Gilded Gadgets

EYES ON: Gab Bois X Miansai’s Phone Collection

The time for gift giving may be over, but for those who didn’t ace it, Gab Bois and jewelry brand Miansai’s Phone Collection is definitely one to circle back on—to coo at if not to own. A creative known for her surreal photography, Gab Bois worked with the brand to create a line of rings, necklaces and bracelets from used cellphone components. Sim cards and iPhone cameras, set simply in gold and silver, take the place of gemstones.

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Gab Bois has seen great success from picturing objects used in ways that they should not be used. A top made from crisps, a heel from an old ipod, a phone from an oyster shell—the images are amusing in how they inject strangeness into the everyday. Objects pull off their disguises until they’re suddenly recognized as out of place.

The same goes for Phone Collection. The beauty of the phone elements used—the geometric patterning of the sim card and the deep onyx-like eye of the camera lens—means the tech-wear kind of gets away with its charade. It’s almost shocking how much these pieces would be at home in any jewelry department.

More surprising though than how easily tech’s sleek design elements can slip into a vocabulary of accessories is how cleanly its symbolic meanings can also translate onto jewelry‘s system of signs and symbols.

Buying this collection will make a statement. A signet ring with an iphone camera instead of a family crest gives off a message. It says something about how you view the world, how you view yourself in it and how you want others to view you.

Exorbitant Machinery

EYES ON: Survival Research Labs Machine Sex

“Machine Sex” was the very first performance by Survival Research Lab (SRL), a performance art group started in the 1970s in San Francisco by a man called Mark Pauline.

Pauline led SRL in creating large-scale machine performances that instead of using the human body as a site for art casted highly technical re-engineered machines. Striped of their initial intended uses, the technologies became engines of rabid entertainment. What could on occasion be mistaken for robot fights, the shows aimed to delight and shock, to bring some gusto and passion into the world of stale, purpose-driven technology.

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Often slightly horrifying outcomes came of SRL performances. Blood and guts were common consequences of the machines in action, having been altered from their productive useful designs and rebuilt for superfluous violence.

The point of the shows, though, was largely this excess. Primordial and sometimes plain revolting, SRL performances brought out a raw, human-side of machinery by creating a setting in which all that their power was good for was extreme, savage play.

The Good Art Habit

EYES ON: ArtTab

ArtTab is a Chrome extension that fills your screen with a new piece of digital art every time you open a new tab. And, if you’re anything like us, that’s happening a lot.

With its praises sung in publications like Outland, ArtTab is no “find”. It’s spotlighted here because those praises are worth echoing. A curated collection of browser-native artworks, ArtTab showcases the best of digital art in its ideal setting.

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It’s such a great way of keeping up the very important habit of actually looking.

If painting or other types of fine art have taught us anything, it’s that the more you look the more you learn to see. To enjoy art, to figure out what to take from it, to judge it, is a skill that needs to be practiced. Looking at art is hard—it takes effort and concentration. Eyes need to be trained.

ArtTab ambushes you with pieces of digital art. You don’t have to muster the energy to hone your looking skills. Instead, you are exposed to new pieces, in their correct contexts, many times a day, and so the hard work gets done more easily.

A Computer 2 Ways

EYES ON: Ben Snell’s Dio

All the way back in 2018, the artist Ben Snell created Dio, a sculpture made from a model trained on over a 1,000 classical sculptures.

Dio’s design was moulded from masterpieces of the past but unlike those sculptures casted or carved, Dio was made up from the computer that imagined it. Snell ground to dust the same computer that determined Dio’s design, mixed it with resin, and refabricated into the sculpture.

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This act of reuse is captivating because there’s something magical about the transformation that occurs. It’s like an act of alchemy. The computer is used first for its computing value, and then reused in a different state, for its material value. As Snell put it, “reborn, the computers assume a newfound physical agency, while traces of their invisible processing power live on in their bodily form.”

Shiny metallic flecks caught in Dio’s resin surface reflect the “invisible processing power” of a computer. The mystery of computing, which so few of us are actually privy to (what is actually happening in there?) is made material, infused into the object.

The Prince of Appropriation

EYES ON: Richard Prince’s Instagram work

The artist Richard Prince’s work offers a really interesting, and straight forward example of reuse. One that isn’t always legal.

Prince often borrows images directly from other photographers, sometimes making slight alterations and then presenting them as his own. Throughout the 2010’s he did this through Instagram, in what he called “screen saves.”

“Screen saves” consist of others’ instagram posts, blown-up and printed, with a Prince edited comment below the stolen image. Taken straight from the screen, the posts are reused, as his own.

