How Art Museum Presents: Quayola, Asymmetric Archaeology

Quayola: Asymmetric Archaeology Gazing Machines reimagines the past and rediscovers nature through the perspective of the machine. Through the works in the exhibition, the past is revisited in relationship to the present and the future, exploring an asymmetry that excludes the subjective view of the human and instead brings to the fore machine-processed objective ideas. Through these processes, classical art forms such as Hellenistic sculptures, Old Master paintings, and Baroque architecture are detached from iconographical semantics of the past to be regenerated into digital abstract works. In addition, familiar visual tropes of nature are transformed into a new artificial landscape engendered by machinery.

Strata I, Laocoon

The artist’s first large-scale solo exhibition in China consists of eight sections featuring artworks in a range of different media, including over 50 pieces of digital print, video, sculpture, and robotic installation. The expansive breadth of the exhibit presents major works by Quayola not only within the interior gallery space of HOW Art Museum, but also extends across the building’s media facades. The exhibition was curated by Doo Eun Choi.

Strata, Iconographies, Sculpture Factory #2 and Laocoön are four projects that analyze classical paintings, sculptures, and architecture using complex computer algorithms, recreating contemporary abstract works by severing religious and mythical scenes from their past contexts. Sculpture Factory is inspired by the ‘non-finito’ technique of Michelangelo whereby unworked sections of the sculpture block mean that pieces appear unfinished. Into this scenario, the artist introduces a new performance undertaken by a large-scale robot, which sculpts infinite variations of Pluto and Proserpina, a Baroque masterpiece produced by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini in the 17th century. Laocoön, meanwhile, draws inspiration from one of the most studied Ancient Greek sculptural masterpieces, Laocoön and His Sons. Quayola’s work is the result of complex digital simulations and experiments with virtual/physical prototyping technologies.

Iconographies

Remains, Promenade, Jardins d’Été and Camouflage represent ongoing projects that reexamine the familiar visual language of nature associated with traditional compositions of landscape paintings. Through intricate digital rendering processes, new digital landscapes emerge from actual natural scenes that are captured in high resolution using high-precision laser scanners and cameras. Diverse motifs come in to play for each work by recreating a new visual literacy; Remains observes the popular practice of en plein air (outdoor painting) of the late 19th century; Promenade explores the new aesthetics of contemporary autonomous vehicles and machine vision using a drone; and Jardins d’Été and Camouflage evoke imagery from the French impressionism of Claude Monet. Ultimately, the works become hybrid landscapes – neither real nor virtual – transcending the boundaries of the figurative and abstract domains.

Our banalities are freely detached from their original contexts to become new objects of contemplation through the peculiar mechanism of machinery and the complex algorithms of Quayola.

Jardins d’Été

Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, often at historically significant architectural sites, he engages with and reimagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Hellenistic sculpture, Old Master painting, and Baroque architecture are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s abstract compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, video, sculpture, and works on paper.

Quayola’s work has been shown widely around the world through 10 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions, public installations and performances. His past exhibitions include Park Avenue Armory, New York, USA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; Paco Das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil; Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Elektra Festival, Montreal, Canada; Sonar Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Japan Media Art Festival, Tokyo and Sundance Film Festival, Utah, USA.

Music collaborations include Vanessa Wagner, Ensemble Intercontemporain, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, London Contemporary Orchestra, Plaid, Jamie XX and Tale Of Us.

Special projects have been commissioned by Audemars Piguet; Bozar, Brussels; Cite’ de la Musique, Paris; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille and Canary Wharf Group, London.

THE EXHIBITION IS POWERED BY NIIO

“It’s quite an amazing system for preserving, managing and distributing digital video editions. My gallerist and I are using Niio for transferring limited editions to buyers and to museums for exhibitions.” Quayola, new media artists, represented by bitforms gallery, NY

Niio is  the premium discovery, display and management platform for new media art, embraced by leading artists, galleries, museums, curators, collectors and arts organisations from around the world, who are using Niio’s proprietary technology tools to securely safeguard, showcase, transfer, monetise and display thousands of their high-quality works on any type of “digital canvas.

HOW Art Museum 
No 1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road
201203 Shanghai | China

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

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

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

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Shaun Gladwell Studio

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

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

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

What does your workspace / desktop / studio look like?

