Russian Roulette and Ruins Paintings 2024-2020
By Claudia Hart
Russian Roulette Series
In 2021, a high-profile NFT platform invited me to create a game that they intended to auction as interactive tokens. I worked on the game mechanics, animations, and 3d images for nine months. Right before the planned release date, the platform shut down - bankrupt! I was left in the lurch. I took it as a sign, and instead of an on-line gambling game intended as a critique of crypto-culture, I produced paintings using the same visuals and in the course of this, produced a hybrid where the virtual and the tangible are fluidly mixed.
My technique is to start each work by hand-painting mosaic patterns appropriated from the historical architecture of failed empires. I then build a 3D computer model of a still life in a theatrical set, framed in a shallow game space. Inside my game space, using a virtual-realty painting software, I improvise gestural painting on the polygon models that I built for my setting, using a sophisticated water-color simulator. Then, I layer in photographs of other handmade tangible paintings that I have made, using traditional gouache paint. My paintings have an uncanny sense of being very ancient, but very high-tech at the same time, with pentimento traces and layers built up of these different techniques. They seem to move backwards and forwards in time. I mix together traditional realistic painting techniques with advanced digital printing techniques in an uncanny soup, until I don’t remember which part is natural and which is artificial.
I mount these paintings on my custom Russian Roulette augmented-reality wallpaper (2023). The wallpaper pattern uses the heraldry of collapsed empires, logos of USA tech corporations, and bankrupt crypto currencies. These symbols act like QR codes, triggering my Russian Roulette App. Through the app, which functions like a magical looking glass, one can see animations taken from The Art of Survival: Aphorisms by an Old Girl, a series of Mp4 movies, written by me, but enacted by an open-source “Queen Elizabeth'' bot that I found on line shortly after her death. All in all: Russian Roulette, an allegorical Satan’s brew with a lot of irony and humor also in the mix.
Russian Roulette, A Game of Life and Death
(2024), 2160 x 3840 px, 3D animation,15-minute loop for installation.
On the gameplay:
I imagined Russian Roulette as a game of life (and death), something like a cross between a casino game of chance mixed with Tarot, Astrology and the I Ching. As in the real world, every move one makes has its outcome, although a player can be strategic and, to an extent, “game the system” by understanding its mechanisms. Nevertheless, there is still the element of chance that we cannot control, though if we can understand our odds, then we can be wise. Russian Roulette translates this tentative reality into a parallel game, that of NFT speculation. Do we save or flip? Be happy with what we have, or spin the Russian Roulette wheel one more time, to get a new and better and more unusual prize? Russian Roulette game play is narrated like a TV game show, by an ironic “Queen Elizabeth” croupier-bot. Its esthetics are flashy - a bit like Times Square but marked by pictures of heraldry culled from the history of collapsed empires, of corporate logos and of course the logos of crypto currencies - often reminiscent of both!
The game begins when a player is granted a Memento Mori, the medieval symbol of the transitory nature of life in the form of beautiful floral still life, with its fragile but momentary beauty. Every player is offered one by the “Queen,” at ground zero, and then invited to spin the Russian Roulette, with 50 possible outcomes: different decorations, lighting, times of day, materials, furnishings, and flowers in varying stages of growth or decay. As with life, the more one plays, the more opportunities a player has to achieve perfection. Each Memento Mori becomes more elegant, and more minimal in esthetic as it becomes more rare - and therefore more valuable. In fact, in this game, “the more you win, the more you lose,” and as with the increased wisdom and insight one gains with age, the still lives become simpler - less chaotic and more clear - as they achieve rarity and increased value on the resale market.
Russian Roulette mimics real life. It’s possible to get burned! It is possible to lose everything, and be thrown out of the game. But when this happens, what a player then receives is the rarest prize of all, a custom “joker” card - a gargoyle based on a player’s personal receipt number. This end-game mirrors the smarts a real life player gets from early failure, as the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche has written: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”
The Ruins Paintings
The Ruins series is a body of work that Hart produced between 2019 and 2024, traversing different media, including paintings on wood, animations projected on canvas, augmented-reality wallpapers, sound installation. online virtual worlds, and finally a wood and resin sculpture, carved by Hart, using a computer driven router that she improvised within real time, Brought on by the crisis in the USA that was initiated by Covid the Black Lives movement in the USA that resulted finally in its political move to the far right, Hart contemplates the failure of Modernism with it’s utopian ideals of progress and technological innovation that were driving forces in post-WWII USA. To do this, the artist introduces still lifes, the classical form of a memento mori, to contemplate the decay of western civilization. With The Ruins, Hart revises the canons of modernist painting and the manifestos of failed utopias. These works are meditations on the flow of history, expressed as a cycle of decay and regeneration. Hart imagines The Ruins as a space of contemplation, an antidote to a world in crisis, navigating from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The Ruins series presents a different notion of time, a present that viewers experience through the possibility of simulation technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future and present into a perpetual now.