LUMEN PRIZE: SHORTLISTED ARTISTS 2023

23 SEPTEMBER — 27 JULY 2024

OPENING RECEPTION

FRIDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER, 6–8PM

Kat Mustatea, Max Colson, Sarah Selby, Adam Cole, Egor Kraft, Kyle McDonald, theVERSEverse, Francois Knoetze, Irmandy Wicaksono, Yi Le, Junkai Chen, Rhett Tsai, Bianca Carague, CNDSD and Ivan Abreu, Untold Garden, Fahad Karim, Maya Man, Alice Bucknell, Jonas Lund, Nouf Aljowaysir, Sam Crane, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Rosa Menkman, Kim Laybourn, Yujin Jung, Bridget DeFranco, João Carlos Pinto, Maria Samper Zamorano.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

Rooted in the practice of expanded cinema, my work uses creative AI and immersive video to reveal how our media-saturated world shapes and stretches our most intimate desires and questions whether these new technologies are doomed to fossilize existing hegemonies or can otherwise be used to imagine authentic, queer futures.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

Originally from New York City, I now live and work in London after completing a master’s degree (2022) in Creative Computing in the city at the University of the Arts London. Prior to that, I attained Education History BSc Digital Media Design at University of Pennsylvania in 2016.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

The history of art is in many ways the history of new technologies. I’m excited about the digital space because I firmly believe artists must use the most prevalent tools of our environment to critically reflect on the way those tools shape, limit, and potentially expand our collective consciousness.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Adam Cole’s Kish/Crash (2023) mines the seemingly infinite depths of Hollywood’s romantic archive to explore AI authorship, queer desire, and intimacy in the digital age. Comprising three works—Kiss/Crash, Me Kissing Me, and Crash Me, Gently—the multi screen work utilises AI image translation to uncomfortably blur the line between love and violence, self and other, pervy spectatorship and control. Within the work’s titular video, hot film stars making out morphs into gnarly car crashes, set against a romantic tune soaked in Hollywood nostalgia. Within Crash Me, Gently Cole invites viewers to play: by accelerating a foot pedal placed in front of the monitor, they can adjust the rate at which the artist kisses themselves. Revving things up creates a more intense and cinematic intimacy, yet also splinters the self into animals, celebrities, brutality, and destruction, ultimately calling into question the nature of technologically-enabled desire.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I work primarily with game engines, speculative fiction, and interactive media in order to uncover interconnections among architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in 1993 in London, and now I live and work in Los Angeles. I studied an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at The Royal College of Art (Distinction), BAs in Anthropology and Studio Art (Honors) from The University of Chicago.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

In 2020. I love making digital work because of its proximity but also distance from the world we inhabit, and its capacity to speculate and offer generative visions for alternative or future worlds to come.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials (2023), a film and video game built inside Unreal Engine, we are teleported into an uncanny version of Los Angeles that looks both forward and backward in time. The city is a desert, its concrete skeleton of a river is a rich riparian ecosystem, wildfires rage in Malibu and a corporation named Aquarius vends synthetic water to the masses in crisiscore pastel packaging. Told through multiple more-than-human protagonists including the LA River, a yucca moth, three wolves, and the ghost of LA’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22, the project explores the politics of drought and water scarcity that shape LA’s future and the city’s complicated relationship with its own terraformed environment.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I attempt to reinterpret classic scenes from Buddhist narratives using digital techniques and futuristic thinking, aiming to retain the relevance of this ancient story within the contemporary context.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Shanghai in China, and now I live and work in Oslo, Norway. I have a BFA in Architecture from Shanghai University.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started self-learning software and creating digital works in 2016. What excites me the most about my personal work and short films is how the virtual and the real interact with each other.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Axl Le’s The Six Realms of Reincarnation (2023) fuses ecological themes with imagery from the six Buddhist kingdoms. By merging a future-leaning vision of the natural world and classic scenes from Buddhist narratives, Le creates surreal digital environments that feel both primordial and science-fictional, spiritual and technological, enchanting and apocalyptic. The work’s rich visuals—split across six vertically-arranged windows into as many imagined worlds—is complemented with paradoxical soundtrack that merges harmonious gongs wit the manic sound of buzzing flies. By merging ancient belief systems with speculative manifestations of hi tech futures, The Six Realms of Reincarnation (2023) implies that any future world we build with technology will sit somewhere between the binary of utopia and dystopia.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I combine design research with fiction and world-building, to tell stories that reflect on social issues and emerging technologies.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Manila, Philippines, but I now live and work in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. I did a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design in the Philippines (DLS-CSB, 2017) and my master’s degree in Social Design in Design Academy Eindhoven (2020).

