‘Internet Recycling’: From Screen to Reality
Translating data into design, artists Rachel de Joode, Katja Novitskova, Julia Crabtree, and William Evans offer a new perspective on icons and images familiar to the majority in the developed and developing world alike.
Translating data into design, artists Rachel de Joode, Katja Novitskova, Julia Crabtree, and William Evans offer a new perspective on icons and images familiar to the majority in the developed and developing world alike.
It is only when taken out of context that one realises the mild absurdity of scroll bars, stock photos, and 2D web ‘pages’. First selecting images from the screen, rendering them tangible, and then exhibiting them as art objects, these four artists challenge viewers to question the ‘normality’ of things we have grown accustomed to seeing in their traditional two dimensions.
Hailing from Berlin, Dutch-born artist Rachel de Joode uniquely interprets online paraphernalia most notably in some of her earlier works, such as The Imaginary Order (2012); a performance piece exploring the border between the physical and the imaginary, the artist utilised a physical rendering of Google’s instantly recognisable search page through which a woman peered intensely, licking the page and contorting strangely at times in what seem to be efforts to push herself through it.
Illustrating the impenetrable divide between man’s often fictional online persona and his ‘true’ physical being, de Joode’s work can only have increased in relevance when considered in light of the rise of social media and the smart phone since the works conception, phenomena that has resulted in an unprecedented surge of people turning the camera upon themselves, projecting desirable ideas of their lifestyle and appearance for their online ‘followers’ to contemplate and envy via a plethora of platforms.
Using photographs to make sculptures (and vice versa) in her most recent work, de Joode has developed her study of dimensions, creating absurd and unusual objects that continue to blur the boundaries between 2 and 3D.
Featured as part of the playfully titled ‘#nostalgia’ group show, Katja Novitskova’s 2014 performance of text and image at CCA Glasgow (available to read and view on her website) is a wonderfully sharp satirical monologue based on a generic stock image representing ‘growth’.
With special focus on the jargon typically associated with business practises that involve technology and globalisation, Novitskova’s monologue highlights the vague and mildly Sisyphean aspects of the financial and technological modern world, distorting the image’s original intended meaning and purpose.
Ideas that the growth arrow signifies have recurred in her work since ‘#nostalgia’, notably in 2014 installation ‘Pattern of Activation’ – modelled out of semi-translucent polyurethane, Novitskova transforms the arrow into a tangible 3D object, juxtaposed alongside a startlingly ‘real looking’ image of an albino stallion, a digital print also originally sourced from the world wide web. Visually representing of the effects of man’s demographic and technological advancement on our planet’s ever-increasing extinction rate, ‘Pattern of Activation’ exemplifies Novitskova’s unique awareness and dexterity as an artist.
‘Antonio Bay’ is Julia Crabtree and William Evans’ most recent exhibition, the result of a continued examination by the artists on the relationship between the body and the screen. A product of their time as the Nina Stewart Artists-in-Residence in the SLG’s Outset Artists Flat, ‘Antonio Bay’ was shown at the South London Gallery in 2014, occupying the first floor with curious and immersive abstract shapes and textures.
Unlike Novitskova and de Joode, Crabtree and Evans’ work is not directly linked to the internet: in their attempts to investigate the imagery of our collective conscious, the artists focus instead on ‘the high artifice of B-movies’ and ‘the spatial logic of cartoon physics’, rendering their own interpretation of these things in physical form.
2D transformed into 3D, viewers were given the opportunity to contemplate previously flat ‘horizon lines’ sculpted into thick, undulating structures; in a mind-bending materialisation, an image of theatrical atmospheric smoke was flattened onto carpet, simultaneously indistinguishable and distinguishable, tangible and yet as impenetrable as it would be on screen.
Crabtree and Evans have worked collaboratively in an experiment in shared subjectivity over the past nine years; their most recent endeavour as part of group show ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ recently exhibited in new London artist-run space Assembly Point was a continuation in their exploration of the boundary between virtual and real spaces, involving the playful manipulation of interfaces, objects and imagery into placeless, immersive scenarios.
The human race is hurtling toward a dystopian and mechanised future at an alarming rate - as our reliance on screens and the internet increases, all aspects of life, including the way we communicate, look, and eat are changing at a rate incomparable to any other period in history.
With some of the world’s most significant and memorable art movements conceived in reaction toward rapidly changing social, mechanical, and political structures, one cannot help but wonder what lies in store for the art world – if the work of the aforementioned artists is anything to go by, then perhaps it is safe to say we have seen the future, and it works!
Julia Crabtree and William Evans
We interview the CEO of FutureEverything Drew Hemment
A 20-year ‘art project’: Drew Hemment’s journey through digital art and innovation with FutureEverything leads him to Singapore.
