There was a time when optimisation was a technical term – the language of engineers, logistics managers and software designers. Today, optimisation is an aesthetic. In our algorithmically determined world, clarity sells. Design, at least in the digital space, is now about frictionlessness and legibility – all modular layouts, sans-serif type and white space.

We can trace the origins of this mindset all the way back to industrialisation, whose standardising principles formed the backbone of modernism, which rejected ornamentation in favour of functional logic. Minimalism extended this ethos by stripping design down to its essential elements. In architecture, the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Tadao Ando emphasised structural clarity and open space; in art, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt stripped away gesture and symbolism in favour of repetition and spatial relationships.

The digital revolution and, with it, UX (user experience) design – which requires efficiency and intuition – inherited these principles, and the rise of touch interfaces – demanding absolute clarity – intensified them. Early computer systems were clunky and dense but, over time, just as modernism rejected visual richness in favour of flow, serifs disappeared from typefaces and skeuomorphism – apps and icons styled like leather-bound calendars, yellow legal pads or detailed rubbish bins – gave way to abstract, 'flat' design.

This logic has begun to seep into physical art, often designed to read at thumbnail scale, colour-calibrated for screens and staged around ‘shareable’ angles. Artists like Petra Cortright produce digitally native work that turns everyday online culture – webcams, GIFs and Photoshop layers – into fine art. Martine Syms examines how Black identity circulates through media systems, while working fluently within them, describing herself as a ‘conceptual entrepreneur’ and borrowing from marketing, branding and corporate language. The contemporary creative is no longer just an artist, but a coherent visual system.

Designing the self

This logic underpins what is perhaps the defining 'exhibition space' of our time: the Instagram grid. Clean, modular and infinitely scrollable, its three-column layout is carefully designed to maximise content density while maintaining visual order.

‘Platforms like Instagram don't merely display images, they impose a visual epistemology,’ says Lev Manovich, a professor of digital culture at the City University of New York and author of The Language of New Media. ‘The grid, the square crop, the algorithmic feed – these are not neutral containers. They train our perception and affect how we process information and experiences outside of screens.’

Marquard Smith, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture and professor of artistic research at Vilnius Academy of Arts, agrees: ‘In the context of [UX culture’s] user-centricity, as consumers, it seems like we are getting what we want. But in actual fact, it’s more the case that our desires are being produced, designed and shaped by it.’

If modernism privileged functional coherence in objects, late capitalism extends those values to people. The individual becomes a design project: streamlined, curated and legible.

This performance of self-optimisation plays out vividly on social media, where influencers document 5am wake-ups, regular workouts and ‘clean’ eating. It even spawned the digital aesthetic trend known as the ‘clean girl’ (as of February 2026, the hashtag had been used over 1.2 million times on TikTok): a persona defined by exercise, skincare rituals and perfectly curated beige homes. ‘The pressure toward coherence – consistent palette, recognisable style, legible “brand” – is not vanity. It is a structural requirement of platforms that reward algorithmic legibility,’ explains Manovich. ‘What looks like an aesthetic choice is often a compliance strategy.’

During its heyday, a critique of modernism was that it risked turning design preference into moral prescription – that ‘restraint’ was promoted not merely as a stylistic choice, but as an ethically superior way of living. Adolf Loos’ 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime – considered one of modernism’s seminal texts – condemned decoration as wasteful and culturally backward.

Similarly, social media’s hyper-curated lifestyles – frictionless, calibrated, free of imperfections – become inextricably tied to ideas about self-worth. ‘There’s nothing inherently neutral about optimisation,’ argues Smith. ‘It’s all part of a “civilising process”. The pressure to optimise – to succeed, to conform, to be “liked” – is bad for personhood, for wellbeing, for the world.’

‘Less is a bore’: In praise of messiness

In 1972, architecture theorist Charles Jencks declared modernism symbolically ‘dead’, based on a common critique that its ultimate expression could feel sterile or inhuman. This backlash set the stage for the rise of postmodernism, encapsulated in architect Robert Venturi’s assertion that ‘less is a bore’.

Now, a counter-aesthetic to our new ‘digital modernism’ is emerging: messy, awkward and visibly human. It foregrounds friction over seamlessness: grids are disrupted, kerning misaligned, typography hand-drawn and layers overlapping. On social media, it shows up as ‘lo-fi’ or anti-aesthetic culture – flash-heavy photography, screenshots posted to the grid and Instagram ‘photo dumps’ of blurry selfies and half-eaten meals.

Contemporary artists such as Cecily Brown, Mark Bradford and Charline von Heyl use loose brushwork, collage, tears, smudges and drips – a lineage that draws on the fragmented, gestural traditions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This emphasis on making ‘the hand’ visible was pushed further in Laura Lima’s ‘The Drawing Drawing’ at London’s ICA earlier in 2026, which reimagined life drawing as a participatory, shifting experience in which models and viewers moved on mechanised platforms. The process itself became the spectacle.

‘In my own art practice, I make iPad paintings that take 45 to 60 hours each, using slow manual processes. The work is dense, nuanced and deliberately “overworked” by platform standards,’ says Manovich. ‘It maintains a different temporality – a refusal of the efficiency imperative.’ (In this spirit, people are actively opting out of UX-optimised tech in favour of intentionally limited devices that add friction and reduce engagement, as reflected in our edit of ‘lo-fi gadgets’).

Could it be that what we’re seeing today echoes the pendulum swing that followed modernism’s apex – that people are beginning to withdraw from the labour of self-branding? Perhaps, but, as Smith points out, ‘anti-design is still a design aesthetic’. The photo dump becomes a performance of nonchalance. Evidence of process in art and visual culture becomes a trend. Which raises the question: does authenticity always become a strategy?

The aesthetics of optimisation are not inherently shallow – UX principles emerged to make systems more accessible. But under late capitalism, ambiguity, slowness and difficulty – qualities central to art and, surely, happiness – risk marginalisation. The turn towards the unpolished signals a desire to reintroduce texture and imperfection into life – to resist the expectation that everything needs to ‘convert’.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is having a moment at the crest of the cultural zeitgeist. Not content with opening up some of its vast archive of objects to public scrutiny, courtesy of the newly opened V&A East Storehouse, the august institution is now venturing into another field of curation; online.

Today marks the acquisition of the museum’s most nebulous accession to date: YouTube. On the face of it, the global video platform is an ever-mutating, impossible-to-bottle snapshot of modern culture, used by some 2.5 billion around the world – making it the world’s second-most visited website (after its parent company, Google, which acquired YouTube less than two years after it debuted for around $1.65bn).

According to the platform, around 20 million videos get uploaded to YouTube every day, petabytes’ worth of content (1,000,000 gigabytes) that either contribute to an invaluable archive of humanity or represent a tidal wave of cultural cruft, awash with slop, trivia, the morally dubious and constant, relentless copyright infringement.

But that’s the modern day. Where did it all start? Digital media might be incredibly transient – and a curatorial headache – but YouTube’s origin story is fairly well documented. The new acquisition takes you back in time nearly 20 years to one of the earliest iterations of the website, presenting it as a snapshot of the early platform, along with the very first video ever uploaded to the platform.

This artefact – 'Me at the zoo' – features and was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, then 25, following a visit to San Diego Zoo. Just 19 seconds long, it’s the internet’s equivalent of the first cave painting, the first vinyl record or the first ever fax. Those 19 seconds have endured however, remaining in the public realm ever since, viewed nearly 380 million times (and given 18 million likes) since it debuted on YouTube on 23 April 2005.

It’s grainy, low-res and low-fi, an indication of just how quickly the quality of portable technology has evolved (it was shot on a digital camera, not a phone). Me at the zoo is important for all sorts of reasons; it’s the first piece of user-generated media, marking the start of the inexorable shift towards content creation, the rise of the influencer, the permanently online and the digital economy that has come with it.

Naturally, YouTube has driven, supported, and promoted this economy every step of the way, enabling the monetisation of content through a slick, algorithmically generated advertising system that turns your viewing habits into a stream of purchasing opportunities.

With this cultural shift has come a necessary shift in the role of a museum like the V&A, originally founded in 1852 ‘to educate designers, manufacturers and the public in art and design’. With some 2.8 million objects in its collection, the V&A has long championed the value of the esoteric and the ephemeral, whether it’s trawling high streets for pizza flyers or acquiring chunks of lost brutalist masterpieces.

The digital collection already include items as diverse as the Chinese social platform WeChat, the deliberately infuriating mobile game Flappy Bird, the EUKI app, and the illustrator Aphelandra Messer’s design for the mosquito emoji.

YouTube 2006 will sit in the Design 1900 – Now gallery at V&A South Kensington. According to Corinna Gardner, Senior Curator of Design and Digital at the V&A, ‘these galleries are full of objects that we use to navigate our place within the world, be it watches, be it chairs… Our everyday world is digital devices, smartphones and the internet platforms. They're all part of that designed environment that makes up how we live our lives. For a museum like the V&A, it is important to bring these types of objects into the collection. It enables a critical curiosity about how these things are created and designed.’

In 2014, Gardner launched the V&A’s Rapid Response Collecting programme, acquiring contemporary objects ‘in response to major moments in recent history that touch the world of design and manufacturing’. It’s taken 18 months to bring this display to life, working with YouTube’s own User Experience team and oio, an interaction design company founded by designers Matteo Loglio and Simone Rebaudengo.

The reconstructed watch page also highlights the innovations YouTube brought to the web, with the ability to share, like and recommend content; the building blocks of the modern internet. The page is dated 8 December 2006 – this is the oldest archived version of the YouTube page on The Internet Archive. Technical challenges included working around the now-defunct Adobe Flash Player.

‘The reconstructed watch page also has ads that are of the time,’ says Gardner, ‘The original video player was built to run on Adobe Flash, but today it’s being emulated with an open source project called Ruffle. So it shows the original video, with the documented comments from that underneath it.’

For YouTube itself, the inclusion of their history in the V&A is something of a fillip. Unsurprisingly, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, called the museum’s decision ‘wonderful’, adding ‘by reconstructing the original 2005 watch page, we aren't just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon.’

VAM.ac.uk

oio.studio

Digital art has been bruised by two acronyms rich with uncertainty, NFTs and AI, each adding a layer of obfuscation to the endeavours of anyone working in pixels rather than paint. True ‘generative art’ – that is to say, procedural art created by hand-crafted code – has therefore suffered, de-platformed and overwhelmed by AI slop and dubious get-rich-quick schemes.

Attempting to right these wrongs is the starting for a new digital platform, Layer Canvas, a start-up initiated by Deviant Art founder Angelo Sotira. With industrial design by Will Howe at Demo, the Layer Canvas is billed as the first true dedicated platform for digital art, a museum-quality 1.1m2 display contained within an aluminium frame that’s distinct from a regular flat screen.

In fact, the Layer Canvas is a computer you hang on your wall, incorporating not just a high-definition museum grade screen but all the processing power required to drive generative artworks – ‘painted in code’. The aluminium frame conceals a dedicated GPU that enables the canvas to run real-time code-based art from a growing library of unique pieces, all curated by the platform.

‘The clarity is on another level compared to video,’ says Howe, ‘there’s no compression or artefacts.’ In fact, this kind of all-in-one platform has never existed before, beyond using a powerful computer hooked up to a separate screen.

The team approached artists working with code to find out what they wanted from a dedicated platform, and this was the result, a very intentional surface for art – with no sound, no family photo albums, weather, TV or other distractions. The 1:1 ratio was also a deliberate move away from the filmic 16:9 and other traditional media ratios.

Howe’s studio was also involving in the branding and business plan, in addition to the industrial design. Back when he was working at Map Project Office, Howe was on the team that developed the Sky Glass television, a project that brought plenty of close involvement with the fast-moving display sector.

‘It’s a very high-performance back-lit LED panel,’ the designer says of the Layer system, ‘it’s always on and has anti-glare coating and a high contrast true black display to do the art justice.’ Other aspects of the design focused on performance and precision, such as the relatively thick panel, rather than a tech-centric sophistication. ‘The 1:1 ratio takes it away from the language of television,’ Howe says, ‘it’s designed to hang on the wall, or on a picture rail just in front of a wall, or even as a room divider.’

To achieve the latter, the rear panel had to look as good as the front, so a gridded design was chosen to make it feel more sculptural and elegant, with Donald Judd cited as an inspiration. ‘It feels more like an ornament for the home, not a fixture that’s just stuck on,’ Howe says. ‘We didn’t want it to feel like a piece of tech – it’s totally passive.’ Layer’s CCO Ben Wolstenholme describes the panel as being like a fireplace – a ‘reassuring presence.’

The art itself is perhaps something of an acquired taste. One of the driving forces behind the project is the American artist and coder Casey Reas, a professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a practitioner and the co-creator (with Ben Fry) of Processing, an open source ‘software sketchbook’ that is the computational heart of much of the work on display. ‘At the beginning, we went to some of the foundational people in generative art,’ says Wolstenholme, ‘Casey said that ‘I’ve waited all my career for this…. basically, it’s the best their art has ever looked.’

Many of the available pieces, including works by Reas, Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Anton Dubrovin, Arttu Koskela and more, evolve slowly, as if an abstract expressionist canvas was subtly shifting and changing throughout the day. Some run through cycles, others never repeat, and a ‘playlist’ can be created on the accompanying app with mood recommendations.

Many of the pieces are interactive, with parameters that can be changed via the app, ranging from forms and colour through to the speed of iteration. What’s more, Layer’s subscription model allows for artists to receive royalties based on how long each piece is ‘viewed’ by the subscriber base. Canvas is a progressive platform in more ways than one.

Layer.com, DemoStudio.co.uk

David Hockney is one of the world’s most famous living artists — pioneer of gay identity, icon of swinging ‘60s London, chronicler of people and places in his adopted city of Los Angeles, scholar of Picasso— and the subject of countless retrospectives. However, a show at the Palm Springs Art Museum addresses all of that and more with the revealing title David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

Comprised entirely of prints ranging from the traditional lithography Hockney began in the 1950s to his current mastery of the iPhone and iPad, the 160 works are from the singular Jordan Schnitzer. The Portland, Oregon collector, owning more than 20,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art, has devoted himself to acquiring complete sets of editioned works by contemporary legends like Jasper Johns, Ellworth Kelly, John Baldessari and others. He says, “Once I bought that first work of art, it just never stopped. Now I have no sense of ownership but a great sense of stewardship.” The Schnitzer Foundation regularly funds and supports exhibitions of their prints.

Though many have tested the boundaries of printmaking, Hockney has used it to question what constitutes fine art. The consummate painter and colourist embraces untested technologies. The show includes his chaotic collages of multiple photographs to explore ideas about Picasso’s use of perspective. It was through photography that he began researching the camera lucida, its role in Renaissance painting and ideas about “reversing perspective.”

“The moment you realise what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well—and that is why you could see round the back of the body as well as the front—once you begin to realise this, it becomes a very profound experience, because you begin to see what he is doing is not as a distortion and slowly, it then begins to look more and more real, in fact, it is naturalism that begins to look less and less real.”

Using a Pentax camera, Hockney combined numerous snaps to complete a portrait of his visiting mother in a way that she is swept into the tumult of his shelves of Zervos catalogs and his own Picasso painting while her white handbag and green suitcase lay touchingly on the carpeted floor. 'My Mother Los Angeles' (1982) exemplifies his exploration of Cubist perspective, which evolves throughout the exhibition.

Hockney gravitated to technological innovation in tandem with his interest in Picasso. Using a xerox machine in the 1980s, he made numerous still lifes and interiors whose charm is at odds with their humble origins. He liked the immediacy of printing an image, changing it and reprinting it on the spot.

But it is digital technology that has captured his heart and mind. “Digital photography can free us from a chemically imposed perspective that has lasted for 180 years,” he insists. A 2014 'photographic drawing' titled 'Perspective Should Be Reversed' features images of his friends standing in a room with a drawn red table that appears to move towards, instead of away, from the viewer. The real and invented coalesce.

Now living in France, the 87-year-old Hockney draws and paints on an iPad as though working on a sketching block. Far from a limitation, it seems to have unleashed ever more ambitious endeavours. In 2019, fascinated by the ways narrative unfolds sequentially in the Bayeux Tapestry, he drew scenes of his house and studio in the Normandy countryside in the seasonal hues of spring and fall. Each is inkjet printed on a 40-foot long band of paper.

More than a dozen of his 2021 floral iPad paintings, all hung on a Wedgewood blue wall, prove the variety Hockney can achieve. There is a double self-portrait of the artist himself, seated in two different wicker chairs, looking at these works in his studio. Taking the cue, the museum used lovely coloured walls throughout the show to compliment the works on paper.

The Hockney show originated at the Honolulu Art Museum but was expanded by the Palm Springs curator Christine Vendredi and director Adam Lerner to include earlier, more sexually provocative work for the museum’s new Q+ initiative highlighting work by artists who identify as LBGTQ+. Schnitzer says, “This is an exceptional exhibition, not only for the community here but for any of us dealing with how we evolved.”

Lithographs from Hockney’s 1966 response to the poems of C.P.Cavafy include a delicate rendering of a pair of naked men in bed. Gay friends are featured throughout the show including a print of L.A. icons author Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy — also one of Hockney’s most renowned paintings — and the prominent art dealer Nick Wilder. There are prints devoted to lovers and partners throughout the years.

The variety and depth of the show is a tribute to Schnitzer. It is rare collector who enables shows that provoke fresh understanding of artists in all of their phases of development.

'There is so much negative discussion about artificial intelligence,' he notes. 'But look at David Hockney when Xerox machines first came out. Look at what he did. Then polaroids and then, in 2004, when the Ipads came out, oh my God, it’s like the horses left the barn! He was able to take that technology and create some of the prettiest things ever made. It’s a joyful exhibition at a time when we all need a little joy in our lives.'

'Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints by David Hockney from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation' is at Palm Springs Art Museum until March 31, 2025

psmuseum.org

Hingston Studio has been announced as the next XO/Art series artist to be featured at the Exosphere, the LED exterior of entertainment orb Sphere, in Las Vegas (the venue inaugurated by U2 in 2023). The London-based creative studio has designed a bespoke digital art piece titled Exhale, which explores the notion of connectivity through a visualisation of kinetic touch points.

Founded by the visionary Tom Hingston, Hingston Studio is renowned for work that seamlessly blends art and technology. With a cultural portfolio that has been exhibited worldwide – including designing album covers for Massive Attack, moulding Grace Jones' body parts from chocolate and making music videos with the late David Bowie – Hingston Studio's newest challenge is designing for the world's largest LED screen.

Exhale delves into the intricate concept of connectivity and the dynamic nature of kinetic touch points. Resembling a giant plasma globe, this innovative artwork transcends traditional boundaries, exploring the profound essence of human connection on a one-of-a-kind digital canvas.

The Exosphere is covered with nearly 580,000 sq ft of fully programmable LED panelling. It consists of approximately 1.2 million LED pucks, spaced eight inches apart. Each puck contains 48 individual LED diodes – creating a vivid new landmark on the Las Vegas skyline, that is visible from space.

Wallpaper* asked Tom Hingston, founder of Hingston Studio, about how a project like this comes together.

Wallpaper*: You've sculpted Grace Jones out of a chocolate, made music videos for David Bowie – how does designing art for a giant desert orb compare?

Tom Hingston: We’ve always embraced projects that present new challenges and problem-solving – quite often the learnings and experience gained in those instances can be applied in other areas of our practice.