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started in 2019, when I first had the idea of creating spaces for therapy on online games like Minecraft. What I love about working in the digital realm is its element of magic and the sense that anything is possible.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Terra Incognito (2020), one chapter of artist and designer Bianca Carague’s speculative fiction film Gen C: Children of 2050 (2023), we are introduced to a Non Fungible Child, or NFC for short. They give us a tour of their floating modular home: a virtual environment that is as digital as they are. Like a tamagotchi for the post-climate crisis era, the NFC represents the thorny question of biological reproduction amid the compacting climate anxieties within the present. Though removed from the calamities of Earth in ‘base reality’, the NFC nonetheless understands the perils facing their parents, as well as the broader planetary human population. In between going to school through portals and playing with their rendered whale pets, the NFC actively works towards climate change adaptation strategies, echoing the political reality that the burden of the climate crisis is shouldered by the youngest generation on Earth.

SPECIAL EDITION OF PRINTS AVAILABLE AT THE GALLERY

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I’m really interested in how space is constructed behind the screen, the line that separates 2D from 3D, and how the shape or feeling of a digital space can change through the emergent behavior of the objects that occupy it.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I’m from New England, and I currently work between Rhode Island and upstate New York, where I’m part of a PhD program in Critical Game Design at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I also hold an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Digital + Media and a BS from New York University in Integrated Digital Media.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I’ve made digital work my whole life, but I started working in game software around two years ago. Game software is particularly interesting to me because the work constructs itself in real time. What you see, you may have never seen before and you may never see again. It’s non-deterministic.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Bridget DeFranco’s Eco logical system 01 is an infinite duration game that meditates on the
agency of the digital image. Appearing like cardboard cutouts of various organisms spanning mushrooms to dandelions, puddles to fish bones, each model in the world behaves as a two-dimensional stand-in for the thing it represents, raising complex questions of semiotics in game space. DeFranco’s ecological protagonists behave as sprites, each with a lifespan, population input and output. Yet the ongoingness of the game, and the thing undergirding its very existence is the chance collisions and chaotic interrelations between its many agents. As its name suggests, Eco logical system 01 pitches virtual environments as ecosystems in their own right.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My work centers around machine-learning based art that investigates our human relation to technology and data.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Denmark, and have an MA in Fine Art from University of the Arts London (2016), and am currently undertaking an MPhil/PHD in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I have been working with machine learning in my artistic practice since 2016. I find it very fascinating to use the medium of machine-learning to investigate questions around the existential and ethical dilemmas which AI poses about our human lives.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm’s An Algorithmic Gaze, no. 1 (2021), machine-hallucinated anatomy stretches the limits of the human body to their maximum. Limbs sprout from thin air as figures rotate in the round, drop down to puddles of skin and crouch, frog-like, amid freakish contortions. The project explores the capacities to both comic and creepy effect, while also standing as testament to the very obvious ways that AI models encode racial bais: very few of the bodies hallucinated by the custom-trained model extend beyond the realm of the white, Eurocentric standard fetishised by the algorithim. In exposing this bias even inherent to acustom-trained model, Falkenstrom’s project indexes the larger biases wielded by mass-utilised large models, revealing a duality within the ‘queering’ of bodies through machinic vision.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

Both coming from the universe of creative programming, Iván Abreu and I channel different creative explorations that range from architecture and sound art to the intersections between science and art. Together we generate a conversation full of digital poetics that is experienced through ever-changing live cinema coding and immersive experiences. Our work is an intense display of live cinema coding of musical aesthetics which are a hybrid of introspective landscapes, glitch noise and intricate rhythms (written live by CNDSD) alongside visuals of 3D spaces intervened by procedural animation, real-time video synthesis, CGI and expressive light control (collaboratively programmed by CNDSD and Abreu).

