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THE MEMORY THEATERS OF CLAUDIA HART | 2023

 

A 35-minute live performance combining 3D animation and storytelling, the premier in Queering Democracy, the first Budapest BINÁLÉ, a digital art biennial, curated by VIOLA LUKÁCS, PÉTER WEILER and JÚLIA MÁRTA NEUDOLD.

 

Since the late 1980s, Claudia Hart, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has used 3D simulations technology to produce subversive works on identity and experience that cross the virtual and physical worlds. Hart thinks of herself as a mixed reality artist, and her art takes shape through tangible installations and sculptures, projection-mapped performances, and what she calls “Digital Combines”— hybrid works that combine NFT encrypted contracts and tangible paintings. These projects explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract. Her new live performance, entitled MEMORY THEATER (2023) embodies this as a half hour theatrical monologue combined with animations consisting of experimental avatar dance, video, and earlier works culled from her personal archive spanning 35 years of continuous media-art practice. In it, she recites fable-like anecdotes that hybrid Grimms fairy tales with art history and personal memoir, bringing together her past, present, and imagined selves.

Created in 2023, Hart uses materials culled from five of her 40-year media archive (2013-2018), focusing on works from The Alice series, Hart’s collaboration with the composer Edmund Campion. “The Memory Theater of Claudia Hart” is 30 minutes in length. Four different animations are projected one after the next in a single reel, with Hart telling stories timed to her projections. The Memory Theater is direct and simple, requiring only a single large screen for projection, and a sound system. Hart listens to a click-track of each narrative on AirPods as she speaks it live against a recorded sound collage featuring samples from Campion’s compositions that he produced and recorded for their collaborative performances. The piece does not require precise digital-sync.

 

 

CLAUDIA HART | DIGITAL DEATH | 3D ANIMATION | 10:32 MIN | 2013/2023

 

 

Digital life is ultimately flawed, fleeting, and very different from the paradigm of natural life and death expressed in classical landscape painting. From the moment of creation, real digital life is commonly marked by myriad glitches and a rapid descent into obsolescence. The problem with digital stuff is that it never really works. However, old digital things still somehow die.



This animation expresses a weird but still organic notion of digital death, although it is very different from the cycling and recycling of life into death into life that one finds in the biological world and is expressed in traditional landscape painting.



Digital Death embraces metaphoric contradictions by glitching a tool that is part of my 3D animation software, Maya, an Autodesk virtual-reality product that I always use. In Maya, it is possible to simulate the growth of a cherry tree by using an algorithmic function based on the mathematics of fractals. So I did. But I found that there was actually no way to "die" the tree. In Maya, there is no tool for wilting, and apparently neither fall nor winter, because in Maya plants can only be programmed to grow. But, while there was no wilting function in my world, I did discover an interesting substitute. I could invert my growth tool by using the negative number version of the same algorithm that I used to grow things. If I grew a tree at a rate of 6, let’s say, I could "ungrow" it equally at a rate of negative 6. And when I did this, when I "ungrew" my tree at a negative rate, it did not wilt in a natural way. Instead, it would glitch, spasm, break into pieces, dissolve into dust, and then finally fade away.



With this simple gesture of growing and then ungrowing—by animating a period of positive growth, followed by a period of negative growth—I could metaphorically add and remove time simultaneously, and in so doing, create a Taoist tree that eats itself even as it is being born, endlessly re-cycling, in a state of digital death.

 

 

CLAUDIA HART | SHORT SEASON | 2023

 

Short Season portrays a room in which a rapidly transforming forming figure devolves and evolves in counterpoint. A variety of visual, temporal, and conceptual cycles are offset and overlaid so that their movement is obscured. As in life, all is in flux as we move towards death, but we can’t perceive it.  Our brains are anchored in our bodies, so we feel fixed. We decay, but we can’t perceive it. In this mix, everything changes constantly, but time seems to stand still, which is the nature of life.