A 20-year ‘art project’: Drew Hemment’s journey through digital art and innovation with FutureEverything leads him to Singapore
The FutureEverything festival began 20 years ago in Manchester as a hub for digital collaboration and innovation in the arts. This September, the festival lands in ‘the city of the future’, Singapore, ready to blow minds and challenge perceptions of digital art. FutureEverything CEO, Drew Hemment, discusses the implications of our ever-expanding digital culture surrounding the arts.
FutureEverything. Credit WeAreTape
How did you find your way into digital art and what led you to transition to focus more on curating it in a large festival setting?
I came across Internet art in the early 1990s, when I spoke at and helped organise the Virtual Futures conferences. Before that in the 1980s I got fascinated by networks when I was DJing and organising acid house parties. I set up the festival in 1995. I’d hung up the decks in ‘92 and in ‘95 I ditched the literary agent and book deal and threw myself into festival curation full time.
This was an incredibly creative moment but there was nowhere people could come together. I wanted there to be an event that was about new work and practice as well as ideas. In secret, the festival itself has always been an art project to me, or at least an arts enquiry.
It seems to me that digital art is a lot more accessible for members of the 21st century public than more traditional or current experimental art forms. What is it about digital art that makes it more accessible and do you think its accessibility promotes or encourages accessibility in other artistic mediums?
Accessibility is a good thing, but it can also be a ruse. Many digital artists working today consume and replay interaction forms and images that saturate our lives, through advertising, social media etc. So digital art can be instantly familiar and accessible, in the same way pop art was before it. Any sense of a single ‘thing’ called digital art is decisively over. I am mostly interested in art, and design, which asks questions about the underlying codes that makes changes, leaving the world and the audience different to how it found them.
How do you focus on encouraging digital art and culture that creates a ‘moment’ or ‘event’ in a digital world that allows for instant access to a variety of archived artistic material and ideas? In other words, how can one innovate artistically and digitally in a world that uses technology to access an infinite amount of ideas and artistic endeavours?
We can access everything instantly; it is at our finger tips. This can create a challenge, however, because we have this overabundance of content and connectivity, people need to meet face to face. We need to focus really hard on one thing that is amazing and profound. We’ve seen music gigs explode because people need the live experience to give meaning to streaming and downloads. It’s the same in art, and ideas events, it’s a symptom of our time.
How important do you think artistic collaboration between individuals is in digital art and culture?
Collaboration, sharing and openness are central to the DNA of digital culture. People can collaborate with tens or thousands of strangers across networks to create original and beautiful media objects in which the results of individual creativity can be seen. Mobile networks enable swift and spontaneous collaboration across loosely connected groups. There are always new ways to collaborate with people from other disciplines using them as tools for new development. Having said this, collaboration does not always lead to good art. Solo practice and isolation can create exceptional things.
How has the FutureEverything festival developed since its conception to the upcoming festival in Singapore? Are you witnessing significant changes in the way technology is being used in collaboration with art?
FutureEverything Singapore does feel like something of a culmination of our journey. We have been on this 20 year rollercoaster, imagining the near future, making it and mucking around with it. Then we rock up in this city that is a city of the future, in so many ways. We have never done two festivals the same, we keep on reinventing it. In Singapore my ambition is that we hit the mark, we tap into deep and unexpected currents there and I feel like we can do something beautiful and profound.
Drew Hemment. Image courtesy FutureEverything
Future fossils, the art legacy of the internet
With rapidly evolving technological advances, post-internet art discusses how humanity goes forward alongside machines.
With rapidly evolving technological advances, post-internet art discusses how humanity goes forward alongside machines.
Still in the process of being shaped and defined by artists, post-internet art is a movement referring to the way society interacts with the widespread use of the Internet and how this affects society and culture. A successor to internet art, post-internet refers to state of mind rather than the explicit use of the internet itself. We discuss artists working now who approach this issue by their own means.
Eno Henze explores the relationship between humans and machines, between organic and synthetic and the complexities of organic creativity. His work frequently uses machines to interpret human activity such as drawing or producing an original ‘good’ piece of art. In this respect it is difficult to assign authorship or originality to the work, made by a machine programmed by a human. The machine is capable of making a ‘perfect’ image but cannot make a judgment call on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art. In a world where images are more available for editing and appropriating than before, this brings us back the ever debated question What is called Art and does not qualify?
Henze’s work asks what the rapid evolution of technology means for human creativity leading us to question what will become obsolete in the future as technological advances are made. Will human creativity become to digital drawing as analogue photography has become to digital?
