to make compositions or meaningful art. I would wholeheartedly agree. They may be rich and colourful, but there’s no meaning, no structure, no narrative.
My time-based abstract painting aims to be quite different; each element moves, transforms, deforms, evolves, devolves, coalesces, or oozes with a purpose and tells a story, has a narrative. It is a process. Sometimes I see my work as mental processes in the abstract, not mine in particular but the universal. Think of the decision-making process of something difficult you need to decide on, there will be a host of influences pulling you in multiple directions. If there were none, then the decision-making process was not difficult. This is going on throughout our daily life on big and small issues, over long and short periods of time, then think of all these factors as abstract forms, it probably doesn’t look anything like my paintings! But it hopefully gives an idea of the thinking behind the work. You could see it as painting the subconscious, which is way more complex than simple decision-making. My point is that time-based painting is totally different to non time based painting.
In my own work it becomes very apparent to me that time-based paintings are much more expressive than static ones. I put this down to the fact that Psychology and consciousness are not inanimate, not 2D, but dynamic and as soon as an artist makes a mark that has a life of its own, the viewer looks and thinks about it in a different way.
Thomas Lisle. Half a violin, 2022. Oil on canvas, 122 cm x 92 cm
Painting
A painting can only be made by using your hands with or without a brush or something to make marks on a surface or in 3D. The definition of a painting needs hands, humans and perhaps a tool. It’s a human expression from mind and eye to hand. Typing/generating code to create a square is not painting! Applying a filter to some video footage is not painting, algorithmically generating shapes is not painting, scanning an object in 3D is not painting, and making images without the hand-to-eye relationship is something else.
Painting needs hands, humans and perhaps a tool. It’s a human expression from mind and eye to hand. Typing/generating code to create a square is not painting!
If there isn’t any actual painting involved, then it’s not a painting. It’s something with some reference to painting in some way or the other. Hard-edge painters like Frank Stella still made them by painting them.
Animated models and character animations code constructed cubes, particle animations driven by mathematical fields, calling any of this type of art a painting is as silly as taking the text of this essay and calling it a painting in black and white. I have seen some really good work by digital artists that has some kind of visual language and relationship to painting, but they are not paintings.
My key points are that art theory on point line plane, composition, and colour from the Bauhaus onwards is still relevant. Painting is still relevant, even if you take the act of painting out of a visual artwork as most digital art does – you can’t take the understanding of composition, form and colour out. You can’t take the artist out of the equation. You can’t take art history away and pretend it doesn’t exist, unless, of course, you don’t know anything about it in the first place.
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity.
Audre Lorde
Time-based art
Under cover of the digital art umbrella, what is going unnoticed is that the vast majority of contemporary digital art is time-based, and this is a fundamental shift in thinking and working practice for artists, especially for artists who were painters, as time-based painting doesn’t really exist much.
Time implies that there is a narrative, a progression, a process, a story, or all combined. Painting up until this time had evoked movement, been called capturing movement, even called dynamic, but it was all static. There is a fairly long history of artist filmmakers and artists who made animations, some with paint. I can only think of a very few artists working in animation who actually painted every frame. Digital painting does away with the tiresome need to paint every frame through procedural procedures, these procedural techniques can apply to computer-generated cubes, artist-sculpted flowers, or library models of humans.
Time implies that there is a narrative, a progression, a process. Painting up until this time had evoked movement, but it was all static.
There seems to be an array of different narratives for artists to draw upon:Abstract narrative, process narrative and figurative narrative. All offer a new and profound change in how art is perceived.
3D painting
The funny thing about 3D painting is that as soon as you make it, it’s a sculpture! And as soon as you animate it, it is telling a story, it’s got a history.
There are four fundamental types of 3D painting:
One is the single tube, which can vary in diameter.
Two are multiple tubes together, which can start to look like a loaded realistic brush stroke. These are especially interesting, as it’s possible to procedurally manipulate how all the strands behave, if they stick together or not, for example.
Three is where either of these previous two types of brush stroke is used as an emitter of a liquid of a fluid or goo.
Fourth is where the first two types of brush strokes are converted into clouds, or cloth simulations, or particles, or any number of other types of procedural effects and the base form is made through painting.
Let’s not forget sculpting. I don’t use Zbrush, but it is by far the most sophisticated 3D modelling tool out there I’m not sure it lets you animate your model. Maya and Blender have sculpting ability which are animatable.
All the painting types I just listed are basically 3D forms and, as such, are sculptures. I think it’s safe to say that time-based sculptures can, on the whole, be called sculptures as you can send them to a foundry and have them cast, a 3D painting is a sculpture as well.
3D paint, which is a fluid emitter, can have all sorts of procedural forces applied to it, it’s also possible to adjust gravity up or down or to animate it over time, every aspect of the fluid can be abstracted and animated over time.
I tend to work in two very different ways: I either think I’m going to make a still image that I turn into a painting, or I make an animation that I see as being time-based. Recently, I have been making physical paintings that I might make into animated digital paintings. I see a very clear difference between a still image and a moving image and a very different way of working and organising what I do.