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It’s quite shocking how often Prince repeated this considerably ballsy act of radical reuse over the years. Even after a court ruled that his Canal Zone series did not modify Patrick Caribou’s images adequately enough to warrant being called original work and so must be destroyed, Prince continued to take from others (he also later appealed this judgement and won).

In his more recent work, the recontextualisation of an Instagram post—taken from the screen, printed and placed on a gallery wall—works in his favour to muddy the copyright waters. But that legal edge doesn’t seem to matter to him, in Prince’s words, “copyright has never interested me.”

A classic bad-boy artist move which asks how far one can take the maybe-exhausted “who is the artist really?” question before getting told off, Prince’s work does serve to remind us of the boundaries between reuse and theft.

Escaping the upcycling brand

EYES ON: RVDK

Founded in 2014, RVDK—Ronald van der Kemp—is a brand that proposes an alternative to the current wasteful ways of the fashion industry. Made from “high-end existing materials and leftovers” each RVDK piece is “crafted by hand by small ateliers and artisans in his native Holland.”

A circular approach to a fashion system is no new idea. Upcycled clothes, seen all over small brand-selling sites and on young girls in big cities, is a current trend for its aesthetic proposition as much as its ethical one.

Upcycling at RVDK is pitched differently though. The brand frames reused materials in terms of scarcity.

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Around for a long time yet still desirable, used high-quality materials offer seasonless and timeless value, the brand claims. But most importantly, they’re one-of-a-kind.

Forget the environmental case, reuse is luxury, reuse is rarity. RVDK sells “wardrobes consisting of limited-edition statement pieces.”

This, we think, is interesting in terms of the brand’s placement in high fashion, because all of this is of course true, each item RVDK makes is by definition limited edition, rare, one-of-a-kind, but the “statement piece” part is where things get more sticky.

Most of the time, upcycled clothing items stink of reuse. It’s hard to escape the “statement” that is their means of production.

Often patchy, mismatched, colourful—a garment made from reused materials carries with it a whole lot of aesthetic baggage as well as creative constraints. The inferences are inescapable. So, whether RVDK likes it or not, their clothes can’t not be read in terms of how they’re made. There will always be an additional “statement” to fight against, one which doesn’t necessarily inspire ideas of luxury.

EYES ON: Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs

Farah Al Qasimi is an artist working between Abu Dhabi and New York. Her work builds rich cultural worlds across time periods and places, often by revealing the inner decorative life of a family home.

Seeped in saturated colours and dense patterning, these interior spaces, and all their many material surfaces, capture the twisted histories of class and taste.

The political underpinnings of these worlds of taste—which have been cross-polinated between the east and west, America and the UAE, colonial pasts and globalised todays—are revealed through how we, as viewers, evaluate them in Al Qasimi’s images. To call something “gaudy” means something. To think something’s “tacky” does too.

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The politics of taste feels very present in these photographs. But, these politics are made even more complex when you view Al Qasimi’s work in the physical, where she introduces what feels like a new geographic location—the digital.

Currently up in a room at the Tate Modern in London, Al Qasimi’s displays, like her subjects, are made up of many layers. Loose photographs bump up against framed photographs on expansive printed wallpapers. Image on image on image. There’s so much to take in. New colours, new references, new data.

All the more dense, the layered display of images mimics the experience of moving through life, mediated through digital layers. The melting of cultural contexts that takes place between screens now takes place on the walls, making the web of aesthetics even more difficult to unpick.

The Hemline Index

EYES ON: Nancy Paterson’s Stock Market Skirt

Nancy Paterson was a writer and an artist working in the realm of new media studies. She was known for her work that dug into gender, the internet, electronics and cyberfeminism. Her Stock Market Skirt is the embodiment of all these interests.

The 1998 dynamic piece consists of a dress whose hem shortens as stock market prices rise. Length is tied to price. The piece, given the grand title of the first “internet-controlled telerobotic device to visualize data”, was a breakthrough in getting live internet data (in this case, live stock pricing) to control a motorised mechanism.

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Beyond making the breakthrough that is a data-interactive mechanical item, Paterson chose a fashion item that is importantly female coded. In choosing a skirt, the piece is doing something else.

As Garnet Hertz writes on the project, “Technology is never just technology, it is always intricately intertwined with people, objects, bodies, places, practices, cultural values, and beliefs.”

In the small act of hiking up some skirt-material, much greater associations to gender, economics and politics are invoked. The beauty of this piece is in how incredibly succinct that small act is.

Prompt Writing Workshop

EYES ON: Say What You See

Created by Jack Wild (the artist in residence at Google Arts and Culture Lab), Say What You See is an “experiment” that seeks to teach the art of image prompting.

