K2 Alice in Wonderland — Claudia Hart

Alice in Wonderland

Location: K2

Interview of Claudia Hart and curator Julia Staudach by Georg Ritter, August 27, 2025, opening day of PATTERNS AND POLITICS, Hart's retrospective at the Francisco Carolinum, Linz Austria.

Claudia and Julie Website Dresses (2013-2014), made from augmented trackable custom fabric, using dye sublimation computer printed polyester canvas, mounted on EVA foam, hand-sewn and glued, and implementing the web-based Alices App triggered by QR, to display text animations of the Alice’s Walking libretto; Blue Ascii Girls Quilt, Big Crazy Quilt; Nayland Split Square Quilt (all 2014), also made from augmented trackable custom fabric, using dye sublimation computer printed polyester canvas, also mounted on EVA foam, and hand-quilted by using a mechanical plastic labeling tool, and also implementing the web-based Alices App, triggered by QR to display text animations of the Alice’s Walking libretto, and made using Adobe After Effects; Black and Yellow Princess Dresses (2016), using 3D computer files hand-modeld by the artist, using Maya animation software then rapid-prototype printed from Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene plastic; The Dolls (2016), 2-channel ten-minute loop, made using Maya 3D animation software, music by Kurt Hentschläger, mounted on Alice XR custom web-based augmented-reality wallpaper.

An ongoing series of works by Claudia Hart portrays Lewis Carroll's novel Alice in Wonderland. This crazy universe, in which the rules of the real world do not exist, is comparable to the cosmos that Hart herself creates in her works with digital technology. Alice as a female figure is a reference of the possibilities of digital media to fluidly redefine female identity, simultaneously restricting, objectifying and exploiting it.

The work Alices Walking, merges catwalk, opera and digital spectacle. Performers wearing "website dresses" move through selected guests who have been invited to join with the five Alices performing on the stage. The guests were given tablets loaded with the Alices custom software, triggering patterns that acted like QR, to reveal AR animations of Hart’s mutated interpretations of Carroll's Alice text.

Julie Website Dresses (2013-2014), augmented trackable custom fabric, using dye sublimation computer-printed on polyester canvas, mounted on EVA foam, and-sewn and glued, implementing the web-based Alices App, triggered by QR to display text animations of the Alice’s Walking libretto; Blue Ascii Girls Quilt, Big Crazy Quilt; Nayland Split Square Quilt (all 2014), also made from augmented trackable custom fabric using dye sublimation computer-printed polyester canvas, mounted on EVA foam, hand-quilted by using a mechanical plastic labeling tool, also implementing web-based Alices App triggered by QR.

The animated text fabric augments used for the Alices Walking emerges from conceptual software created by designer Alon Zouartez. Zouartez’s custom Spinabook app took an original text, and to produce a legitimate plagiarism, substituted words with their synonyms to rewrite a legal but unethical copy. Using these legal plaiarisms, Hart spun a short excerpt of Lewis Carroll's original Alice in Wonderland, revising a text that slowly devolves as it is repetitively cloned. After six variations, the excerpt comes to mean its opposite - a succinct demonstration of the perversion of truth that occurs when things go viral on social media.