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

When did you start working creatively with technology?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Virtual reality pioneers Shaun Gladwell and Leo Faber talk Badfaith Collective

What projects are you currently working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

What We’re Reading Now: Art (x) Design (x) Technology

At Niio, we are passionate about the intersection of Art, Design & Technology. From code-based and algorithmic artworks, to AR & VR installations, to blockchain for authentication, crypto art as well as the .ART domain, talk of digital art was everywhere in ’17.  Check out some of the great stories that we’re reading now and look out for lots more throughout the year.

ARCHITECTUAL DIGEST  // 
Marilyn Minter’s Largest Public Artwork Is All About Me 

“Well, all artists have a narcissism problem,” says Marilyn Minter gleefully as she walks the 280-foot length of her newest work. A collaboration with the Art Production Fund, the project is a video, produced in partnership with Westfield World Trade Center and displayed, unignorably (as any narcissist would appreciate), every eight minutes on the 19 screens of varying sizes that dot the inside of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus and its surrounding buildings.”  Read more.

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Photo via Art Production Fund

 

THE ART NEWSPAPER  // 
The Future May Be Virtual, But Who Is Running the Show? 

Virtual reality (VR) art is no longer the preserve of geeky coders. Artists such as Paul McCarthy, Marina Abramovic and Jeff Koons are beginning to create work using the technology, and start-up technology firms are springing up in the race to distribute and sell them. But as collectors begin to circle and prices rise, several legal and ethical questions are being raised, including who owns the art, how do you protect your work, and who has the right to place art in virtual public places?  Read more

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Mat Collishaw: Thresholds at Somerset House Photo: Graham Carlow

 

NEW YORK TIMES  // 
Will Cryptocurrencies Be the Art Market’s Next Big Thing? 

“On Dec. 16, the nascent market for what might be called cryptoart appeared to reach a new level when the hitherto-unknown Distributed Gallery announced the auction of “Ready Made Token,” a unique unit of a cryptocurrency that the gallery said was created by Richard Prince using technology from Ethereum, the network responsible for Ether. The online gallery describes itself as the first to specialize in blockchain-based artwork and exhibition.”  Read more.

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Richard Prince’s “Ripple” paintings share a name with a high-rising cryptocurrency. Credit David Regen/Gladstone Gallery

 

ARTSY  // 
When Steve Jobs Gave Andy Warhol a Computer Lesson

It was October 9th, 1984, and Steve Jobs was going to a nine-year-old’s birthday party.  He’d been invited just a few hours earlier by journalist David Scheff, who was wrapping up a profile of the Apple Computer wunderkind for Playboy. Jobs was far from the highest-profile guest, however. Walter Cronkite, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Louise Nevelson, John Cage, and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson were also in attendance. And Yoko Ono, of course—it was her son’s birthday, after all.  Read more.

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A 1984 Macintosh. Photo via Dave Winer on Flickr.

 

THE GLOBE & MAIL  // 
Is It Big Brother? Is It Art? What If It’s Both? 

The watchers watch us, we watch ourselves, and maybe someone is preparing to feed it all back to us as art.

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The creator of Colorimeter is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a Mexican-born artist who lives in Montreal.

 

ARTNEWS  // 
Rhizome Gets $1M. From Mellon Foundation For Webrecorder, Its Web Preservation Tool 

The New York–based digital arts organization Rhizome has been awarded a two-year $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue the development of its web preservation tool Webrecorder. The grant, the largest in the institution’s history, follows a previous two-year grant of $600,000 from the Mellon Foundation that it received in December 2015 to put the tool’s development into full gear.  Read more.

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Niio & Genesis Technologies >> VIP Lounge (France & Spain)

Art, Design & Technology in France & Spain 

Together with our partner Genesis Technologies, one of Europe’s premiere technology integrators for luxury homes and yachts, we participated in their VIP Lounge on the Cote d’Azur and again in Marbella, Spain.

In France, participants included art collectors and prestige design professionals (architects + interior designers)  while in Spain we spent an afternoon with hardware partners and technology integrators.

We are on a mission to expose people to original, high-quality, immersive digital art experiences. With a collection of thousands of works from top artists and galleries, state-of-the-art technology, a global hardware infrastructure and white glove installation and support, Niio makes it easy to incorporate captivating digital art into any environment.

Interested in premium digital art for your home or next project? Please contact us.

 

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Digital Art >>A Glossary of Terms

When talking about digital art (art created with technology that’s often intended to be viewed or experienced on screens or projectors), inevitably people use a myriad of different terms. In order to help clarify,  we’ve pulled together a glossary of terms.