Made with the help of Google AI, the experiment asks for your description of a generated image on screen, and then uses that description as a prompt to create a new image. To move onto the next level, your prompt has to produce an image that is above a “visual threshold” ie. it looks enough like the one you were describing.

Like in any language learning app, a little personified margin-dwelling character (in this case its a smiley brain) gives tips on how to improve your prompt writing and so produce more successful image results.

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Say What You See is interesting for not only what it teaches but how. The initial disbelief that followed the announcement that prompt-writing is/ will be a valuable skill has worn off in many ways, but seeing this experiment, designed like any other early childhood education tool, that shock is renewed.

Just like learning French, learning to write prompts requires the observation of language rules. To become better at it, you must learn and apply the rules. This, of course, is not new information. But seeing this laid out in what looks exactly like a subject, object, verb exercise, sends it home.

EYES ON: Is This the Middle East? by Rayane Jemaa

Is This the Middle East? is a project by British-Tunisian digital artist, Rayane Jemaa, exploring the depictions of the Middle East and North Africa in video games. Jemaa uses screenshots from games to create 3D renders of “Middle Eastern” structures, spotlighting stereotypes of the Arab world that repeatedly pop up across game environments.

The project was born from the realisation that most games “set” in the Middle East are games that revolve around violence or war. In turn, the landscape of the region is presented as entirely shaped by violence. These stereotypes are so engrained in the language of certain games, that even if a game is not set in any specific geographical location, references to Islamic architectural features or Arabic script are scattered across the unknown location to encourage a feeling of war.

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The way in which Jemaa produces the 3D renders (by translating multiple images into a 3D model) is a common practice in many different areas of work and life. The results are familiar; they look like any other architectural 3D scans. But unlike ones we’re used to, these renders are formed from screenshots of fake places and not from photographs of real ones.

So, although the 3D sites give off the impression that they refer to reality, in fact, together they form an archive of a nonexistent landscape, an extremely subjective and one-sided view of what the Middle East looks like, as perpetuated through video games.

Art Jewel

EYES ON: Studio Jewels by Josh Smith

The well known artist Josh Smith recently came out with an appendage to his artistic practice, a new venture, Studio Jewels. Created in collaboration with jeweller Will Shott, the limited edition silver pieces are being sold through his gallery’s digital portal, Zwirner’s own, Platform.

Smith is known for his very gestural depictions of rudimentary symbols and characters, all painted with thick colours that are often muddied or mangled. A classic example of his style can be found in his early 2000s name paintings, in which he abstracts the letters of his name to play with painted space and its layers of meaning. Smith’s Studio Jewels run alongside this practice, and are based off his own small figurine sculptures that are very like his strange painted subjects.

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Smith’s jewels are cool, but the campaign images that came out with his jewels are really what interest us most.

In some ways the images are like any jewellery campaign, featuring shots of the product worn by models or close ups to show details, but in other ways the images are so far from the norm. They are fully Josh Smith-ified. The compositions, the colours, the framing—all borrow from his paintings’ visual language. They all carry the same undercurrents.

That in itself is not necessarily surprising. The artist’s style is expressed through many outlets. What is surprising is seeing Smith’s style so seamlessly slotted into the format of a brand aesthetic. In the fashion sales context, the artist is framed as a brand. And in this case, it works so well!

With such a pronounced style and characteristic aesthetic, this campaign formatting sheds light on how much Josh Smith, and many other artists, are brands already.

Made of Clay

EYES ON: A 3D digital trend

One of the most prevalent, and curious, trends in digital image making in the past 10 years has been what CARI calls “blob world.” There, the trend is described as images created with the “use of strange, elaborate 3D renders to create playful textures, strange/uncanny forms, surrealist compositions, and occasionally unnerving body horror.”

Much of the outputs require no explanation for why the trend is popular. They are mostly made of pop-y colours, have shiny textures and provide a satisfying sense of depth in the shapes depicted. But within this trend lies a niche sub-trend that stands out as the most popular (yet the least likely popular) faction of the digital “blob” trend— the clay blob.

Made up of what looks like, bright, cylindrical, polymer clay, this type of “blob world” image is getting continuously pumped out to smiling faces.

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The clay blob is found in digital art as much as it is in advertising material. And even though our tools have advanced to such a degree that means that they can produce extraordinarily life-like digital representations of things, blobs win out more than you might expect.

So, why does a texture-type closer to Wallace and Gromit’s so often trump crisp digital realism or any other effect? What is the appeal?

EYES ON: Shahryar Nashat’s Reverse Rorschach (2023)

Shahryar Nashat’s installation Reverse Rorschach is a depiction of the artist’s real-time emotional state. Hooked up to monitoring devices for the duration of the exhibition, Nashat’s vitals are recorded, interpreted and then translated into images using the text-to-image generator Imagen. What comes out looks just like the ink blots of a Rorschach test.