Whether working for an artist, a brand or a cultural organisation, we have always enjoyed projects that push us creatively and this certainly presented that challenge.

W*: What are some of the technical challenges of designing at this scale?

TH: To some extent, this project was a learning curve for all involved, both us and the team at Sphere. Of course, the technology is tried and tested; however, the Sphere is still in its infancy, so how certain visuals behave at that scale is different each time. In that sense each new piece of visual content brings its own individual challenges which need to be worked through collaboratively with the team. Designing for this canvas is entirely unique because essentially you’re building a simulation for a spherical screen, so it needs to feel seamless, regardless of the angle you’re viewing it from. That’s why we were excited about the possibility of creating something that could wrap itself around the physical form – a dynamic expression that extends across the surface area and envelops the Sphere.

W*: The piece explores themes of connectivity and kinetic touch – why was that front of mind?

TH: Above all, we wanted to use the Exosphere’s scale and location to create something really beautiful that could connect with people globally – a universal gesture that would be experienced at different levels, depending on the viewers’ proximity to the piece.

Exhale will be displayed on Sphere until the end of August 2024 as an initial launch, but will remain part of its programming for the next two years.

The XO/Art series at Sphere in Las Vegas is a programme designed to integrate art and technology in a unique and engaging way. Previous featured artists include GRAMMY Award-winning percussionist Mickey Hart, new media artist Refik Anadol, and filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg.

Maxim Zhestkov’s London studio is an emporium for the future. Located in the W1 Curates building, it has everything a digital art pioneer could dream of: a vast ground-floor space with floor-to-ceiling screens, multiple recording studios to meet every sonic need, and a huge warehouse floor-turned-VR playground. It’s here, while comfortably rooted on planet Earth, that Zhestkov hands me a VR headset, sends me to a different planet, and proceeds to rewire everything I thought I knew about art galleries. 

This unearthly space is ‘Modules’, Zhestkov’s new playground for digital art. Blending sculpture, architecture, film and music, in this cavernous bespoke museum for the artist’s work, viewers are not viewers but participants. 

‘Modules’ by Maxim Zhestkov: art meets gaming

Zhestkov’s practice orbits around how in digital space, we can abandon the logic of reality, and become liberated from its constraints. Gaming has been a long-term preoccupation for the artist, who grew up in Ulyanovsk, Russia, and studied architecture and graphic design at Ulyanovsk State University. ‘Gaming platforms have always been a source of fascination for me, and their capacity for creating immersive and captivating art is often underrated,’ says the artist, whose collaborators range from Google, PlayStation, Adobe, Nokia, Adidas and BMW, to art platforms and galleries such as W1 Curates, where Zhestkov exhibited last year, and Unit London, where he will unveil a solo show next month. ‘As I delved into the captivating worlds of gaming and art, I recognised that they were often perceived as distinct realms, evolving independently of one another. However, I couldn't help but notice the boundless potential that lay at their intersection.’

In the contemporary art world, the word ‘immersive’ is applied to almost anything involving a screen and a soundtrack. ‘Modules’ is submersive; taking body and mind through an 11-room network of space-age staircases, ledges, lifts and corridors, navigated by pinching your (real-world) fingers. Your earthbound body flinches as Zhestkov’s monumental sculptures sail past your face, almost squash you, and bend, dissolve, and warp around you. They are hyperreal digital simulations that mirror real-world physics, halfway between the gaming universe and real-world museum experience. 

‘Modules’, which has been launched with Finnish virtual reality manufacturer Varjo, is an evolving project, expanding to contain Zhestkov’s entire body of work as it grows, blurring the boundaries between art, games, and reality and carving a new space for art in the metaverse. 

Zhestkov’s mission for Modules is not modest; he hopes it’s the first step in ‘revolutionising the world of art’, in a fusion of art, technology, and human imagination. ‘With “Modules”, my immersive VR art space/gallery, I have created a unique platform that enables me to express my creativity, push the boundaries of artistic exploration, and redefine the future of artistic experiences.’

Modules is currently available to experience free of charge on the platforms Steam and Oculus. ‘I will incorporate new rooms and installations, each carefully designed to challenge the conventional norms of artistic expression’, says Zhestkov. ‘It is my firm belief that art should be accessible to all, and in pursuit of this ideal, I am excited to announce that soon, “Modules” will be available to everyone, free. This endeavour aims to democratise the world of digital art, inspiring countless individuals to engage with and contribute to this ever-expanding universe.’ 

Modules can be experienced via Steam and Oculus 

Zhestkov will unveil a solo show at Unit London from 20 June - 22 July 2023. unitlondon.com

zhestkov.studio

Surveying and synthesising more than 200 years of art from MoMA’s collection would be a daunting, and likely insurmountable task for most artists and researchers. Not so much for Refik Anadol, who recently unveiled a major installation in the museum’s ground-floor Gund Lobby, using AI art to generate endlessly changing forms and sounds across a 24ft x 24ft media wall, based on 320,000 visual inputs.

Unsupervised, as the installation is tagged, is a major career moment. ‘To show at MoMA is one of my biggest motivations in life,’ describes the Turkish-born, LA-based media artist. But numerically speaking, it is far from the most ambitious. In 2019, he’d used 100 million photographs of New York City, found publicly on social networks, to create a 30-minute cinematic piece. For a 2020 exhibition at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, Anadol deployed Google AI’s algorithms to process around 200 million nature and landscape images to create a 3D visual piece, Quantum Memories. The following year, his contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sense of Space, involved a collaboration with neuroscientist Taylor Kuhn to develop machine-learning algorithms based on 70 terabytes of MRI data, then used it to imagine the development of brain circuitry throughout the human lifespan. Not only is Anadol fascinated by what data sets tell us about the world, he also uses words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘inspiring’ to describe them.

‘In 2008, I coined the term “data painting” to express the idea that data can become a pigment that reflects imagination. This has driven my practice for 14 years,’ he tells me via Google Meet from his LA studio. Rather than conventional paintings, which involve fixing paint on canvas, he creates ‘living paintings’ which morph and evolve infinitely.  

‘I became the first artist-in-residence at Google in 2016, which made me realise that a machine can learn, it can remember, and it can dream,’ Anadol continues. ‘Machines are becoming part of our society, and now they’re in our creative practice as well. It’s a whole new world.’

He explains that the MoMA installation has its origins in a 2021 online exhibition on the digital art platform Feral File, for which he’d trained a machine-learning model to interpret publicly available visuals and information around the museum’s collection to create a piece of generative art. The result was MoMA’s first NFT collaboration, ‘reimagining the trajectory of modern art, paying homage to its history and dreaming about its future’. ‘The idea is to stand on the shoulders of these incredibly pioneering artists [in the museum’s collection] to create something new,’ says Anadol.

Unsupervised takes the collaboration further, introducing a physical dimension as well as incorporating live inputs. Sensors within the Gund Lobby – which detect changes in light, numbers and movement of people, as well as the weather – will inform the visuals and sound, further reinforcing the idea of a living artwork. It is true that technology will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but Anadol is keen to emphasise the importance of human involvement. There is a lot of work that his 15-strong team (including computer graphic experts, architects, designers, musicians, data scientists, and AI researchers, who all together come from 11 countries) have put into creating a new AI model, and setting parameters so the AI can make decisions around colours, forms, patterns and speed. ‘It's not an autonomous piece, because I don't believe that’s what the future should be. I think human and machine collaborations are more relevant and positive for the future.’

The installation was co-curated by Michelle Kuo, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, and Paola Antonelli, the museum’s senior curator of architecture and design, and director of research and development. ‘With this commission, MoMA underscores its support of artists experimenting with new technologies as tools to expand their vocabulary, their impact, and their ability to help society understand and manage change,’ explains Antonelli.

Certainly, seeing Anadol’s digital animations come to life on the media screen in the Gund Lobby drives home the importance of physical experiences in our increasingly digital age. It puts Unsupervised in a long line of projects where Anadol has brought digital art to architecturally significant spaces, such as the façades of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, and Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona. ‘I enjoy the moment when the physical and virtual connect. It’s always powerful to bring the two dimensions together,’ says the artist. His one-night-only projection mapping performance at Casa Batlló, in May 2022, had drawn 48,000 attendees. He spent the night walking among the audience, many of whom came up to him, moved to tears and asking for hugs. ‘That moment, when you touch someone’s mind and soul, and trigger beautiful emotions, is the ultimate moment of success,’ he reflects.

Up next for Anadol is a new take on the metaverse, called Dataland. As the project’s placeholder describes, it’s ‘the world’s first multi-sensory metaverse project [...] we will architect unprecedented spaces and invent cutting-edge poetic algorithms for new meditative experiences in the metaverse’. Collaborators include leading neuroscientists, architects, and AI pioneers, as well as tech titans such as Nvidia, Google and Epic Games. ‘I want to show that the metaverse is not just a virtual, cold space with heartless and soulless machines,’ he explains. ‘This is our attempt to find narratives in this new galaxy of imagination.’

‘Refik Anadol: Unsupervised’ is on view until 5 March 2023 in the Gund Lobby at MoMA, moma.org; refikanadol.com; dataland.art

Sample data visualisations of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations —MoMA — Fluid Dreams (2022) appear on the limited-edition subscriber cover of  January 2023 Wallpaper*, ‘The Future Issue’. Featuring real-time digital animation on LED screen and sound, the data sculpture was created using custom software and a generative algorithm with artificial intelligence.

A version of this story appears in the January 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Recent internet debates have proved that it doesn’t get much more polarised than AI creativity. Some believe the two terms are fundamentally incompatible. Others believe machine technology is diluting, or undermining, the output of human creators. There is also a branch of thought that sees the bright side: AI’s potential to enable human creativity (if employed correctly), not steal it. 

While there’s been much discussion about AI tools that can ‘write’ and ‘create’ images in response to specific commands. (ChatGPT, the most widely publicised example of recent weeks, uses a strain of artificial intelligence that can generate ‘natural’ language text using information mined from the Internet), there has been less talk about algorithmic curation in art, whether it’s of any use at all, and who’s in charge. 

In an attempt to understand the impact of algorithms on art curation, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute have unveiled a new London art exhibition ‘The Algorithmic Pedestal’, taking place at J/M Gallery from 11-17 January 2023, which compares Instagram’s algorithm with human-driven curation. 

In recent years, machinic ways of seeing have rapidly infiltrated our visual culture, driving what is created, what is visible, and who reaps the rewards – no doubt the late John Berger would have a field day with this one. 

As the show explores, algorithmic systems are increasingly becoming gatekeepers of the creative content appearing on social media users’ feeds. Content is mined from an ever-expanding ocean of images and videos, further expanded by freshly-minted AI systems that operate generatively. But ultimately, who should – and can – perform this curation?

For the exhibition, researchers have presented a scenario in which a human approach can be compared and contrasted directly with an algorithmic curator (Instagram). Artist Fabienne Hess was invited to select and display images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection that corresponded with the concept of ‘loss’. The images displayed in the exhibition are part of Hess’ ‘Dataset of Loss’, which she has created over the course of three years. Her curatorial process is driven by the human experiences of time, curiosity, and patience; she has spent years physically exploring collections in an embodied fashion, learning about each object’s stories and photographing them during site visits. In this sense, Hess’ curation represents the extreme in human selection criteria.

Conversely, Instagram’s curatorial decisions were captured by uploading images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (New York) Open Access collection to a designated Instagram account: @thealgorithmicpedestal. The results, on view in the show, demonstrate which images Instagram’s algorithm chose to display, and in which order.

As Laura Herman, a researcher at Oxford University’s Internet Institute commented: ‘In recent months, Instagram has publicly announced that the content displayed in users’ home feeds will increasingly be decided by a “black box” algorithm, rather than what friends or family have recently posted. This means that we do not know exactly what Instagram chooses to prioritise, though these prioritised selections drastically influence users’ experience of visual culture. In this exhibit, the algorithm reveals its own ways of seeing, providing the audience with an intimate lens into its perceptual mechanisms.’

‘The Algorithmic Pedestal’, is on view at J/M Gallery in London from 11-17 January 2023.
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A colossal wave crashing onto the two-sided rectangular LED display on the external façade of COEX in Seoul’s Gangnam district was a sight that captivated many Seoulites. They stopped to stare, mesmerised, into a three-dimensional tank of screens that offered a cathartic visual experience.

On the other side of the world, a larger-than-life waterfall flowed in the middle of Times Square in New York, stealing the show amid the visual noise of its surroundings. 

WAVE (2020) and Waterfall-NYC (2021) by South Korean digital media design company d’strict are two of many public artworks that astonished crowds amidst the pandemic and catapulted the firm to fame with their instantly-recognisable, captivating aesthetic. Both pieces were created using anamorphic illusion, a type of projection technique used to create an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality. 

While d’strict now frequently collaborates with big-name brands, a’strict – the artistic arm of the company – is open to digital media artists from both within d’strict and outside. A’strict functions as an art collective creating non-commercial artwork with more creative freedom.

‘Among our projects, WAVE was the most popular. I think it came from the unexpectedness of the artwork in the middle of the city. No one would expect a wave to be there and to be so real,’ said Sang Jin Lee, vice president at d’strict. ‘Timing worked well for us because we became well-known during the pandemic. Waves and waterfalls in the middle of the city provided solace and were a stress reliever for many, in times of frustration. I think this made our work connect with the audience,’ she says.

Starry Beach (2020), exhibited at Kukje Gallery in Seoul in September 2020, is an example. Maximising sight and sound, a’strict created an intuitive and immersive beach experience, which enthusiastic visitors queued for hours to see. Morando (2021), which was shown at the much-acclaimed ‘LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art’ show at London’s 180 The Strand, uses an X-ray technique to depict infinitely blooming peonies and the ethereal cycle of life. 

‘A’strict focuses on intuitive artwork which can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of art and something that can resonate with people’s everyday lives,’ Lee explains. ‘Nature is a theme that people can intuitively resonate with and immerse in, and also gives them a sense of comfort.’

Through immersive digital art installations, both d’strict and a’strict aim to bring nature closer to people’s lives. D’strict’s own exhibition space, Arte museum, is structured around nature-orientated themes such as ‘beach’, ‘wave’, ‘waterfall’, ‘forest’, ‘flower’, ‘garden’, and ‘jungle’, to name a few. The museums are currently located in Jeju, Busan, Gangneung and Yeosu in Korea, with d’strict’s first overseas branch having debuted in Hong Kong in October 2022. Plans for 2023 include museums in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, and Chengdu. 

As well as anamorphic illusion, generative art technology is also an integral part of a’strict’s work. A recent collaboration with crypto artist duo Hackatao resulted in Spirit Forest Incanto, in which a reindeer changes its colour subject to the movement and behaviour of visitors. The colour of the reindeer – red, green, yellow, etc. – is responsive to how visitors walk towards them or touch them. Using code, the reindeer can generate multiple appearances that shift based on subjective input.

A’strict will soon launch a flower project titled Mugunghwa, which uses generative technology to produce multiple variations of Korea’s national flower. The aim is to create 815 different variations of the flower to be sold as NFT editions, meaning that each collector can own a unique version. The flower will be incubated and exhibited from the seed stage in one museum, then presented as a blossomed flower in a travelling show across Arte museums across Korea.

‘Using a technology called real-time engine, the flower will be coded to bloom and die continuously and change its colours. The characteristic of generative art is that there is no beginning and end. The work keeps moving,’ said Lee. 

‘For example, if we code to create five red flowers in five types of shapes with five different stems, we will have multiple random variations possible within this setting. We can also program it to reflect the reality, such as when it snows, the flower will be white, if it rains, it will turn yellow and so on.’

D’strict also has a crypto art project arm called Arte Meta under which these NFT projects are handled. 

The digital revolution in generative art emerged due to NFTs, says Lee. ‘For NFT artworks, many of them have to be mass-produced and often each one represents each person’s identity so each work would have to be unique. Unfortunately, it is difficult to create 10,000 different variations of an artwork,’ she said. 

‘People started using generative technology to produce random variations of works. What differentiates generative art from randomness, however, is that combinations will be made from pre-coded settings.’

D’strict’s next project will touch on environmental issues. ‘Ice’ will be a work of anamorphic illusion of the arctic melting, exhibited at one of its Arte museums. ‘It won’t be an explicit statement on saving the environment, but it can send a message indirectly,’ said Lee. 

dstrict.com; kukjegallery.com

Generative art is defined by the unseen hand – a system or algorithm or AI-powered design program that, working with variables and within parameters established by the artist, can generate almost infinite outcomes. And for some, it’s the future. ‘The most radical and interesting art is happening in the generative art space,’ argues the Irish artist John Gerrard. ‘It’s the work most aligned with contemporary conditions.’

Gerrard is not yet 50, but he’s been tagged as an OG of generative art, a title he’s not entirely comfortable with. Most of his work – the mesmerising Farm and Solar Reserve, for instance – is produced using game engines, though it is not classically generative. But he is evangelical about the potential of generative art and the wave of younger artists redefining it. German artist Kim Asendorf is a particular favourite. ‘He’s a coder and an artist who invented a process called “pixel sorting”,’ Gerrard explains. ‘He’s creating a new language of abstraction, which is only going to get more interesting over time. Give me this over any painting of the last 15 years.’

Full disclosure, Gerrard is an Asendorf collector. But as of right now, and for a relatively modest outlay, you could be, too. Asendorf’s artworks are minted as NFTs and available on the fxhash generative art platform for as little as two Tezos, equivalent to about $2. Gerrard has now created his own series of categorically generative art pieces, Bone Work, for the platform.

Over the last couple of years, fxhash and the more blue-chip Art Blocks have emerged as the key platforms for generative art NFTs. And for Gerrard, alongside others, they are leading the revolution. ‘I put the blockchain mechanism, as a new distribution and exhibition model, up there with photography in terms of what it is going to do,’ he says. ‘I think it’s transformative.’

Of course, there was generative art before the blockchain. Many trace its roots back to the procedural art of Sol LeWitt and the ‘arranged by chance’ work of Ellsworth Kelly, while the Hungarian artist Vera Molnár gets credit for pioneering computer-generated art in the late 1960s. The English artist Keith Tyson (W*212) created the ‘Art Machine’ in the early 1990s, using algorithms to randomly generate words and ideas he could turn into physical art, and the American artist Casey Reas, who co-created the open-source programming language Processing, has been producing what Gerrard calls ‘long-form’ generative art for over two decades.

Over the last decade or so, collectives such as teamLab, Universal Everything and a’strict, and artists Jakob Kudsk Steensen (W*268), Refik Anadol and Maxim Zhestkov, have used increasingly sophisticated programs to magic up fabulous, immersive digital landscapes and projections in physical spaces, setting in motion an evolution of alternative digital worlds and lifeforms. 

The Berlin-based art foundation Light Art Space (LAS), in particular, has become a showcase for large-scale immersive digital art. Launched in 2019, it debuted with a Refik Anadol installation and has since shown work by Kudsk Steensen and Libby Heaney (W*276), who brings the confounding magic of quantum computing to generative art. 

‘We want to show what is relevant now, but even more so, what will define the next 20 or 50 years,’ says LAS director Bettina Kames. ‘Platforming the latest technologies as an artistic medium is central to that approach; we’re here to bridge the gap between society and these technologies.’ LAS recently presented Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (W*283), which features the longest and most complex animated film ever generated in the Unity gaming engine. 

