Claudia Hart extends the question of power into the spatial and architectural realm of simulation. Her newly commissioned installations Empire Failure and The Rise and Fall of Art & Other Histories (both 2026), insist that digital art is not confined to the screen but unfolds through immersive environments. The music was composed and produced by Kurt Hentschlaeger in 2014.
The Dolls is a media ballet by Claudia Hart, molding mathematical cycles into visual form, to create rhythmic, animated patterns from the historical heraldry of collapsed empires of world history. They are projected onto Kristina Isabelle, choreographer and dancer, who wears a paper, hand-drawn tutu, functioning not only as wearable art but also as a movie screen. Cello music improvised by Danielle DeGrutolla for the Alice series of ballets, performances and opera created between 2015 and 2019 in a family collaboration including Hart, Edmund Campion, Kurt Hentschlaeger and Danielle DeGrutolla.
The Dolls was revived in 2026, curated by Amira Gad and produced by Heleen Kosse as part of Pixel Pioneers, the first major exhibition at the Museum Boijman Van Beuningen devoted entirely to digital art. Spread across two galleries in the Depot, the exhibition traces how artists have used digital technologies to experiment, critique, and reshape visual culture over the past decades.
The Dolls Grotesques evolved from my 2015 media ballet, revived in 2026 at the Boijman Van Beuningen. The music for The Dolls Grotesques was composed by Ian James Hicks, specially for this reel. The idea for this work was the translation of the i-Phone formulated "bounce" reflex into a contemporary form of flicker as it might exist in current techno club-culture. The original Dolls graphics were projected onto choreographer and dancer Kristina Isabelle, on the Boijmans site, who wears a paper, hand-drawn tutu, functioning not only as wearable art but also as a movie screen.
Claudia Hart extends the question of power into the spatial and architectural realm of simulation. Her newly commissioned installations Empire Failure and The Rise and Fall of Art & Other Histories (both 2026), insist that digital art is not confined to the screen but unfolds through immersive environments. Working with 3D modelling since the 1990s, Hart builds environments rather than images. Her installations draw on modernist abstraction and architectural design, translating them into immersive spaces. Within these rooms, corporate logos, failed cryptocurrencies, and references to historical empires sit side by side. The result is direct: today’s technological systems function like empires – circulating through images, embedding themselves in infrastructure, and shaping how we move through the world. Simulation, in Hart’s practice, names the condition we already live inside and puts on display the collapse of our techno-utopian ideals.
-Excerpt from Amira Gad’s Catalog Text
I’d like to add to Amira’s point that In both of my installations, Empire Failure, and The Rise & Fall of Art and Other Histories, Jacoba van Heemskerck was my specific source. I produced what I think of as “the Jacoba algorithm” in collaboration with computer scientist Licia He. I was inspired by the abstract stained-glass windows in the Boijmans collection, so we called our piece In Conversation with Jacoba. Although I’d never heard of Jacoba before seeing her work in Rotterdam, Amira and the museum's curators of applied arts and design (Annemartine van Kesteren and Nora Leijen), thought I would want to know her. They were right! Jacoba became my inspiration. Her story fit perfectly into my mission, which started with a project I produced for the 2023 Armory Art Fair, celebrating the centennial of the original 1913 show that included Matisse, Duchamp and all of the modern male canons. In a section curated by Robyn Farrell, in the booth of Montreal gallerist Patrick Mikhail, I recovered nine women artists shown in 1913, all little known (I personally never heard of them either). These paintings remix post-Impressionist and Fauve works by Marion H. Beckett, Marie Bracquemond, Emilie Charmy, Marjorie Organ Henri, Marie Laurencin, Jacqueline Marvel, and Katharine Rhoades. None were minor figures in their day. They were founding members of Fauvism, celebrated in their times, then systematically erased when the art market made auction prices the meter of success. When Matisse reached the millions, the Armory Women sold for 2-3 thousand at small auction houses. They were removed from art history. It was economical! At that time, I also recognized myself as part of a pattern. I understood that my own position was not accidental — it was structural. Hence Jacoba, who inspired the central piece in the Boijmans exhibition.
-Claudia Hart
Excerpt From Whitehot Magazine, August 2026, In Conversation with Intermedia Art Pioneer, by Jakob Dwight
Jakob Dwight: Can you say more about the idea that you touched on in your talk with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen curator Amira Gad for the Pixel Pioneers group exhibition, that you were trying to challenge technology - to 'break technology' as much as work through it?
Claudia Hart: I’m all about my inner life. When I say ‘break’, I don't mean to literally glitch technology, but rather to work against its inner logic: which is logocentric and rational. I want to use it fluidly, to paint with it intuitively, and to improvise with it. Nevertheless the softwares I use are still hyperrationalist. But they are also “simulators,” a special category of computer graphics developed to simulate wars, flying airplanes, or breaking through gravity in a spaceship. Their terms and languages reflect the natural sciences: things like gravity or the physics of fog, light, or optics. If you want to figure out how to use them, you have to go outside and observe nature in microcosm - like how leaves rustle in the wind. But when I use them, I try to work against nature, to make natural forces behave in unnatural ways.
I think of the things I do as allegorical, like what happens to nature when you make plants “ungrow?” Is this actually a special form of “Digital Death” (I made a piece called that)? Maybe that appears to be Techno-Utopian because I am in fact using technology to visualize magic and magical worlds.
Jakob Dwight: On the occasion of your Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen talk was a zine the museum published, Claude and Claudia Figuring it All Out, Claude being the the LLM created by the Anthropic Artificial Intelligence Company. Can you share more about this?
Claudia Hart: On December 15, 2025, I fell on black ice and was bedridden for a while, so as a distraction I listened to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West as an audio book. Spengler fit my doomful ideas about the fall of our current US Empire as a result of technocolonialist capitalism.
Spengler predicted, in 1918, that a demagogue like Trump would appear and he was correct in both time and place. It is uncanny. I decided to have a conversation about Spengler with Claude, my favorite bot, who I’d previously only used to code. Our conversation became the Boijman’s Zine Claude and Claudia Figuring it All Out (2025), in which I talk with Claude but also with myself about my insights into how he was programmed to think. This project has opened up my next body of work, a detective story about a Large Language Model called Claude, a police investigator, Detective C, and various other and sundry characters. But more on this soon.....