Short Season uses a longer 10-minute animation initially produced in 2007, but now sped up, the same events taking place in only two minutes. A seated woman in a pose of erotic abandon cycles clockwise on a rotating pedestal. As she cycles, she decomposes, a vine of roses surrounding her, blooming and then fading away. The room also revolves, though counterclockwise, while the animation camera pans back and forth. These movements function in counterpoint, to appear only on the edge of perception. Although faster than the 2007 animation, the sense of flux and chaos is even more acute, so more confusing, and even more imperceptible. The sound for the piece is of crumpling paper, but magnified and at fast speed, giving the impression of a frightening, anxiety-provoking digital noise.  The color scheme is white on white.

CLAUDIA HART | THE ART OF SURVIVAL:  APHORISMS BY AN OLD GIRL | MP4 MOVIES | BETWEEN 10 AND 40 SECONDS IN LENGTH | AUDIO TRACK ENACTED USING AN OPEN-SOURCE "QUEEN ELIZABETH BOT | 2020/2023

The Art of Survival is a series of NFT, inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War - the classical canons of power politics. These aphorisms are the words of another OG (me), narrated by the late and great OG paradigm, Queen Elizabeth (or rather her bot). My versions are not tangible books but instead are animated NFT, mottos meant to heal a flaming world where discussion has been polarized by social media and current real politics. Evoking Times Square billboards and branding slogans, this is public-address but imagined here as homily directed to the divided space of social discourse.

These are recent works, but they are a revival of my earlier practice because my first works were also aphoristic.  Over forty years ago, I was a painter who was very influenced by conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner. At that time, I produced a work called A Child’s Machiavelli - an early form of a graphic novel - before the term was in common use. In 1996, I published A Child’s Machiavelli as a Penguin edition - a so-called “gift book” for adults. I decided to animate it, my initial motivation to learn 3D animation.  But the simulations-technologies behind 3D lead me into another direction. For years I considered myself a post-photographer, simulating instead of photographing the real.  But when NFT came along, minting appealed to me for two reasons: because it was a new way of simulating, but at the same time, a compact version of publishing and perfect for my aphoristic style.The Art of Survival aphorisms produced for the Feralfile.com NFT platform, for I Know, an exhibition curated by Synthesis gallery, Berlin, were a way of experimenting once again with language. The Old Girl aphorisms are a personal version of the 1990s Machiavelli project, created over thirty years later but now with a strong dose of The Art of War by Lao Tsu thrown in.  My plan was to publish it as an NFT hybrid between text and image and between image and object, channeling the voice of Lawrence Weiner – and also a strategy for integrating all of the aspects of my various periods and practices into one.
 

CLAUDIA HART

ALICE XR: A MACHINE FOR THINKING | 2019

Computer, software, VR headset, Vive VR world; wallpaper, custom Alice XR augmented-reality app for droid tablet; 3-channel animation plus computer software

Alice XR: A Machine For Thinking is a physical room installation consisting of projections on three walls covered by augmented-reality wallpaper with a VR headset accessible in the center of the room. Hart’s Alice world is conceived of as “a machine for thinking,” an hallucinatory chamber for repose and contemplation.  It is the third work loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s  Alice in Wonderland, created by Hart. Alice is a computer animation featuring an androgenous avatar dancing a live performance by ballerina Kristina Isabelle. Isabelle’s  performance was digitally captured, then embedded in a virtual character, and finally staged inside of Hart’s fantastical world. Hart has also created a VR experience merging both realities, asking the cellist Danielle DeGrutolla to improvise music within this mixed reality. The music and the realistic motions of the dancer respond directly to the artificial world, to come together as an other-worldly yet visceral work intended for large-scale installation.  

Hart further complicates her play between multiple realities by covering the gallery walls with augmented-reality wallpaper. Alice XR wallpaper features a decorative motif esthetically related to the Alice virtual worlds but also triggering an augmented-reality app for smart devices. This app turns a tablet or phone into a “magic mirror,” permitting viewers to see animation embedded in the graphic wallpaper pattern.

Alice XR mixes realities in the truest sense. The installation combines different perceptual models in a single exhibition space. The first is the “flat” three-channel high-definition movie projection. The second takes place within what has been mathematically and therefore perceptually constructed as a spherical dome: the Vive VR world.  The third is the flat decorative animations on the wallpaper revealed through the augmented app. These three kinds of representational space coexist simultaneously, though each emerges from a different epoch in art history. The animations use different versions of photographic illusionism coming from the 19th -20th century, the age of the analog camera. The VR dome-like space is post photographic, and is a new kind of post-digital picture-making. These multiple illusions transform Alice XR into a halfway space, one that is truly liminal. It bridges multiple worlds by uniting very different representational strategies. But it is also a world of inverted logic capable of confounding the mind and its perceptions.