The Asendorf strain of generative art is more scrappy, lo-fi and explicitly algorithmic, and also oddly painterly. Take the almost-op art of Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak’s whirring tape heads, Anna Ridler’s art of the data set, the shape-shifting work of Itzel Yard (aka IX Shells), the psychedelic landscapes and portraits of Ellie Pritts, the reconfigured myths of Morehshin Allahyari and the mixed-media collages of Juan Covelli. This wing of generative art mostly runs on small screens rather than in large spaces, and heralds a post-speculative bubble era of NFT art, built around genuine innovation rather than hype and drop-culture economics. 

Originally, most galleries and art fairs gave generative art a wide berth – to deadening effect, argues Gerrard. ‘Collectors and galleries have been successful in largely keeping out the digital, but, in doing that, they have kept out contemporary conditions. If you go to an art fair now, it’s like travelling back to 1960, nothing has changed. That’s dangerous for art, artists and collectors because it’s a very conservative environment.’ Generative art’s embrace of NFTs, he says, was largely a case of having nowhere else to go. ‘The art world had no room for an artist like Asendorf. So in a way, digital art has made its own room through the digital platform. And it’s exploding before our eyes.’

Hobbs and Yard, in particular, are blowing up price-wise. Last year, a single Hobbs NFT sold for $3.3m, while the rights to mine 99 new NFTs sold for $17m. A single Yard/IX Shells NFT sold for $2m. Unsurprisingly, the big galleries are now involved in a clamorous if still uncertain rush to join the party. Pace can rightly claim to be ahead of the pack. It launched Pace Verso in 2021 with a mission to put digital and Web3 tools in the hands of its artists. And last year, it announced a partnership with Art Blocks, which launched with Gerrard’s new NFT series Petro National.

Ariel Hudes, who heads Pace Verso, is the first to admit the initial speculative hype around NFTs, and the bad art that drove much of it, was also a deterrent to other galleries. She also argues that a very sharp popping of that speculative bubble is a long-term positive in terms of the quality of generative art produced. For Hudes, the job is now to put the tools of generative art into the hands of artists, and expose the wider Pace collector base to generative art (and hold their hands while navigating the complex crypto-mechanics of actually buying NFTs) – as well as hopefully introduce the very distinct Art Blocks collector to collecting physical art. ‘I think NFTs have created a new wave of people who are excited about art, and want to talk about art,’ Hudes says.

One of Hudes’ projects is the launch of NFTs by the painter Loie Hollowell. The series, Contractions, is based on Hollowell’s Split Orb paintings, a typically lush, semi-abstract meditation on childbirth. Hollowell and Pace Verso let an algorithm work on various elements of the original pieces to create 280 unique, generative NFTs. Hollowell, who describes herself as a luddite, says the NFT-generating creative process was ‘organic’. ‘There were these spontaneous forms that I use in my practice that I had no intention of producing within the NFT,’ she says, ‘but they presented themselves nonetheless.’

For Hudes and Gerrard, generative art works best when the artist has tight control of the variables in play and a clear vision. ‘To me, some of the most technically complex pieces are the least interesting,’ says Hudes. ‘You see video game-type renderings of these dystopian worlds and they look amazing. But it doesn’t make it good art. You have to prioritise the artist’s eye over the computer.’

Kames takes a slightly different tack. ‘Artists are often the first to experiment with new technologies,’ she says. ‘Take Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Berl-Berl virtual swamp, for which he created a completely new visual language in a game engine.’

For Gerrard, the key is actually the democratisation and greater accessibility of these digital tools. He is particularly excited about WebGL, a browser-based 2D and 3D design program. ‘It’s an emergent culture,’ he argues. ‘And you are going to get different forms of complexity emerging – spatial, temporal and conceptual complexity. It’s really all just getting started.’

A version of this article appears in the January 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Read more about Artificial Intelligence and the future of the creative professions

If we do have to time spend substantial time in the metaverse, at least let Matt Pyke of the digital art collective Universal Everything design it. Or perhaps more accurately, be its benign, divine creative force, its bringer of life. 

For almost two decades, Pyke has been experimenting with generative design, birthing moving digital creatures. The studio’s digital menagerie really does move, run, dance, parade and prance with an astonishing physicality. It also, unapologetically, delights and entrances.

‘Lifeforms’, the studio's new show in the subterranean 180 The Strand, sees 14 of its digital bestiary within Ab Rogers-designed ‘habitats’. As Pyke says, the show is not a sweeping retrospective – animating new life is just one part of what the studio does – but it’s a comprehensive walkthrough of the different media they work in: video, immersive pieces, interactive pieces, graphic design, architecture and even lenticulars. And it gets to Universal Everything’s essential mission.

Pyke is a techno enthusiast and optimist, a champion of advanced technology as a tool for engineering uplift and enchantment. The show’s meticulous renderings of upright movement, perambulation, sprinting, shape-making, and of material in motion, are the fullest, most convincing expression of that optimism.

‘There is just something fundamentally human about walking,’ Pyke says. ‘It’s a beautiful, natural, graphic way of depicting life. And rather than creating a narrative or some form of storytelling, you have this almost mesmerising banality. The fact that these things walk or run forever suggests infinite energy or an infinite journey and it's somehow utopian.’ As the show’s moving forms – big, hairy, rock or mineral, liquid or gaseous, plant-based and even architectural – miraculously mutate and re-make themselves, they also get to the defining magic of generative technology and design, its ability to create the new and unique all by itself. ‘We think of it as designing the seed,’ Pyke says. ‘As the designer or artist, we define the visual parameters, the range of colours or material or forms. And then within those rules, infinite iterations can be created. It's our way of creating the boundaries of the playground. And then when you press “go”, it generates these forms that interest me and surprise me. It's like letting something out into the wild.’

That impulse to render life forms has always been a driver for Pyke. He studied botanical and technical illustration as well as design and typography before spending a decade at the Sheffield-based studio The Designers Republic, best known for its work with Warp Records and for pioneering games packaging, including for the first iteration of Grand Theft Auto.

In 2004 Pyke, still based in Sheffield, went solo and started looking online for interesting 3D animators and programmers. He found them in Germany, San Francisco, Japan and South America and the studio remains an international digital collective with a core UK-based team working with over 60 architects, engineers, designers, cinematographers, animators, musicians and developers around the world. 

From the outset, Pyke was determined on merging graphic design and moving image and quickly became interested in designing his own creative tools rather than using off-the-shelf design software. ‘We wanted to create things that didn't exist and explore the edge of technology,’ he says. That push to experiment quickly attracted commercial clients and Universal Everything’s list of brand collaborators now includes Apple, Google, Hyundai, IBM, MTV, Samsung, Nike and Chanel. 

These commercial partnerships often spring from the studio’s self-initiated work and are marked by their longevity and the creative latitude Universal Everything is given. ‘We’ve never felt like we’ve had to compromise in any of the collaborations,’ Pyke says. ‘It’s always been like they were supporting the studio and it’s been very genuine and authentic.’

The studio has also worked with bands including Radiohead, Coldplay and Primal Scream and created digital pieces for exhibitions at MoMA, The Barbican, London’s Science Museum and more. And despite the constant technical innovation, Pyke’s particular take on generative design is so defined, there’s little clear distinction between commercial and non-commercial work. ‘It’s just another expression of working with different contexts, audiences and forms,’ Pyke says.

What comes out in all the studio’s works, though, is a clear sense of play, in their creation and in the way they are experienced. ‘I think playfulness is important,’ says Pyke. ‘You get a brand-new piece of technology and it’s really just a matter of playing with it and seeing what comes out.’ And play, he says, should definitely be part of the viewing experience. ‘I don't really like art shows where it’s whispering in a white cube space, I'd much rather people were shouting and running about.’

Despite that emphasis on play, Pyke and his team aren’t rushing to make every piece interactive. Only two pieces in ‘Lifeforms’ are interactive, and he says they are only interactive for good reason. One of those pieces is Into the Sun, one of three new works in the show. ‘We wanted to create a collective experience,’ Pyke says. ‘The screen displays the sun and plants and they grow in response to the viewer’s positions and movement. And it works with up to four people so you get this collective experience, you create this kind of plant choreography.’

Pyke is more interested in getting ‘beyond the loop’, creating pieces where nothing is ever repeated, ‘like an improvisational jazz gig’. Another new piece, Maison Autonome, Pyke describes as an ‘automated design system’.

‘It's framed as a kind of catwalk show with motion-captured models walking up and down the runway but the costumes or clothing that they wear is generative, infinite combinations of forms and materials. It's so random that you get these enormous models with incredible inflated clothes or spider thin and chrome. It asks who the designer is because they're not designed by anybody apart from the code, really.’

Like much of the studio’s work, Maison Autonome is a dizzying, mesmerising endless parade that taps into Pyke’s essential optimism about human possibility. ‘There’s just that curiosity about what will emerge next out of that kind of unknown randomness.’ 

Universal Everything, ’Lifeforms’ is at 180 The Strand from 12 October- 18 December 2022.

universaleverything.com

180thestrand.com

We’ve seen the viral videos of people using virtual reality headsets at home, so involved in personal digital realms that they forget the physical limitations of their living rooms. They jump away from a monster only to leap into an IRL wall, or swing an imaginary baseball bat and end up smacking a relative.

It can be awkward to squeeze emergent technologies into physical spaces, let alone more traditional modes of exhibition, commerce, and communication. We are observing in real time the rather haphazard way in which artists (and occasionally con-artists) have been exploring and exploiting NFTs. Equally, artist-made VR can feel awkward in a gallery setting. Spending 15 minutes hooking up to electronic gear, to speculatively explore a virtual artwork, hardly encourages the accidental encounters that we expect in physical galleries.

These are questions New York-based artist Ian Cheng wrestles with – amongst others of a deeper philosophical bent – in his ongoing project ‘Life After BOB’. At its root is a 50-minute narrative anime, The Chalice Study, whose protagonist, Chalice, has had an experimental AI named BOB placed into her nervous system by her neural engineer father. Cheng envisions it as the first of an eight-episode series, which will not only explore a variety of characters, each with ethical and social reflection upon AI technology, but also explore aesthetic and technological capacities as each episode absorbs new modes of making, collaboration, networking, and play.

The Chalice Study is presented largely as a traditionally projected artist film, though future episodes will experiment with new experiences and technologies. Cheng considers this first episode a scaffolding: ‘Can I tell a story? Can I make an animation look like anime and feel entertaining enough within the Unity game engine? Because that will be the foundation for later episodes, which will have more AI and algorithmically driven storytelling.’

The work is co-commissioned by the Luma Foundation, The Shed, and Light Art Space (LAS), and its global tour has so far included Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art as well as Zurich and New York, homes of the first two collaborating organisations. It has now arrived in an industrial space adjoining Berlin’s legendary Berghain for LAS’ presentation. While the film was given a traditional cinematic presentation at previous locations, in its present iteration, LAS head of programmes Amira Gad has overseen a truly immersive and architectural experience.

With Gad’s encouragement, Cheng has drawn inspiration from Disneyworld, particularly its use of mundane fictional details to build a deeply immersive experience. His scaffolding is created in Unity, an engine employed for many well-known video games including Monument Valley, Fall Guys, and Pokémon Go, and increasingly used by artists and filmmakers intrigued by the overlapping of fine art with progressive technology and aesthetics. He has used Unity to create environments formed of countless carefully composed components and characters, a process he terms ‘Worlding’ – not only ‘fleshing out the territory’ of place, character, and backstory as a fiction writer would, but going further to create ‘an actual place that people can inhabit, then have the potentially tedious and difficult task of keeping that world alive’.

His ambition is to create a world so deep in character, backstory, and potential that not only can it contain narrative tales such as The Chalice Study, but the worlding can go on to support interactivity, audience collaboration, and new (perhaps as yet unknown) modes of storytelling.

The Chalice Study follows a scripted, fixed narrative, though background elements of the world react differently for each screening. Future instalments will become more AI-driven, potentially so each retelling of a story may emerge differently in narrative and aesthetic, producing genuinely one-off experiences.

‘The holy grail in storytelling is if I can start a story as an author, and then have a simulation and AI help complete it in a meaningful way,’ Cheng proposes. He had taken on this challenge with Emissaries (2015-17), a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution, in which his cast interacts within open-ended narratives. With a dual degree in cognitive science and art practice, Cheng seems to view his works more as ongoing experiments than completed art objects. He states that in Emissaries ‘the main character goes off script and it becomes chaos. It’s entertaining for me, but inherently meaningless – it doesn't coalesce in a satisfying and meaningful way.’

Visitors to LAS’ exhibition finish their visit with a free NFT, an imagined and personalised future character referencing the Life After BOB story. Away from LAS, Cheng has also collaborated with Outland to create 3Face, an NFT forged of aspects of an individual’s personality and their digital wallet transactions to create a unique psychological portrait. Cheng hopes that such NFT owners might appear as background entities in future Life After BOB films, so that anybody ‘can start to participate, influence the artwork, and actually see some of themselves in it’.

The promise of NFTs as a component of audience engagement, rather than a mere vehicle for speculation, is enticing. However, for all the potential technological futures which Cheng’s scaffolding may support, this exhibition is a fundamentally physical and bodied experience, constructed around three phases. Cheng describes the first as a moment of ‘existential gathering’ as guests climb upstairs into darkness, slowly emerging through a horizontal laser field that fills the vast Berghain space like a glistening watery surface. The atmospheric otherness is supported by Lugh O’Neill’s spatial soundscape, designed to play with rhythms permeating the walls on days the Berghain nightclub is in full swing.

‘It’s a prelude to the film, an unconscious spa to massage your brain and mood into feeling the world,’ Cheng explains. Soon, the mellow vibe is interrupted by a sun-like light throbbing at increasing speed until it’s a visceral strobe. Both lighting experiences aesthetically foreshadow scenes from the film, though the artist is also interested in psychological framing: ‘I hope something happens to people's nervous systems, leading to “a sense of surrender to see the film”.’

The actual film plays in a purpose-built cinema within the exhibition space, soundproofed by engineers Arup to shut out the world beyond. Chalice’s traumatic and existential journey is presented with bewildering creativity – perhaps too much for a first-time viewer, but in a way that builds anticipation for future episodes. We follow Chalice as she explores her identity with her infused AI BOB, and then as she reconsiders the meaning of self after it’s removed.

It is fitting that LAS – a young organisation formed to put on technologically infused art encounters in unexpected locations – is presenting Life After BOB in Halle am Berghain. The cavernous space not only has an otherworldly feeling, but is also conceptually aligned with Chalice’s journey. Berghain is a space of escape – in all the excessive, decadent, and kinky ways you can imagine – and clubbers are known for remaining within its thick industrial walls for days. Cheng was drawn to the location as soon as LAS suggested it: ‘In the film, Chalice is stuck in a dreamlike state for ten years, then she comes out, the sun hits her retinas, and she feels every photon like it's stinging her for the first time. I imagined coming out of Berghain, having not seen sunlight for 24 hours, feeling the pain of reality but also a stunned appreciation of “I'm back to the city streets and noise, the normality of life.” You can travel between a dreamworld and the real world fluidly. That's Berghain.’

After the screening, a final phase – Worldwatching – allows anybody to use their smartphone to rewatch an interactive version of the film. Any moment can be paused, cameras rotated, or focus pulled onto seemingly-arbitrary objects to uncover details, presented within a Wiki. ‘You can really break the film in this way,’ Cheng explains, and while this interactive mode is nascent, he hopes that by the final episode it might become the primary experience: ‘Suddenly you're in the world exploring details that couldn't be spoken about in the film itself.’ It’s an enticing possibility, in which audiences don’t just receive the narrative, but become real-time directors for unique and bespoke versions which unfold and evolve based on their input and involvement.

‘LAS is about the future,’ declares the organisation’s director Bettina Kames. It's intriguing to think that the work exhibited here also isn’t so much the end result or a completed art project, but more the acknowledged first steps into a decade-long exploration with outcomes that can only be speculated on at present. Cheng has created his worlding scaffold ready to adapt and respond to new AI technologies so that Life After BOB might become not only an eight-episode anime series exploring the ethics of AI, but also a mapping of existence-altering technologies over their formative years.

He hopes that by the final episode he will have built a world so deeply immersive and rich in character that he can create an Avengers-like episode in which a cast of deeply developed characters return. Cheng thinks that by this stage ‘it's not even a film anymore, but almost like an existential fighting game where it plays itself’, the viewer offering ringside advice as though a boxing coach, guiding Chalice and other anime characters to interpret the narrative ‘in their own style and their own way of being. That’s the dream!’ 

INFORMATION

‘Life after BOB’, until 6 November, Halle am Berghain, Berlin, lightartspace.org; iancheng.com

Since establishing his eponymous studio in Barcelona in 2018, Andrés Reisinger has helped to define the look and feel of the virtual realm. With his love of pastel colours, organic forms and surrealist environments, Reisinger brings an unexpected warmth to his designs, challenging the clinical stereotype of digital spaces. His ability to bring together the digital and physical worlds is at once disorienting, soothing and comforting. It has also won him fans including Wallpaper* guest editor Kelly Wearstler, who named him one of her five favourite contemporary creatives in her takeover of our October 2022 issue. 

From the tantalising Winter House (2022) NFT residential project, a collaboration with architect Alba de la Fuente in the metaverse, to last year’s physical exhibition of seating at Nilufar Gallery in Milan, which saw three furniture pieces exist both in real life and as NFTs, Reisinger constantly pushes the limit of how these two worlds can be bridged. 

Reisinger describes his work as ‘the reflection of an uncanny feeling, one where it is hard to distinguish whether it belongs to the physical or digital realm, reality or fantasy. For me, the digital is an expansion of our physical experiences.’

He continues, ‘I like to provoke, to raise questions. Many of my works feature seemingly surreal forms. The colour palette is filled with shades of pink, like the inside of our body. It is very important for me to build a collection of bodily experiences, to underline that there is a strong connection between multiple dimensions, all belonging to a human reality.’ 

Drawn to the digital sphere from a young age – ‘Of course, I wanted to play games, but I was more interested in creating my own worlds than playing by the rules of someone else’ – the Argentinian has a knack for technical skill and precision, which led him to pursue graphic design at the University of Buenos Aires. There, his love of music inspired him to explore the visual aspect of composing.

‘At first glance, [my works] are pleasing to the eye, but on a second, more attentive look, they feature elements of oddity,’ he reflects. ‘It is important for every component of the work to be noticed, and for it to happen in a world overwhelmed with visual stimuli, it needs a discrete element of oddity.’

One of Reisinger’s earliest works, Hortensia, 2018, began as a digital rendering of an armchair adorned with thousands of pale pink petals. It went viral on social media, prompting Reisinger to turn it into a real-life chair with Moooi, for which they ruched 500 strips of laser-cut fabric flowers into clusters to envelope the frame. ‘The experience taught me that you can create digital demand, develop a product digitally before putting it in production, without wasting unnecessary resources,’ he explains. ‘The digital can help us discover what we can achieve, by pushing what we think is possible.’ 

In an increasingly competitive landscape, Reisinger is already thinking about his next steps. ‘I’ve invented a genre, and that is undoubtedly a beautiful feeling,’ he reflects. ‘I might not be the most skilled creative, but I can innovate by understanding a future where different worlds can meet and enhance each other’s experiences.’

