I work trans-media. This means that I produce 3D animation, and by using it as digital source material, I also make sculpture, paintings, prints, installation and theater. The style of my art is a version of magic-realism, meant to evoke fairy tales. But this is a story of disenchantment.
Part of my practice is to reflect on the media and its impact on broader social and historical forces. My artistic life runs along the tracks cleared by the Internet. The upheavals the Internet has engendered informs it; my relationships have been shaped by it. I searched it for friends and collaborators and found a community that I nourished by using the Internet. It has also engendered and proliferated the explosion of new technologies initiated in America by WW2 arms production, which was then expanded by the Cold War arms race that followed.
I am a 3D computer-animator, using its tools to produce everything else that I make. It all started when I happened to see Toy Story 1 premier at the Berlin Film festival in 1995. I fell in love with its styling. I decided to learn how to do what Pixar did so well - to make uncanny artificial pictures. Their style resonated to me, mirroring the artificial booming world of my American childhood - the world of Coca Cola, strip malls and Barbies.Toy Story reflected the fake-reality that I lived in. But strangely, it also reassembled my favorite period of art history - the early Renaissance, when artists first adopted mathematical perspective, painting pictures that are eerie, with their cool, detached precision.
In the beginning, 3D animation required powerful computers, until then only found in institutions. But as those things go, around the same time that I saw Toy Story, personal computers became more powerful and much easier to use than when they first appeared in the late eighties. It was the beginning of “user-friendly” operating systems. I got a Mac Powerbook 100 in 1991, a couple of years after Web 1 hit. Then, in the year that I saw Toy Story 1 in Berlin, the Windows operating system arrived. I became a user, quickly addicted. It was clear! The Internet and computers were about to change everything. I felt that real-fake 3D pictures like the ones that inspired me in Toy Story were iconic. So in 1996, I put money down on a powerful Dell personal computer. It cost $5,000. By the time I paid it off, the Millenium had passed and Web 2 hit. The knot was tied. Web 2 brought with it popular commercial email servers like Compuserve. I embraced it, and with it befriended my future husband - the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager. He also had e-mail! I’d found love, but with the Internet, I also found my art in both its form and content.
I track the simulacrum. When I started, in the arts what that meant was 3D computational pictures. I considered them to be a new form of painting. But this was painting morphed - combined with sculpture and with photography in their way of making. I also thought of these kinds of pictures as iconic, of a new computer culture emerging in the shadow of the Internet and of new user-friendly personal computers.
3D pictures are actually hollow. Although they implement empirical, scientific data to model realistic effects, they are totally synthesized. They are not copied from a reality that you LOOK at. These are fictional pictures. Utterly imaginary. Nevertheless, computational pictures simultaneously represent our world as it really is, an empty world of hype, of branding, marketing and misinformation. The world of advertising is one of desired outcomes rather than real ones. 3D synthesized pictures are fakes. Their reality is therefore fluid. They can be produced from scratch by a human using a computer. Or by taking a photo shot with a tangible apparatus - a camera - then manipulated. Or more recently, are fully simulated AI images. AI imagery can be produced even more easily than the other more easinesses before them. A user writes verbal descriptions. The computer sort of listens to your commands, drawing on its version of what is supposedly a literal description (but since language is also fluid, not so precise, limited, strange things happen). AI tools, unless customized, draw on their own history. This means pictures found online, the cultural memory of the Internet. Whatever can be scraped. It is also necessarily biased. It takes what it can get. This is a memory filled with memes and funny cliches. Its tastes are populist: the best-of hits of the Western World.
I believe that pictures alter our cultural values and the consciousness of everyone. People everywhere are bombarded by computational pictures, a space of ultimate fluidity. With computers, reality flows. Pictures are easy to make, easy to erase, stretch, distort and modify. And are therefore ultimately expressive.They reflect and modify our notions of being in the world, of time and by extension, of history. They also express the American creed - the ideology of innovation. It drives the American version of consumer-driven capitalism. Very innovative! How great! The American dream.
A long-gone famous artist once told me that my “problem” was that I couldn’t tell the difference between a picture and reality. But isn’t a picture all that reality actually entails? So computational pictures must necessarily have destabilized our cultural notion of it! In the first decade of the millennium, I called this notion real-fake-ness. I wrote about it, taught about it and co-curated exhibitions on it with the artist and author Rachel Clarke. I retired from teaching in 2023, so I don’t have to do that for a living any more, but I am still trying to decode what it is that computational culture has wrought.
At the moment of this writing, early 2025, Donald Trump verges on his inauguration. His second Presidency promises to erode the freedom of the press and America, put an end to the America-as-melting-pot project, but also marks metaphorically significant digital transformations. Of crowdsourcing into mob-rule. Of political debate into a 24/7 Internet stream of marketing and recriminations. From Web 1, to Web 2, to the Internet’s latest iteration as Web 3-AI, I have seen marked in its various transformations also the transformation of my youthful ideals. From gender fluidity as a symbol of personal liberation, into fluidity restaged as propaganda, misinformation and lies - now wielded by the Donald Trump + Elon Musk, USA/corporate-tech alliance.
Making it all very hard just to be. Not Disenchanted.