 

Claudia Hart
Alice XR: A Machine For Thinking, 2019

Computer, software, VR headset, Vive VR world; wallpaper, custom Alice XR augmented-reality app for droid tablet; 3-channel animation plus computer software

Alice XR: A Machine For Thinking is a physical room installation consisting of projections on three walls covered by augmented-reality wallpaper with a VR headset accessible in the center of the room. Hart’s Alice world is conceived of as “a machine for thinking,” an hallucinatory chamber for repose and contemplation.  It is the third work loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s  Alice in Wonderland, created by Hart. Alice is a computer animation featuring an androgenous avatar dancing a live performance by ballerina Kristina Isabelle. Isabelle’s  performance was digitally captured, then embedded in a virtual character, and finally staged inside of Hart’s fantastical world. Hart has also created a VR experience merging both realities, asking the cellist Danielle DeGrutolla to improvise music within this mixed reality. The music and the realistic motions of the dancer respond directly to the artificial world, to come together as an other-worldly yet visceral work intended for large-scale installation.  

Hart further complicates her play between multiple realities by covering the gallery walls with augmented-reality wallpaper. Alice XR wallpaper features a decorative motif esthetically related to the Alice virtual worlds but also triggering an augmented-reality app for smart devices. This app turns a tablet or phone into a “magic mirror,” permitting viewers to see animation embedded in the graphic wallpaper pattern.

Alice XR mixes realities in the truest sense. The installation combines different perceptual models in a single exhibition space. The first is the “flat” three-channel high-definition movie projection. The second takes place within what has been mathematically and therefore perceptually constructed as a spherical dome: the Vive VR world.  The third is the flat decorative animations on the wallpaper revealed through the augmented app. These three kinds of representational space coexist simultaneously, though each emerges from a different epoch in art history. The animations use different versions of photographic illusionism coming from the 19th -20th century, the age of the analog camera. The VR dome-like space is post photographic, and is a new kind of post-digital picture-making. These multiple illusions transform Alice XR into a halfway space, one that is truly liminal. It bridges multiple worlds by uniting very different representational strategies. But it is also a world of inverted logic capable of confounding the mind and its perceptions.
 

CLAUDIA HART

ALICE XR: A MACHINE FOR THINKING | 2019


Computer, software, VR headset, Vive VR world; wallpaper, custom Alice XR augmented-reality app for droid tablet; 3-channel animation plus computer software

Alice XR: A Machine For Thinking is a physical room installation consisting of projections on three walls covered by augmented-reality wallpaper with a VR headset accessible in the center of the room. Hart’s Alice world is conceived of as “a machine for thinking,” an hallucinatory chamber for repose and contemplation.  It is the third work loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s  Alice in Wonderland, created by Hart. Alice is a computer animation featuring an androgenous avatar dancing a live performance by ballerina Kristina Isabelle. Isabelle’s  performance was digitally captured, then embedded in a virtual character, and finally staged inside of Hart’s fantastical world. Hart has also created a VR experience merging both realities, asking the cellist Danielle DeGrutolla to improvise music within this mixed reality. The music and the realistic motions of the dancer respond directly to the artificial world, to come together as an other-worldly yet visceral work intended for large-scale installation.  

Hart further complicates her play between multiple realities by covering the gallery walls with augmented-reality wallpaper. Alice XR wallpaper features a decorative motif esthetically related to the Alice virtual worlds but also triggering an augmented-reality app for smart devices. This app turns a tablet or phone into a “magic mirror,” permitting viewers to see animation embedded in the graphic wallpaper pattern.