INFORMATION

reisinger.studio

A version of this article appears in the October 2022 Legends Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

When the concept of NFTs first blitzed into the mainstream and cemented itself in everyday parlance, it seemed the medium’s groundbreaking upsides – smart contracts built around artist royalties, or the ability to digitally authenticate works in perpetuity – became quickly overshadowed by the sheer volume of content. But now a new breed of fine art Web3 platform is raising the cultural cachet of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), elevating them beyond online marketplaces and framing them with a considered curatorial impetus.

Founded by a forward-thinking group of artists, collectors and creative minds – Wallpaper’s own photography director Holly Hay among them – Fellowship brings museum-worthy photography to the blockchain. ‘We want to push the boundaries of how photography can exist in the digital space through presenting traditional fine artists and estates alongside the more experimental and working artists of today,’ explain co-founders Alejandro Cartagena and Chadwick Tyler. ‘Not only are we commissioning “native” work, but we are nurturing emerging artists through programmes to make work not yet conceived. Our intention is to spotlight how the world is today through photography, and create a new path for artists to reach new audiences.’

The organisation’s inaugural NFT photography auction offered works by Gregory Crewdson, with further auctions and exhibitions to feature Laurie Simmons, Larry Sultan, Hank Willis Thomas, and the estates of August Sander and László Moholy-Nagy. Fellowship is also building an active community through weekly talks and panels with leading figures across arts, photography, collecting and publishing. (Beyond that, Fellowship offsets all mint costs and is committed to being carbon neutral).

With over six decades of artistic practice under his belt, Joel Meyerowitz has lived the evolution of photography more deeply than most. ‘Photography is the only art form that constantly refreshes itself through changes in its technology, while at the same time sharing these changes with the global population. It is the world’s most democratic art form. The medium has been this way almost since the first moment of its creation. It has always been “collectible”,’ says Meyerowitz. ‘Now, we have the NFT: a remarkable new way to collect the great images of the past and the present, with the exception that now one can have only a single minted image, rather than an unlimited number of prints. The rarity that collectors of photography have always sought is now a reality.’

South African photographer Pieter Hugo is another artist embracing the medium: ‘I’ve been thinking through the shifts I have had to make in my career from 35mm to medium format, colour negative to digital. The nature of photography is such an evolutionary one and has always been tied to technology – you have to adapt. I would hate for my work to feel like a sentimentalist reiteration of an expression that existed in the past and I’m excited by change.’

The potential applications and opportunities for artist’s estates, too, are promising. Guy Bourdin continually broke new visual and conceptual ground throughout his career – so what would he have made of the blockchain and his Fellowship exhibition? ‘Bourdin was an early adopter of new devices and technology, unhappy with the quality of the print in publication,’ his estate comments on its collaboration with Fellowship. ‘It’s our belief he would have adopted and enjoyed the possibility in the same way that Joel Meyerowitz approaches the medium. We’re committed to constantly improving the way his works are displayed, and the progressive technology behind Web3 would’ve been something he would’ve enjoyed exploring.’

Initiatives such as the Fellowship are building a vital and thoughtful foundation for NFTs – more importantly ensuring their staying power in a meaningful way. ‘It’s very important for Fellowship that they are talking about photography both in and outside the NFT space. This is all about the future of photography as a whole and supporting artists with new opportunities,’ adds Hay. ‘In my role, I feel a responsibility to understand and support new possibilities for photography. This space provides a real potential to fund new work, [and in terms of] who can access it and from where.’

INFORMATION

fellowship.xyz

Maxim Zhestkov’s work is a tale of two worlds. One we can set foot in, one offers us a convincing illusion of that possibility. 

After 20 years working with brands such as Playstation, Google, BMW, and Adidas, the Russian-born, London-based artist is now immersed in self-initiated art projects, driven by an ‘obsession’ with computer graphics, VR and the construction of digital environments that fuse the fundamental laws of physics with human emotion. 

On August 18, Zhestkov will open a solo show across the interior and exterior of London’s W1 curates on Oxford Street, where he will debut Waves, an immersive digital experience exploring how one ‘wave’ in everyday emotion or communication can trigger drastic systematic changes. 

As the line between physical and digital worlds erodes, Zhestkov’s work asks what we can learn from the similarities between the two: ‘Who are we? Are we our bodies? Are we what others perceive, which can change so easily with avatars in different worlds?’ 

Wallpaper*: We’re seeing increasingly fluidity between game design, art, and architecture. What do you think is driving this interest in ‘phygital’ experiences? 

Maxim Zhestkov: The biggest transformation of our time is the exodus into a new dimension of perception. Last year Fortnite accrued more revenue than the biggest fashion brands. It might not be the virtual reality we know from Blade Runner; our world still looks the same. These shifts in values are already happening, everything is changing very quickly.

My projects explore the interaction between digital and real spaces. How can we be there – in the digital world – or here – in the physical world – and experience environments that are not made for our bodies but only for our dreams?

Even fairytales are, in a sense, virtual worlds with their own rules and logic. We can step inside and experience them. We are the creators of the universes to come, along with the rules, logic, and appearance. We need to invest in developing, building, and understanding this future. I love that everything is so connected. My work is about this thin membrane that separates us from the future.

W*: You’ve previously worked with brands. Why are you now focusing more on personal art projects, and what freedom this has offered? 

MZ: Even though I touched the art world through my study of painting, I wanted to explore using computers and making animation, which led to commercial work with brands. I have learned so much about project development because projects for a client are always about limitations. 

I am an experimenter. I do not like to repeat things. Space for experimentation allows me to build things from scratch at micro and macro scales. Working this way means I don’t need to listen to brands or solve their problems. Now I make and solve my own problems. My artistic projects have been much harder and are more intimate. I think it is very important for everyone creative to find a territory where they can truly experiment.

W*: What inspired your new project Waves for W1 Curates? 

MZ: My mind can obsess over certain things. Thinking about waves, I started to see them everywhere. Even the light that enters your eyes is decoded into different colours through wavelengths. We look at our world through waves. I recently read The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. It’s about the idea that beautiful and terrible things are happening everywhere, at every millisecond, but we develop shells that filter these signals. My work is aimed at breaking these shells to allow people to see and feel the smallest things.

The project Waves is not about physical waves, like the waves of the ocean. It’s about the waves we experience every day in communication and in emotion – about how one trigger can result in drastic changes in a system.

My projects begin with an algorithm that always takes me to a very different place from what I expected. Small errors create beautiful patterns. As an artist, I don’t feel like I create. I curate the results of complexity and unpredictability. It is a dialogue with machines; together we determine what is beautiful and what is not.

W*: Talk me through the creation and development process

MZ: My team and I use Houdini as our main tool, and we add snippets of our own code which allow us to make complicated simulations. For Waves, we used 100 million objects, which interact to form a new whole. 

Everything comes from the laws of physics. Still, sometimes we can’t understand why processes proceed as they do. We build every project on this crossroads of artistry and technical direction. Sometimes it can be hard to alter the smallest detail without ruining the whole thing.

We spent half a year with ten people working every day on the project. One challenge is that we’re always pushing our hardware to the limit. We used 100 state-of-the-art video cards. It took a month to render hundreds of iterations with their own errors and miracles. 

Our simulations are grayscale sculptures. We work without colour because it’s like drawing in pencil before working on a painting – colour can change the perception of shape. It’s such a wonderful and impossible way to work because you can’t predict what you’ll get as a final result. One mistake can produce a wave of mistakes. You are only partly the creator.

Waves, 2022

W*: What do you hope viewers will take away from the experience? 

MZ: I want people to walk away with a feeling of wonder. Said another way, the takeaway might be experiencing everything like a child. This state allows us to keep a fresh perspective of systems and of everything around us that we can’t control. 

Small errors which make changes to the system are exactly what produce life, what produced us. Mutations in the DNA of our ancestors are the reason we are who we are today. This is the beauty of life – that waves, mistakes, and unpredictable events bring the future.

W*: What we can expect from your upcoming project ‘Modules’? 

MZ: I wondered, ‘What can we bring into the world of virtual reality from a first-person experience?’ Telling stories through a third-person experience – via avatars – has its limitations. For my work, full immersion occurs only from a first-person experience.

At the moment there are only a couple of VR headsets that render in a quality high enough for my work, and they’re quite expensive. We wanted to bring the best experience to the biggest audience, so we started using the Oculus Quest 2, the most affordable VR device currently available. 

Art brings me something completely different from video games. In a virtual world, I don’t want to kill, solve quests, and solve puzzles. Sometimes I just want to be there and experience the environment.

We will launch in about two months. It looks and feels and sounds so different than I expected. I love every second. I love the calmness that comes with diving into a different, endless world. Modules is a game with no end. You can’t win, you can’t lose; all you can do is be there. It’s a big universe to explore.

When it comes to VR, I believe the biggest challenge for humanity is understanding how to use it well – how to educate, how to inspire, how to show beauty and teach kindness. 

INFORMATION

Waves by Maxim Zhestkov will open to the public on 18 August 2022 at W1 Curates, Oxford Street, London. w1curates.com

zhestkov.studio

As if there wasn’t enough in the way of day and night terrors to be getting along with, Apple has marked the opening of its new London store by introducing Blakean demons into the world. Virtually anyway.

The writhing augmented reality spectres and serpents – with their raging internal hell fires visible – are the work of Australian but New York-based tech-art duo Tin Nguyen and Ed Cutting, collectively Tin&Ed.

Magicked up by the just-launched United Visions app, available now on the Apple App Store, the AR art piece is a tie-in with a Covid-delayed William Blake exhibition at the Getty Museum in LA, originally planned for 2020 and now bumped to next October. Having used Apple products exclusively for the development of the app, an early preview at the launch of a new store in Blake’s home city seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

Tin&Ed are currently members of New Inc, the art and technology incubator run by the New Museum, have created digital, AR and old-fashioned physical art for the Rockefeller Center, Space10 in Copenhagen, the Sydney Opera House, and an interactive digital piece is currently at The Barbican as part of its ‘Our Time on Earth’ exhibition. They insist that Blake is the perfect artist to get the AR treatment.

‘Blake had these visions and hallucinations and that is such a perfect marriage for AR,’ says Nguyen. ‘AR is about taking what is in someone’s head and bringing it into the physical space in a way that’s really immersive, that could be real and there but maybe only you can see it. It’s a very hallucinatory medium.’

The pair worked with the Unity3d game engine and digitally sculpted Blake works from the Getty, Yale and Tate collections and animated them using motion capture technology. The exhibition’s pandemic delay gave the artists extra time for research and development and to refine the digital conjuring but also to redefine their ambitions for the exhibition and the form itself.

‘We made thousands of prototypes of this thing but even with the rudimentary prototypes you could still feel something, this presence and this entity and the gravity of that,’ says Cutting. ‘It’s such a new medium so we’re still working out to how to tell stories with it.’

You suspect that for Blake, a visionary poet, painter and printmaker, these angels, demons, and strange hybrids were a constant and very real presence. The United Visions app is a perfect insight into his dream-fevered imagination as these apparitions form and unform, with limbs appearing out of walls and forked tongues out of thin air, all in a way that’s specific to your environment. ‘It’s spatial, multi-sensory and fully immersive and reacts very differently to every space, whether you’re in an Apple store, the Getty Museum or at home in your kitchen,’ says Nguyen.

Central to that multi-sensory assault is an otherworldly soundtrack by Grammy-winning hip-hop producer Just Blaze who recruited his four-year-old son to read Blake’s poem The Tyger, and Dominican spoken-word artist Oveous Maximus who turns other snatches of Blake poetry into an incantation. 

For Tin&Ed, the piece also points to our ‘mixed reality’ future. ‘We’re super interested in this hybrid space that mixes the physical and the digital,’ says Nguyen. ‘We all have these digital identities now and that is how we are engaging with each other and it’s important for us to understate how the physical and the digital merge and become a new space.’

As Tin&Ed say, at the moment most of us are experiencing AR on smartphones and tablets but that will change. The pair say they will keep updating United Visions as AR technology advances (and we imagine that some kind of Apple mixed-reality specs are almost certainly on their way).

John Giurini, assistant director at the Getty, describes how the United Visions project is also a taste of things to come. ‘Museums in general, but particularly museums that deal with older art, are going to have to become more creative in terms of how they draw in audiences. AR is a way that younger generations are interacting with their world so you either get on the train or let the train pass you by.’

INFORMATION

Apple Brompton Road, Apple.com

Getty, Getty.edu

Tin&Ed, TinandEd.com.au

In 2013, Ron Arad visited R Proietti, a London-based specialist repairer of original Fiat 500s. Arad explained that he was looking for a selection of Cinquecentos in a variety of colours, and was planning to crush them flat. Unsurprisingly, proprietor Stefano Proietti was not immediately on board. Summoning his considerable if mischievous charm, Arad explained that he too was a 500 lover and that his intent was to immortalise the cars, as a pressed flower eternalises an ephemeral bloom. Arad won Proietti over and he took six cars to a specialist in the Netherlands who could flatten them to his satisfaction. 

These became the Pressed Flower series, part of the 2013 ‘In Reverse’ exhibition at the (Arad-designed) Design Museum Holon near Tel Aviv. The show explored the relationship between physical and digital design and making, and between the flat sketch and the 3D model. ‘Normally you make something from a drawing into something three-dimensional and functional,’ Arad explains. ‘I did the opposite. I took a three-dimensional, fully functional thing and I rendered it two-dimensional and non-functional.’

The show also included Slow Outburst, a digital simulation of a car being crushed by an invisible force and then reconstituting itself, created with the help of special effects studio Framestore, more usually employed on Marvel blockbusters. 

These pieces are the basis of Arad’s debut series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). And the crushing and conceptual and commercial reframing of a Fiat 500 might be as nice an analogy as any for the promise of that technology. NFTs are like cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether in that they are generally built using the same programming. However, unlike cryptocurrencies, they are not equal to one another and cannot be exchanged like for like (hence non-fungible). Each one is ‘minted’ in small numbers from digital objects such as music, animation, GIFs or avatars. Crucially, they use blockchains to register ownership and all sales thereafter; smart contracts can be coded in so creators get a piece of all future sales. But because they rely on blockchains, they carry the same reputational stink of scandalous energy use associated with cryptocurrencies. They are mostly in the news because last year an NFT by video artist Beeple was sold at Christie’s for $69.3m, the third-highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist.

Arad is the first to admit that, like most people, he has a very limited understanding of the mechanics and potential of NFTs. But like most artists, he has been bombarded with calls from NFT-minting suitors telling him he should get a piece of the action. Arad is fascinated by emerging and not-yet-emerged technologies, so he just needed the right approach, the promise that he could create something enviable, to get him over the line.

That approach came from Tel Aviv-based Shifting Vision. Established in 2020 by entrepreneur and art and design collector Edouard Sterngold, Shifting Vision has already partnered with artists including Erwin Wurm, Isaac Julien, Rashid Johnson and Adel Abdessemed to create short films.

Sterngold says that, in the early days of the pandemic, he had a sense that art was resonating differently, but also that artists felt there was a greater disconnect between their work and what he calls ‘actuality’. With physical galleries closed, artists had to think about how people engaged with their art. And at the same time, seismic socio-cultural shifts, such as the rise of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, were reframing their existing work. Shifting Vision would work with artists to create films that were more immediate, accessible versions of the monograph. 

NFTs presented an opportunity to work with artists to create digital art that could reach a new audience. That pitch worked with Arad. ‘I showed them stuff and they reacted to the right things,’ he says. ‘I liked the other artists they were talking to so I said, “Yeah, let’s give it a go”. And then it was just a matter of deciding what would be the right project to start with. Luckily, we are very rich in digital material.’

The animated version of Ron Arad’s limited-edition cover creation, featuring Reverse Again, 2022, hand-painted on the artist’s tablet. Presented in association with Shifting Vision, soundtrack by Dario Marinanelli. 

Set to be auctioned in April, ‘Reverse Again’ is four lots of NFTs, including a reworking of the Slow Outburst film in an edition of 15 (each a different colour), a one-of-a-kind edition of Slow Outburst, and Little Yellow Car, an early video ‘prototype’ of Slow Outburst, also in an edition of 15. Meanwhile, Let’s Drop it, OK? and Let’s Drop it, OK? (Side View) are digital images of a collapsing Roddy Giacosa, the bent steel rod simulacra of a Fiat 500 Arad created for the ‘In Reverse’ exhibition, now produced in editions of 50. 

The Arad collaboration is Shifting Vision’s debut NFT project, but Sterngold has big and serious ambitions. ‘As a technology, it is still 100 per cent potential and opportunity,’ he says. Sterngold knows fine art NFTs are still relatively uncharted territory; it’s his mission to convince established contemporary artists of the potential of NFTs, to help them figure out how and why the technology can work for them. As Shifting Vision’s curator and project manager Jemma Elliott-Israelson says, ‘The goal is to work with artists who are super-established and don’t want to take big, stupid risks with their work.’ 

Sterngold is the first to admit that NFTs are still a difficult sell to many artists, but there is obvious low-hanging fruit. The initial appeal is to video artists who can now ‘mint’ editions of new video work. ‘There’s nothing to lose and all to gain,’ he says. 

He also argues that NFT smart contracts will encourage more cross-disciplinary collaboration, as all creative partners are guaranteed a piece of the financial pie. NFTs allow an artist to explore the potential of digital art, in whatever form, with a greater sense of security around ownership. ‘If you’re an established artist, you want to know what happens to your licensing and copyrights of your image after it’s sold,’ says Elliott-Israelson. ‘We are trying to provide a safe space for artists to do this and then hopefully ignite a lot of creativity within them.’

‘Artists need time to adapt and make the transition. Art shouldn’t be created in a hurry,’ concludes Sterngold. ‘We’ll go on a journey together with the artists. We’ll test some things, we’ll learn and we’ll adapt.’

Shifting Vision produced a short film, directed by art director and filmmaker Giulia Magno, exploring the artistic process behind the creation of Ron Arad's NFT artworks. Shot in Arad’s London home and studio, the film retraces the artist’s long-standing fascination with the Fiat 500

This article was originally featured in the May 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands now and available to subscribers. 

ronarad.co.uk, shiftingvision.org

Cause-driven cash-gifting platform Double Dutch is a new initiative responding to a big problem: gifts cause waste, and lots of it. Spurred on by alarming research data that last year Americans threw away $16 billion worth of holiday gifts, Dutch artists Inez and Vinoodh proposed a solution. 

Their initiative bypasses wasteful wrapping and unwanted presents through artist-designed digital greetings cards for cash gifting. ‘We asked ourselves “What is the perfect gift to express love and gratitude and how do we bring that to a larger scale? How does showing one person you care about them benefit all of us?” We figure that by combining art, message and money we can eliminate waste and really contribute to “the bigger picture”’, say Inez and Vinoodh, who founded the initiative alongside Laura Bailyn, founder of Kidfund and Piyusha Eluri, former executive of Rent the Runway.

The renowned photography duo – known for work on the intersection of fashion and art – called on their creative network, including the likes of Urs Fischer, Maurizio Cattelan, Derrick Adams, Gigi Hadid, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Es Devlin, as well as emerging artists, to create greetings cards. The process is simple: users pick the card design and cause of their choice. Sales revenue is then split 50-50 with the artist who, in turn, has the option to donate their proceeds to a charity of their choice.

Double Dutch is powered by the no-fee charitable donation feature Adyen Giving, in which payments platform Adyen absorbs the full cost of the donation. The social and environmental impact causes set to benefit from the initiative include Knot on my Planet, Save The Music Foundation, charity: water, Every Mother Counts and Parley for the Oceans. 