Developed in 1921 by psychologist Hermann Rorschach, the Rorschach test uses a patient’s response to a series of abstract inked images to make psychological interpretations. In the test, the image is the input — the stimulus which brings about a response to be interpreted.

As the name suggests, Nashat’s installation flips this on its heads and presents these images as the final result, a graphic interpretation of his self.

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The piece digs into the complexity of interpretation between body, machine and image. What was once a visual prompt—the Rorschach abstract image—now holds actual data. But, they look almost identical.

This is interesting because by presenting the information in the culturally significant format of a Rorschack ink blot, the audience, with all their knowledge of how the test works, automatically attempts to interpret the artist from the images.

As one commentator on the piece says, Nashat’s choice to use the Rorschack-style image shifts the responsibility of self-analysis, which is so commonly placed on the artist, onto the audience.

Wet Digital Design

EYES ON: The mysteries of Frutiger Aero

Frutiger Aero is a design trend that took hold across tech-related products of the late 2000s. Its entrance into the collective consciousness can be traced back to the Microsoft Windows XP UI design, which was released in 2001 and achieved extraordinary global adoption. Fresh green grass, perfect wet bubbles, streaming water—clean, natural elements depicted in sharp blues and greens made up the foundation of this digital aesthetic.

The term Frutiger Aero was coined by Sofi Lee, the consumer aesthetics researcher, and has recently seen a huge resurgence of interest on social media. People feel nostalgic, people feel confused—how did a digital aesthetic with such immense visual character ever thrive? Why didn’t we question it then? Where’s all that kitschy character gone now?

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Like everything, Frutiger Aero was a product of its environment. So, what makes it so fascinating to us all today is trying to understand what in the world that environment could have been…

Of course, there’s the social explanation for why natural elements were so prevalent in the design schema. Technology was moving from alien to human, from completely foreign to in your hands. Therefore, comforting oceans and serene hills helped to make the transition soothing.

That explanation—that the blues and greens of Frutiger Aero greased in our current relationship with technology—is very straightforward, retrospectively.

But, at the time, there was another practical reason, one that had less to do with the narrative content of these natural images and more to do with their marketing strengths in showcasing the potentials of a screen. No image showed off the sheer definition and hyperreal qualities of an HD screen better than a close up of a dewy flower. The depth of space, the sharp colours, the clear details—all of this was never before experienced, only made possible through these new screens that were being released at the time of this design trend.

So, from our current position of hindsight, Frutiger Aero can be easily explained by numerous sociological explanations as its effects are traced to today. But, it can also be viewed from a very different angle, from the perspective of pure hardware, a perspective wholly oblivious to the persuasive powers of graphic design.

Carpet Preservation

EYES ON: Hussein Shikha’s carpet translations

Hussein Shikha is an artist whose work looks at preservation and translation in the context of the prolific digitalisation of today’s visual culture. Shikha is an Iraqi born artist and has a particular interest in the issue of preservation when it comes to Eastern design perspectives, namely traditional carpet designs.

To explore “the erasure of handmade Iraqi tapestries”, Shikha uses digital tools. He takes the language of the older ways of weaving reality into the new.

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Part of what’s so interesting about this work is its stated intention of preservation.

What’s preserved in each of these pieces? Is it the essence of the carpet? or is it just a blueprint that allows for the carpet’s recreation back into the physical?

The question of what exactly is getting preserved in these digital translations feels relevant because of the digital visual language chosen. It’s so un-carpet like. The strength of the pixel is extremely felt in each of the pieces, so much so that a “carpet” is not something visibly obvious. The pixels flatten. They make no effort at creating the illusion of a carpet at all.

In that sense, Shikha’s work sheds light on the art of digital translation—what it actually is and what its intentions are.

What is it that we are trying to carry through when we make things digital? and does that have to look like it does in the physical?

EYES ON: Will Pappenheimer’s Proxy, 5-WM2A

In 2014 Will Pappenheimer was commissioned to create a virtual designer drug for that year’s Whitney Gala/museum building relocation party. Pappeneheimer, an artist working on the border of the physical-digital and a founding member of the Manifest.AR group (click the link and read its incredible manifesto, well worth it), created Proxy, 5-WM2A — an AR experience to be consumed by all guests in attendance.

Through guests’ screens, the space of the museum was transformed. Loud colours and wild light aberrations covered the field of sight. The perspective of a 90s club kid was offered up to help celebrate the night.

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It’s fun. The principle of a museum sanctioned, mind-altering drug is cheeky and silly and showcases the digital layers of our everyday experience.