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

Both of us, Malitzin Cortes and Ivan Abreu Cuban, are Mexican and work in Mexico City. Iván studied Informational Design in Cuba and I studied architecture and algorithmic music. We both specialize in creative coding, and are science lovers and technologists. We started from sound experimentation, and over time used different software to expand our practices and initiate new research around data visualization, avant-garde electronic music, machine learning and live coding.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Digital matter is unlimited and goes through different states of material, as well as being capable of being displaying itself in different formats, interfaces and information surfaces. We love expanding our various technological and poetic skills in search of emotions beyond the screens.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In this excerpted recording of Auto{}construccion (2022-2023) by Mexico City-based duo CNDSD & Iván Abreu, we get a glimpse into a striking project that uses video game animations sequenced by algorithmic music. The audio-visual concert merges speculative architectural renderings, instances of informal housing in countries like Mexico, the US, Latin America, Asia, India, and some regions of Europe. Using real-time rendering, large datasets, and live coding, the work produces what the artists call “live cinema coding”—offering an an extreme audiovisual syesthesia experience. Its stunning visual and sonic dimensions also carry with them a critical weight: they critique and expose certain biases of the internet, reflecting more accurate representations of life in the ‘edge zones’ of large cities and offering speculative architectures that move beyond such cliches.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

Currently, my work, writing and research is preoccupied with such synthetic epistemologies, ecologies of automation, computational aesthetics and models of networked sovereignty.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in St. Petersburg and have lived nomadically for the past 25 years, most recently basing myself in Vienna and Tokyo. I graduated from Rodchenko School [RU], Academy of Arts Vienna [AT], Central St. Martins College [UK], Tokyo Geidai University [JP] & Strelka Institute, where I’ve studied media, speculative design, film, philosophy and art. I hold an MFA and multiple postgraduate degrees and I also teach at the University of Art & Design in Linz.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

In my work, I’ve always been concerned with the domain ontologies of human and non-human agencies and epistemic technologies, and the way in which they not only amplify the knowledge-making capacities of humans but produce their own knowledge-making agents, models and scales. The outcome of what I do is often expressed in a form of speculative models, thought–object experiments and dynamic, community-operated networks. This involves practical experiments with artificial information systems, computational technologies, films, interventions, texts & various material productions. I tend to create speculative narratives that highlight frictions between human reasoning and quantitative orders preferred by machines, industrialisation and anthropogenic interventions at large.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

What if dominant scientific narratives were wrong, and a coloUr existed beyond prior human discovery? In Egor Kraft’s ongoing web-based project The New Color (2018), the artist plays around with speculation, bunk science, post-truth culture and fake news that looks really real. The project introduces NeoChrome—a technological breakthrough crafted by chemists vielwing new skills in chemistry, spectroscopy, and dye synthesis, we are told—which results in an exciting new hue that exists beyond current means of perception. Introduced when terms like ‘fake news’ or ‘post-truth’ were still nascent, The New Color has evolved continually with the times, maintaining a terminally alluring marketing persona that still solicits inquires today.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I’m excited about building creative systems that explore our cultures through automation and technology, often re-imaging or re-examining ‘the traditional’ in new and dynamic ways.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I’ve lived a nomad’s life around the globe – moving between Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, and the US. Though I’m originally South Asian, I’ve made NYC home for the last 12 years. Before that, I studied Computer Science at Cornell University.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

After keeping software and art on separate tracks for most of my life, my interests finally clicked into place in 2021 when I began pursuing larger, more ambitious generative art projects. I love working in this medium because of the countless dimensions it offers: scale, automation, interactivity, portability, and dynamism.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Inspired by Aztec mythological motifs and the rich cultural history of Mexico, Pohualli is an ongoing series of live code-generated images. Organised across three themes—nature, motivations, and entities—the work shape shifts over time, revealing itself as a timelapse of morphing creatures and visions. The generative nature of the project meditates on the passing of time and the slippery interplay between past and future. The title itself is a reference to the Nahuatl vigesimal counting system, inside which pohualli is a base unit. Pohualli #31 (age 2140days) (birthday 2017)—characterised by geometric imagery layered, collage-like, atop an oceanic navy backdrop—represents a small blip in the map of this generative world. Drawing a welcome connection to the idea of Oceanic Feeling—a psychic state in which the sense of self is annihilated in favour of a collective consciousness—the work is a poetic meditation on the nonlinear capacities of storytelling as a cultural carrier bag for generations and worlds to come.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

Through the project’s projection of modernity, we ask: how can we draw examples from history which illuminate the invention of modernities from within Africa, rather than received from elsewhere?