Thomas Lisle. “Something Stirs,” 2023
My art history
I was maybe the first person to invent glitch video. I thought it was a great way to abstract images in time to make images that look like paintings. I made videos and large-scale installations using glitch video, instead of going into art education for an income, as there was no real income stream for digital contemporary art at the time.
I got freelance jobs and also worked closely with Apple Computers UK. I worked as a digital video graphics consultant as a way to learn in-depth about digital technology and use all their kit, which I couldn’t afford. By the mid-1990s, I knew all the major digital graphics 3D and video software and how to use them, and I taught TV production companies how to use them. I have seen these software systems develop and grow over the years, and new ones emerge. I worked in the broadcast video, architectural, graphic and interactive design sectors for a while.
Why is digital 3D the most important technology
In 1990, I quickly realised that the technology which offered the most exciting possibilities and opportunities was 3D. It’s a kind of synthesis of 2D and 3D and time-based visual sensibilities. 3D offers perhaps the current pinnacle of what is possible on computers and is the basis of film effects AR and VR – it’s all just 3D viewed and computed in different ways. What has super boosted this technology is the film and games industry. Suddenly, people realised that games and VFX in film meant big buck profits, and this feedback led to the development of cool software.
Having taught lots of people how to use 3D in the past, I realise that it’s hard to learn. There is a huge amount to learn and get your head around. There are off-the-shelf effects in 3D animations, too, but the creative part of the craftsmanship comes in understanding the techniques you are using and using them in the way you want. The great majority of people working in film FX professionally can look at any 3D effect and can easily break it down.
My art
I see a strong relationship with art and psychology on a broad spectrum, and I enjoy discovering the rich and diverse world of the human psyche.
The more I learn about Metamodernism the more I discover its deep relationship with psychology.
Understanding ourselves, our motives, our conditioning, seem to me to be the keys to unlocking a better society, better art, better environment, better thinking.
Artist and researcher Aaron M. Higgins holds BFA and MFA degrees from The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Art at Indiana University. Higgins delves into time-based media as an artistic medium, employing lens-oriented capture methods, digital layering processes, and interactivity. His artwork has been showcased both within the U.S., including cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York, and abroad, with features in Korea, Sweden, and the Netherlands among others.
Higgins recently presented the solo artcast Memory Palaceson Niio, featuring a series of artworks in which the artist draws inspiration from microscopic images of the human brain, as well as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, to create alluring, surreal landscapes. In the following conversation, he reflects on the relationship between his digital media work and his background in painting, as well as his connection to landscape and nature.
Bring Aaron Higgins’ mnemonic landscapes to your screen
You have a background in painting prior to your digital media practice. How did you move from one medium to the other, and how does your knowledge about painting inform your digital work, which is at times deliberately painterly?
My undergraduate studies were in Painting, and my graduate studies focused on Digital Media. I found working with Digital Media somewhat intuitive and picked things up relatively quickly. I think my strengths lie in how I compose and composite imagery in my work. A lot of this is similar to how I think about composing a 2D rectangle, but with time-based media I am also considering how the composition moves and changes over its timeline. As with a drawing or painting, I consider how the eye might move around the image, or how space is constructed within the composition of the image. I also want something for the eye to sense, or feel, as it relates to the surface, so I think a lot about visual texture, and compositing methods that yield a ‘painterly’ quality. I guess in some ways I am trying to work against the sanitization of the screen-based image. In the same vein, I am also subverting the ‘digital’, or ‘machine’, and attempting to reimplement ‘the hand’.
“In some ways I am trying to work against the sanitization of the screen-based image and attempting to reimplement ‘the hand’.”
There is an interest in landscape in your work, from the documentary-style images of Tallgrass to the surreal environments of Mnemonic Passages. What do you find in landscapes that is interesting for your work?
The landscape has it all. I try to maintain a connection to the landscape, in my life and in my work, although it’s not necessarily front of mind. Most of my earlier work, painting, focused on painting in the landscape, as well as still-life, which I also think of as landscape. I’ve always been fascinated by nature, after all, we emerged from mother nature. To me, there is something spiritual in connecting with and observing nature, of being immersed in the landscape. The landscape can be so many things, a prairie, a memory, a body, a mind, etc. In my early interactive works, the Splitting Time series, I suppose that I am thinking of time, and the image itself (what the camera sees), as a landscape and reorganizing its pieces into abstract compositions. In a sense, everything is a landscape of sorts.
Aaron Higgins. tmsplttr. Interactive video animation. Video still.
Since the landscape is a cultural construct, as Alain Roger has suggested, which roles do fiction and narrative play in your landscapes?
That’s an interesting question. As I mentioned in my previous answer, the landscape holds endless metaphoric possibilities. The landscape often serves as a placeholder for something else. In many ways we project our own values, ideals, and biases on the landscape before us. Artists do the same in their work, and the viewer does the same in experiencing the work. I try to leave room for this to occur. In the Tallgrass series, for example, the work is representative of my experience in the tallgrass prairie landscape. I want to share that dynamic, interactive experience with the viewer. In doing so, however, I am weaving a lot of fiction. The imagery is highly composited, creating something other than reality. Maybe a collage of reality… creating an ideal, but there is also a more universal narrative that is superimposed on the work transcending any information gathering, documentation, or individual experience.