In a nutshell, Double Dutch is a simple concept with big ideas: to minimise waste, fund impactful charity efforts, and put the cool back into cash gifting – all through the power of art.

INFORMATION

doubledutch.cash

‘Cao Fei is running late,’ says the interpreter for my interview. ‘She can’t get Zoom to work on her new computer.’ The interpreter – he’s calling in from Melbourne, and I, from Singapore – tries to set up FaceTime, but that doesn’t work either. And just as we’ve managed to log on to Google Meet, Cao comes online on Zoom from Beijing. She’s using her old laptop. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The irony of the moment looms large.

Since she burst into an unsuspecting art world in 1999 with Imbalance 257 – a grainy, voyeuristic video of disaffected Chinese youth she’d shot for her third-year project at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts – Cao has become renowned for her adept fusion of technology and visual art to create surrealistic, dystopian worlds where an entire online city floats over water (RMB City: A Second Life City Planning, 2007), a man is lost in hyperspace (Nova, 2019), and a robot vacuum cleaner wanders aimlessly through rubble (Rumba II: Nomad, 2015).

‘Cao’s practice has always hovered between the real and virtual worlds,’ says Stephanie Fong, the founder of Fost Gallery in Singapore, who has been following Cao’s work since Cosplayers, 2004. ‘She was making multimedia works even before the current generation of art consumers was born.’ And now, in the midst of arguably the most prolific period of her professional life, Cao finds herself sufficiently let down by technology that she declines to even turn on her Zoom video. But then, with such a punishing schedule, who can blame her?

She has just come off her first major solo show in China at UCCA Beijing, a milestone she believes has brought her the widespread recognition that has eluded her over the past 20 years. The show charted her artistic development in the context of China’s profound social changes, and the aesthetic and cultural transformations they caused.

In August, her film Nova had its Russian premiere at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. A month later, she won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for ‘Blueprints’, her 2020 exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries. She currently has a show at Sprüth Magers’ Los Angeles gallery, and is prepping for ‘Supernova’, another solo at Rome’s MAXXI.

All this, while creating the limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s November 2021 print issue. It is the latest riff on Hong Xia, her research project on the history and current state of Jiuxianqiao, the Beijing neighbourhood she works in and which was the birthplace of China’s electronics industry.

The Wallpaper* portfolio is a retrospective of sorts of two of Cao’s seminal works. Nova – which debuted at her Pompidou show ‘HX’ in 2019 – is a retro-futurist tale of a failed secret science project that attempts to turn humans into digital mediums. Lost in cyberspace, the protagonist drifts through overlapping worlds and time. The other work, Asia One, 2018, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, is a meditation on the effects of automated labour and the repetitive motion of factories on the human spirit. ‘It’s been six years since I started Hong Xia, but it’s a continuous project,’ Cao says, explaining that there is much material still to be mined in documenting the evolution of a specific urban pocket as buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and communities reshaped. ‘It’s a combination of history, fiction and the abstract. The Wallpaper* cover has a lot to do with the post-Covid world. Will we live like this forever, or will there be an end in a year, two years? And, of course, these questions are all linked to issues currently affecting the world, such as climate change.’

For any artist, that’s a lot of ground to cover, but for two decades now, Cao has been both prolific and thoughtful in her exploration of such grand themes. For Yung Ma, who curated ‘HX’ at the Centre Pompidou in 2019 and is now the artistic director of Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Cao ‘has the unique ability to connect the past with the present in a playful yet profound manner. In doing so, she has created visions of the future that are deeply rooted in our dreams, hope, fear and anxiety.’

The bounty of her current works may say much about Cao’s evergreen popularity, but it also obscures the discordance of the better part of 2020, when the pandemic kept her and her family in Singapore. ‘I’ve never spent such a long time out of China,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t a good feeling.’ Yet, she managed to impose a sense of perspective onto the experience, wringing a new work out of the unfamiliar sense of isolation, uncertainty and dislocation. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Isle of Instability, 2020, is a magpie’s collection of video, photographs and sculptures whose disparate natures are emotionally stitched together by the pandemic. It debuted at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai and it is, to date, her most personal work.

Confined to a Singapore family apartment with her children and husband, the Singaporean conceptual artist Lim Tzay Chuen, Cao imagined her then nine-year-old daughter, Qing, as the last surviving human on an island, marooned with the detritus of the virus – bottles of hand sanitiser, bread bag clips and thermometers – but still unaccountably hopeful about the future.

Part of that hope springs from the fact that at a time when the virus was tearing apart entire societies, Cao was grateful to be with her children and to create something with them. Another part comes from the realisation that she has always believed in the end of the world and seems to have spent her whole career preparing for this very moment, prophetically exploring how she thought humanity would experience that crisis in Haze and Fog, 2013, and LA Town, 2014. And so, when Covid-19 arrived, it came with both a sense of déjà-vu and relief. Relief, because having already imagined the worst, she felt she was at liberty to explore a more positive side to the pandemic. This is not to say that there is a happy ending, but rather, well, it’s not the end of the world.

With Isle of Instability, you realise that whilst Cao’s work is streaked with the constant theme of gloomy dystopia, it is also firmly balanced by a sense of impermanence – in the positive sense that, whatever else may be troubling us, it won’t last, because everything is in a state of flux. In the world according to Cao Fei, the sun will rise and shine again over her daughter’s island, just as it does at the end of her seminal work, Nova. Which makes the artist’s job of faithfully recording the times all the more important.

This fidelity to nature and history imprinted early on Cao. Born in 1978, she grew up during the years of Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy, which unleashed China’s economic and political powers – embodied in a magnified version of capitalism – on the world. Those reforms transformed China by empowering an entire generation with the belief that anything was possible, even if it came at the cost of their individuality.

Cao’s early works are all driven by this belief. Cosplayers showed how a segment of Chinese society, disenfranchised by China’s runaway hyper-capitalism, regained some of its power by dressing up as fictional cosplayers. One of her best known works, Whose Utopia?, 2006, tries to humanise China’s industrialisation by asking workers in a light bulb factory to explore their personal ambitions.

Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, notes that at the time of Cao’s emergence, ‘she was among the first artists to enter a Chinese art world that was beginning to find its contours, newly capable of recognising not just generational difference but a new sensibility. Unlike the contemporaneous clusters of experimentation driven by artists just a few years her senior in Beijing and Shanghai, she did not then understand herself as part of a boundary-pushing dialectic stretching back to earlier movements like the Stars and the 1985 New Wave, but rather as a participant in a new culture and society taking shape around her.’

As Cao herself points out, ‘When I was growing up, it was a period of intense urban transformation. I was immersed in the new pop culture and films, so it was natural that I would be so focused on these external social changes, especially in Whose Utopia?’

Eugene Tan, director of the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum, says that at a time when the world was beginning to comprehend China’s rise onto the global stage, Whose Utopia? provided a fascinating insight into Chinese society. ‘Juxtaposed against the backdrop of an industrial factory – something we associate with China, as the “factory of the world” – it demonstrated the desire for self-expression and individual identity in the Chinese people, manifested through the performances of Cao Fei’s collaborators in the video, who were workers in the factory.’

In other words, Cao’s work, for all its elements of fantasy, is rooted firmly in a genuine social concern, which Tan says explains her enduring connection with her audience. ‘Her work resonates because of the subjects they centre on – the effects of neoliberalist capitalism on our environments, particularly in China where it has taken hold rapidly. And its effects are especially pronounced, its omnipresence and inescapability, and the individual reactions and emotions from individuals who exist within these quite alienating spaces.’

In a very unique way, concurs Philomene Magers, co-founder of Sprüth Magers, ‘Cao deals with the changes in our globalised and digitalised world and how people react and integrate them into their lives. This combined with her own distinct visual language makes her one of the most exciting artists of her generation.’

Another reason for Cao’s endurance as an artist is that her sympathies genuinely reflect her own experiences. There isn’t a single false note to be found simply because she refuses to fake an emotion, which explains why when I ask her about the absence of gender politics in her work, there is a brief puzzled silence. Her eventual response – ‘Gender has not been an issue in my personal experience as an artist’ – has the terse quality of a verbal shrug, despite the fact that China’s art community is almost entirely male-dominated.

From another perspective, the lack of gender politics may also be due to the fact that her work is based on universality, rather than a narrow identity of, say, a Chinese artist. As Fong notes, though many of Cao’s works feature China as part of the mise-en-scène, ‘they have a sense of universality, either through the themes she is dealing with, or the use of popular global culture and iconography.’

‘She is much more than a Chinese artist,’ adds the Hong Kong-based art critic Alexandra Seno. ‘She’s really an artist of the contemporary. Her work is for everyone, and the test of her success is how relatable her art is beyond geography, age and context.’

Tan also agrees: ‘With the effects of global capitalism being the central focus of her work, I think it speaks to a likewise global audience. While she does take a particular interest in developments in China, due to how rapidly and profoundly economic change has taken hold there, perhaps the need to pigeonhole her as a Chinese artist is ambiguous.’

If there is a common thread to be found in Cao’s work, it would be her innate curiosity about different media. Case in point is her intuitive grasp and enthusiastic embrace of technology. She began blogging at a time when the act was practically unknown in China. She’s been using digital tools such as augmented reality and virtual reality for years now, an approach that has paid dividends in a post-Covid world where staging physical exhibits has become so challenging.

She is, for instance, an aficionado of Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, in which digital versions of real-world artistic creations are bought and sold online. A few days after our conversation, she debuted her legendary avatar China Tracy on Kanon’s K21 project – a groundbreaking open-source, closed-end art vault that allows artists to create, protect and store art files of unlimited size and metadata. If that all sounds like gobbledegook to you, there’s no shame in that. ‘The digitally adept Gen Zs are her ideal audience,’ says Fong, at the same time as she wistfully regrets not buying more of Cao’s work when she had a chance. ‘I can’t afford her anymore.’

What’s a little frightening is just how adaptable Cao is and, by extension, what more she is capable of as an artist. If, as Tan says, she cannot be pigeonholed as a Chinese artist, equally, her oeuvre defies convenient pegging as it continues to evolve. Unexpectedly, she credits part of this evolution to her husband. ‘I created Haze and Fog after I got married,’ she says, ‘and my friends all thought my work had become more restrained and minimalist.’

Cao’s limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s November 2021 issue shows a train carriage and ferris wheel at the Jalainur Mammoth Scenic Area in Manzhouli, a border town between China and Russia. Limited-edition covers are available to print subscribers, see wallpaper.com/sub21

She also points to Fú Chá, 2020, which she created for the National Gallery Singapore just before the country went into lockdown. The installation featured a recreated traditional Chinese junk boat. Filled with water, it was suspended from an A-frame below a neon sign that read ‘Almost Arriving’, and it was programmed to swing back and forth on the structure’s axis, sloshing water like some out-of-time theme park ride. The junk boat was also, perhaps, ‘a metaphor for a concentration of hyper-consumption, the apotheosis of the neoliberal economic reform undertaken by China when Cao was a child,’ says Tan, who guided the project.

Cao says a work like Fú Chá would not have been possible before her marriage to Lim. ‘His approach as an artist is to focus on the non-visual elements, to try to use a simple object to represent a complex idea.’

That said, by the end of our interview, I find that while I’m considerably more versed in Cao’s art, I’m no closer to knowing her as a person. Talking to a disembodied voice on a rectangular blank on Zoom probably hasn’t helped. ‘I hope we’ll meet one day in Singapore,’ she says as we prepare to sign off. I begin to mutter a platitude about keeping safe, but then, I realise, just like her avatar China Tracy, who flits in and out of her work, she isn’t there anymore. 

INFORMATION

Cao Fei’s eponymous show runs until 20 November at Sprüth Magers LA, spruethmagers.com; ‘Supernova’ runs from 16 December 2021 – 24 April 2022 at MAXXI, Rome, maxxi.art; caofei.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*271). Subscribe today

There’s nothing new in a well-known brand using its resources to promote the arts, but few have undertaken that mission with as much dedication as La Prairie. The Swiss luxury skincare brand began its sponsorship of contemporary art at Art Basel and the West Bund Art & Design fairs in 2017. Since then it has funded projects at the Fondation Beyeler museum for modern and contemporary art in Switzerland, supported students at ECAL, and is now set to cement its place as a leading patron of contemporary art with its first appearance at Frieze London this October from 13-17 October.

La Prairie at Frieze London

La Prairie’s debut offering at Frieze London is Sense of Blue, a multisensory immersive installation that plunges the viewer into the depths of the night. The piece is by French digital artist Maotik, best known for using computer-generated algorithms to create reality-shifting environments.

Here, he deploys that same technique, although this time using motion sensors, low-frequency sounds, and shifting blue and black lights to simultaneously distort the viewer’s sense of space and heighten awareness of their immediate surroundings.

‘The idea was to travel through the night through this immersive environment,’ says Maotik, speaking from Sense of Blue’s debut at Art Basel this September. ‘To use these devices to create [the sensation] of travelling not from one distance to another distance, but travelling through time and to use light to change your perception of space.

‘At night, your vision is less clear. You see things with more difficulty, but it also opens up new perspectives; when you see less you maybe open your imagination a bit more.’

The Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil

Maotik’s installation was commissioned by La Prairie to celebrate the launch of its latest product, Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil. Skin Caviar is one of the brand’s most iconic collections, famed for harnessing the reparative powers of caviar and augmenting them with the use of La Prairie’s patented Exclusive Cellular Complex (a formulation so highly protected that its components are produced and blended in three separate labs to ensure the recipe remains a secret). The Nighttime Oil is unique within the Skin Caviar collection as it blends the line’s signature caviar formulation with a new ‘caviar retinol’. 

Speaking about the collection, La Prairie’s global director of strategic innovation, Dr Jacqueline Hill, says: ‘Caviar is, of course, a source of life, and because it’s an egg, it's a very rich source of nutrients. We've got quite a few different forms of caviar, and we've studied their benefits at different levels. What we've seen is that most of the forms of caviar that we've developed have an action on fibroblasts, which boost the formation of collagen.’

She continues, ‘Then what we've seen is that in different forms, the caviar can have different effects. So when we talk about caviar retinol, you get all the benefits of retinol, which are quite well known – it boosts epidermal renewal, and it also acts on collagen formation – together with the ingredients in the Skin Caviar.’

‘All the ingredients in the formula will help with three different things – improving the skin surface as far as deep lines; skin firmness, and there we got really great results; and increasing the barrier function, because your skin barrier gets less efficient at night naturally, but it gets even less efficient with age and we want to compensate for this.’ 

The product is packaged, like all other Skin Caviar creations, in the brand’s striking cobalt blue jars, which pay homage to the late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who suggested that La Prairie use this distinctive colour. 

Art meets science

‘The link between the house and contemporary art has been there from the very beginning,’ says La Prairie’s global chief marketing officer Greg Prodromides. ‘That's why it feels like it is at the very core of who we are.’ He refers to the establishment of La Prairie clinic, in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1931, which went on to host artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the fact that its founder Dr Paul Niehans was an art collector himself. 

‘There was always a kind of artistic effervescence in the clinic that actually continued to strengthen with the beginning of [the skincare line] in the 1980s with the encounter with Niki de Saint Phalle,’ Prodromides continues.

‘In recent years, we wanted to be a bit more vocal about this link and to share it with a larger audience. Hence, our decision to collaborate with Art Basel in all its editions, but also other contemporary art fairs.

‘When we choose an artist to work with [on these projects] we are always looking at a couple of things. First, artists with whom we share a common set of values; where we see that they will help us tell the story of the house but via their creative paradigm, via their eyes,’ says Prodromides.

‘And we always try to work with younger artists that are emerging, and often women artists since women are underrepresented in the world of contemporary art.

‘So for this project, we were looking for somebody who could really bring the values of Skin Caviar to life, which are the audacity behind Skin Caviar, the audacity of using [actual] caviar in skincare, and also this fusion of art and science. The choice of digital art became much more evident, for its audacious characteristics and because it was a form of art with which we could push the boundaries of what we’ve already done.’ 

Speaking about the connection between art and science further, Maotik says: ‘When it comes to artists and scientists, we do the same thing. Everything is a series of experimentations that eventually brings together a [beauty] product or an artwork.

‘We move ahead, sometimes into the unknown, developing new techniques. Our work is like that of scientists – we do a lot of tests, creating prototypes and guiding ourselves according to the results. We can come across unpleasant surprises, as well as stunning outcomes.’ 

In the case of the brand’s latest launch and its Frieze debut, from the 13-17 October, the results are certainly a ‘stunning outcome

Information

laprairie.com

There's an intangibility behind the DNA of innovative fashion designer and artist Aitor Throup’s latest project Anatomyland. The Argentinian-British creative, who has in the past worked with materiality experts CP Company, G Star Raw and Stone Island and musicians including Damon Albarn and Flying Lotus, defines the project as being ‘multi-dimensional and non linear', ‘a definition of luxury through depth in meaning, precision and innovation' and a continuous ‘conversation'.

It's fitting therefore, that the release of Anatomyland's first prototypes have not been launched as physicalised products, but as an NFT (non-fungible token) drop. Today (7 May 2021) premier marketplace Nifty Gateway, launches a series of intricately formed, collectible digital sculptures, showcasing figurations that allude to themes central to Throup's vision. These allegorical characters, named ‘Lil Ying‘, ‘Lil Yang’  and ‘Good Ol’ Dom’, are a trio that represent the harmony and chaos of life and the concept of non-duality and the idea of living outside of societal norms and expectations.

These ideas are the culmination of over 15 years of Throup’s research. ‘I’ve always struggled to fit in. But I’ve always been fine with that. As a kid I created  my own worlds and spent most of my time there rather than here,' he says. ‘As an adult I’m still that kid. And for the past 16 years I have devoted my life to creating a definitive world as an alternative to the  one we’ve been told we exist in.'

NFT fashion: Aitor Throup's non-fungible frontier

The next phase in Throup’s non traditional project roll out? Two pieces which feature in Anatomyland's launch campaign images, the ‘Modular Veil Cap’ and ‘Modular Bucket Hat’ will be released in an extremely limited drop of five units per design. These editions will be numbered, signed and authenticated artworks, linked to individual unique NFT’s. 

Like the art and design worlds, NFT's are gaining momentum in the fashion world. Back in March, virtual sneaker brand RTFKT Studios linked up with the crypto-artist FEWOCiOUS, on a Nifty Gateway sale of 600 NFT sneakers that totalled over $3.1 million in sales. Jeweller Simone Faurschou has also bolstered her blockchain presence, selling the first piece from her latest jewellery collection ‘Block1' as an NTF, through the marketplace Rarible. 

‘There are multiple reasons behind my decision to join the NFT community. Decentralisation is at the core of the NFT ethos, which deeply resonates with me and my practice,' says Throup. ‘As a conceptual designer, my primary interest is to capture complex narratives into objects through design; and digital tools have allowed me to merge my drawings and my sculptures into a hybrid medium with unlimited potential for detail and narrative. Further, there is intrinsic aspirational value in NFT artworks if they are rich in concept, meaning and detail; so creating in this space is aligned with my wider objective to redefine not only fashion, but luxury itself through a multi-disciplinary approach.' 

