ART AFTER DARK 2022
Boundless Breakers (2021)
by Jonah Allen Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, America
Jonah Allen is an American photographer whose body of work explores his relationship with the surface of the planet. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Allen lives and works in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. In 2017, Allen embarked on a wave- and light-chasing journey through Central and South America, Europe, Indonesia, Hawaii, and Iceland. On his return he amassed a substantial portfolio focused on the Florida’s Gulf Coast’s waterways.
At play in Allen’s work is the ephemeral relationship between water and light that emanates from his intimate knowledge of their raw energy. Allen is interested in abstraction, environmentalism, color, sacred geometry, and landscape, all of which include hydrological elements. A creator of both digital and analogue photography, he compels viewers to reflect on the earth’s natural landscapes.
Captured in the Gulf of Mexico, each image in Boundless Breakers is a breaking wave, which the artist describes as an intimate moment between water and light. Original score written and performed by the artist.
darknet (100p) (2016)
by Beeple Charleston, South Carolina, America
Mike Winkelman, professionally known as Beeple, is a graphic designer based in Charleston, South Carolina. Winkelman creates digitally to make artwork that includes short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, “Everydays,” and works of virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
A native of North Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Beeple began his career by creating widely used free Creative Commons VJ loops that led to concert visuals for pop stars, including Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and others.
In 2007, the cheeky artist began creating daily artworks, called “Everydays.” They came to fame when his collage “Everydays: the First 5,000 Days” was auctioned in 2021 as a non-fungible token (NFT)—the first digital work for Christie’s—and sold for $69.4 million and was paid in crypto currency.
From Beeple’s “Everyday” series, in darknet (I00p) nodes appear and disappear in elastic patterns forming a complex game of cat’s cradle. From the artist, “I know beeple that know beeple.”
The Garden (2013)
by Michael Burton, Lincoln Nebraska, America
Michael Burton is a digital artist, film producer, and professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He combines art, film, and animation to create digital artwork. Both an accomplished professor as evidenced in the success of his students, he is a frequent and featured exhibitor in Museums and Film Festivals. His work has been shown at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska; the Denver Art Museum; at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Art Museum; the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, at Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach, Florida; and at the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln where he lives and is represented by Kiechel Fine Art.
Burton’s films have appeared at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville; the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles; the Utopia Film Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland; the Hampton Film Festival in Hampton Road, Virginia; the Hip Hop Film Festival in New York City; and the Bronze Lens Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Garden shows painterly reductions of a meadow in a meditative motion, disturbed by an onslaught of technology. (Stop motion animation)
Shrooms (2018)
by Colors and the Kids, Berlin, Germany
Colors and the Kids is a creative company that specializes in design, motion, and music. The group’s studio is based in Berlin where its team works closely with the leading brands worldwide, creating meaningful and forward-thinking content together. Colors and the Kids is structured uniquely such that its projects are partner-led collaborations based on deep friendships and shared compassion for the work.
The studio encourages its clients to think about new perspectives and leads them in navigating wholesome and thoughtful processes. The company name itself, Colors and the Kids, reaffirms daily its core beliefs, intuitive trustworthiness, and non-prejudicial open minded attitude.
Shrooms is a colorful research project in artificial growth algorithms.
Dirty Look (2021)
by Zlatko Ćosić , St. Louis, Missouri, America
Zlatko Ćosić is a video artist born in former Yugoslavia. His work includes short films, video installations, theater and architectural projections, and audio-visual performances. He studied electrical and computer engineering in Yugoslavia and Serbia, and later earned a BA in Video Production and Interactive Digital Media from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri and later a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art at Washington University, also in St. Louis.
Ćosić’s work began with the challenges of immigration and shifting identities, and evolved to socio-political issues associated with injustice, consumerism, and climate crisis.
Dirty Look is about simple movement and presence in space, inviting the viewer to come and go as they please.
Anonymous Enemy Procession (2018)
by Ian Gouldstone, London, United Kingdom
Ian Gouldstone is a BAFTA winning artist and filmmaker whose work incorporates games, animation and new media. He graduated from Harvard University in Mathematics and in Animation at the Royal College of Art, and holds an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
Gouldstone describes himself as “a conceptual artist addressing themes of frustration, spectacle, pleasure and distraction through immersive installation, electronic objects, and film. I draw on my background in mathematics, videogame design, artificial intelligence and animation to synthesize a new language that resonates with and contemplates our contemporary digital experience. My work is influenced by diverse sources ranging from the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han and the poetry of Wallace Stevens to Angry Birds and Reddit.”