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Francois Knoetze, Russel Hlongwane + Amy Louise Wilson draw on speculative fiction and world building tactics to imagine DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2023), a film and research project that explores Africa’s technological history. Merging past and future, the collaborative work presents a fictional universe that’s fully grounded in the present. Narrated by roaming scientists of the DZATA institute who travel the continent with their mobile laboratories strapped to their back, the film features breathtaking landscapes, stunning costume design, and rich tapestries of AI envisioned imagery. Scaffolded by the themes of indigenous knowledge and Afrofuturism, the project celebrates and re-centres African modes of thought through a visual language as imaginative as it is critical.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I weave electronic devices into soft materials and the fabric of everyday life for various applications ranging from physiological sensing, human-computer interaction, space exploration, to the interactive arts.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Birmingham, United Kingdom. I am an Indonesian citizen based in Boston, USA, with a Media Arts and Sciences PhD from the MIT Media Lab, USA, an MSc in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and a BEng in Electronic Engineering from University of Southampton, UK.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

In 2019. I aspire to augment knitted textiles with sensory and computation capabilities that bridge and merge the physical and digital worlds to evoke magical and novel experiences.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Irmandy Wicaksono’s Tapis Magique (2021), dance is translated in real-time into a unique musical score. The interactive textile is comprised of 3D sensors that capture movement data of the performer dancing atop it, transforming each gesture into a multisensory experience. Functioning like a skin between movement and sound, the tactile and intangible, virtual and material, the textile’s design is comprised of 1800 pressure-sensing ‘pixels’ that appear equally cellular and cosmic in scale. The project draws together the ancient history of dance, the craft-based knowledge of textile production, and the capacities of technology to serve as a ‘sensing system’ in collaboration with human actants to generate a rich auditory-gestural synethetic environment.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I like to explore the rapid overtake of technology. I’m interested in what we define as the basis of knowledge and how it relates to cultural and social inheritance – religion, the occult, archetypes, ritualistic practices – the intemporal nature and never-changing nature of things alongside changes of mediums and tools. Everybody is still seeking answers or some sort of enlightenment, either through a Moses, ayahuasca or an Iphone 14 Pro Max.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Portugal and studied Piano and Music Composition at the Gulbenkian Conservatory in Braga. I finished my Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition in 2019 at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa and I’m currently doing a Master’s in Multimedia Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Since early on, I’ve been interested in incorporating technology into my work. I guess it’s just a natural response to my surroundings. In the same way Berlioz used the trombone, I get captivated by working in digital spaces.

ABOUT THE ARTWOK

Presented as a motivational performance, Ad Hominem (2023) by João Carlos Pinto draws on a diverse carrier bag of media—movement sensors, VR glasses, a hello kitty drum-kit with DIY triggers, a modular synth, video, electronics, voice, acting, lights & smoke—to gesture at a totally-connected speculative organism. Everything is controlled by Pinto, who is hooked up on stage to a Max patch; their body becomes a centralised brain or nervous network for interactions between these media. The narrative of the work unfurls in real time and in a seemingly random order, manipulated both by the performer and an AI oracle. Ad Hominem was produced collaboratively by the artist and a series of artificial neural networks (ANNs).