Alice XR mixes realities in the truest sense. The installation combines different perceptual models in a single exhibition space. The first is the “flat” three-channel high-definition movie projection. The second takes place within what has been mathematically and therefore perceptually constructed as a spherical dome: the Vive VR world.  The third is the flat decorative animations on the wallpaper revealed through the augmented app. These three kinds of representational space coexist simultaneously, though each emerges from a different epoch in art history. The animations use different versions of photographic illusionism coming from the 19th -20th century, the age of the analog camera. The VR dome-like space is post photographic, and is a new kind of post-digital picture-making. These multiple illusions transform Alice XR into a halfway space, one that is truly liminal. It bridges multiple worlds by uniting very different representational strategies. But it is also a world of inverted logic capable of confounding the mind and its perceptions.

Claudia Hart, 2016

Inside the Flower Matrix (single channel exhibited as 3 channels, each offset by 2.5 minutes, accompanied by an Oculus Rift VR experience)
3 Channel 10 minute movie, computer, software, VR headset

The Flower Matrix is a mixed reality work combining a 3-channel 3D-animation installation and an Oculus touch VR world, with music composed by Edmund Campion, cello improvisations by Danielle DeGruttola, and vocals by Claudia Hart and Mikey McParlane.  

Inside the Flower Matrix is a part of Claudia Hart’s Alice world, reinterpreting the Lewis Carroll paradigm as a labyrinth. Inside the Flower Matrix envisions Wonderland as the Interweb, covered by flashing emoji, the icons for power, money, addiction and control.  Hart’s Internet is commercial stripway, the enactment of Casino Capitalism but at the same time, paradoxically, also a metaphor for a model of the mind and a site of transformation. 

The Flower Matrix is specifically modeled after the ancient Roman mythological labyrinth of the Minotaur, an endless maze from which there is no escape. Hart has created a game world covered with pulsing graphical patterns made from emoji, and also from symbolic computer language and public signage icons, conjoined in animated patterns that throb and pulse hypnotically. Also inside the Flower Matrix are five original species of fantastical flowers designed by Hart and covered with the same pulsing patterns, randomly growing and decaying. This is an environment portraying an esthetic of fakeness where technology has replaced nature, both sugary sweet and chemically toxic in equal measures.
 

Claudia Hart, 2016

Inside the Flower Matrix (single channel exhibited as 3 channels, each offset by 2.5 minutes, accompanied by an Oculus Rift VR experience)
3 Channel 10 minute movie, computer, software, VR headset

The Flower Matrix is a mixed reality work combining a 3-channel 3D-animation installation and an Oculus touch VR world, with music composed by Edmund Campion, cello improvisations by Danielle DeGruttola, and vocals by Claudia Hart and Mikey McParlane.  

Inside the Flower Matrix is a part of Claudia Hart’s Alice world, reinterpreting the Lewis Carroll paradigm as a labyrinth. Inside the Flower Matrix envisions Wonderland as the Interweb, covered by flashing emoji, the icons for power, money, addiction and control.  Hart’s Internet is commercial stripway, the enactment of Casino Capitalism but at the same time, paradoxically, also a metaphor for a model of the mind and a site of transformation. 

The Flower Matrix is specifically modeled after the ancient Roman mythological labyrinth of the Minotaur, an endless maze from which there is no escape. Hart has created a game world covered with pulsing graphical patterns made from emoji, and also from symbolic computer language and public signage icons, conjoined in animated patterns that throb and pulse hypnotically. Also inside the Flower Matrix are five original species of fantastical flowers designed by Hart and covered with the same pulsing patterns, randomly growing and decaying. This is an environment portraying an esthetic of fakeness where technology has replaced nature, both sugary sweet and chemically toxic in equal measures.
 

 

CLAUDIA HART ARTIST WEBSITE:  https://claudiahart.com/

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Claudia Hart emerged as part of that generation of 90s intermedia artists producing what was known then as “identity art,” that she later filtered and updated through the scrim of rapidly developing technologies. Hart’s work is about issues of the body, perception and nature, charting the natural as it collapses into and merges with increasingly encroaching new technologies. In Claudia’s work everything is fluid, including gender. She considers it Cyborg-ish, so she creates liminal spaces, and is in love with the interface between real and unreal because it lends itself to contemplation and transformation.  

Hart was very early into virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, and objects using computer-driven production machines, all adapted from the same computer models. She is considered a pioneer in this, taking a feminist position in a world without women when she entered the space 27 years ago, inspired by the French media artists of the 60s. 