Best of all is the description of this drug-fuelled institutional experience as intentionally “dissociative”. Like digital Ketamine therapy, it provided fantastical virtual add-ons to help guests “dissociate from its iconic Breuer location and transition to a new building.”

New Lexicons for Embodiment

EYES ON: Barbara Sanchez Kane’s NYC exhibit, New Lexicons for Embodiment

Barbara Sanchez Kane’s solo exhibit, New Lexicons for Embodiment at NYC’s Kurimanzutto gallery navigates the “intertwined worlds of fashion and art”, exploring the “clothed body as the interphase with which we experience the world.”

The work employs traditional fashion practices such as weaving, pattern making, and molding to produce wearable sculptures that investigate the craft of clothing production and how that craft enables the performance of identity.

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“The thing is that these clothes are unstable; they are in a constant state of transformation. As soon as one speaks of them, they’re already turning into something else. Yes, mutant clothes. No.” - Luis Felipe Fabre

To us, Sanchez Kane’s work acts as a remarkable example of the collision of art and fashion.

Physical works that claim to be on the border of fashion and art are too often just clothes with a sculptural edge. Sometimes it feels like the “art” label is used to justify the extreme discomfort of a worn item or an item’s altogether complete lack of functionality.

This feels different. Sanchez’s objects exist between plausible wearability and pure sculpture all within one viewing experience. Part of that comes from Sanchez’s repurposing of traditional objects in the “garments.” With the integration of these objects (the belts are an obvious example), one can just as easily see those individual objects themselves as one can their assemblage as a garment.

This repurposing and recontextualizing of everyday objects into garments made us think about what the equivalent might look like in the digital world. What is a digital readymade? Can this approach to fashion-making find its equal in the digital?

Online Philosophy of the Self

EYES ON: Kyle McDonald’s Going Public

Following a 2013 Twitter update that allowed anyone to receive direct messages to their Twitter accounts from anyone, the artist Kyle McDonlald decided to make use of the new feature to explore the bounds of online identity.

Through the project “Going Public”, he decided to put his own identity in the hands of the public by allowing all direct messages sent to his account to be automatically published on his profile as if they came from him.

On the experiment, McDonald writes, “There’s a strange connection between our “self” and our body. The connection is assumed, because they’re difficult to separate. But the only thing connecting our identity to our online persona is the knowledge of a password. What happens when we break that connection and dilute our online identity?”

In decentralizing his online identity, McDonald digs into the nature of that identity.

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When first learning of this project, our immediate reaction was fear — fear for what people might have written in McDonald’s direct messages. It’s a ballsy move to give out control of your online presentation; it’s a move that could cause offense or embarrassment.

Our knee-jerk response—the fear of being misrepresented or misunderstood—brings to light some fundamental characteristics of the online self, like how much it’s founded on other people’s view of it.

In a much less serious, more internet way, “Going Public” experiments with modern philosophy’s blockbuster question of the Self.

EYES ON: Maya Man’s I’m Feeling Lucky

Even if you don’t yet know Maya Man’s work, you’ll be instantly familiar with it. You’ve seen the fonts, scrolling in bed, bleary-eyed. You’ve read the text a hundred times over. It’s all (perhaps embarrassingly) very recognisable—that’s because it’s taken straight from your Instagram feed.

Maya Man’s most recent release, I’m Feeling Lucky, takes the aesthetic language associated with the culture of online astrology and braids it into a long-form generative project. The result is a series of random outputs that reflect the randomness of astrological readings that have proliferated across social media for years.

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There are loads of notable aspects of this collection that make it really effective at capturing the cultural phenomenon that it’s talking about: the strength of its aesthetic language, Maya Man’s commitment to that language, as well as the relevance of its subject matter to us all and to digital art making more generally.

For us, though, the aspect that makes this project most effective is that many of its outputs are really funny.

With each generated declaration or piece of advice that’s pumped out (such as “You may express your instinct” or “Others find you lucky and normal”), you can’t help but giggle in response. Completely nonsensical yet spoken in an all-knowing tone, the made-up phrases bottle up online teenage self-seriousness in all its ridiculousness.

But, not only are the phrases ridiculous, as their interpreter, so are you. Just like with a horoscope that doesn’t quite fit, with each generated phrase you bend over backwards to find its relevance to your personal life. And, even with the knowledge that I’m Feeling Lucky’s lessons are categorically random, you still give it a go. With no success in finding a meaningful fit, or worse, success, you are left embarrassed for implicating yourself and so for being the very thing the project is making light of.