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Jonas Lund’s The Future of Something (2023) is a generative video artwork that merges uncanny AI generated imagery with a speculative fiction script to both comic and eviscerating effect. Across the morphing vignettes of seven AI-generated human support groups—ranging from couples therapy to robot love tensions, online poker addicts to content creators anonymous—the video deftly navigates familiar fears of machinic displacement of the self through parody. We watch hallucinated influencers in crisis, unable to compete with the indifferent gaze of an artificial intelligence that is post-authorship, post creativity. As the humans band together to console each other in survival mode and therapy sessions, they attempt to cash in on each other’s paranoia. Ultimately, The Future of Something suggests that the real threat in the room may not be the machinic other, but something more human after all.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

Plastic art, lighting, sound and performance are mixed into my practice. I try to find a continuum aesthetic that varies in different spaces.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Shanghai, where I now also live and work. I studied sculpture in Shanghai, and then Art Plastique at the National Higher School of Fine Art in Nice (Villa Arson), Electroacoustic Music in Conservatory in Nice and finally Creation/Study in Le Fresnoy-National Studio of Contemporary of Arts.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

From 2013, I started creating digital works, especially from sound creation. Digital spaces contain unlimited possibilities; they can create works from physical data, analog data and digital algorithm.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Junkai Chen’s Bagua (2017), the story begins with the concept of “八卦”, the eight trigraphs symbolizing the tangible representations of Yin and Yan, which stem from a three millennia-old text called the “Yi Jing”. At its core, the Bagua is a theory of motion; Chen’s project manifests as a multi-channel video projection on a moveable screen in tribute to this concept of constant motion. The installation functions within two distinct temporal dimensions: the first takes the form of a performance-based approach, using an augmented sword to bend the physical body with audiovisual movement. Meanwhile, the second dimension enables the piece to be experienced as an interactive installation, allowing each visitor to interact with the artwork and discover their own personal language through it.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My work focuses on the uncanny and awkward boundary between live performance and the digital.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I live and work in New York.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

The digital space excites me because it is a stage on which we enact a heightened version of IRL selves

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Voidopolis – Part 34 – double negative (2021) is an excerpted artifact from Kat Mustatea’s digital performance, Voidopolis: a hazy retelling of Dante’s Inferno set in a pandemic-era rendition of New York City. Rather than Virgil, the narrator’s spirit guide through this modern hellscape is Nikita, a houseless person living in the city. As a digital performance and AR book with a limited lifespan, the project ultimately culminates in loss: the loss of self as much as the loss of media, with its image library created from “scrubbing” human presence from stock photography. This lost imagery is complemented by an ongoing txt narrative generated without the letter ‘e’ by a modified GPT-2 text generator. The physical book’s pages are unscrutable, only capable of being deciphered through an additional media layer of an AR app. After enough ‘readings’, even this media device fails: it obliterates both image and text, just as human memory would—and does—in such apocalyptic times.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I make work that transcends our notions of reality, and its inherent or adopted possibilities and limitations. It presents a heightened reality, which extends beyond the experienced and observed world, and examines the human position and existence, through virtue of everything we touch and what surrounds and shapes us.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Denmark, where I grew up in the countryside in the south. Now I live in Oslo in Norway, where I studied at the art academy and obtained a BFA in 2017 and an MFA in 2019. I work between Denmark and Norway.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I briefly tried working digital back in 2016, while I was studying. This video is my first real digital work, which I begun working on in 2021. The techniques of 3D-animation enable us to create imagery that normally cannot be experienced in real life, but only through thought and imagination.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In the ASMR-laden landscape of Kim Laybourn’s film The Animate Landscape (2023), moss wiggles, plants dance, and dandelions shake their bulbous feathery heads beneath a forest crown. The work pairs full resolution field recordings of natural environments with deftly-rendered 3D-animation interventions, offering a psychedelic rendition of an animated ecosystem. Playfully giving credo to the concept of landscape as main character, the work displaces an anthropomorphic agency onto this pulsating network of nonhumans, revealing the aliveness inherent to every forest. It’s both a dazzling scene and a little bit silly, playfully digging at the concept of anthropocentricism itself—of how humans ascribe value to other life-worlds only by bringing them closer to our own—and yet carves out a space for wonder and re-enchantment.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I want to bring deep research and clever interventions to the code-driven computational worlds that seem to be increasingly out of control.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I live in Los Angeles and was raised in southern California. I have a Master’s in Fine Art and a Bachelor’s of Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