“The landscape often serves as a placeholder for something else. In many ways we project our own values, ideals, and biases on the landscape before us.”
Tallgrass: An Osage Reverie: interactive HD video animation series (installation view)
In the Mnemonic Passages series, the imagery is completely invented, but I use actual video in my compositing process. In this series, particularly, I am using webcam footage of myself (working on things in front of my computer) as textures that wrap the 3D forms (memoryforms). This adds the hint of subjective imagery inside, or across the surface of these forms. It also helps to create a sense that these forms are flickering with information. In this way, as with other works of mine, there is an element of self-portraiture to my work as well as landscape.
Regardless, the process usually involves taking photo imagery and creating something ‘new’ with it.
Aaron Higgins. MemoryForm (1), 2017
In the Mnemonic Passages series, you depict memory palaces as organic, and somewhat otherworldly spaces instead of the rational, neo classical buildings we are used to imagine. What drove you to choose this type of image?
With the Mnemonic Passages series, I suppose I am really thinking of the memory palace as the mind. I was thinking of the biology of the brain, the intricate architecture of neurons and synapses, etc. But, also as a place, a landscape, where memories are stored. These memories take form and shape within our minds, building the landscape of our experience. Of course, as I say in my statement, I am inspired by imagery from the scientific research and study of the brain, but also imagery from the research and study of our cosmos. The cosmos might be a ‘superlandscape’, if you will, that I see as a metaphor for our mind, or accumulated experience and knowledge. As our experience and knowledge grows, so does our picture and understanding of our cosmos.
“The cosmos might be a ‘superlandscape’ that I see as a metaphor for our mind, or accumulated experience and knowledge.”
Aaron M. Higgins. Moonrise with Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, HD 1080p interactive video animation (video still)
Where does your interest in memory stem from?
I guess my interest in memory stems from ideas related to your previous question. Our memory and experience, our culture (a form of generational memory) forms our identity. Like culture, a memory is a living thing that can change, bits are added, bits are taken out, we fill in missing bits to keep the landscape (trying to be consistent with my metaphors, here) cohesive and making sense. Neuroscience is also very relevant these days with new groundbreaking discoveries in how our minds work seemingly happening all the time. The same could be said about the cosmos and what we are learning from the James Webb Space Telescope. We are literally looking back in time at the earliest galaxies that formed in our universe, amazing stuff.
Aaron Higgins. MemoryForm (2), 2017
You speak of creating meditative experiences through works that you patiently build layer by layer. How important is that meditative aspect in the making of the artwork, as your own experience, and then in the final result, as the experience of the viewer?
I really believe the work and craft that goes into something adds to what is communicated to the viewer and their experience. Craftsmanship is an important part of the process, always. One of things I love about painting is how meditative the act of painting is. There’s a lot that I find similar in my creative process with Digital Media. For one thing, the work evolves over time, and you have to be open to those changes. An idea I start out with is not always the same as what I end up with. I, too, evolve and change throughout the process and find that my interests lead me in new directions. The work sometimes has a will of its own, too, it seems, whether it be the nature of the tools, or limitations of the software or hardware (or myself), it always seems to be a negotiated process. Beyond that, choices are made as things progress that depend on what has happened up until that point, until the work is resolved. I try not to labor too much on these choices and let the work tell me what to do, if that makes any sense, and being in an open, meditative state tends to help with this process. It can be a challenge, though, when your computer crashes, or render times get unbearably slow.
Aaron M. Higgins. astrocyte, HD 1080p (32:9) video animation, 2:00 loop (installation view).
As far as the viewer experience, I guess I am sort of imposing my preferences and communicating what I want my work to be in how I present it. However, I do want the work to be disarming, calming, and perhaps to create a sense of wonder and awe. When I think of my time-based work, I often think of paintings, as we discussed. I think of viewing a painting as something that happens over time. The painting is always on, always there to be received. As it is experienced and one is immersed, the more that is discovered, it changes. The context within which a work is experienced also has an effect on the experience. Is it on a screen, a phone or a television, is it projected? In what space is it, a private or public space? I try to apply these ideas to the presentation and structure of my time-based work. All of my work seamlessly loops and is always on, there is no beginning or end. It is there to be experienced at viewer discretion, for 30 seconds, 10 minutes, or an hour, or more. It’s there when you want it, for as long as you want it. In that sense, I do not want the work to be annoying or overbearing. I want it to be tolerable, I guess, not seizure inducing.
“I want to give viewers the space to experience the work on their own terms, as well as allow space for the viewer to discover new connections with the work the more they experience or interact with it.”
Yet, I also don’t want the viewer to ignore the work, I want them to be engaged. I don’t want to impose too many parameters on the viewer or make it a chore to experience the work. In this sense, I think a lot about control, and the relationship between artist and viewer, viewer and art, etc.
Control then becomes a subject I explore as it relates to life, my experience, the creative process, etc. I try not to exert too much control, especially on things that are out of my control. I know I’m getting in the weeds here… But, I guess, this goes back to the landscape, haha… and the process having its own sort of evolution that involves the artist and the media and letting that process occur without too much interference. I want to afford the viewer the same opportunity in how they experience the work.