French label Coperni is continually harnessing the innovative intersection between fashion and technology. Last year, it honed in on the luxury world's captivation with gaming, launching ‘Coperni Summer Camp,' a series of interactive puzzles on its Instagram. The launch was a social media follow up to ‘Copernize your Life’, a wormhole-like series of Instagram profiles that led users deeper and deeper into its brand DNA. The brand's accessories also allude to our ever-increasing relationship with the digital world, named the Wifi, Swipe and App. For spring it also created C+,  an anti-bacterial fabric resistant to both rain and UV rays.

AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) have been utilised by brands over the past year, keen to bring online animation to collections viewed at home from a computer screen. But XR (Extended Reality) is the technological star of Coperni's latest S/S 2021 campaign video. ‘Ready to Care' is a dizzying spectacle which hones in the vast skyline of an imagined metropolis, and incorporates both digital and physical reality. The technology – which allows a viewer to interact with a virtual space as if it were real – was first used in the Star Wars' The Mandalorian series (2019).

Dive into Coperni's cutting edge campaign

‘Ready to Care' charts a series of friends who convene on the dizzyingly high beam of a building, where they dance, kiss in the rain and smoke, against a vertigo-inducing backdrop. Coperni founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant enlisted music video directors, We Are From LA, to direct the brand's cutting-edge campaign, who have also worked with Pharrell Williams and Dua Lipa. The film was created in Paris, in the first XR studio in France, opened by Julien Collect and Pierre Guy-Costanzo.

Coperni harnessed a host of different digital technologies to craft its 3D urban world. This includes Unreal Engine, a gaming software, and TouchDesigner, a visual language tool, and stYpe Red Eye camera tracking technologies, ensuring a camera’s movement is mapped to the content on an LED screen and then extended to create a 360-degree space. Get ready to dive into its dizzying world. 

Despite its relative youth, NFT art has already dazzled the art world with controversy, intrigue and surprise in equal measure. For the latest in a number of firsts for the genre, a Christie’s auction will offer traditional, physical paintings accompanied by NFT artworks made by digital feminist collective Rewind. 

The anonymous collective has blazed a trail in digital art, reinterpreting existing paintings to confront gender and minority imbalances in art world structures. 

Rewind Collective has created original works inspired by five paintings by pioneering women of Abstract Expressionism. Collectors who successfully bid on the paintings – by Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Yvonne Thomas, and Lynne Mapp Drexler – will receive an accompanying original NFT created by Rewind Collective.

For the sale, Christie’s and Rewind Collective have teamed up with activist and gallerist Amar Singh, who recently pledged to donate $5m worth of art by female, LGBTQ+ and minority artists to museums worldwide by 2025.

‘I exhibited Rewind Collective at my gallery in 2017 and I share their mission to champion women and underrepresented communities,’ says Singh. ‘For me, LGBTQ+, female and minority artists have long been overlooked and cast aside. My collaboration with Christie's brings the women of abstraction to the forefront where they belong, with the added help of Rewind Collective's stunning NFTs also honouring them.’ 

NFT artworks include Thinking of Elaine, created in response to Elaine de Kooning’s Red Oxide Grotto (Cave #175). As Rewind Collective explains of the piece, ‘Elaine de Kooning always called bull amongst the misogyny of the art world, she was outspoken, a rule-breaker, and famously humorous. This digital work anthropomorphises de Kooning’s famous bull paintings, fighting like the women of Abstract Expressionism fought in the 1950s to be seen and heard.’

INFORMATION

Rewind Collective x Christie's NFT and women of Abstract Expressionism auction will take place on 14 May. christies.com

amargallery.com

After a year of experiencing art (along with almost everything else) in the digital realm, the value of going virtual is being explored deeper through a new partnership between social platform Snapchat and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The multi-year initiative will bring together local artists and technologists from different communities in Los Angeles to highlight and share under-represented histories from the region with a wider audience. 

The partnership’s first chapter, ‘Snapchat x LACMA: Monumental Perspectives’, sees five local artists each create an augmented reality monument in ode to a different facet of the city’s diverse culture. Built using Snapchat’s technology and available to experience by anyone with the Snapchat camera, the monuments are situated at sites around Los Angeles, including LACMA, MacArthur Park, Earvin ‘Magic Johnson Park and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. 

Ranging from Mercedes Dorame’s abstract portal that considers what it means to be a Native indigenous inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (Los Angeles) and I.R. Bach’s animations that inspire self-reflection while disrupting the idea of what a monument should be in the first place, to Glenn Kaino’s path of generational stories that connect together along the 1932 L.A. Olympic marathon route, these tributes give recognition to an array of lesser-known perspectives.

‘Historically speaking, communities of colour and marginalised communities are not normally included or considered in the creation of monuments,’ says Kaino, who is Japanese-American. No Finish Line is a sculpture of an exploded clock in which all the gears are taken from different symbolic elements of the neighbourhood.’

Ruben Ochoa, the artist behind ¡Vendedores, Presente!, which pays homage to the history of street vendors in Los Angeles, adds: ‘There’s an aspect to monuments that highlights a person, a place, or a group. I wanted to depict that through [my piece] and depict a community that’s often overlooked.’

Rounded off with Ada Pinkston’s memorial series that casts the spotlight on Biddy Mason, a woman who arrived in California enslaved in 1851 and ultimately died in 1891 as a free person, not to mention as one of the wealthiest Black women in the country, these virtual monuments couldn’t come at a better time.

‘These monuments are not only relevant to issues of today—Los Angeles, civic space, community— but also to the medium of art, opening doors to new ways of thinking about art in both physical and virtual spaces,’ says LACMA’s CEO and director, Michael Govan.

Snap Inc’s co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy adds, ‘Through this collaboration with LACMA, Snap Inc.’s augmented reality technology has become an immersive medium for advocacy and representation. We’re thrilled to empower these artists and Lens Creators, and support their desire to share stories through a new perspective.’

INFORMATION

snapchat.com

lacma.org

It’s always a treat to experience art in real life, but sometimes navigating a crowded museum to catch a glimpse of an artwork behind a throng of visitors can leave us wanting more. Now a new initiative by Outset and Visualogical brings together 15 leading British arts institutions, including Tate, National Galleries of Scotland and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and is seizing the digital opportunities offered by the pandemic to create a very different, complementary viewing experience for gallery-goers around the world.

A non-profit platform for virtual exhibitions that combines a new micro-philanthropic model with cutting-edge technology, theVov aims to make culture accessible to a truly global audience thanks to a series of digital spaces hosted by tech specialist Vortic Art. Some of these spaces are exact replicas of real locations, some are otherworldly galleries, but all the bespoke digital extensions will be able to host live and pre-recorded talks and tours.

TheVov launched on 19 April with a talk by curator Ralph Rugoff, who led viewers through a virtual rehanging of Andreas Gursky’s 2018 retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery. Thanks to the new platform, viewers can not only visit the online exhibition, taking in Gursky’s unique way of framing the world in their own time, but also have access to Rugoff’s presentation and essay as well as behind-the-scenes images, articles and reviews. 

Also kick-starting the ten-week programme of theVov’s first season are two other exhibitions, the 2019 ‘Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol 1’ from Goldsmiths CCA; and the 2020 ‘Pacita Abad: Life in the Margins’ from Spike Island. With three seminal shows launching every Monday, future releases include the return of Chris Burden’s iconic 14 Magnolia Doubles to South London Gallery after 15 years; Yinka Shonibare’s open-air installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 2013; and Lisa Brice’s 2018 ‘Art Now’ exhibition at Tate Britain.

Supported by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, theVov also offers an innovative social interface by art-science collective Visualogical and the option of a new funding stream for the art world, which has been so impacted by the various lockdowns. ‘If harnessed sensitively and ethically, online experiences can not only complement the physical art world but actually further enrich it,’ say Visualogical’s co-founders Natasha Hersham and Victoria Westerman. Users are invited to donate when viewing the online galleries, with funds raised being distributed equally between the participating institutions. 

With the country’s top curators and experts sharing their knowledge, and unprecedented virtual access to important contemporary artworks, theVov is set to redefine our gallery-viewing experience, and help ‘the physical and digital realms coexist symbiotically side-by-side, making the arts more accessible globally than ever’.

INFORMATION

thevov.art

Using Italo Calvino’s seminal novel as a springboard, ‘Invisible Cities’, a new show of NFT (non-fungible token) art imagines utopian cityscapes that never came to be. 

The digital exhibition presents a world of potential, as viewers coast through these imagined cyberspaces, which oscillate between fact and fantasy. Comprising ten newly commissioned unique digital pieces by Fabio Giampietro, Jenisu, Elise Swopes, Karisman, Dangiuz, Kldpxl, Gutty Kreum, Mari K, Annibale Siconolfi, and Nate Mohler, the show presents a multifaceted global response to Calvino’s framework. 

‘Calvino’s seminal text is a perfect framework for today’s NFT art market, remaining a tour de force of the imagination,’ explain exhibition curators An Rong and Elisabeth Johs. ‘Most likely, we will never be able to fathom the origin of such visions. Are they part of the universal archetypal imagery? The mystery behind the future of NFTs and their place in the world needs a response with imagination. The mystery behind imagination is a forever conundrum.’ 

‘Invisible Cities’ will be live to collectors worldwide until 30 April 2021, as buy now or via auction, through SuperRare, a platform built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Mari K’s Diomira offers a take on the first city described in Calvino's book. Elsewhere through the ether, Gutty Kreum stirs up nostalgia-induced dreams of Japan, and Nate Mohler delves into memories and dreams in his Painted Cities series. 

The show makes no effort to hide parallels between these urban fragments and the crypto world they occupy. Built on abstract foundations and decentralised viewpoints, they both present a web of invisible objects, economies, exchanges, communities, systems and processes. But their most common trait hinges on a riddle: what is real, and what is imagined? 

As Calvino states in Invisible Cities, ‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’

INFORMATION

’Invisible Cities’ will be live until 30 April 2021. superrare.co

we've shown our appreciation by giving the platform a nod in the 2021 Wallpaper* Desgin Awards

It didn’t take long for WeTransfer to become a cornerstone of modern creative business. The online file-sharing firm was founded in Amsterdam in 2009, just as big tranches of digital data were becoming way too unwieldy for emails and the ‘couriered hard drive’ was already as archaic as the stagecoach.

From the outset, the start-up prioritised ease of use and wasn’t afraid to put its primary revenue – ads – bold and centre stage. WeTransfer rapidly became essential, and the big visual hit of its full-screen campaigns transcended the banality of the pop-up and the banner ad. By 2014, the company was ramping up support of its creative ecosystem, with side projects including a bursary scheme for Central Saint Martins students.

These days, WeTransfer’s free ethos remains, albeit bolstered by a premium subscription service that adds functionality and a suite of helpful tools and apps for subscribers. Co-founder and chief creative officer Damian Bradfield has overseen an increased emphasis on presenting new work, with three million people clicking through to the ever-changing roster of WePresent portfolios every month.

WeTransfer’s tools, Collect, Paper and Paste (which help to create a cross between a grown-up version of Pinterest and a simplified Photoshop), are perfect for ordering the digital paper chain of inspiration that we gather as we move around the web. The company is also a vocal supporter of good causes, regularly giving its high-profile ad space over to both emerging creatives and activists, such as gun control advocates. If that’s not enough, WeTransfer cements its place as a piece of ‘curatorial infrastructure’ with an annual Ideas Report, especially useful for getting a handle on how others have dealt with the creative blocks imposed by the pandemic, for example. With 60 million users sending around 1.5 billion files a month – most probably including substantial chunks of the magazines you read and the websites you browse – WeTransfer is a vital creative backbone.

In a year when virtual connections replaced real life encounters, a host of brands have sought creative ways to inspire their customers. As in every industry, change has been afoot for jewellers; whether they have overcome an initial wariness about selling online or found new and innovative ways to provide impeccable customer service through a screen.

For some entrepreneurial new businesses, the timing is spot on. Just launched is Once, an elegant online fine jewellery retail platform. Dubbing itself the first fine jewellery e-commerce community, it aims to provide an immersive experience into fine jewels, compensating for face to face interactions with slick tech which makes for an intuitive visitor experience.

A carefully-curated selection of jewellery designers brings established fine jewellers – Boodles, Elizabeth Gage – together with internationally renowned brands – Messika, Amrapali – and independent designers, including Hannah Martin, Anais Rheiner, Dauphin and Bibi van der Velden. In total, over 30 brands are currently available on site.

For ONCE CEO Shezan Amiji, it is an efficient way to bridge the gap between fine jewellery buyers and sellers. ‘It makes the industry more efficient and transparent, while offering a simplified visitor experience,’ he says. ‘Everyone can now discover new and classic fine jewellery designs spanning a range of budgets at one dedicated destination.’

INFORMATION

youronce.com

A vast 10,000 sq ft space on Cork Street, split into two levels including an open office space, the new gallery is the brainchild of art world titan Charles Saatchi’s daughter Phoebe Saatchi Yates and her husband Arthur Yates. 

‘Our gallery will show artists at the start of their careers in full-scale presentations. We are going to represent them and work with them throughout their careers,' says Phoebe Saatchi Yates. ‘We view it as “marrying” the artists; every one we are completed invested in and completely behind. We are all in at the start line.' In addition, the duo will display and sell contemporary works from leading names: for the opening, this includes works by Yayoi Kusama, Robert Motherwell and Anselm Kiefer. ‘Normally if you are going to see a secondary market work, you would usually go to a dealer’s house or you see this kind of work in an auction hang. So, we are somewhere in the middle as we will have ten artworks on show at any given time in our office space which is open to view,' explains Phoebe. 

The inaugural exhibition is a series of paintings and works on paper by Swiss-born, London-based artist Pascal Sender. Fascinated with augmented reality, Sender integrates technology into his practice: previously, he has created works by following the instruction of live digital audiences. To accompany the artworks for his Saatchi Yates show, he has created an app through which to view the works, bringing them to life in a fully immersive experience using 3D renderings and sound. 

Wallpaper*: What drew you to Pascal Sender’s work, and where did you discover him? 

Phoebe Saatchi Yates: We found Pascal online. He was doing these live paintings where he would strap an iPhone to his chest and he would paint what the digital audience directed him to. When we saw these canvases, we thought there might be one or two – there are 22. And on the back of this one there is another amazing painting. He has a completely wild mind. This one is a portrait of us which he created over Facetime in lockdown. We had to 3D scan ourselves so he could create the renderings. 

Arthur Yates: He has a dedication that is wild. He moved to London because he went to a talk on Georg Baselitz and he couldn’t speak English and wanted to understand more. He’s learnt how to code and built the app himself. He’s so involved in every aspect and it’s so playful.  

W*: What can we expect in terms of the future programming of the gallery?

PSY: In terms of the programming, all the artists are very international. The next show will be four artists from France who are doing something wildly interesting, then we have artists from Chicago, South Korea, all over. None have every really had big shows before. 

W*: It’s a brave move to open a brick-and-mortar gallery of this scale during a pandemic. Why was it important to you to do this now? And why did you want to pursue the ‘in-person’ experience? 

PSY: We always wanted to do this for October and Frieze and we thought you can’t put your life on hold, especially when you are our age. What are you supposed to do, wait around twiddling your thumbs? We had to go full steam ahead. 

AY: I think when all the restrictions get lifted, going to galleries will be so important. We realised when we were building the space how critical it is. I’m sure that people will be so excited to go out and actually see art. We wanted to do something big and bold in this space. There is no romance left in art fairs and non-live viewing events anymore, art needs that. It’s interesting with Pascal because his art is so digital but you need to be in the space to actually view the works in their other virtual dimension. It’s quite ironic!

W*: Why London, and why Cork Street in particular? 

AY: We looked all over London to begin with. You need to be in Mayfair if you want to have a successful gallery now. Collectors don’t go to East London and South London in the same way, there is natural footfall here. Globally, London has a giant art scene and art heritage. England does produce amazing artists, dealers, auction houses, it’s really embedded here. 

PSY: Collectors come here for weekends. It’s nice to contribute to ‘your city’ and do something at home. Cork Street is a heritage art street and protected. 

W*: Will there be a digital presence to the gallery? 

PSY: Obviously we will have a comprehensive website and a presence on Instagram but we are traditionalists. We were never going to start a virtual gallery, it takes all the charm out of it. When everyone was going that way, we said ‘let’s take the risk’. Doing this space in Mayfair with such gusto will be an interesting shake-up. 

AY: One foot in the past, one foot in the future. 

W*: How long has the gallery been in the works? 

PSY: We’ve always been involved in my dad’s collection; it’s always been part of the family and part of the conversation. We would always go for lunch with my dad on a Saturday and see shows before, and walk through the student shows. It became a bigger and bigger part of our life during the past five years and something that we cared a lot about.

AY: We started working with Charles on the collection, buying and selling, and started doing some private dealing. We got to a point where we felt confident and had met the right collectors who trust us to take on a project like this. 

W*: What was your aim with the architecture of this large space? 

PSY: It was a shell, but it was a gallery shell, so we didn’t have to transform an office space. All we cared about was making white walls that would best show the art. 

AY: We didn’t work with an architect per se. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible, we didn’t want anything flashy. 

W*: Have you set yourselves a brief on the artists you want to nurture, and the collectors you want to work with?

PSY: Something we really want to do with the gallery is not only build a new generation of artists, but we also really want to appeal to young collectors. If you’re a new artist, you need a young collector who is going to back you throughout your career. The next generation of collectors is something we are really passionate about building with the gallery. 

AY: It’s about being approachable. I think a lot of young collectors maybe get overlooked by the old guard, whereas we are a similar age to them and having similar conversations. It makes sense for us to work with younger collectors as well as the more established ones. 

W*: How do you share the responsibilities of running the gallery?

PSY: It’s all shared, we zig and zag! Some artists call Arthur, some call me, but there are a lot of speaker-phone moments with everyone really! Most things are a total collaboration. 

AY: We also have a great team we are working with, and they will be the next movers and shakers.

Below is a selection of artworks by Pascal Sender. To experience the paintings in augmented reality, scan the QR code with your iPad or iPhone camera. This will invite you to download the Pascal Sender app. Open the app and press ‘Start' to view the paintings through the AR camera. Enjoy the show!

INFORMATION

Pascal Sender’s exhibition at Saatchi Yates runs until 15 December 2020. saatchiyates.com

Watch the interview with artist Pascal Sender on Wallpaper’s Instagram Stories here.

ADDRESS 

6 Cork Street
London W1S 3LH

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Recently launched, Earth Speakr urges global leaders and policymakers to listen to the voices of young people speaking up for their planet’s future. The project comprises an app, website and physical presentations, available in all 24 official languages of the EU and accessible globally.
 
Eliasson’s practice is deeply engaged with society and the environment, and this is not his first foray into AR. Earlier this year, he launched the Wunderkammer project, which saw users ‘bring the outside in’ through the artist’s intriguing collection of natural elements, from a radiating sun to an amicable puffin.

People of all ages can download the free Earth Speakr app and see their environment transform through playful AR technology. Users first design a face which mirrors the expressions of their own. This can then merge with anything from a shoe, to a plastic bag, a tree or an entire building. Both entertaining and serious, the app aims to drum home the severity of the climate emergency and prick up the ears of those in power. Children and young people below the voting age can then record messages, quite literally on behalf of the planet, and share their thoughts globally via the Earth Speakr network.