Ian Gouldstone is a founder of the Australian games collective Pachinko Pictures, a former member of the Computational Creativity Group at Goldsmiths, and also the Gesture and Narrative Language Group at the MIT Media Lab. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics before studying animation at the Royal College of Art, and more recently completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
Normally NPCs (non-playing characters from video games) travel right to left, attacking the player and causing general mayhem. In this artwork, Gouldstone turns the table and frees the NPCs, allowing them to behave as if in a civil parade—what will they do next?
The Astronaut (2014)
by Olga Guse, Dresden, Germany
Born in the Saratov, a city in Southwestern Russia on the banks of the Volga River, Guse’s field of study was Art History. Since 2003, Guse has called Dresden her home. Using “stop motion” to enliven her paintings as a primary medium, Guse has shown or curated works for festivals, exhibitions, and screenings around the world.
Her stylized whimsical figures and colorful landscapes are the overlay to deeper meaning and messaging. Referred to as “a visionary video and painting activist,” Guse has recently curated workshops and exhibitions in Dresden, including “INLUSICHT” (meaning “included”) for artists with and without immigration backgrounds and another titled “Kunst als Brücke” (meaning “art as a bridge”) for artists with and without disabilities.
In The Astronaut, an American astronaut embarks on a mythic journey across an imagined time and space, in stop motion animation.
Dolphin and Seal (2022)
by Kaybid, Istanbul, Turkey
Kaybid is an intermedia artist and works in organic graffiti digitalized after its installation. He began in creating his version of an “urban jungle” in 2018, and has been installing his artwork on the walls of Istanbul since. His work recently appeared at Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach, Florida where he exhibited 150 small collages on the white-washed walls of the New Urbanist community in Northwestern Florida.
The artist who uses only his graffiti-esque handle develops his imagery such that when displayed back to back it coalesces in motion. The video animation of the organic paintings come alive. Viewers see the painted images in their daytime lived experiences, artwork in its own right. At night, the animated projections of the same works bring a new media perspective to the already familiar traditional medium. It is as if Kybid’s creations, like some of the animals he paints, are daytime hibernators who come out to play at night.
Dolphin and Seal are small hand-painted collages displayed on a wall by day, and coalescing in motion by night.
Homage to Bridget Riley (2019)
by Olga Guse, Dresden, Germany
Considered one of the pioneers of software and net.art or internet art, Austrian artist LIA has been producing works since 1995. She applies video, live performance, software, installations, sculpture, projections, digital, and combinations therein, using code itself as her medium.
By combining the traditions of drawing and painting with the aesthetics of digital images and algorithms, her works are characterized by a minimalist quality with an affinity for conceptual art. She focuses on the translation of certain experienced principles into abstract forms, movements, and colors allowing the viewer to explore the same at a subconscious level.
About Homage to Bridget Riley LIA notes: given the way computer hardware interacts with the movement of the black and white lines, shades of grey appear, providing the moving images with a surprising depth.
Transcendence 115 (2015)
by LIA, Vienna, Austria
The Viennese artist LIA translates from the conceptual to a “written” or coded structure for machine-generated real-time multimedia outputs. LIA’s process is fluid by nature as compared to the formality of engineered precision and she sees the artist-machine interchange as a conversation.
LIA is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2017 Outstanding Artist Award, Austria; Digital Graffiti 2014 Curator’s Choice Award; Prix Ars Electronica 2007 Honorable Mention; a First Prize in Innovative Cinema at the 2006 Diagonale Film Festival; and the Net Excellence/Award of Distinction at the Prix Ars Electronica.
In Transcendence 115 black and white lines generate new sources of depth, confusing our vision and leading us to believe there is more to space than initially thought.
Excerpt from 5 Cyclic Hiva Flowpi number 3 (2018)
by Jonathan McCabe, Canberra, Australia
Jonathan McCabe is a generative artist living in Canberra, Australia. He currently works as Assistant Curator of Digital Archives at the National Library of Australia. McCabe’s interest in computer art dates to the early 1980’s.