TIMELAPSE/(MNEMOSYNE)
Set Design for a ballet by David Dawson
RANDOMCONDITION(ARABIDOPSIS)
Dimensions variable (ca 6 x 3 x 0,5 m)
48m laser-exposed photo paper
Wall mount: wood / aluminum
TSCHERENKOWS TRAUM (Cerenkovs Dream)
Technological objet trouvé with 4 Led Panels, power adaptor and image processor.
Approx. 5 x 1 x 1 m.
Amy Brener creates sculptures using plastic and remnants of technology to create light sensitive sculptures reminiscent of natural geological rock and crystal formations. Laptops, phones and computers, the tools we use to access the internet, are quickly made obsolete with rapid advances in hardware and buyer preferences in our current consumer culture, going quickly from the most connected and important object in one’s life to a antiquated piece of plastic and metal.
The materials used in Brener’s work subtly combine many components of these machines into human height crystals, which suggest an imagined future and allude to the merging of nature, humans and technology. Perhaps this realizes a now, eerily more precise vision of prophetic 20th century science fiction films.
However, though many artists are making work about the ongoing and always changing overlap of human and machine, Flavie Audi’s work completely moves away from the cyber connection and comes back to direct connections with objects. Audi uses glass and light in her work to create experiences in which humans can form a relationship with materials. Her art is about making a space for this to happen because, in a world of industrial production and virtual realities, she believes that humans have a desire to return to materiality.
If this is the case, it would appear that we have made a journey full circle. In the early boom of consumer capitalism the more objects one owned the higher status they had in society. More recently there is an attempt to escape this consumer culture; the word materialistic has become negative. It is therefore, somewhat alien to hear Audi talk about humans desire to return to materiality, due to the evolution of the word. Though, the use of this word does not imply that humans’ deepest desire is to own the latest sound system but that they wish to have a physical connection with an object in a space away from digital tools, and this is what her work aims to do. It is about creating social emancipation from technology.
Post-internet art has a self awareness of the networks it exists within, including influences of imagery that is for profit, advertising and merchandising, because of this aspects of design will continue to cross over into art that concerns itself with the virtual. The term post-internet is still developing but these artists approach the themes it encompasses in ways that independently question where the progression of technology will lead us, whether we should be allowing it, resisting it or if we have no choice at all. Whatever we should be doing, humanity is so entrenched in the virtual world, it seems certain that there is a long way to go before the Internet and it’s accompanying state of mind could ever become history.
Rafaël Rozendaal: The Internet’s Artist
In the rising field of Digital Art, Rafaël Rozendaal’s interactive websites, colour-changing paintings, and immersive installations offer a fresh take on the definitions and limits of contemporary art.
By Lucy Saldavia
In the rising field of Digital Art, Rafaël Rozendaal’s interactive websites, colour-changing paintings, and immersive installations offer a fresh take on the definitions and limits of contemporary art.
Where some artists specialize in oils, and others in sculpture, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal is best known for his work in pixels. His playful websites allow visitors to poke and prod a wobbling red jello mold, or unroll an endless roll of toilet paper, or simply watch an array of colors play across the screen. Some websites are completely abstract, while others contain recognizable shapes and symbols for viewers to manipulate. They are endlessly entertaining, and strangely hypnotic—like arcade games with a conceptual twist. Websites as art may seem a like strange idea at first, but in the growing field of Digital Art, Rozendaal’s work is a pioneering example of the ever-growing opportunities available to artists working with modern technology.
www.nevernowhere.com
The internet, for Rozendaal, is both his platform and his canvas. Like the works of other artists, Rozendaal’s websites can be bought and sold, but they must remain online and accessible to anyone. Where other works of art can only be reproduced on screen, Rozendaal’s pieces can be viewed and interacted with by anyone, anywhere.
Rozendaal’s ‘lenticular paintings’ are more traditional, but still involve the viewer to create their effect. Using the same technology that makes the figures on baseball cards to appear to move, Rozendaal’s swirls, blotches, and shards of color shift hue and form as viewers walk past. They give the impression of digital animations placed within frames.
As well as his websites and paintings, Rozendaal also creates installations, drawings, haikus, writings, and lectures. His installation works utilize light, reflections, and animations to cultivate an immersive experience, and his writings often explore the nature of his art and the art world in general. In 2010, Rozendaal founded BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), an open source series of exhibitions created by artists worldwide. The idea is simple, as the BYOB website explains: “Find a place, invite many artists, and ask them to bring their projectors.” This avant-garde approach to art and exhibitions, utilizing new media and the internet, is typical of Rozendaal’s progressive style. His work has been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, at the Venice Biennale, and at numerous smaller galleries across Europe, the United States, and Asia. He has lectured at prestigious universities, including Yale and the École beaux-arts. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Check out some his Internet works:
All Images via © Rafaël Rozendaal