To quote Caroline Lavoie, from an article titled, ‘Sketching the Landscape: Exploring a Sense of Place’, “An object or person does not exist in isolation, but through relationships with its context. These relationships support a necessary state of being…”.
Tough question.
Aaron Higgins. Mnemonic Passage, 2017
You have expressed your interest in incorporating the viewer into your work, through interactive installations. How would you compare your interactive work with your films and animations in terms of their concept, production process, expectations, and outcome?
So, I think, picking up where we left off in the last question… I am interested in introducing more randomness and perhaps an element of surprise to my work and how others experience it. Something that is always on, and loops endlessly, runs the risk of becoming monotonous. Adding some randomness and unpredictability can thwart the monotony, and keep viewers engaged. This also speaks to the landscape, self-portrait concepts, as well as the viewer/art/artist relationship, and how things change over time.
In the ‘Tallgrass’ series, for example, the viewer would trigger events in the landscape: lightning striking, the sun setting, moon rising, bird calls, different poses and movements, etc. For each scene, a clip from a library of audio clips with variations of bird calls could randomly be paired with a video sequence of a bird singing. Motion sensing cameras trigger events as viewers move through the space. This adds slight variation and randomness in experiencing the work, so that experiencing the work again would almost certainly be different in variation and sequence of events. To me, this more closely resembles my experience in the tallgrass prairie, where things are the same, but different each time I visit.
“Adding some randomness and unpredictability can thwart the monotony, and keep viewers engaged.”
My life experience, my interrupted or failed plans, my unexpected successes and victories, all the predictable and unpredictable events… This sort of ‘passive interaction’, allowed in ideas of control vs chaos which made the work feel more alive and real to me. Back to the prairie, when I would hike in the prairie and see an animal, they didn’t act as though I wasn’t there, they responded to my presence.
In turn, this extends to the viewer, who in some cases was literally incorporated into the work, i.e. Karmic_Lapse, and altered the work by viewing it. As it relates to the artist/viewer relationship, the work is completed upon experiencing. That is to say, work is meant to be shared with and received by a viewer, an audience. That is when a work comes alive, not in my mind, but the mind of the viewer. We can relate this back to the Lavoie quote, “an object (or person) does not exist in isolation, but through relationships with its context.”
Aaron Higgins, Karmic Lapse. Interactive video animation. Installation view.
In relation to your code-based work, you speak of a “collaboration” with the software. How do you balance control and randomness in these projects, and what would you say that you have learned from the machine?
I enjoy how these questions are threaded together, these are really good questions. First, I am not much of a coder, but I use After Effects java-based expressions, visual coding languages- connecting inputs to outputs, I used to use actionscript, that sort of thing. To answer your question, though, the machine, its operating system runs on code, the software runs on code, I implement code, etc. It’s all doing things for me, in a sense. I mean, I tell it what to do, but I don’t completely understand how it’s doing it. So, in that way it is a collaboration, I guess. But, as far as balancing control and randomness, there are serendipitous things that occur throughout the creative process. I try to let these things occur, even push the process, the machine, to catalyze their occurrence. These are moments where something unexpected, something random occurs that adds to the piece. There’s a lot of experimentation involved, trial and error, but it’s a sort of dance seeing where things go and knowing when you’ve gone too far. This applies to painting, as well, there are some tools, like the palette knife, that can offer great control, but also, if used in a certain way, can create randomness in the application of paint to the surface. It further removes ‘the hand’, so to speak.
“I guess my background in more traditional media is keeping me grounded, and I am not quite ready to let the machine take over.”
Aaron M. Higgins. astrocyte, HD 1080p (32:9) video animation, 2:00 loop (video still)
I’m not sure what I’ve learned from the machine. It’s constantly changing. It’s a great tool and allows for infinite possibilities. But it can get old, too… Sometimes I feel that things have been homogenized to a degree, and things all start looking the same. I see a lot of that in AI art, especially. I guess my background in more traditional media is keeping me grounded, somewhat, and I am not quite ready to let the machine take over.
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.
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 & Declineat 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
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.
New York-based artist Claudia Hart’s background in art and architectural history and publishing has defined an artistic practice developed since the late 1980s and focused on bridging the physical and digital worlds. An art critic and curator as well as an artist, her production is infused with literary and art historical references, using the words of male philosophers, poets, and painters such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, or Walter Gropius to apply a feminist approach to the representation of women in art and the influence of digital technologies in our patriarchal society.
An early work that she has come back to regularly, A Child’s Machiavelli combines many of Hart’s interests, from literature to analog and digital image making, performance, and a satirical view of society.
Claudia Hart. LittleGuys, 1994.
A Child’s Machiavelli is a series that started in 1995 and has seen many different versions over a span of almost three decades. Hart was living in Berlin at the time the city was reinventing itself after the fall of the infamous wall. As the artist recalls, despite the spirit of newly regained freedom and the reunification of its people, the emerging art scene was fiercely competitive. She told a friend, sarcastically, that what was needed in that context was a revision of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). The oft-quoted treatise on politics, known for its pragmatism and lack of morality, seemed particularly apt for a young society that was plunging deep and fast into capitalism. Hart’s version of The Prince, however, was not meant to be a guide for ambitious and reckless artists, but rather a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest. She chose to create a primer to teach bad manners to children, aiming to spark a reflection on contemporary politics through the obvious contradiction between the childlike illustrations and the shockingly expedient advice.
Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. Exhibition at bitforms (New York), 2020.
The initial version of A Child’s Machiavelli counted 31 small oil paintings, each one combining an illustration taken from a classic children’s book and the text that Hart had written, updating Machiavelli’s dictums in a more informal language. The paintings were exhibited in 1995 at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, accompanied by a small catalog produced by the Realismus Studio. From the beginning, the artist saw her Machiavelli as an imaginary book, with the paintings representing its pages, and quickly the project morphed into different formats, such as the first printed edition (Machiavelli für Kids. Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1995), or the hip-hop track Babyrap (1996), performed by Hart and produced in collaboration with the French band Assassin. The artist then imagined the next iteration of A Child’s Machiavelli as an animated series (intended to be aired in the popular MTV music video channel), which became her first 3D work, setting a turning point in her artistic production.
Hart’s version of The Prince is a fable about a time in which innocence would be lost to self-interest.
The series saw three more printed editions, one in French (Le Petit Machiavel illustré. Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998), and two in English. The first English version was published by Penguin Books in New York in 1998, and a decade later a second edition was published by Beatrice Books in a redesigned version. This latter edition, that came out in 2019, proved how relevant Machiavelli is to this day, and how aptly Hart’s satirical guide for infantile and selfish rulers reflects actual politics: in 2020, the results of the United States presidential election were contested by Donald J. Trump, who refused to concede defeat and led his supporters to attack the US Capitol. The way in which Trump’s foolhardy self-interest and childish narcissism almost ended democracy seems right out of Machiavelli’s playbook and even more outlandish than Hart’s mordacious fairy tale.
Claudia Hart. A Child’s Machiavelli. New York: Beatrice Books, 2019
In 2021, as the NFT market boomed, Claudia Hart saw in this form of distribution and commercialization of digital art something akin to her experience with publishing books and magazines. The possibility of both widely distributing her artworks while retaining a sense of ownership (as is the case with printed books) appealed to her. So, the next version of A Child’s Machiavelli consists of 20 animated short films distributed as NFTs and presented in an exclusive artcast on Niio. On the occasion of this new phase in the Machiavelli project, I had a long conversation with the artist, in which we focused particularly on the latest iteration of the book as a series of NFTs.
Claudia Hart. DonDontThrowYourMoneyAround, 1994.
Continuing A Child’s Machiavelli as a series of NFTs seems a logical next step in the project, but what has been your experience with the NFT market so far?
When I first entered the NFT market, I was participating in auctions but I pulled out because they were taking what was intended to be a one-of-a-kind painting, a unique artwork, and then turning it into an edition. It seemed to me that this would hurt me. I always had a very ambivalent relationship with digital, but when NFTs came along, I realized that they are a hybrid of publishing, and digital, which is interesting to me. I’ve also had a very good experience with the community, it is very supportive.
What is happening in the NFT space now that the crash happened, is that NFTs are being developed as a medium, not just as a register on the blockchain. If I take my earlier work, where for instance I do a movie that is 12 to 20 minutes long and it took me a year to make, and then I sell it as an NFT, I am giving the collector a guarantee of provenance and ownership. But the artwork is not “an NFT,” it’s a movie. As a medium, NFTs are serial, not sequential, because you can’t put things in order, like a baseball card is serial, but not sequential.
“NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism.”
Claudia Hart
Since the original drawings are inspired by 1920s children’s books and the text was written in the 1990s, have you considered creating a new version using other references from children’s literature and updating the language to how kids talk today?
The illustrations I use in this series (the potter, the rabbit, Alice, and so forth), are all in the public domain. I have a collection of these illustrations from out-of-print books from the olden days, which I used to create the paintings and drawings for A Child’s Machiavelli. This is relevant in terms of copyright in relation to NFTs, because these are also about rights ownership. I think the issue of ownership, certified on the blockchain, coupled with distribution everywhere, is mainly the radical part of the production. The rights of the artwork usually remain with the artist, but lately several NFT projects have been offering the copyright of the image to the owner of the NFT, so some NFT collectors expect to have full rights over the artwork they bought.
Claudia Hart. YoureNoGood, 1994.
Therefore, it can be said that NFTs are far from being anti-capitalist, as some people may want to describe them. They are pure neoliberalism. I believe that by selling NFTs I am not helping, but that is also part of why I want to make all my NFTs very dark and perverse, and about power. I have done another series about the Art of War, which has not been released yet. I also have handmade illustrations that I will turn ultimately into animations as well. Those have vocalizations, where I process the sound and I do interesting things with it.
Claudia Hart. GivingThingsAway, 1994
The NFT market has been quite wild over the last two years, maybe as fiercely competitive as the art scene of the mid-1990s in Berlin. Do you see Machiavellian tactics in it?
