Travels in Hyperreality @claudiahart-hyperreality - Tumblr Blog

Someone gave me a free ticket to Toy Story 1, in pre-release at the Berlinale, in 1994. I had no interest in cartoons, or in animation for that matter, but it was free so I went.

I was amazed. I’d never seen anything like it: a hybrid of the mathematical meta-structuring of early Renaissance painting and photography. The world turned. I had to figure out how to do that. So I went back to NY, where it was possible to take a class. That was the beginning.

#bottielli #The Adoration of the Magi #1475

Early work, one of my first animations, in what was the "high def" of the day: 720 p x 486 p. I appropriated Rutger Hauer's death speech, from the 1982 Blade Runner. It was shown in "Animations," an early exhibition on the animation in fine art at PS1 MOMA, organized by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who later became the Documenta curator in 2012. "Animations" ran from October 14, 2001–January 20, 2002, and traveled to several locations. The strategy was related to that of 1990s Post Modern photography, one of inversion of commercial modes. So this was funny but also dark.

Another early animation from 1998! This one was actually 400 pixels x 243 pixels, not high def but "normal" definition. This one was part of a city-wide billboard project sponsored by the Speed Museum, in Louisville. The animation was shown in the Museum and the billboard was a a scanogram, also a new technology, printing digitally on plastic. These were proto-emoji btw.

As one of the few art world folks with the magical 3D skills, it was easy for me to get teaching gigs. So in 1998, I started at Pratt Institute. Having to deconstruct the Maya software and the 3D context in general, as part of my pedagogical practice, changed my art and my life. This image was the currency of 3D animation at that time. My all male students embraced it.

BloodRayne was introduced on the cover of Playboy Magazine in 2004. It further mobilized me. Along with Claudia Herbst, another Pratt professor, I initiated a romantic rebellion, one of resistance and inversion directed against 3D culture, a culture that emerged from the DOD military research and post 9/11 gaming culture and was grossly misogynist.

Machina, 2-minute excerpt of 10-minute animated loop, (2004) from bitforms gallery on Vimeo and Liberty on the Barricades by Eugene Delacroix, 1830.

#vimeo

The Seasons, 2007, 10-minute 3D animation loop for installation

The Seasons portrays a room in which a slowly evolving sculptural figure gradually transforms. In this animated loop, a variety of visual, temporal and conceptual cycles are offset and overlaid so that their movement is obscured. All is in flux but time seems to stand still, as in life.

In The Seasons, a seated woman in a pose of erotic abandon cycles clockwise on a rotating pedestal. As she cycles, she decomposes, a vine of roses surrounding her, blooming and then fading away. The room also revolves, though counter clockwise, while the animation camera pans back and forth. These movements function in counterpoint, to appear only on the edge of perception. Sound for the piece is of crumbling paper. The color scheme is white on white.

#Vimeo #claudiaharttheseasons

I had to deconstruct Maya, my software, in order to teach it. I began to understand it as an epistemological software that modeled the phenomenal - that there was a profound philosophy of the interface, one that expressed our categories of knowledge and also expressed the way we understood the world around us and what we thought of as reality. As a student studying structural film making twenty years earlier at NYU, I’d written my honors thesis on Michael Snow who gave me my key to articulating the virtual.

Maya menus; Albrecht Durer, Melancholia, 1514; Albrecht Durer, Perspective Machine, 1525; Micheal Snow’s 1967 40-minute Wavelength in 2.5 minutes

Caress, 2011, 3-channel silent 3D animation in custom wood case, 12 minute loop.

Structuralist animation installation

#Vimeo #claudiahart #caress #bitforms #whenthisyouseerememberme

Empire, 2010, installation at the Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh

#Vimeo #claudiahart #thewoodstreetgallery #ellajoycebuckley

The Prison of the Body, 2014 3d animation, looped, 1 minute

#Vimeo #claudiahart #simulism #postpictures

The Real-Fake

Realizing 3D software as an epistemological model allowed me to think of the art created with it, in all of its manifestations, as a new media: the merging of a virtual camera with a mathematical matrix - a Cartesian xyz perspective space. It is a hybrid that integrated into a new media. As such is pushed the history of representation into a new era. We are currently living a paradigm shift, post-photography as the cinéma vérité construction based on the idea of “capturing” a slice of life by imprinting it, is replaced by the simulations construct created by modeling the real in a mathematical space. Let’s call it Simulism.

The philosophy of the interface was formally framed in an exhibition curated by the media artist Rachel Clarke and myself in 2010, first at Cal State Sacramento as a show, a conference organized by their art history department and finally, a website. As the simulations model rapidly replaced the photographic at this time, our website was more and more referenced. At the urging of its growing audience, Rachel and I, along with Pat Reynolds, an artist/art historian whose expertise was in photography, restaged the The Real-Fake and composed its “manifesto.” At the same time, Donald Trump was elected and we entered its political epoch.

Optic Nude, 22-minute animated loop for installation, 2014

For a while I understood my practice as deconstructing the philosophy of the the interface - an epistemological modeling of the algorithmic recreation of the phenomenal. But as a proceeded, I understood perception itself as algorithmic. I found this through practice but later learned it as a biological fact: if one offset a number of regular visual algorithms with a layer of chaos, or randomness on could induce hypnosis, in other words, trance. I made this work during a particularly bad spell of insomnia. If I looked at it long enough, I would pass out. The Buddhist monk chanting was an added audio layer of the same. It also was the gateway through which I passed into the liminal and a transformation of my practice into its current phase.

inspired by a 1963 image by the same name by British photographer Jean Straker, known in the fifties for his erotic images of unconventional female beauties. His work was regularly confiscated by the British authorities, resulting in Straker becoming known as an activist who helped to change to the censorship laws of his time.

I was in 2012, when augmented-reality interventions were first being staged in the art world (a Whitney Biennial AR intervention also took place in 2012), I was invited to produce and augmented object by SEEK-ART + mOsantimetre, a fine arts ceramics atelier in Istanbul. I produced the Nue Morte dish. I was excited by its multivalence, seeming to integrate the real and the unreal into a truly liminal object. It resonated. With it I produced Double Narcissus, an art work demonstrating the Nue Morte porcelain dish as viewed through the Nue Morte custom app through a Mac tablet by a living avatar.

#Vimeo

Alice's Giftshop: The Looking Glass Collection, 2014, a collection of liminal housewares, made for the New Museum shop, as seen through The Looking Glass, 2014-18, an expanded augmented app..

#Vimeo #claudiahart #thenewmuseum #dooeunchoi #aliceapostrophesgiftshop #thelookingglasscollection

The Alices Walking, 2014, A liminial opera and fashion show created in collaboration with Edmund Campion and produced by CNMAT, The Center For New Music and Audio Technology, UC Berkeley, and the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology in Chelsea. The wearable augmented-reality scuptures were created by Claudia Hart and Julie Robinson. The Alices App was created by Claudia Hart. The Alices Walking film is by Artur Ratton, and produced by Genoa Mungin.

#Vimeo #thealices(walking)#claudiahart #arturratton #edmundcampion #thealices #experimentalfashionadriansa

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