One Stop Too Far

EYES ON: Burberry Street Station

For London Fashion week (which feels like forever ago already), London’s Bond Street tube station was temporarily transformed into “Burberry Street”. Every piece of signage was overlaid with Daniel Lee’s blue in a remarkably seamless way (literally no visible poster seams), that made the tube-makeover feel very real.

This textbook guerrilla marketing move caused perhaps as much alarm as it did delight in commuters. Some oohed and aahed while others got lost.

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Without going into the ethics of commodifying public services for private gain, the Burberry Street stunt reveals just how far brands have become intertwined with life, how un-separate they are from the fabric of society. The stunt turned out to be a nice little metaphor for this, with people literally getting lost between the brand’s world and reality, unable to differentiate between the two.

Practical way-finding was swapped out for fiction, maybe too easily. At least when London’s Barbican station was transformed into Barbie-can station for the movie, the new name sounded like the original.

We all love a fun routine shake-up, but not one that means we find ourselves at the other end of the train line. This renaming stunt literally begs the question of whether we’ve gone too far.

The Great Divide

EYES ON: Physical art mediums in digital art

In discussing Katherine Frazer’s Gemma-commissioned work, Life Force, Michael Connor of Rhizome brought up the blog PAINTED, ETC. by Ry David Bradley. The blog, started in 2009, aimed to “document what was happening to painting as it collided with network culture”, meaning it recorded all types of artworks, from paintings that look digital to digital works that look like paintings. From this blog, a semblance of a definition for the (maybe impossible to define) term “digital painting” could be pieced together.

In mentioning this blog, Connors points out that a new style of work is increasingly falling under the label of digital painting. Previously, works fell under this category because they had a messy digital mark making that looked “painterly”. Wet and gestural, their pixels slid like paint.

But later on, work like Katherine Frazer’s, which possesses a very different kind of mark began to be referred to as digital painting too. Hard-edged, corporately clean, these paintings are much less obviously “paintings”. Instead, their mark making makes very clear which professional digital tools were used in their creation process (Frazer actually makes some of her paintings from Keynote, a tool young professionals know all too well).

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Although a differentiation between painterly and not-so painterly digital artworks—those with evidence of “brushstrokes” and those without—has been developing over many years, the difference doesn’t really have a claim on who actually gets to live under the umbrella of digital painting. All types of digital painting are welcome (?)

The same is true for digital generative art. In fact, this very conversation—on a digital work’s relationship to physical creative mediums—was nicely echoed in a tweet posted right next door, in the world of NFT generative art twitter. The tweet identified the very same chasm developing between generative art projects that feel digital and those that imitate the textures of physical art mediums (watercolour, oil paint etc.).

Digital art’s relationship to physical art mediums is rightly a big subject of interest and one that can teach us more about how different types of digital art work.

Weirdly, that’s not at all the case in the world of digital fashion. Digital clothes almost always directly mimic the textures of physical materials without a peep about the implications of doing so or the alternatives to doing so. There’s still SO much to get into!

EYES ON: The share-ability of physical glitch art

Images of glitched furniture are a niche, but extraordinarily popular, part of the internet. Made from solid material, they’re more than images. These objects actually exist in real life, struck with an intervention—the glitch—that would normally only exist in the digital.

For some strange reason, this “glitch-out-of-water” effect is extremely pleasing to social media users. It has become the source of much thrill.

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The most interesting thing about glitch sculpture is trying to understand why it’s so entertaining. How could it be that an effect, usually placed on an image and now placed on a real life object, is so enthralling? One answer is in these images’ aha! moment.

An aha! moment is created when the viewer realises that they’re seeing the well-known digital effect, but out of context. Next comes the realisation of the practical implications for creating that moment; the recognition that someone went to such extreme lengths as to actually carve it out.

Perhaps too harsh a read on what’s going on with these objects (one might hope that putting that much effort into creating an art object would result in a less clickbate-y outcome), there is something undeniably sticky about physically glitched household items.

Attention Real Estate

EYES ON: The Million Dollar Homepage

In 2005, The Million Dollar Homepage was thought up by the then student Alex Tew as a very clever way to make money to pay for university.

The website is made up of 1 million pixels (arranged in a 1000x1000 grid), with each pixel priced at $1. Tew sold off blocks of 10x10 pixels to advertisers, who could fill the space with their logo, a link to their website, and a short slogan which would appear as a visitor’s mouse hovered over a piece of property.

After great sales success, the last 1,000 pixels on the homepage were a hot commodity, and were auctioned off for $38,100 to the weirdly similarly named business, MillionDollarWeightLoss.com.

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A phenomenon contained to the internet of the early 2000s, The Million Dollar Homepage is a telling illustration of the attention economy in its nascent state. Before user attention was spread thin (and simultaneously made thicker) across social media platforms, sharp spikes in internet attention could be found in rather obscure locations. A simple hook, or even word of mouth, could randomly bring a $1 million dollars of attention to a webpage.