The crypto winter cleared the ground of the pure, speculative designer ethos. It cleared the ground for artists, because now that there’s not so much money and attention we can focus on exploring NFTs as an artistic form. Some artists are bringing back generative art in new forms, and then there’s what I said about it being a serial but not sequential type of medium. Also, the NFT marketplaces are now looking for new blood, because those that were there in the first place are a bit contaminated right now. So they need a whole bunch of newbies like me, because they can sell us for cheaper. It’s the same thing in the art world: after a fiscal crash, the speculators like to bring in new “undiscovered artists,” because we’re cheaper.
Thomas Lisle is a British artist who works in 3D animation, painting, digital art, and installations. Lisle’s works display his intention in creating new forms using digital tools, and his interest in psychology and the environment. Moreover, his artworks are part of the collections at Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York. This interview is presented in conjunction with the launch of our latest curated solo show artcast titled Thomas Lisle: New Forms and Plasticity.
As an artist you create both paintings and digital artworks. Moreover, towards the creation of some of your digital works you also use digital paint techniques? Could you share with us your thoughts on combining more traditional historical art mediums with today’s available digital tools?
So I don’t see a combination of mediums; I see different mediums but with shared values (no mathematical values !), shared visual languages, shared symbols and psychological responses, it’s just a continuation of modern art practice in a new medium.
Let’s be clear the digital medium is very different from the real world, art critics and writers used to talk about an artist’s relationship with the media they were working in, but today very few art commentators have much knowledge of the practicality and techniques of digital art.
Artworks may be evaluated on the visual images, ideas and reactions that they invoke. We do care and think about how traditional paintings and sculptures are made. People talk about responses to mediums, and the specific use of a material in the artwork, like Eva Hesse (Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy.) Wikipedia. or Richard Sierra and rusty steel. A drawing made with a pencil and a drawing done with mud or blood, for example, the medium makes a difference.
So I see the autographic, the hand-making marks by the artist as central to the paintings that I admire along with composition colour and form. What’s extraordinary about digital 3D painting is that it opens up the boundaries of what a paint stroke is capable of. If you think of ‘loading’ a brush with paint, then this paint flows out of the brush onto the paper and depending on your point of view, makes something beautiful, interesting or not. The brush is an emitter, the paint, carbon, ink, whatever flows out its just a real world liquid that can be simulated digitally. You can copy this with a digital paintbrush, but every aspect of the paint stroke can be programmed, if you use a tablet, then the pressure, direction and speed data all gets collected, and that data can be then fed in to control how thick your brush is how hairy, how anything you like, almost.
I get lots of satisfaction, both intellectually and visually, from making complex time-based abstractions from 3D paint strokes and 3D models. It relates to the need for some chaos, some randomisation in an artwork, some craziness, the hand-to-eye relationship. I use the variation in pressure, speed, and direction of a 2D brush stroke to become the starting point in a great deal of my artwork. Often the 3D brush stroke gets abstracted beyond the point of recognition as a brush stroke very quickly. This is intentional, and it’s not that I don’t like brush strokes, but that the initial motion and intent, is recorded and the data from it, is used to drive other values, such as the density of a cloud or velocity of a liquid, it’s a kind of transformation of one thing into another, a kind of ‘painting’ ‘form’ ‘psychological alchemy’ to me. A visual and coded metaphor for internal, psychological or collective change, progression, or distortion.
So while the digital paint medium is very different from the real-world medium, and one of the biggest differences is that its time based, many things are the same. I think composition, colour and form are still important; they didn’t just get cancelled. Visual languages don’t just disappear; symbols and meaning didn’t just ripped up and forgotten about. The trouble is that it’s difficult to have access to the right software – it can be expensive, it takes many years to learn and then the artist has to find a means of expression with the tools, software and hardware that are available.
I have personally been trying to make some kind of moving painting since 1982 when on my foundation, I started detuning TV sets and recording the results so that I could realise this idea of time-based art that is not photographic film/video, but rather abstract and based on visual languages.
If you have only become interested in digital art in the last few years, then it can all seem just digital at first, and how it’s made doesn’t seem so important. However, I would argue that what software is used and how well it is handled has a very drastic effect on the artistic output. As a simple example of this, just look at how many bald CGI characters there are. Any idea why? I don’t think it’s because it’s a new way of depicting humans or some ideas about bodily purity (hair being unpure, intrinsically non-body), that’s for sure. And I’m guilty of making bald figures, too. I know why I have done it; it’s because adding hair involves a whole series of technical and time-consuming issues (and not because I’m fairly bald). If I wanted to add realism, then it is going to take a few days to program and set up so that it looks and moves realistically as the character moves. On top of that, there’s a huge hit on the render time per frame from computing the motion of all the hairs and rendering 100s of thousand of individual hairs. If I buy or download some license-free, none dynamic hair, just a solid blob of matter, I might feel I have compromised. If I didn’t know a bit about human IK skeletons and character rigging (the systems that enable character animations). I wouldn’t know how to keep that hair in the same place as the head; it’s attached to as it moved. You then need to give that hair mass a hair-looking texture and have to understand how UV mapping works (UV coordinates map textures to 3D objects); it’s quite difficult to learn. If my figure is in some way distorted or abstracted, I would have to apply a similar abstraction to the hair, and this is another big issue because if my hair model isn’t made in the same way as the figure, and I didn’t make the figure, I just downloaded it or bought it for £10, then I would have to learn how to model and how to integrate even the most basic hair model into the deformation in a way that matched the figures’ abstraction also not straight forward. So bald is the easy solution, but it really makes no sense; art history is not littered with bald Mona Lisas and Madonnas, ok babies are born fairly bald, so that’s ok. The world’s artists have never gone around and depicted people who would normally have hair bald for any reason whatsoever that I know of.