Hart produces real things, not just mediated ones, meaning “mediated objects” (digitally enabled sculptures, drawings, paintings, wallpaper, crafts), and projections on painted walls and human bodies wearing sculptural screens of some sort. She produces bodies of work shown in galleries that then inspire performances that are shown in the experimental theater and performance context. 

Hart’s work is symbolist and poetic, not really narrative, but vaguely so, and is mesmerizing, hypnotic and formal. Bodies or natural forms like flowers always appear in her work. Hart calls her work, “post photography,” and has created a body of theoretical writings and exhibitions based on this concept. The occupants of her worlds are generated by computer models instead of captured with a camera. At The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now a Professor Emeritus, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept. It is called Experimental 3D and is the first art-school curriculum teaching simulations-technologies.  

Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Vera List Center Collection, The Borusan Contemporary Collection, The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection, The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, The Goetz Collection, The New York Public Library, the Addison Gallery of American Arts, Andover, MA, The Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection, and many other private collections. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14, and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC California, Berkeley where she is currently a fellow.

Claudia lives in a ramshackle Victorian house on the North Shore of Staten Island, New York City. She was born in the borough of Queens, in Queens County hospital, and is married to the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager.

 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

 

Claudia Hart was educated in art and architectural history in the late seventies and early eighties at NYU and Columbia University. This training was and remains formative to her digital art practice, one that emerged in the late nineties after she first exhibited intermedia work for a dozen years in the NY downtown art scene. Hart then transferred her analog practice into the digital space. As a result, she has always bridged these two worlds. 

Hart’s strategy is conceptual. She tends to make distinct bodies of work that track an art-historical research, setting herself up as both its subject and its object. Her work is profoundly reflexive and consistently so. Her approach is two pronged. 

As a feminist artist, Hart speaks in the voices of patriarchs. She expands on tropes borrowed from canonical  philosophers, poets, painters. In her first analog exhibitions, she impersonated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron and Niccolò Machiavelli.  In the late nineties, she reinvented herself as a digital artist but one concerned only with the virtual simulations that she thought of as “post-photography.” Hart then continued to channel history but thinking of her animations, experimental theater, VR and AR work as simulated historical “enactments” in an artificial world. As a digital artist, she appropriated the artistic styles of Renaissance and Baroque painters, Impressionist and Modernist masters, and in her audio work, the literary voices of Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford and Walter Gropius. Using historical references, Hart still embraces only emerging technologies, thinking of her translations of canonical art into digital form as part of an historical process that is also its meaning. In addition, Hart inverts the rationalist voice and esthetic language of canonical male patriarchs, turning them into something playful and fantastical. She appropriates sober historical aesthetics, reinventing them as theatrical decor and liminal environments.  

As an art historian, Hart analyzes and positions her own work and also the work of her peers. She traces the history of representation from the analog to the digital. She has curated many group exhibitions, written scholarly papers and developed pedagogy (in the form of curricular spine at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) as well as publishing multiple book chapters and myriad critical writings, all about different aspects of post-photographic simulations. Hart places her own work and the work of fellow partisans of a “simulations” media-art community she also cultivated, into an emerging art history.  She contextualizes its various practices within a history that begins with the invention of mathematical perspective and extends through photography, finally arriving at the present moment when 3D animation, virtual and augmented realities and the NFT Metaverse have seized the public imagination.

 

Painting After Digital After Photography
Paintings, Augmented Ceramics and Wallpaper


This project reflects the chaos of our current moment, one that is in every way reflecting the paradigm shift we are also experiencing in the world of  art and pictures. We are currently transforming from photographic paradigm to another related but very different concept, that of the virtual. Photographic capture is physical.  Photographs are actually an imprint of light, focused by a lens, on a chemically treated film, re-transferred onto chemically treated paper to create a kind of fossil of something that happened in the tangible world. It started in the 19th and then mutated in the 20th-century to its most contemporary version of painting.  Virtual imaging simulates reality rather than inscribing it.  The virtual  eschews physical processes that rely on physical things (like chemicals!). It is instead based on ephemeral, conceptual models and is mathematical. Post-photographic painting sits on hundreds of years of accumulated data,  deploying the history of human scientific knowledge to make mathematical algorithms that model the natural world by using data and mathematics.