My first exhibited work is a generative piece from 2004 called “Empathy”. Back then, I was most excited by the way that digital work could unfold infinitely. Then I found purpose in online community and the open source scene. Recently, I’ve been excited by work that goes beyond the online and computational to connect with a broader ecosystem.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Kyle McDonald’s Amends (2022) is a trifecta of sculptures that collectively call for fiscal reparations towards the carbon expenditure of the NFT economy. Comprised of hand-crafted glass blocks—each filled with a material utilised for carbon removal and prevention, ranging from olivine sand to carbon-rich soil—the works also exist on-chain as digital renders. Partnering with Nori, Tradewater, and Project Vesta three organisations working toward carbon capture and removal—McDonald has set the price for each work ranging from $500k to $16 million, equating to the estimated carbon debt of the three major NFT art marketplaces. Taken together, the works reflect on the entanglement between digital art economies and planetary survival, while offering those with the largest contributions to crypto’s historically gas heavy activities the opportunity to finally settle the score.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My work explores how archival material can come to be reinterpreted in the digital age — what new meanings can arise from digitally processing archival images, and how can these meanings change how we see and interact with archival material?

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Cali, Colombia, and I’m currently based in London, UK. I have a Bachelor of Media Studies from the University of British Columbia (2017-2021) and a Master of Science in Media and Communications, from the London School of Economics (2022-2023).

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started creating digital art at 13 years old, when I began to teach myself Photoshop on my father’s computer. I am excited to be working in the digital space because of the feeling of possibility that surrounds this practice — you never know what technology or innovation is coming next!

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Maria Samper Zamorano’s Vulgar Altar (2022), the artist draws on original footage sourced from a distant cousin, a Colombian filmmaker, to ask after the politics of perception, moving image as activist practice, and the affective capacities of the poor image. Throughout the short film, original footage is paired with its degraded double, sometimes as a diptych and at other times fully supplanted by the glitched version. Recalling Legacy Russell’s Glitch Manifesto alongside Hito Stereyl’s In Defense of the Poor Image, the project creates a poetic and potent space for questions surrounding the poor image and its body double, the entangled relationship between original and corrupted sources, personal and collective memory, trauma and political violence.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I am a London based media artist. Most of my work uses 3D animation, game design software, and 3D scanning technologies to capture and visualise architectures and landscapes that relate to British identity and history. My output ranges across digital and the analogue: short films, installations, prints and virtual environments.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in London in 1985 and still live in the city. I did not come to artistic production through the traditional art school route. I read English at University College London as a BA student, then worked in advertising for four years, while also completing an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Around 2012 I became interested in how photography was becoming raw material for use in elaborate photorealistic 3D visualisations, for example those created by architects to visualise future buildings and public spaces. I’m excited by in the immediacy and the scale of distribution that can be achieved through digital media and the opportunities for artists to teach themselves how to use these technologies very quickly.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

More than 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies; their net value in London alone is estimated at £55 billion. In Offshore Capital, an ongoing project initiated in 2019, Max Colson brings to light this expansive network of complicit real estate through 3D scanning. The animated GIF work 88 West Heath Road, London, NW3 7UJ UK (2023) is one of Colson’s case studies; digging into the 2022 HM Land Registry records, Colson presents property information alongside each scan. Within the artist’s ever-expanding database, which will take the form of a book, digital prints, and 3D laser etched glass sculptures of each property alongside the moving image works, the ghostly pixels of offshore finance offer a critical insight into the UK’s complicity in serving as an international ‘butler to the world’ for offshore companies, regimes, and oligarchs.

