Berlin in the 1990s: Digital Fables for a Mediated World

Machiavelli book illustrations (1995), gouache watercolor on rag paper, mounted on Machiavelli web based augmented reality-wallpaper using animated Flash animations (2010), written and performed live by Claudia Hart.

During her ten-year stay in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hart created, among other things, children's books for adults in which she combined sugary aesthetics with brutal political realities.

Claudia Hart Illustrated Books (1994-1998): A Child's Machiavelli (1998), English, Penguin Editions; A Child's Machiavelli (1998), French, Abbeville Press; A Child's Machiavelli (1995), German, Nautilus Editions; A Child's Machiavelli (1997), hand-made book dummy; Dr. Faustie's Guide to Real Estate Development (1997), English, Nautilus Editions.

In A Child's Machiavelli, she rewrites Machiavelli's The Prince as a guide in etiquette for children. She appropriates open-source illustrations from the 1920s, and ironically combines children's language with unvarnished politics. The work, published by Penguin USA in 1998, was later recycled as NFT animations.

More Life (1998) 3D 30-second loop made using Maya 3D animation software, sound is an appropriated recording of Rutger Hauer from Bladerunner (1982) by Ridley Scott.

More Life features Dr. Faustie, a pink teddy bear, the star of Hart's second Berlin children's book. In the animation based on it, Rutger Hauer's words from Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, become Hart's plea for dignity in technocratic culture.

Animated Flash animations (2010), written and performed live by Claudia Hart and produced for an e book created by the Moss Collective / Flicker Labs using gouache paintings by Hart.

I produced the Machiavelli drawings for A Child’s Machiavelli, a small book made in Berlin by hand using a small brush. The story of these drawings is interesting because they gradually transformed into a case study charting digital art history. In 2013, I was approached by the Moss Collective/Flicker

Labs to produce an interactive CD Rom based on the book. The collective consisted of Harold Moss and the stop‐motion animator Negin Sharifzadeh, who I mentored at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moss ultimately closed, but before they did, they made a series of Flash animations using my drawings as their source. When they closed, I put them in a hard drive and forgot about them. Adobe deprecated Flash in 2017, so the animations continued to languish in my hard drive, forgotten. When NFT happened, it occurred to me that they might make great ones, so when Adobe introduced their software Animator in 2020, I was able to use it to open the Moss Flash animations. In 2023, I met Anika Meier, who minted them with Expanded.art! Those NFTs again transformed into the augmented animations I made for the Machiavelli wallpaper, using the original watercolor motifs I drew in 1994 in Berlin as their QR “triggers.” A formidable tale of tales!