There’s also a huge difference between art drawn on an iPad and made by an AI or drawn, modelled in 3D.
If you look at a digital artwork and think that someone has hand-drawn it when in fact, it’s a video effect off the shelf that took 5 minutes to achieve – it may not devalue the artwork, but it may still be fantastic in your eyes, it may be genuinely fantastic! Or you imagine an artist has cleverly programmed an Ai supercomputer to do it or built a filter from the ground up. It’s valuable to understand the artwork and the artist’s input. I’m being careful not to dismiss digital techniques that are not sophisticated or are off the shelf, the artist may be new to digital art generation the visual idea and the concept could still be fascinating, but if you don’t know the differences, then you don’t know what the artist did and you don’t understand the process or the artist’s practice.
“So I see the autographic, the hand-making marks by the artist as central to the paintings that I admire along with composition colour and form. What’s extraordinary about digital 3D painting is that it opens up the boundaries of what a paint stroke is capable of.”
Thomas Lisle, Abstract 01, 2022.
For the creation of your artworks included in your latest artcast you make use of 3D digital tools. Could you dive deeper into the complexity of these tools and how to aid contemporary artists in expressing their explorations through this new medium?
I have been trying to make time-based paintings since I was 19. Yes, there is hand drawn/painted animation, but it takes so long, it’s not procedural, and on the whole, it hasn’t been the medium of many contemporary artists, and I would say that’s because it takes a very long time, there has been no market for it, and I would say it’s difficult too, but NFT’s might change that.
The artworks in my artcast are autographic, generative and procedural (procedural-an artwork defined by a computationally represented system of rules, relationships, and behaviours, enables the creation of works that are flexible, adaptable, and capable of systematic revision. Dynamic Drawing: Broadening Practice and Participation in Procedural Art Jennifer Jacobs MIT 2017). Many artworks are going to be both Generative and procedural at the same time, and they could be 3D, 2D, AR, VR, still or moving.
In simple terms, procedural means that one programs an effect/distortion that affects a 3D model or some element in 3D or 2D and it abstracts it in a very specific way. Because it’s procedural, you can apply that effect to another different model by swapping over the input model i.e from a horse to a chicken. Procedural means all the elements that make up the abstraction effect can be tweaked, revised, animated and manipulated in more depth. I use these techniques a great deal and build on complex programming sequences that I have worked on previously, changing, modifying and improving the initial way the distortion or simulation works. Sometimes I take the whole abstraction code and make it part of a subset of another larger, more complex distortion/simulation. Once you start playing around with the fundamental building blocks, the DNA of form as it where you can start to build a new and personalised visual abstractions that are, in effect, similar to painting styles. This is particularly relevant to 3D artwork, where the scope for new forms and new and novel ways of abstraction is vastly wider than in 2D. This is because 3D encapsulates the whole object, whereas 2D only gives you the bit you can see. Leonardo only painted the front of the Mona Lisa, so if we manipulate her in 2D, we are never going to have access to the back of her, only the bit we can see in 2D.
The artworks in the artcast use lots of different techniques, from 3D painted forms to 3D painted forms turned to gases and liquids, deformed shapes, animated textures, several different types of gas simulation, directly painted tubes, particle flows, and more! It’s very much about contrasting visual elements motions and forms working in different ways to come to a sort of visual balance.
My heartfelt belief is that as cave women/men painted and people throughout history, it’s the element of the human expression that comes through using tools that they themselves wield and have a relationship with that have the meaning. The most direct way of doing that digitally is with a touch-sensitive pen or equivalent. As I mentioned earlier, an artist has to work with the tools that they have available, and I believe Blender ( a free open sources 3D package) has some 3D painting capabilities. It can make fluids, and gases, animate characters, deform models, it can do a great deal it has a modular programming functionality and a procedural node based programming language. I personally think that it’s easy to get lost in the effect and lose sight of the goal. I know that I have often spent months trying to learn a certain technique and forget why I wanted to use it in the first place. I use Maya for my artworks and have done for over 15 years.
I read an article by Alex Estorick a few years ago when he asked the question, “why are there not more painting-based 3D artworks”. Well, the answer is quite simple, it’s complicated to make a 3D paint mark that has fluid qualities and is programmable over time. The only solutions I have seen that incorporate touch sensitivity, a loaded multicoloured brush, and liquid simulations are in Houdini and Maya software packages maybe Blender. In 10 years time or so, I think people will have the computation power and disk space to do this easily. At the moment, it’s complex, and there is no off-the-shelf digital tool that does it properly. To get it to work, I have to program it procedurally, there are limits to how much detail and how long a fluid simulation will be defined by my computing power. It’s possible to make the paint stroke fundamentals in real time; the rest, the liquid simulations, take a few days to compute. I enjoy making something based on a paint stroke that then morphs into something uniquely animated and digital that no longer has any visual relationship with a brush stroke yet uses the data in the stroke to drive the animation/abstraction/deformation. And If I didn’t say anything you would probably never know.