The science of modeling the natural world is called simulation technologies. Scientific information that we have collected over time concerning phenomenal experience is used to build a visual that resembles an architectural model as seen through the lens of a digital camera.  Simulations-technologies numerically calculate the impact of physical forces such as gravity or wind, the mathematics of light, gasses and lenses, and the measured and enumerated properties of real materials such as oak or granite. These calculations are tabulated by some of the most complicated software ever made. They are then visualized in representational form in a mathematical Cartesian space, in the same way that scientists and engineers visualize the impact of disease on the body, or stress on a bridge, or the workings of subatomic particles, or the outcome of nuclear war. These visualizations are viewed by computer operators in schematic, architectural form “inside” of their computers, meaning through a software interface, or “window.”  Such 3D software then also simulates a mathematical, digital model of a camera with an interface almost identical to that of a tangible digital camera, in turn derived from a traditional mechanical, analog camera. Instead of capturing the real in an indexical fashion like a photograph, Post Photography artists use measured calculations to simulate computer-generated models of the real.

Simulations-software is profoundly philosophical. It is epistemological, its graphical design reflecting the canons of scientific knowledge. This type of epistemological software stands on centuries of theoretical and scientific models of the real, and reflects the foundations of Western knowledge. The issues implied by it are made manifest at our own historical juncture where the culture of science and climate-change deniers along with every other version of a fact. now rule America. The manufacturing of fake truth in the form of misinformation and ubiquitous infotainment on social media are obviously epic. 

Claudia Hart makes paintings hover in a space between the natural and unnatural worlds. Her process is a kind of dance between the hand-made and the computer-assisted, between organic materials and simulated ones. Her images begin hand painted with a small brush. Hart then builds on those paintings, re-photographing them and then adding them to architectural models that she skillfully constructs in a computer game space, then paints free-hand on a tablet, finally using a computer-assisted air brush to layer pure pigment on fine-grained wood panels that she has painted, repainted and stained. These processes come together to create a liminal object. Hart has discovered a new way to paint, creating a work of uncanny beauty.

 

Hermitage Combines, 2021


In November 2021, I was invited by Dimitri Ozerkov, the Director of Contemporary Art at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, to participate in his on-line exhibition, The Ethereal Aether. For the show, programmers recreated the old Leningrad Stock Exchange as a social virtual-reality website, so that users could don digital avatar bodies to explore the show on their home computers. The exhibit inspired me, and for the first time I was able to understand NFT as an extension of my installation-based practice.  For it, I produced two Hermitage Digital-Combine NFT that that I ultimately combined with a physical painting, produced by means of a complex process mixing hand painting and painting made by a digitally-controlled airbrush machine with natural materials into a complex whole. After the initial on-line project, I showed the Hermitage combines in tangible life, where each painting was an element in a single piece that included a poetic text, and was mounted on custom augmented-reality Hermitage wallpaper.  I have shown these works several times in this manner. The first was in an exhibition that I curated at bitforms gallery, San Francisco in 2022, entitled Digital Combines, along with six other artists work. I showed them again in 2023, in Dimensions: Digital Art since 1859, a project of Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V., Bonn curated by Richard Castelli, in Leipzig, that included the work of 50 international artists.

All Digital Combines are memento mori, and meditations on decay. These particular pieces are inspired by appropriated photographs, shot during WWII in the Louvre in Paris and in the Hermitage - during the blockade of Leningrad (currently called Saint Peterburg). At this time, Allied troops were retreating from the Nazis, who idolized the Western painting canon and so were systematically pillaging. Both museums, currently pitted in opposition as the West restarts a new version of the mid twentieth-century Cold War, are filled with empty picture frames, the masterpieces of both collections having been removed and safely hidden in the countryside in advance of an invading Nazi army. I am also using the empty frame as a symbol of the NFT. To me the NFT as a phenomenon is interesting because it is polarizing - a disruptor – and therefore one half of my Digital-Combine form. I think of them as paradoxical constructs, produced for an era of radical political and cultural instability.