He is fascinated by the ability of natural systems to generate form. In his recent work, he turns toward generating artworks based on a theory of biological pattern formation, such as spots and stripes on tropical fish, as first posited by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1952. Since 2008 McCabe has gone beyond modeling the minimal two component reaction diffusion systems on the computer to more complicated systems with increasingly more components. The basic forms in his art are recognized as Turing patterns.
5 Cyclic Hiva Flowpi number 3 is a simulation of the process that produces spots and stripes on tropical fish, combined with a 2-dimensional compressible fluid flow in an inflating 5-fold cyclic space with polar co-ordinates to make—a flower?
Frosti (2013)
by Matt Pearson (aka zenbullets), Brighton, United Kingdom
Matt Pearson refers to himself as a “Maker of abstract things. Author of ‘Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing.” In a 2013 issue of Vice magazine, Pearson “ponders whether we’re entering a new artistic era, one defined by the possibilities of real-time art” in an article titled, “The Third Era of Visual Art Is Finally Upon Us.”
Extracted from Novelty Waves, he starts off with “When my kids ask me, ‘what did you do in the Visual Art Wars dad,’ I can tell them, with pride, that I fought on the side of the future…”
Frosti is like a complex string of pearls, a simple spherical mesh rotates and warbles into what could be a world-building moment on the head of a pin.
Veneer (2021)
by Robert Seidel, Berlin, Germany
Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science and technology. By the organic interplay of various structural, spatial and temporal concepts, he creates a continuously evolving complexity.
He began his studies in biology before transferring to the Bauhaus University Weimar to complete his degree in media design. His projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals.
Out of this multifaceted perspective emerges a narrative skeleton, through which viewers connects to the artwork on an evolutionary derived and phylogenetic-fixated symbolic level.
Veneer shows a subtle rotation of a digitally elegant but seemingly fragile 3D form.
Reulf (2016)
by Tout Court, Paris, France
Literally translated “Tout Court” means short: figuratively, it means simply, with no addition or qualification. In the case of Charles Klipfel, Quentin Carnicelli, and Jean-François Jégo, Tout Court’s collaborators, they combine the best of both definitions for the creation of short animated films that are delivered simply and pointedly. Their landing page on Vimeo says it all, “We love to make short films.”
In Reulf, Tout Court explores pseudo-active perceptions of viewers by adding micro movements on screen. They play with parallax effects to better understand the depth of the set and volume of small characters. Tout Court is the recipient of Best Video Clip Award at the Festival International Benicàssim in Spain, and Reulf was a national selection in the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France, and the winner of the Audience Award, which was sponsored by Dreamworks, at e.Magician Festival also in France.
Reulf shows digital tourists unwinding with the locals and exploring the city of Paris.
SkyReport (2017)
by Sean Capone Brooklyn, New York, America
Sean Capone is an artist who creates using digital animation, projected installations, and moving images. Having worked for more than 20 years in digital video and animation. Capone has an extensive body of work that has been shown in television, video games, music videos, gallery and museum exhibitions, and at festivals, in event and stage scenography, and at site-specific public art installations. Capone studied in the Video Art/New Media program at the University of Texas at Arlington under multi-media artist Jim Pomeroy.
SkyReport is a combination of algorithmically generated and hand-rendered marks & forms evoke a range of associations, from Abstract Expressionism to graffiti, from musical notation to cosmological phenomena.
Waiting for You to Come Too (2022)
by FeverDreamScapes, Miami, Florida and Chicago, Illinois, America
FeverDreamScapes is a collaborative series created by Keaton Fox and Renée Silva. The two experiment with painting and video to create an uncanny effect. By integrating traditional and new media, video artist Fox and painter Silva generate surreal landscapes of static and moving images that visualize paradoxical ecologies of the present.
Silva’s abstracts oil paintings of rooms, foliage, and symbols are animated and assimilated into Fox’s video collages of limbs, animals, and loss. The contemplative traditional medium unfolds to a new narrative as the painting imagery dissolves to pixels of chaos and connection. Weaving contemporary with traditional introduces a unique visual language that the duo says, “alludes to a universal but undefined feeling of recurring dissonance.”
Waiting for You to Come Too combines old and new media combine: an oil painting of house and home overlaid by the comfort of a wire fence is invaded by a rising tide and the inundation associated with climate change.
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