Link to the artwork: https://readitandweep.live/

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I focus on our relationship to the internet and the way we understand our identity through the process of consuming and producing content online.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Philadelphia, PA, USA. I currently live and work in Los Angeles, California. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degrees in Computer Science and Media Studies from Pomona College and an MFA in Media Art from UCLA.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Ever since I was a little girl I knew that I wanted to be on the computer a lot.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Maya Man’s live code project Read it and Weep (2022) is a cyber-linguistic trash heap, a ritualistic chant, an internet spell, an archive of search binges and a nonlinear elegy for our shared digital detritus. Visually, the work is pared back but harbors a mania in its minimalist approximation: pink and white text appears ad infinitum against a grey-brown backdrop, with miscellaneous excerpts (occasionally linked through to their primary source) permanently displacing and digesting the language that came before it. Culled from over a decade’s worth of collected source materials, this aggregate of text trash is a potent and persistent case study of our obsessive need to catalog and reinforce our on screen identities.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My current practice is research-based, in which I study deeply personal topics relating to my identity, memory, and ancestry using cultural methods and various AI technologies. The methods I employ when questioning and gathering information inform the output and message that I want to craft in my artwork.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, then I moved to a boarding school in the US at age 13, and I’ve subsequently lived between these two countries ever since. Today, I am based in NYC. I studied computational architecture and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Carnegie Mellon University and later got a Master’s in New Media Art at NYU’s ITP Graduate program.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started creating digital works around 2014 while studying computational architecture, which combines coding, architectural design, and sometimes robotics arms! I enjoyed working in an interdisciplinary way and using code as a medium to express ideas. It was fulfilling to working in this playful and free-thinking mode when using technology.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In NOUF ALJOWAYSIR’s Ana Min Wein (Where Am I From?) (2023), the artist merges film footage with old family photos, movie clips, and AI content detection tools to offer a poetic and political commentary on notions of migration, memory, and identity. Engaging in dialog with an AI voiceover who prompts questions to the artist, Aljowaysir traces her immigration path to the US and her family’s migration history throughout Saudi Arabia and Iraq. As the machine’s gaze follows her through a forest—occasionally misidentifying her as a bear—and simultaneously misreads her hijab as a poncho, we are exposed subtly and critically to the biases baked into such content recognition models.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My work explores the ability of video games to mediate reading and affect, by guiding the player with cinematic interactivity and connecting the act of “wandering” in video games with an individual’s feelings in wartime.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in 1995 in Ningde City, in the Fujian Province of China. I currently live in Hangzhou City, in Zhejiang Province of China. I have an MFA from The Centre for Chinese Visual Studies at the China Academy of Art and a BA from the Open Media Department, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started creating digital art in 2016, and what excites me most about digital art is that I get to discuss the issues of this era in a medium that belongs to it.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Set inside a sprawling, mostly monochromatic virtual environment, Rhett Tsai 蔡宇潇’s How Deep is the Dark Water? (乌水有多深?) (2023) is a poetic meditation on the politics of memory within the cross-cultural experience of warfare. As an experimental video game, the project leverages speculative fiction to imagine a cross-strait war. The player must manoeuvre across landscapes and contexts, encountering ghosts and violent destruction; their character is perpetually turned away from the camera, conjuring a universal persona who encounters many echos and symbols of warfare but never receives the clarity or closure of the thing first-hand. Poems are buried inside gamespace in wait for the player’s curious discovery, offering little clues and deeper perspectives on personal archives, moments of resistance, and the means of carrying on amid global precarity

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I am a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions with a special focus on glitches, resolutions, cyclopes, impossible rainbows, unnamed colours and IANA, the goddess of staircases.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

Arnhem, Netherlands. I studied new media at the University of Amsterdam.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

My interest started with the course Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Arts in 2003.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Rosa Menkman’s From one plane of complexity (2017), we hover over a monochromatic digital landscape, its glitchy pixels jostling against each other like overheated atoms. Here the Dutch media artist—known for her investigations into glitch art, cyclopes, and impossible rainbows—has shot a short cinematic video inside Unity, utilising a custom-built modification to skew the scene’s lighting in extreme, contradictory settings. The shadows began to dither: a term used in computer graphics to refer to the strategic application of ‘noise’ over typically monochromatic images to create a sense of depth. It’s in this productive perpetual rupture created by the glitch that the landscape appears to continue onwards indefinitely, each mass of quivering pixels behaving something like a portal to depths unseen.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I reimagine video games as a medium for live performance and video art, and explore the blurred boundaries between real and virtual worlds.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I live and work in London. I studied Classics as an undergraduate at Oxford, trained as an actor at LAMDA and am currently a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started making machinima in 2021. I find it very exciting to merge the seemingly disparate cultural spheres of classical theatre and video games, and to challenge their perceived positions in a supposed hierarchy of artistic expression.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Sam Crane’s We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On (2023) merges two icons of human creativity: the masterworks of William Shakespeare and Rockstar Games’ infamous Grand Theft Auto video game series. The video piece documents Crane “Shakespeare-bombing” Grand Theft Auto Online, a multiplayer iteration where users typically take turns stealing, robbing, and murdering each other. This unlikely splicing of genres creates a cognitive disconnect, wherein Crane occasionally woos his audience as a Shakespearian bard, set against missile strikes, grand larsony, and gunfire on Santa Monica beach (but his avatar is mostly shot at or ignored by other players). Both tender and darkly funny, We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On (2023) offers surprising insights and weird pockets of tenderness within the largely indifferent social network of game space.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