 

THE RUINS


The Ruins implements still lifes, the classical form of a memento mori, to contemplate the decay of western civilization. In this exhibition, Hart revises the canons of modernist painting and the manifestos of failed utopias. Exhibited works are meditations on the flow of history, expressed as a cycle of decay and regeneration. The Ruins is an antidote to a world in crisis, navigating from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The exhibition presents a different notion of time, a present that viewers experience through the possibility of simulation technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future and present into a perpetual now.

The Ruins, the central artwork from which the exhibition gains its title, is an audiovisual animation tracking through a claustrophobic game world from which there is no escape. As the three-channel maze unravels, Hart introduces her newest interpretation of still lifes—low polygon models. These models, hearkening to the idea of a poor copy or image popularized by Hito Steryl, are computer-made replications of copyright-protected paintings. Taken from works by Matisse and Picasso, patriarchs of the Modernist canon, these forms cover The Ruins in flirtatious copyright infringement. Copyright marks the beginning of Modernism as a response to the emerging technology of photography. Music composed by Edmund Campion furthers the ethos of modernism through the tactical mixing of failed Utopian ideologies: Thomas Jefferson On American Liberty; The Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius; Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed suburban rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest; and Jim Jones’s sermon, The Open Door. Campion has processed and mixed each recording read by the artist, using Hart’s voice as an instrument that serves as the soundtrack to both the animation and the exhibition itself.  

The Still Life With Flowers by Henri Fantin-Latour exists as a three-dimensional sculptural object made from walnut, bleached basswood, and maple, with blossoms in burnished resin. It is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy—and therein lies its unique character. Hart created this work first through production with a computer model, developed in fastidious imitation of the 1881 original. She then transitioned the digital rendering to a physical object with a CNC router and rapid-prototype printer. Later returning to the model, she dissolved the source into a low polygon model to be placed within The Ruins. Together in the exhibition, the poor copy and sculptural form incite an allegory on the passage of time, decay, and obsolescence. 

The third component in The Ruins is Hart’s custom augmented wallpapers. Borrowing motifs that also appear inside her animations, the artist telescopes time and space from her virtual world to real life. Using The Ruins App, visitors can see animations embedded in the wallpaper that combine written allegories, animated abstract patterns, and heraldries of collapsed corporate empires, made visible only through the camera of a smart device.

The final part of this exhibition comes as a series of three monumental animations, The Orange Room, Green Table, and Big Red. In continuation of her study of copyright-protected twentieth-century painting, these video animations were prompted by the significant collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work there as a professor at the School of the Art Institute. Hart imports the compositional structures of The Red Paintings by Henri Matisse to propose a paradigm shift in painting practice, creating monumental animations at real painting scale. These works are constructed as images-within-images, architectures that open onto windows and doors, and lead into simulated landscapes bestowed with animated paintings, carpets and wallpapers. The digital, pictorial clockworks turn at different rates and temporal schemes to mesmerize viewers, ushering them into a state of contemplation. 

Music and software programming for the custom algorithmic sound engine by Edmund Campion, Director, Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, UC Berkeley. Original spoken voice recording by Claudia Hart. This piece utilizes the CNMAT “Resonators~” synthesis object designed by Adrian Freed. Special thanks to Jeremy Wagner and CNMAT for support with sound installation.  

The Ruins is live as a virtual exhibition for Mozilla Hubs, designed and supported by Matthew Gantt. It is featured in Ars Electronica’s 2020 festival hub, along with a video interview with Claudia Hart about the project.
 

 

E: THE VIRTUAL SUPERMODEL, 2002-2004

E represents the condition of the contemporary woman in today's post-industrial, technological society. E can mutate her face and body, adapting it to coordinate to the style of her clothing, here all the designs of my own creation mixed with those of the most extreme idea-driven designers of contemporary fashion. E is beautiful, but she is nevertheless the ultimate fashion victim: her face is so mutable that its transformations render her actually faceless. Converging the potential of bioengineering with the contemporary reality of endless fashion-based marketing cycles, E is a metaphor of woman as the ultimate consumer product in a dystopic future world in which the artificial has uneasily crossed the boundary of the real.

 

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