Digital art is an artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as an essential part of the creative or presentation process. Today digital art itself is placed under the larger umbrella term new media art.

New media art refers to artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, video games, computer robotics and 3D printing that can enable the digital production and distribution of art.

 

Video art is an art form which relies on moving pictures in a visual and audio medium. Video art came into existence during the late 1960s and early 1970s as new consumer video technology became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sounds.

440px-Electronic_Superhighway_by_Nam_June_Paik

 

Internet art (often referred to as net art) is a term used to describe a process of making digital artwork made on and distributed by the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art.

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Blingee by Olia Lialina (artist) and Mike Tyka (Co-Founder of the Google Artist and Machine Intelligence Program) for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven ’17.

Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks.

Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist.

Algorithmic art, also known as computer-generated art, is a subset of generative art (generated by an autonomous system) and is related to systems art (influenced by systems theory).  For a work of art to be considered algorithmic art, its creation must include a process based on an algorithm devised by the artist. Here, an algorithm is simply a detailed recipe for the design and possibly execution of an artwork, which may include computer code, functions, expressions, or other input which ultimately determines the form the art will take.

Algorithmic art. Custom generated wallapaper by Siebren Versteeg @bitforms gallery, nyc

Video game art is a specialized form of computer art employing video games as the artistic medium. Video game art often involves the use of patched or modified video games or the repurposing of existing games or game structures, however it relies on a broader range of artistic techniques and outcomes than artistic modification and it may also include painting, sculpture, appropriation, in-game intervention and performance, sampling, etc.

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Super Mario Clouds by Corey Arcangel as seen at the Whitney

Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices.  In a technical sense, a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction, especially occurring in software, video games, images, videos, audio, and other digital artefacts.

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Example of glitch art, by Rosa Menkman

Fractal art is a form of algorithmic art created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, and media. Fractal art developed from the mid-1980s onwards. It is a genre of computer art and digital art which are part of new media art. The mathematical beauty of fractals lies at the intersection of generative art and computer art. They combine to produce a type of abstract art.

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Fractal art.

Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation.

Multi-media art uses a combination of different content  forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content. Multimedia can be recorded and played, displayed, interacted with or accessed by information content processing devices, such as computerized and electronic devices, but can also be part of a live performance.

NYC TRANSFER Gallery + Niio @ Minnesota Street Project (SF)

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Summer in the City

We are big fans of Brooklyn based TRANSFER. Gallery founder/director Kelani Nichole, started the exhibition space nearly four years ago in order to support and and cultivate artists with computer-based practices through solo exhibitions, events and international art fairs.

This summer, Kelani and TRANSFER have migrated west, installing an outpost inside San Francisco’s brand new, highly anticipated, Minnesota Street Project.

TRANSFER DOWNLOAD @ Minnesota Street Outpost

The TRANSFER Download

Installed as a series of hyperlinked solo exhibitions,  ‘TRANSFER Download’ invites artists to present custom three-channel solo presentations of moving image. Each work is accessible via a playlist, creating a layered salon-style exhibition format first tested during Art Basel Miami in 2014. Selecting an artwork from the control screen changes over the entire installation space to feature a single work – formats include time-based narrative, generative 3D video, and looped moving images. 

TRANSFER + Niio

We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Kelani and TRANSFER during their debut at Minnesota Street. Niio, via its cloud platform + video player (4K/60fps) + remote control app,  will power a dedicated 4K 65″ single-channel screen featuring a collection of artworks from the gallery’s inventory which will give collectors an opportunity to take the Niio technology for a test drive while discovering new works of art.

Garden of Emoji Delights by Carla Gannis
Photo Credit: Kelani Nichole Instagram: “New toy from @niioart – upload on website, watch in 4K ??? @carlagannis ‘The Garden of Emoji Delights’ looks stunning ?”.

 Featured Artists Include:

Claudia Hart – ‘Empire’
Mary Ann Strandell – ‘Tromploi’
Rosa Menkman – ‘DCT’: Syphoning’
Phillip David Sterns – ‘Polar Visions 002’
Rick Silva – ‘Vibes Accelerationist’
Rollin Leonard – ‘Spinning Pinwheel of Death’
Laturbo Avedon – ‘Pardon Our Dust’

Check Out the Show:

July 30th – September 8th, 2016 in San Francisco

Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA
Open Tuesday – Saturday from 11am-6PM and by Invitation

Learn more about the Minnesota Street Project.

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