‘What Earth Speakr will become depends on the Earth Speakrs – their creativity and imagination. The artwork is made up of their thoughts and visions, concerns and hopes’, explains Eliasson. ‘What they create can be playful and whimsical, serious, or poetic. There is no right or wrong, and it is easy for everyone to take part. Earth Speakr invites kids to speak their hearts and minds and participate in shaping our world and the planet, today and in the future.’

Earth Speakr gives kids the floor, and adults the chance to listen. It sees the next generation become both artists and spokespeople for their planet, and have a great deal of fun in the process.

INFORMATION

earthspeakr.art

olafureliasson.net

The mass migration to the digital realm in these post-pandemic times might be driven more by necessity than by choice, but the occurrence of the first-ever virtual fashion week, which kicked off with the menswear Spring/Summer 2021 shows from Paris last week, is proof that there is still grace to be found in the face of adversity.

While few things can come close to recreating the experience of watching a runway show in the flesh, several brands created compelling substitutes by providing in-depth and intimate looks into their latest collections while embracing highly creative approaches. Jonathan Anderson, who helms his eponymous label JW Anderson as well as Loewe, chose to send out a show-in-a-box; a beautiful package containing inspiration, ephemera and key looks that distills the essence of a runway show and brings it into the confines of home.

For Loewe, a classic archive box wrapped in textured canvas, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Museum in a Box experiment and creatively directed together with M/M Paris, opened with a letter from Anderson, and was subsequently filled with an inspiration booklet, key looks and pieces printed on paper blocks for 360 degree views, colour and fabric cards along with real fabric swatches, a pop-up version of the show’s set and even a portable cardboard record player that played the show’s soundtrack when manually wound.

A similar box for Anderson’s eponymous label was equally captivating – wrapped in a blue pinstripe fabric and accompanied by a handwritten note. Filled with pressed flowers and foliage, fabric swatches and a mask created by the illustrator Pol Anglada, who also made the fictional male visages that model the collection in the lookbook, the portable experience elegantly conveyed the ethos of the new collection.

Manipulating the film and video medium was another way labels upped the ante. Hérmes’ menswear artistic director Véronique Nichanian collaborated with the French playwright and director Cyril Teste to produce a film that stylishly documents every aspect of the backstage experience. From Nichanian giving models and looks their finishing touches to intuitive close-ups of the garments’ intricate and more subtle details and the final applause and celebration amongst the production team after the show concludes, the performance piece gives viewers a glimpse into the ecosystem created around an Hérmes runway show, this time set within the house’s ateliers in Pantin.

Instead of referencing the runway experience, Issey Miyake and Lanvin transported guests into each of their unique worlds. To showcase its joyful and free-spirited attitude, Issey Miyake’s film saw three male protagonists dance, leap and run through an abstracted city environment while donning its brightly hued collection. Lanvin, on the other hand, shot its fantasy-steeped collection, which reflected creative director Bruno Sialleli’s longing for escape, adventure and normal life, against the naïve art architecture of Le Palais Idéal – an equally dream-like Medieval castle built over 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, by Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman.

Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh created a series of films that will be unveiled on a democratic and inclusive tour around the world. Debuted in Paris and continuing to Shanghai and Tokyo, the film starts off with movers packing up around Vuitton’s ancestral founder’s home and follows a colourful band of animated characters (designed by Reggie Know) who have stowed away. The adventure will continue in Shanghai on 6 August with a full runway show and the characters coming to life, with more chapters and destinations revealed throughout the year.

With majority of this season’s collections being designed in lockdown, there was a shared emphasis on simplicity, craftsmanship and relaxed, versatile silhouettes across the board – even the simplest of pieces were imbued with extra care.

Dior and Berluti both showcased special collaborations with artists. Dior artistic director Kim Jones teamed up with the Ghana-born, Vienna-trained artist Amoako Boafo after an encounter at the Rubell Museum in Miami in 2019. The resulting collection is not only a poetic and seamless blend of cultures, but also expresses different perceptions of blackness and masculinity, while finding shared similarities along the way. Boafo’s artwork is transposed onto garments in multiple ways, be it mimicking his highly textured canvases in ribbed knits or jacquard patterns, or more literally as embroideries and intarsia knits.

Berluti’s Kris Van Assche undertook a similar long-distance collaboration, this time with the Los Angeles-based sculptor Brian Rochefort. Inspired by volcanoes and exotic plants, Rochefort’s melting textures and multilayered glazes have been co-opted onto shirts, sweatshirts and jackets, which all play beautifully with the house’s restrained tailoring.

Van Assche succinctly sums up the shared sentiments that have informed this menswear season. ‘I really love fashion shows. I love the emotion. There is this one thing you can’t do in a fashion show, which is put pause, and explain where things come from,’ he says in the collection’s behind the scenes video. ‘I thought it was a once in a lifetime occasion to actually give people the background.’

If you’re not familiar with the APFEL design agency by name, you’ll have likely come into contact with its output – on gallery walls, in publications and in the hallmarks of creative institutions.

Established in 2003 by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas, the London-based graphic designers' work can be seen work can be seen throughout the UK (and internationally) in the digital experience of Camardy Groarke's Windermere Jetty, in publication design for Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, and in the bespoke typefaces for V&A Dundee.

Type design has been ‘central to APFEL’s practice since its inception', explain the duo, and so the creation of a native foundry seems a natural progression. Launching with four retail typefaces – Certeau, Periferia, Remnants and Lining – alongside a bespoke type design service, the APFEL type foundry is now open for business.

As many will appreciate, launching a landmark project during a pandemic presents challenges. But for Carter and Thomas, it also presented opportunities. ‘Our launch date for the APFEL Type Foundry project didn't change significantly due to the lockdown, and we actually found that the situation galvanised our determination to make it happen – this is a project that means so much to us as a studio that we felt it was really important to stay on track, as we were so close to completion by the time that lockdown happened.'

They continue: ‘Having something so big and important for the studio to work towards alongside our client work during these months has been really valuable for the team as a whole, and it's wonderful to have something to celebrate right now.'

Though they aren't celebrating with a physical launch party just yet, APFEL has released a physical publication to mark the moment. A specemin for the foundry's new retail typefaces, Type As Readymade features a timely essay investigating the cultural concept of the everyday, and type design in context. As the value of clear and creative communication – both virtual and physical – is assigned gravitas in these strange times of isolation and distance, APFEL's communicative work is marked with renewed importance. 

INFORMATION

apracticeforeverydaylife.com

Few things bring more comfort than hunkering down with a good read, which is what makes Maurizio Cattelan’s latest endeavour – an imaginative collection of readings from the who’s who of the contemporary art and cultural world, that is currently being shared by New York’s New Museum online, just so captivating. Conceived by Cattelan as a way to stay together during these long periods of social isolation, ‘Bedtime Stories’ sees the artist invite friends, fellow artists and performers whom he admires to read a sentence, passage or chapter from a favourite book, in a bid to keep us company. 

As part of a series of new digital initiatives that New Museum is presenting online, ‘Bedtime Stories’ sees the likes of Iggy Pop, Rashid Johnson, Maya Lin and Laure Prouvost narrate passages from existing works or even original writings in an unfiltered fashion. Recorded by the artists on their phones or laptops while in their homes or studios, the intimate readings are surprisingly poignant and evocative, in spite of their lo-fi nature. 

The series kicked off last week with Iggy Pop reading a humour-tinged love letter to a long-lost dog in his unmistakable gravelly tone, with new instalments revealed on the museum’s website and social media channels daily. Since then, Tacita Dean has recited an excerpt of a particularly reflective Thomas Hardy poem, David Byrne has read a passage from Milton Rokeach’s psychiatric study ‘Three Christs of Ypsilanti’ and Laure Prouvost has shared a work of her own creation, offering a peek into the surreal literary landscape within her mind. 

Scheduled to continue through the end of June, expect to hear the voices of Marilyn Minter, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Ugo Rondinone, Michael Stipe and Rachel Feinstein, along with many others, add to this quirky compendium of strange and inspiring tales for your amusement.

INFORMATION

A new instalment of ‘Bedtime Stories’ will be unveiled each day until the end of June 2020 on The New Museum's website. newmuseum.org

Hong Kong multi-media artist Victor Wong and his robot, A.I. Gemini, first captured our attention last year with their ink painting, Escapism 0001, commissioned by Cathay Pacific Airways for the front cover of its in-flight magazine. The artist’s subsequent Far Side of the Moon series is proving equally beguiling: a contemporary landscape painted in the sweeping, infused tradition of Xieyi creates calligraphic forms through the pressure and slope of the brush. 

These are on show alongside The Fauvist Dream of Gemini 03, a dramatic, new 69 x 47cm ink painting on rice paper, created specifically for the exhibition opening this week in an airy Lane Crawford atrium in Hong Kong’s IFC mall, as part of the store’s new ‘Making Moments’ creative programme.

Wong was keen to make the most of the non-gallery setting to provide an insight into how the world’s first artificial intelligence ink artist creates the original ‘mindscapes’. Alongside videos showing Gemini in action, dipping its brush into the real ink and water before sweeping brush strokes across traditional Xuan rice paper, the new painting is also presented as a high-resolution digital art image on a Samsung Frame television. Customers purchasing the television set will receive a digital copy of the work of art. Gemini’s Dream 03 marks a new look with both mauve acrylic and gold paint added for the first time.

Wong’s background studying physics and electrical engineering is core to his work, which also includes creating digital and special effects for feature films, many of which have won international design awards. A.I. Gemini took three years to build and programme, and the artist began by experimenting with converting the genesis of geological landscapes into formula which he ‘fed’ into Gemini’s ‘mind’, adding the ability to identify the best photographic angle. The upshot is that Gemini has its own recognisable style and not even Wong knows what the final result will be.

‘The landscape does not exist anywhere apart from in Gemini’s “mind”,’ Wong explains. ‘I didn't want my AI to copy me; I wanted him to learn from me. We feed off each other.’

While Gemini’s Fauvist Dream of Gemini 03’s lines and shading exude the sensibility of traditional Chinese paintings, the piece also feels fresh and contemporary – as well as quietly disruptive raising timely questions about what science and technology offer in the exploration of new possibilities for the contemporary expression and future development of ink art. Wong x A.I. Gemini are exclusively represented by 3812 Gallery.

INFORMATION

'Making Moments', until late June, Lane Crawford Hong Kong. lanecrawford.com

ADDRESS

Lane Crawford
8 Finance Street 
Central, Hong Kong

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In a time of enforced stillness and isolation, our relationship with the natural world has taken on new significance. Camden Art Centre has launched a digital exhibition exploring the intelligence of the vegetal kingdom and its profound influence on humanity through time. 

The exhibition, ‘The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree’ was due to open physically on Earth Day (22 April), but in response to current lockdown measures, has been postponed. In the meantime, the north London gallery has launched ‘The Botanical Mind Online’, a complimentary online programme placing contemporary art, historical artefacts and radical schools of thought on plant life in a cross-era dialogue. 

Shedding a holistic light on the significance of plants to human culture, from the indigenous traditions of the Amazon rainforest to new philosophies, the online initiative seeks to explore our physical, psychological and increasingly complex relationship with the natural world.

Through new artist commissions, films, and podcasts featuring leading voices the fields of science, anthropology, music and art, the platform spotlights a breadth of theories on themes of plant intelligence and spirituality, from quantum biology to queer nature. Viewers can dive into surrealist, modernist and contemporary perspectives, as well as an expanding archive of historical manuscripts, textiles and ethnographic artefacts spanning 500 years.

Archival and new material from artists, thinkers, musicians and writers including contributions from Carl Jung, Linder and Carol Bove are staged in tandem with new digital art commissions from artists including DAS INSTITUT, Adam Chodzko and Joachim Koester.

This is a time of increasing tension between visible and non-visible forces: the micro threat of a virus and the looming impact of climate change. ‘The Botanical Mind Online’ provides a space for personal engagement, and an arena for global, trans-cultural visions on the deeply rooted relationship between human and non-human life

INFORMATION

The postponed physical edition of ’The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree’ runs until 23 December 2020 at Camden Art Centre. camdenartcentre.org

ADDRESS

Camden Art Centre
Arkwright Rd
London NW3 6DG

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In that happier alternate reality where Covid-19 had not sprout and spread, or was at least contained and quashed, the art industry’s travelling circus would this week have pitched up in New York and made a fantastic spectacle of itself. There won’t now be spectacle or socialising. There will though be a fair of sorts and, crucially for Frieze and its gallery clients, sales.

The Frieze New York team had been plotting a virtual version of the fair before the Covid-19 outbreak, a first for Frieze, and that has been smartly retooled. ‘It was meant to be a nice addition to the physical fair,’ says Loring Randolph, director of Frieze New York, ‘an opportunity for galleries to show off special projects or just pieces they couldn’t physically show. But as soon as it became clear we would have to cancel the physical Frieze New York we just changed the whole structure and how you would look at the galleries. And it was really led by the galleries.’ What was planned as side-show is now the main, indeed only, event. ‘We have essentially recreated all of the regular programming,’ Randolph says.

Frieze Viewing Room is an augmented reality replacement fair with 200 galleries able to display 30 pieces apiece. What’s on offer is not a simulacra stroll from booth to booth but virtual visitors will be able to see pieces in virtual spaces. And if they are viewing on a smartphone, digitally install a piece in their own home. 

Randolph says the virtual fair will see the same flurry and flutter of sales, just that they will happen over the phone, e-mail, Zoom or similar. And that the launch of Frieze Viewing Room has generated the same levels of excitement and pre-fair jitters. ‘Building up to this has felt almost exactly like the lead into the actual fair. There has been the same energy so I guess we must be doing something right.’

As in other areas, the Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated and amplified existing trends. There was already a push, mostly from the galleries, to make the art fairs more digitally visible and accessible. And the now digital-only fairs are also making the market more transparent. Prices and price guides will be clearly marked for most of the works in the Frieze Viewing Room, as they were at the digital version of Art Basel Hong Kong earlier in the year. This will make life a lot easier for younger and first-time collectors perhaps too intimidated to even talk prices at physical fairs. ‘It hasn’t been that easy for a newer generation of collectors trying to find things at a specific price point,’ admits Randolph. ‘But now you can easily look for works that are less than $10,000, do a search and see everything available from every gallery that's participating in the fair. And actually, I get kind of addicted to looking at it because there is just more market transparency. We made sure that the price field shows up in the thumbnail images.’

The major commercial galleries are also shifting their experiments in AR and VR from side-project to centre stage. Hauser & Wirth co-founder Iwan Wirth says he first started pushing experiments in VR two years ago. Or rather the gallery’s artists started pushing him. ‘We really started to be questioned and challenged by our artists. And then Paul McCarthy did some work with virtual reality that really blew me away. That was a real game-changer. And at the same time, Mark Bradford talked to me about VR as a tool for planning and visualising exhibitions. So last summer we created ArtLab, a kind of internal task force to look at digital innovation within the gallery.’

ArtLab set out to create a new VR tool to help artists plan shows in specific Hauser & Wirth spaces. That tool though has been smartly turned outwards to become HWVR. Its first outing is a VR exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca art centre, a Balearic take on Hauser & Wirth Somerset which is actually still under construction and won’t open until next year. 

ArtLab Inaugural HWVR Exhibition Trailer, 'Beside Itself', Hauser & Wirth Menorca. Features Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 

‘Beside Itself’, which includes virtual versions of works by Bradford, McCarthy, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Lorna Simpson and more, launched last week. Wirth says the gallery’s new VR platform pulls together technologies usually used in architecture, construction and video-game design, building up VR imagery on a pixel-by-pixel basis. ‘We aren’t re-inventing the wheel,’ says Wirth, ‘but we have taken three technologies to build a new wheel.’

At the end of March Oliver Miro, the son of London-based gallerist Victoria Miro, announced the launch of another ‘extended reality’ art platform tagged Vortic. Three years in development, Vortic also promises a new level of viewer experience and offers galleries the chance to create new virtual gallery spaces, or have their own 3D-scanned, and create digital versions of physical exhibitions or digital-only exhibitions. Miro says galleries will even be able to create bespoke virtual exhibitions for individual collectors. The Vortic Collect app will allow collectors an AR view of exhibitions while Vortic VR will allow for a more immersive experience using Oculus VR headsets. The technology will have its first major showcase with a Vortic-only exhibition put together by Victoria Miro and David Zwirner launching next week.

Like Wirth, Miro hopes that VR technology will eventually help galleries cut down on shipping costs. And Miro suggests his new technology is convincing enough that collectors will make serious investments on the basis of Vortic-only viewing. ‘As collectors become more comfortable with the digital viewing experience, I think they will be confident making acquisitions without seeing the artwork in person. That’s certainly the initial feedback we’ve had.’

For now, Wirth isn’t thinking of HWVR as a commercial tool, but simply as a way to take you somewhere new and different in a different way. And who doesn’t need that right now? ‘We're all increasingly frustrated with the online experience and I'm no exception. And we don't for a second believe that this will replace anything, it just adds something. It gives an indication of where we might go with this, what this tool can do. But at the moment it is just a way to try and give people some joy.’

INFORMATION

frieze.com
hauserwirth.com
victoria-miro.com

British artist Damien Hirst has joined forces with Snapchat to develop a new spin art lens in aid of Partners in Health. The initiative sees Hirst's renowned – and divisive – spin paintings spun into an augmented reality experience. Users can create and share their own spin paintings by lashing, dashing and splashing vivid virtual paint onto a round, whirling canvas. All that’s required is the Snapchat app, a reasonable Internet connection and a lust for colour. 

The collaboration is in support of Partners in Health, a non-profit social justice organisation bringing quality health care to vulnerable communities across the world. Stationed in four continents, Partners in Health are using more than 30 years of experience in fighting epidemics to provide vital information and care to those most in need during the Covid-19 crisis. 

‘It's amazing to be working with Snapchat on this totally mega spin art lens and making it possible for millions of people to make their own spin paintings right from their phones,’ says Hirst, who drew inspiration for his famed spin paintings from memories of watching BBC's Blue Peter as a child. ‘I'm so happy that this partnership also supports Partners in Health, a brilliant and forward-thinking organisation that helps communities in developing countries around the world cope with the devastating impact of Covid-19.’

INFORMATION

damienhirst.com
snapchat.com
pih.org

Our current situation has ushered us into a new, technology-driven relationship with the art world. The virtual exhibitions and augmented reality experiences from museums and galleries across the globe have accelerated our path into a digitised future, albeit a temporary one.

But as our world relies further on technology and algorithms to shape every aspect of our lives, how will our relationship with machines evolve? Where will our humanity begin and end? And how might this data-driven reality risk reinforcing our worst fears about the future?

These are some of the questions posed by ‘Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI', the first major contemporary art exhibition exploring A.I. at the de Young museum in San Francisco and currently accessible via its Instagram page.

Bringing together 13 artists and activist collectives including Zach Blas, Ian Cheng, Stephanie Dinkins, Forensic Architecture, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen and Martine Syms, the works leverage immersive technology to explore how machine learning, data sets, cloud infrastructure and search engines are transforming our existence as we know it. 

‘Uncanny Valley’ was a term first coined fifty years ago by Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in an essay where he examined the apprehensive reaction humans have to robots who look and act just like us. It has taken on a new meaning in today’s world of digital alter egos, deep fakes and AR influencers, where the lines between man and machine have become increasingly blurred.

‘Technology is changing our world, with artificial intelligence both a new frontier of possibility but also a development fraught with anxiety’ says Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The socio-economic and moral implications of A.I. technologies are explored throughout several of the works.