The look and feel of The Million Dollar Webpage conveys the nature of that attention. It’s quite impossible to pay real attention to the details of the webpage; its users are drowned in overstimulation by the page’s signs and colours. The page doesn’t work to sustain your attention either. One visit is enough.

Instead, the webpage produces attention by planting the idea that others have given it. In that sense, calling it the million dollar homepage is what’s clever. It manifests $1 million dollars worth of page visits, of attention, by just getting people to check out what the whole thing’s about.

Encrusted Computing

EYES ON: The Embroidered Computer by Irene Posch

The Embroidered Computer consists of a programmable 8 bit computer made from metallic gold thread. An array of conductive materials arranged into elaborate, but specific, patterns gives rise to this adorned computer’s electronic functions. Visitors were even invited to program the textile themselves to carry out instructions, bringing each flower’s stem to life.

What is usually kept concealed at the very back of a computer is placed front and centre, beautified. And design motifs which are central to so many design traditions are networked.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

What’s so striking about this project is how much the whole thing doesn’t look like a computer. The flowing lines, organic and irregular, are far from the hard edges we usually associate with computers.

So, beside the obvious fact that this computer is stunning due to it being a product of a feat in embroidery, it also stuns because it’s so odd to see a computer in a completely foreign visual language.

EYES ON: William Morris’ Strawberry Thief

In the tech world’s favourite book of last year, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, there’s a surprising reference to William Morris’ famous textile, Strawberry Thief. In a book that is more likely to describe the beauty of gaming worlds, the mention of the 19th century textile somehow fits right in.

In the book, the Strawberry Thief design is invoked by the textile designer/mother character, Mrs Watanabe, to make a point about the amount of time and effort necessary to craft something of such quality. The technique (indigo discharge) used to achieve this rich design was, at the time, groundbreaking. Morris’ first attempt to print the intricate design was in 1875, but he only succeeded in 1881.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

That’s all very interesting in itself (all seriousness). But what is more interesting is what Mrs Watanabe sets off with her reference to this old school craft. The design begins to pop up throughout the book in different forms.

In describing the painstaking design, and the use of those involved techniques, the book shows how a textile design could be created that is so pictorially dense, so full of life even in all its flatness, that it can inspire way bigger stories that escape the textile’s borders. Through its craft, a textile can hold the narrative complexity of a game. And in this book, it does.

A great, very real-world illustration of this is Sophia George’s Strawberry Thief. A game born directly from the story of the design, in which Morris’ birds come to life.

Digital Ruins

EYES ON: Joe Hamilton’s Close to Infinite

Close to Infinite is a video piece that takes us through a landscape of 3D rendered old buildings, covered in all sorts of overgrown and oversized plants, bathed in a thick pink end-of-day sunlight.

The video is meant to show the “various states of decomposition,” a result of “the impermanence of (all) structure and material.” Supposedly, the video has set out to convey the decrepit, the very real effects of time on matter (how things change shape, colour, etc.). And that’s weird, because nothing but the architectural styles in the video actually feel old (spot Stonehenge). Instead, the space feels more like the set of a new Gladiator film than a tale of decomposition. It’s more kitsch than it is about time.

This exact phenomenon is something that’s always been interesting to us — why choose to talk about the nature of materiality in a digital depiction? How can you make something digital actually feel old, when most digital things feel like they exist outside of time completely?

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

First off. That name — Close to Infinite. How bold. How cool. And is maybe a clue to why this video feels so kitsch. It’s only close to infinite, only close to any time at all.

Although everything in the video dramatically “references” time — the old buildings, the overgrown nature, the big skies, the setting sun — none of it has any claim to its effects at all. It’s a video safari of old things, but because they are made digitally they exist in another realm completely.

So, with each sign of its digital-ness, the video slowly seems more and more ridiculous, with everything only pointing to BIG time and nothing creating an experience of that time.

Alternate (Game) Worlds

EYES ON: Third World: The Bottom Dimension by Gabriel Massan and collaborators

Third World: The Bottom Dimension is a video game currently on view at The Serpentine Gallery in London. It’s “on view” in that the exhibition offers up more than the game itself, showing video pieces and sculptures that further fill out the world of this jaw-droppingly beautiful game.

Called Third World (as in the old-timey term for undeveloped countries), the game “explores the Black Brazilian experience as it intersects with the impacts of colonialism.” And as descriptions go, this is a rather good one, as that’s actually what’s going on. In the role of the gamer, you are forced to actively explore.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

When asked about the work, Massan says, “I want to create the experience of walking through possibilities and memories of life and narrative.” Games make that possible by offering an opportunity to experience a world from someone else’s perspective.

