Daniel Canogar is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video, sculpture, and installation. The evolution of the artistic object towards a digital, block-chain certified possession has radically changed the definition of material culture and archiving. Shred takes this cultural shift as its source, employing a generative animation that uses NFTs as raw material. The algorithm that activates the dynamic content of the screen has been custom designed by Canogar’s studio to capture in real time the thousands of NFTs that are being uploaded to e-commerce platforms. Once captured, the work shreds the images into rows of pixels and weaves them together into new configurations. This incessant activity evokes the indefatigable fever of digital collecting.
LIA is considered one of the pioneers of software and net art and has been producing works since 1995. Her practice spans across video, performance, software, installations, sculpture, projections and digital applications. The artist’s primary working material is code, which consists of LIA translating a concept into a formal written structure that then can be used to create a “machine” that generates real-time multimedia outputs. Since her concept is fluid – opposed to the formality of the written code that requires engineered precision – the translation process between machine and artist can be viewed like a conversation. The process is repeated until LIA is satisfied with the machine’s interpretation; at which point the generative framework, in which the artwork can develop, is considered finished. little boxes on the hillsides, mother is an animated abstract suburban cityscape powered by a program of LIA’s own design and development. Taking inspiration from the song Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, this work is a contemplation of houses and cities. The cyclical relationship between the construction of homes, the lands and environments they have replaced, and the ecosystems that will eventually replace them is echoed through an infinite production of geometric compositions. The installation of this work invites user interaction, allowing visitors to reset parameters or pause the application and view the artwork in stillness, much like a print or painting
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is known for creating large-scale interactive installations in public spaces throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Using robotics, custom software, projections, internet links, cell phones, sensors, LEDs, cameras, tracking systems, and often employing vanguard technologies, his works challenge traditional notions of site-specificity, focusing instead on the idea of creating relationship-specific work through connective interfaces. Since his emergence in the 1990s, Lozano-Hemmer has mixed the disparate fields of digital media, robotics, medical science, performance art, and lived experience into interactive artworks. Saturation Sampler uses AI computer vision to track onlookers and extract the most saturated color palettes from their bodies and clothes. Colors are analyzed and classified in real time, creating a gridded composition from the footage, where viewers catch glimpses of their reflections in the pixelated field.
Manfred Mohr is a pioneer within the field of software-based art. Co-founder of the Art et Informatique seminar in 1968 at Vincennes University in Paris, he discovered Professor Max Bense’s writing on information aesthetics in the early 1960s. These texts radically changed Mohr’s artistic thinking, and within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer-generated algorithmic geometry. Mohr’s work is an important bridge between handmade manipulations and machine-calculated structures in art. His demonstrated interest in process, language and line texture are revealed in early abstract painted works, prior to his discovery of the computer as a tool for art. Mohr’s early algorithmic work phase emphasized a “formalism” of the software medium: logical and automatic construction of pictures. In this work phase, compositions are influenced by Mohr’s observation of the way a computer-controlled drawing machine (the Benson plotter) drags ink across the paper, as if it were written in a script. Typical of his early algorithmic work, this piece links line to language, process and conceptual systems. Mohr calculated the image using a program that he authored in the FORTRAN language. With a choice of different line characteristics, an alphabet of randomly generated elements is created.
Casey Reas writes software to explore conditional systems as art. Through defining emergent networks and layered instructions, he has defined a unique area of visual experience that builds upon concrete art, conceptual art, experimental animation, and drawing. While dynamic, generative software remains his core medium, work in variable media including prints, objects, installations, and performances materialize from his visual systems. Exhibited works There’s No Distance 1.2 and HSB-119-006-090-1366-618 / HSB-135-006-090-1232-687 continue the artist’s practice of creating a system that performs the work. They specifically engage Reas’ interest in the space between the subjective experience of being in the world versus the objective, analytical way the world is measured, divided, and defined.