Based on an unrealised design by Amazon to contain human workers in its warehouses, Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage, US 9,280,157 B2:  System and method for transporting personnel within an active workspace, (2016) stands at seven feet tall. With just enough space to turn around, the cage-like structure houses an augmented reality application that displays a bird that is almost extinct, the King Island brown thornbill. Featuring a joystick control and a metal claw to pick up orders, the piece questions the future of labour, and whether the human worker is not too long from finding themselves rendered obsolete.

Silicon Valley’s crowdsourcing marketplaces and their invisible armies of human labour are critiqued in Agnieszka Kurant’s A.A.I. (artificial artificial intelligence), an installation of multiple termite mounds of coloured sand, gold, glitter, and crystals that shines a light on the layers of human beings hidden behind these advancements.

Zach Blas has created an artificial garden inspired by those found on tech campuses to highlight how these companies appropriate ideas from counterculture to drive their commercial ambitions. The garden space is surrounded by video screens that play out perception-altering visuals – a kind of algorithmic psychedelia.

Elsewhere, the risks that artificial intelligence poses in reinforcing racial, gender and class divisions are explored in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2019). Allowing viewers to see their digital footprints and urging them to take control of their data, it looks at the reliance on algorithmic systems in policing that categorise individuals based on inaccurate ‘embodied metrics’. 

Stephanie Dinkins’ Bina48 is a robot that has no understanding of race, gender or class. Her conversations with it illuminate the darker side of A.I. programming – how can a machine be used to make decisions if it has no awareness or sensitivity to history or social equity?

A dystopian future is not the only prediction offered here though. In Martine Syms’ Mythiccbeing, the possibilities for A.I. to be used to redress these same imbalances are suggested. Syms has created an Alexa-like avatar who listens and responds to instances of racial inequality and social injustice in everyday life, a ‘woke’ companion who challenges its human subjects to aim towards fairness.

No longer the stuff of science-fiction movies or a far-off moment in time, the ‘Uncanny Valley’ that Masahiro Mori foresaw in 1970, is now a place that we inhabit. Our friends are electric. Do they control us or do we control them? The fast-moving path to an A.I. future must be powered not only by data and neural networks but by humanity, ethics and heart.

INFORMATION

The de Young museum, San Francisco is temporarily closed to the public. For more information, visit deyoung.famsf.org; instagram/deyoungmuseum

There’s much talk in the art world about the untapped potential of virtual gallery viewings, online curator’s tours and digitally driven sales, and, propelled by world events, Art Basel Hong Kong is putting them to test.

This year’s edition, from 20-25 March is an online-only event, with 234 galleries from 31 countries displaying works through virtual viewing rooms.   

More than 90 per cent of exhibitors from the cancelled Hong Kong fair decided to take part in this experimental iteration, and since more than half of these have exhibition spaces in Asia, art from the region was an obvious highlight.  

Lisson Gallery collaborated with Antenna Space from Shanghai, Beijing’s Boers-Li Gallery, Singapore’s STPI and Taipei’s Tina Keng Galleries and TKG+ to provide a VIP virtual walkthrough of their booths. Each gallery gave a ten-minute presentation to an online audience of hundreds, providing descriptions of its artists and insights into their methods. Up to ten works can be displayed per booth and unlike a real-time fair, these come with a title and a price tag. 

Technical hitches aside (and there were a few), David Tung, Director of Lisson Gallery Shanghai who master-planned the virtual walkthrough, reveals other challenges; ‘You lose texture and feeling online, so we selected works differently to try and replicate this.’ Among Lisson’s heavy-hitting pick were Julian Opie, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel and Carmen Herrera, whose Camino Negro sold at the preview for 850,000 USD. Lisson’s Alex Logsdail explains, ‘While a viewing platform is not a substitute for the pace and interaction of a fair, business is still active and we have made sales in parallel to the fair this week.’

STPI director Rita Targui adds: ‘the online format provides an opportunity to be nimble. We can change works round with ease.’ Each day, two different artists are exhibited at its booth, accompanied by images of the works in progress, (adding narrative that might well be lost in the traditional fair setting). All the works on show have been made in STPI’s on-site paper mill. First up were Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi and his Autumn Trees series and paper pulp pieces by British artist Jason Martin, while additional exhibitors include South Korean artists Do Ho Suh and Haegue Yang who incorporated ground spices purchased in Singapore markets into her canvases. 

Opie’s distinctive, reductive language may work well online, but other artists translate with less success; viewing Antony Gormley's Breathing Room II, an environment that uses phosphorous to conjure architecture as if from the air through Galeria Continua’s portal, or seeing James Turrell’s new circular glass work at OMR’s online gallery, leaves you feeling underwhelmed. You just wish you could be there.

Perhaps inadvertently, Heemin Chung, on show at P21 Gallery, sums up the reality of this year’s Art Basel. The Seoul-based artist explores the lack of tactile sensations – and our desire for them – in a modern world that is filled with virtual images. She strives to capture those senses that are overstimulated or deficient in the digital realm and portray them on canvas; direct touch, not digital media, provide true reality.  

But who gets to touch big-ticket artworks anyway? Collectors often know what they want without having to see it at a fair, and a time when we need to reduce our carbon footprint, Art Basel’s virtual version may just be a trailblazer.

INFORMATION

Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms, 20-25 March. artbasel.com

Artist Ryan Gander and critic Jonathan P Watts have spent the last year and a half delving into 281 of the most interesting creative minds of our time. They've gathered their findings into book form (or, more accurately, USB-book form), that you can buy for £5, by ‘downloading’ it from a pop-up vending machine in London's Cork Street Galleries.

‘We asked a cohort of internationally creative people to imagine they’ve missed the last train home,’ Gander and Watts write in the introduction. They asked: ‘Is there one piece of writing that you would want with you for company in the small hours?’ Each creative figure submitted a text with personal annotations and notes made directly onto it. The impressive reel of contributors – which spans three A4 content pages – includes Marina Abramović, Art & Language, Antony Gormley, Olafur Eliasson, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Alistair Hudson, Tony Chambers and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Zeros + Ones, by Sadie Plant, 1997, annotated by British sculptor Alice Channer

Which text each creative figure picked is as revealing as what they scribbled on it. Kjartansson chose an extract by fellow Icelander and Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness; Eliasson chose Sensorium – Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, by Bruno Latour 2006; and Pedro Reyes, (who, along with his wife Carla Fernández, has just been awarded the Design Miami/ Design Visionary Award for 2018) picked Who Shall Survive?: Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama, by Jacob Levy Moreno, 1977.

Some of the annotations are elucidating: ‘Can my perspective through the camera be as open as these words?’ muses artist Rob Crosse at the close of Ash Wednesday, by Samuel R Delany, 2017. Some are instructional: ‘Worth straining your eyes for!’ writes artist Pavel Buchler on the almost illegible How I Write, written in tiny typewriter print by Viktor Shklovsky in 1930. Others still are filled with the mundanity of the everyday: ‘+ wine / + broccoli / + beans / + tampons’ reads a shopping list at the dogged-edge of SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas, 1967, as picked by British artist Rachel Ara.

The pages are haphazardly scanned into the book; a communal, global scrapbook of the digital age. ‘As a non-profit project, our hope is to create an educational resource that can be used as both a teaching aid for future generations alongside being an archive that captures personal mementos and unique perspectives from a variety of contributors that are at the forefront of our contemporary society,' write Gander and Watts. ‘The Annotated Reader will be a curriculum, an index and an ethics.

INFORMATION

The Annotated Reader is on view at Cork Street Galleries from 2-13 October. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Cork Street Galleries
9a-9b Cork Street
London W1S 3LL

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Crisp winds whip down Melbourne’s Bourke Street mall where locals rugged up in their winter armour stop in their tracks to absorb the warm kinetic glow emanating from retailer Myer’s street-level windows. All seven, spanning over 60 m in their entirety, unveil a theatre of the senses as footage of male and female dancers interact rhythmically with tactile hybrid skins and emotive scenography. It marks Aesop’s fifth Myer Bourke Street window display and its first digital collaboration with an artist, Bart Hess, who in the past has worked with a roster of visionaries including Lady Gaga, Nick Knight and Iris van Herpen.

Epistēmē (the Ancient Greek term for knowledge and understanding) serves a dual purpose: to evoke the sensory experience of Aesop’s product offering (including skin, body, hair and personal care, alongside fragrance and ranges for travel and the home) and to distil the notion of absorbing knowledge through the senses, the skin being the interface between the body and the environment it inhabits. ‘I imagined the body as a canvas for the sensations felt and information absorbed. The figures undergo some kind of transformation based on the attributes of the products,’ notes Hess, whose work expresses his ongoing fascination with the human form using instinctive and futuristic textiles. In this case, they include the digitally manipulated material properties of foils, paper, PVC, latex and water colour patterns to create impressions of envelopment and volume.

Each window framing the imagery (ranging from 38 seconds to 3 minute loops) is dedicated to the aforementioned product categories against a backdrop of melodic futuristic soundscapes created by Ricky van Broekhoven that ripple with recordings of the materials used. ‘The films talk to the qualities of our products and the transformations which occur as they nourish both the physical and sensual being,’ clarifies Aesop’s creative director, Marsha Meredith.

The sequence commences with skin care. Folded and concertinaed golden translucent veils morph over the upper body. ‘Visually, it talks to intense vitamins nourishing your skin and the ritual of daily skin care routines,’ adds Marsh. The home (room sprays) window is fluidly expressed with women unfurling swathes of cape-like aromas that billow around the body like puffs of smoke. Representing fragrance, splintered paper-thin feathers taking their inspirational cue from origami adorn the limbs of figures like a Boccioni sculpture in motion to represent the crispness of the Tacit aroma. A woman magically floats in the travel window suggestive of Aesop’s approach to nurturing the skin and senses during journeys. ‘Satin-like ribbons support her body playing with the idea of material time,’ offers Hess.

Presented on variously sized grids, each sequence is uniquely self-contained, yet together with their heightened colour palettes (alluding to Aesop ingredients) and cinematic expression, they possess the mesmerising effect of drawing viewers in to experience the tactile sensations themselves. ‘As they’re deeply set from the street, the challenge was to communicate from a depth,’ adds Hess. Mechanical precision (so refined and precise) and organic fluidity co-exist harmoniously to portray liberated states and the confidence each product offering instills.

The windows at Myer Bourke Street will remain in motion until 29 July, whilst film stills will also be presented in the windows of Myer Queen Street in Brisbane and Myer George Street in Sydney during this time.

INFORMATION

Until 29 July. For more information, visit the Aesop website

ADDRESS

Myer Melbourne
314-336 Bourke Street, Melbourne 300

Myer Sydney
436 George Street, Sydney 2000

Myer Brisbane
91 Queen Street, Brisbane 4000

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Earlier this year, Google’s Arts & Culture app ignited a viral storm with its ‘art selfie’ feature – social media feeds were awash with selfies of users and their fine art doppelgängers. More recently, Google announced a follow-up experiment: Art Palette, which invites users to select a colour palette, and using a complex combination of computer vision algorithms matches artworks with their chosen hues.

The premise is simple enough – the results, addictively less so. The feature reveals how Van Gogh’s Irises shares a hidden connection of colour with a 16th-century Iranian folio and Monet’s water lilies, or that Ettore Sottsass’ ‘Carlton’ room divider has more in common with Bartolomeo Passarotti’s 1580 painting The Coronation of the Virgin than you might realise. More fun still, users can upload an image of their own – from home décor to fashion – and make visual connections to their immediate surroundings (even Sir Paul Smith’s given Art Palette a whirl).

In addition to Art Palette, the Paris-based Arts & Culture lab revealed two further experiments as part of its ongoing reseach into how AI can be used to enhance culture. LIFE Tags uses Google’s Image Content-based Annotation (ICA) algorithm to scan, analyse and tag over 4 million unpublished photos from the magazine’s archives, from the A-line dress to the zeppelin.

The technology giant also collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to create an art-recognising programme that used an algorithm to comb through over 30,000 exhibition photos, looking for matches with the more than 65,000 works in the New York institution’s online collection. Over 20,000 artworks were eventually matched, which the museum has used to create ‘a vast network of new links between our exhibition history and online collection’.

Google unveiled its first set of AI-aided cultural experiments in 2016. Since then it has collaborated with institutions and artists, including stage designer Es Devlin, who created an installation for the Serpentine Galleries in London that used machine learning to generate poetry.

It’s no secret we love a Google art remix at Wallpaper*. Last year we teamed up with photographer Brigitte Niedermair and designer Martino Gamper to celebrate textile brand Dedar’s 40th anniversary. The creative duo used Google’s Dominant Colour Lazy Loading – an algorithm that creates a series of placeholder boxes appear while the actual pictures finish loading in search – to render master artists’ work in a new hue, eventually adapting them into decorative wall-hung panels.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Google Arts & Culture website

Video games are about to level up as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announces a major exhibition dedicated to the medium, opening later this year. ‘There is a wealth of creativity to explore, from the craft of the studios to the innovation of the audience as players,’ explains V&A director Tristram Hunt, who considers video game design as ‘one of the most important design disciplines of our time.’

The V&A exhibition will focus on video game design from the mid-2000s, and while this will mean the stunning omission of history-making games such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), there will be plenty else to feast the eyes on, from concept art to moving footage, prototypes, character design sketches, and interactive installations.

Highlights will include glimpses into the creative process Nintendo’s Splatoon (2015), and of The Last of Us (2013) – a breathtaking post-apocalyptic marvel from Naughty Dog (a sequel is currently in the works). Also on view will be the painstakingly accurate recreation of the continent of Westeros from Game of Thrones in Minecraft, and a section exploring DIY arcade games and grassroots gaming culture.

Video games are big business. The eSports industry alone cracked the $1 billion mark last year, earlier than predicted (footage from the League of Legends World Championships will be shown as part of an immersive installation at the exhibition). Independent studios will get their dues too: take Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero (2013), a magical realist adventure game. Its parallax scenography draws on brutalist architecture, theatre, set design, typography and – surprisingly enough – René Magritte’s 1965 optical illusion painting La Blanc Seing (The Blank Signature).

‘Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be jointly curated by Marie Foulston – who arguably holds one of the world’s most enviable museum posts as the V&A’s Curator of Videogames – and Kristian Volsing, research curator. Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio will oversee the exhibition design, with support from Squint Opera (AV design), Julia (graphic design) and Coda to Coda (sound design). To coincide with the exhibition, the V&A is also inviting applications from UK-based artists, designers or makers involved in the video games scene for a Videogames Residency, which will run from 15 October 2018 until 15 June 2019.

While it may seem an unlikely move by the 166-year-old institution, it’s not the first prestigious art museum to do so. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC staged an exhibition in 2012 exploring the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, and the MoMa in New York has a number of video games (and a console) in its permanent collection.

‘There is a rich universality to video games in contemporary culture,’ adds Hunt. ‘This is the right time for the V&A to be building on our active interest in video games to investigate this exciting and varied design field at the intersection between technology, engineering and broader visual culture, presenting the influences, inspiration and debates that define it.’

INFORMATION
‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be on view 8 September 2018 – 24 February 2019. The exhibition is supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more information, visit the V&A website

Behind the scenes of Björk’s music video for Arisen My Senses, directed by Jesse Kanda

‘Cloud-based computer file transfer service’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but WeTransfer is more than just that, having made the Internet a more beautiful place with its on-point curation of full-screen wallpapers from artists and brands around the world.

It may then surprise you less to learn that the Amsterdam and Los Angeles-based company is also a creative incubator, recently announcing a four-part documentary series with Pi Studios exploring what makes artistic partnerships tick. First up: the indelible Björk and visual artist Jesse Kanda.

The pair are frequent collaborators and best friends – their close rapport evident in the brilliantly bizarre art Kanda has realised for the Icelandic musician’s latest album, Utopia. (There is also possibly no moment more Björk, than Björk emerging from a glowing chrysalis in the Kanda-directed music video for Arisen My Senses, below, writhing slug-like creatures notwithstanding).

‘There’s so much more to music than just work,’ says Björk in the inaugural instalment of Work in Progress. ‘If I collaborate, then I want connections to be genuine, for them to be for real.’ Kanda adds: ‘Collaborations forces you to think about where to draw lines, and who you are and who they are.’ You’ll also be treated to some bonus early performance footage of a teenage Björk, who breaks down the Icelandic music scene and how every member of its small but perfectly formed community has their own aesthetic language.

‘With this series we wanted to look at how collaboration really works. We want to go beyond the standard behind-the-scenes, and tap into what creativity looks, sounds and feels like,’ says Jamal Dauda, WeTransfer global head of music. ‘We don’t claim to explain it, but we believe that by showing how creative minds see the worlds around them, and understand each other, we’ll window onto some of the magic and the mystery.’

WeTransfer’s editorial platform – rebranded and relaunched as WePresent at the end of January – has previously presented an online exhibition with Ryan McGinley, created an original podcast series with Gilles Peterson, and sent photographer Nadia Lee Cohen on a US road trip, among other unique commissions.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the WePresent website and the Pi Studios website

Alexis Christodoulou wasn’t always an artist, though his dreamy 3D renders of imagined modernist interiors belies his brief tenure as one. A former copywriter at an advertising agency, Christodoulou began experimenting with the 3D modelling program SketchUp during a particularly frustrating spell of screenwriting. Five years on, the Cape Town-based artist offers simply this on his Instagram profile: ‘No photographs. Just renders.’

His flawless renders take anywhere between a couple of hours to a few days to create (‘It really depends on how much I’ve had to drink,’ quips the artist, who helps out with his family’s winemaking business by day). And though his works represent fictional places, they borrow details from real-life modernist architecture and design. A recurring motif of circular windows, for example, nod to the brutalist relics dotted around Cape Town, while the swimming pools and bath houses he’s imagined recall the architecture of Soviet sanatoriums, however unintentional.

While the artist tries to keep his scenes as pared-back as possible, he’s recently begun incorporating furniture. In one frame – this ‘set’ uncharacteristically more dressed than others – Thonet’s iconic ‘S40’ chair by Martin Stam is ‘seen in a rare knockoff “washed canary” at your mom’s friend’s house that’s going through a divorce’. He’s cited David Chipperfield, Le Corbusier, Superstudio, and Aldo Rossi as influences, though notes his work has become more intuitive, ‘creating spaces as if I can see them in front of me before I start’.

Christodoulou’s visual language has evolved – almost unrecognisably so – since he began dabbling in 3D rendering. ‘Because I started right at the beginning, with renders and image making, I’m still exploring both and developing my vocabulary as I go along,’ the self-taught artist explains. ‘I started making images with a lot of obvious humour in them. Now I’m the only one who finds them funny so I’d like to bring the laughs back.’

The stark hyperreality of his scenes are tempered with pastel tones and soft textures, such as cloth draping over a prop or rippling water. ‘[Water] is an extremely pleasing texture to render with all the refraction and caustics,’ he adds. ‘More than that, I think it’s just funny to think about swimming in every scene that I make.’ The artist has also developed a taste for rendering stone aggregates, such as terrazzo, though it’s a skill he says he’s still honing.

With trips to Greece and Florence on the horizon, the artist is always looking forward: ‘I’m already starting to push my images into a different direction again.’ If Instagram is a portal for escapism, then we’ll happily follow Christodoulou down the rabbit hole.

INFORMATION

For more information, contact Alexis Christodoulou on Instagram or email