2013, 23-minute 3D animated loop
for installation
Claudia Hart has created a tech version of a sixties cannon - the black-light "painting on velvet" - with her 2013 23-minute 3d-animation "Optic Nude." The animation, projected on a floating velvet projection field is 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. Hart has reconstructed Straker's photo and then used a variety of digital processes to layer different types of pulsating visual patterns over it, from strobing light simulations to the simulation of the motion of a curtain slowly fluttering in the breeze, then created a personal remix of chanting Buddhist monks as audio. The result is a version of trance-art that is techno-sublime: an attempt to imagine a digital space of disembodiment that is post-op, post- pop, post-human, post-Pictures, post-capture and post-photographic.