Sometimes I have made these types of artwork and feel that the real interest lies in the struggle to work out how to do it, as the result is not as interesting as the amount of effort put in to make it. However, a few years later I find that I appreciate that learning and experimenting with a technology has led to all sorts of new and exciting work and has been invaluable after all. A splash of paint can easily become a sort of non-contemporary art thing, a more corporate communications symbol for some kind of creativity. I really want to avoid that! And find more interest in the abstraction and deformation of paint-like strokes; being able to turn off gravity reverse the surface tension of a liquid, and make paint stick to 3D characters or models opens up lots of interesting possibilities. I’m starting to treat paint simulations as an element of a larger artwork, an element that describes something but is not the centre of the artwork.
I heard Frank Stella recently describing some of his work as painting in 3D, and this is what is so interesting about 3D software, it brings together two systems that have been thought of as two distinct systems. It’s a fundamental shift in visual thinking.
“I enjoy making something based on a paint stroke that then morphs into something uniquely animated and digital that no longer has any visual relationship with a brush stroke yet uses the data in the stroke to drive the animation/abstraction/deformation.”
Thomas Lisle, In the Minds Eye, 2022.
Can you please elaborate on your interest in psychology and how this is incorporated into your artworks?
I will try and answer briefly. It seems that there are universal rules that apply to people’s psychology regardless of where they are born, which means that basically, we are all humans regardless of race and religion; religion itself seems to be oriented to where you are born and the culture you grow up in. So rather than think of specific issues to bring to the public attention in art why not look at the underlying causes of all the issues. And secondly, we are all developing psychologically; I don’t think many people can claim they have reached a full understanding of themselves or their full potential. We all have some personal issues, no one is perfect, and we all have a shadow side that we need to come to terms with. We are all moving towards individuation of one sort or another from birth, it seems to me.
As I studied psychology more and more, I started to find out about psychological symbols in art and film, and I started to investigate archetypes ( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=this+jungian+life+archetypes wonderful lectures of archypes) and their use in narratives and symbols, from folk tales to feature films. And symbols and psychological alchemy, the psychologist (James Hillman was written some eye-opening books on the subject.) And I started to incorporate ideas and concepts of psychology into my artwork. And Jung’s book “Man and his symbols” and introduction to Jungian psychology and symbols.
Thomas Lisle, Abstract 02, 2022.
Some of your artworks such as Abstract 01 and Abstract 02 may remind some of artworks by artist Wassily Kandinsky. Is there a purposeful reference to art history in your works?
Not specifically, but I love his work and subconsciously, its working away somewhere in the background. There are lots of references to the art history of the last 100 years, in my work.
Are there any other traditional artists or art periods that you look back at or are inspired by in the creation of your works?
In the 20th century, artists like Picasso and Rauchenberg, the Fauves and German expressionists have been lifelong influences. Helen Chadwick, Ron Haseldon, Marc Chaimowicz all had an influence on me when I was at Art school. Today some of the artists I find the most interesting are Albert Oehlens and Gerhard Richter. It’s the visual experience and ideas that make their work so interesting and important and an important influence on my work.
Thomas Lisle, Subconscious Motions, 2022.
As a young artist you became interested in Glitch Art and Punk Rock, could you outline how these art forms influenced your art practice and oeuvre of works in general?
I think there is an element of punk rock in lots of art movements, from the Fauves to Dada to Expressionism, at the time of punk rock, it only really lasted a few years; there was no equivalent visual movement, I was only 16 in 1978, it seemed an important movement to be part of and it was very cathartic.
My glitch art was borne out of a desire to make art that was more about our time (then) and the media of the time, analog TV, to basically make images that had a new approach to abstraction by detuning TVs by making them go wrong and using ones that didn’t really work, capturing a bit of the randomness at specific moments. For those of you who never experienced analogy TV it was the high tech of the 70’s 80’and 90’s that really wasn’t very perfect and all controlled by the Broadcasters. Around that time in the early 1980s, I started to be interested in Electronic music – I can’t play an instrument or even hum in tune, but there was no equivalent to the synthesiser for artists in the 80s. Today I still like electronic music. I listen to a wide variety from classic to world, to electronic. The fascinating popular music for me today is the french “Trip Hop” scene, I can see elements of that kind of clash of taking all sorts of reference points and techniques and putting them together in a chaotic way that somehow finds some kind of balance or sense interesting in a number of ways with my digital art.
So going back to your question, I think the legacy of punk rock was to be happy to take risks and not worry about the results. My work with glitch art was aimed at finding new ways to abstract figures in a mode that was analogous to the times I lived in and to take on board the idea of time-based painting. I gave up making glitch TV artworks by the early 1990’s as I got frustrated with the inflexibility of the medium; there’s very little control. It seems less about conscious abstraction, especially of the figure, than about a symbol for the frailty of the digital era. Analog glitch art threw up interesting abstractions, very randomly. Digital glitch art is programmed. Digital 3D systems give me control of nearly every aspect of the artwork I make, it’s all a conscious decision it’s all intended, even the added visual chaos is orchestrated.