My work explores digital culture, with a particular focus on human-machine interactions and the influence of emerging technologies on our behaviour and experiences.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Gloucestershire, UK, and currently live and work in Birmingham. I graduated in 2017 with a degree in Interactive Arts from Manchester School of Art. Recently, I completed a master’s program in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

I started creating digital works in 2019 during a residency with Creative Youth Network in Bristol. The aspect that excites me the most is the ability to merge the digital and physical, allowing us to manifest intangible systems in a way which fosters curiosity, facilitates discussion and provokes critical thinking.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Sarah Selby’s Raised by Google (2019) draws on speculative fiction, machine learning, and critical systems thinking to question the true reach of data practices into our lives and those beyond. Pairing a choppy, pixelated video of an ultrasound with image reading algorithms and the gamification of data aggregation, we step into the black box of machine learning to witness, in real time, how these analytics are rendered in code. Applying Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Department’s code ‘Apply Magic Sauce’ (AMS), a software that builds each user’s psycho-demographic profile to better understand and challenge how big data mines the speculative value of our digital presences, the project expands on the need for digital users to protect the freedom and autonomy of the children of tomorrow.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

We how technology can catalyse interpersonal relationships and enable alternative human experiences. By creating participatory systems, we urge the audience to question who controls our online presence and speculate on how we might interact in the future.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

Max Čelar, born in Ljubjana, Slovenia (1994), based in London, BArch Architectural Association School of Architecture London. Jakob Skote, born in Ystad, Sweden (1990), based in Malmö, BArch Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. Michael Brewster, born in Uxbridge, UK (1995), based in London, MArch Bartlett UCL.

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Our interest in digital technologies started during our architecture studies. We explored how AI and immersive technologies will affect the design of homes and urban spaces. The digital realm offers many opportunities for fresh perspectives, imagining the future, and exploring new types of social interactions.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Untold Garden’s Interspatial Echoes (2023) is an AR enabled urban experience taking the shape of a digital world cloud that is activated through urban squares around Sweden. Utilising their smartphones as portals, visitors gain entry into a virtual communication platform that proprogates a cloud of crowdsourced phrases, and throughout the duration of their visit, they are invited to add to and tend to this collaborative act of communication. This linguistic garden unfurls above the visitor’s head, growing in complexity and content throughout the duration of the artwork. It connects all of Sweden’s 1979 towns and cities through a digital infrastructure. The project is a poetic mediation on both the capacity for virtual spaces to construct a sense of community while also reflecting on the politics and poetics of a digital attention economy: the platform “weights” each of its linguistic according to the frequency that each text has been read an interacted with.

Biography:

theVERSEverse is a digital poetry gallery where text is art, poetry is technology, and language is limitless.

Can you define your practice briefly: what do you try to explore through your work?

I primarily work with sound, voice, text, and moving images to explore the cultural and philosophical implications of folklore, oral history, vernacular knowledge production, and myth in order to contemplate our contemporary world.

Where were you born, what did you study and where do you now live and work?

I was born in Seoul, South Korea and I’m based in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have a BA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College in London (2013), and a MA in Fine Art from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2021).

When did you start creating digital work and what excites you most about working in the digital space?

Within the process of interpreting, translating, and adopting, I am fascinated by how the digital form of materials become reinterpreted, recontextualised, and reconfigured. I try to raise a new level of reality or creating a surreal fabrication out of what is real and present, re-imagining it to create ‘sonic fiction’.