For some context, the exhibition touches on the use of the gaming format as a means of unpicking the story of colonial Brazil. At one point, the wall text references the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire who argued that personal narratives can be used constructively to help people imagine alternative scenarios for how their lives could play out differently. For that purpose, gaming is the perfect tool. And through the infectious fun of engaging in an alternative story, Third World proves that out.

EYES ON: Simple Thoughts by Khwampa

Digital tools are often used to recreate biological processes, for scientific and creative purposes alike. In the digital art world, “Microbiology” is a rampant theme. Artists like ciphrd and agoria are digitally replicating the beauty of natural growth. And, with such crisp quality and striking realism, these works make it hard to tell the difference between science experiment and art.

At first, Simple Thoughts, a series of digital paintings by artist Khwampa, exhibited last month on Verse, seems to fall into this “sciency” category. As if translated from the view of a microscope on a petri dish, bits of life are spread across the screen. Left alone, the contents might grow by themselves.

But, the more you look, the less organic these shapes become.

Made in MS paint, Khwampa’s work holds strong evidence that it has been made by hand, not by nature. The chunky pixelated lines, the playful scribbles, and what Verse calls the “the aesthetics of digital compression artifacts,” means that the illusion that each piece is a view onto a cell’s biological development slowly fades. Instead, the forms increasingly inhabit a different realm, sketched from the subconscious.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

How can a MS Paint black line so drastically change how we interpret a work?

That’s what’s so interesting. That MS Paint black line says so much. It speaks to the time put in to handmake each mark. It points to the mouse, the artist, their intentions, their imagination, and this piece in it. So, in noticing all of the small visual traits of the paintings — produced by the constrained tools of MS Paint — Simple Thoughts becomes a very different kind of digital depiction of life. Far from a simulation, the black line’s character pulls each piece into a view of life closer to those made by Kandinsky, of the subconscious, of the intangible, of the artist’s own mind. Cells turn into sublime shapes. And the biological structures of life become the stuff of abstraction.

Marbled Development

EYES ON: Amanda Ghassaei’s digital marbling

Marbling is a long practiced craft that uses the movement of water to create intricate swirling prints. Inks are floated onto the water’s surface, then delicately pushed into new shapes (or in cases which include a comb, more like torn into shape). The ephemeral patterns are then immortalised on material — pasted and stuck in place.

The first known cases of marbling are believed to date back to the 12th century in Japan. However, over the past 1000 years, it has been employed worldwide. Different cultures, utilising varied approaches and tools, have each created their own catalogues of marbled patterns.

Marbling, today, is little changed. A traditional craft, its products are romanticised for their continued use of old techniques.

But Amanda Ghassaei, the independent engineer, has created a digital marbling project which simulates traditional techniques to take marbling somewhere new.

For the more technically inclined, in her project breakdown, she delves into the nitty-gritty of creating a digital simulation of marbling, and the argument put forward for a mathematical model as opposed to a physics-based simulation. But for those whose comprehension of a simulation is limited to pure visual entertainment — these mesmerising sims do more than just hypnotise. They actually illustrate the possibility of entirely new marbling patterns.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The project allows experiments in pattern creation that are completely impossible in the physical. Shape-making movements can be preformed with unmatched precision, from multiple angles, to create patterns that have never been seen before. Traditional patterns, in use for centuries, can be taken in new directions. And, as Ghassaei comments, she has “only just started to scratch the surface here.”

Ghassaei’s project is cool, not only because it gives access to an entirely new bank of marbled patterns we wouldn’t be able to achieve otherwise, but also because it serves as a very relevant example of how a craft — with deeply rooted practices and historical means of production — can still be evolved through technology today.

Flowers in Fashion

EYES ON: Beaude Studio

We’re often looking at the edges of fashion — those things that aren’t quite wearable but contribute to the visual cultures that clothes allow us to inhabit. Flowers, maybe unexpectedly, often appear in these edges.

From fashion events to photoshoot prop inventories, flowers have always played a major role. No matter the trend of the day, or even how inorganic or futuristic a trend purports to be, flowers are present. And so, artists creating anew with fashion’s flowers are always of particular interest. Beaude Studio, a floral artist based in Paris, is a great example.

Using flowers as subjects in themselves (and not just decoration), Beaude Studio’s creations “focus on the strength and beauty of each individual flower, combining them unexpectedly to portray a sensibility of futuristic floral manipulation.”

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Although depictions of flowers have been a fixture of art for almost ever, forming a large part of what is known as the “Still Life” genre, Beaude Studio’s work is set apart in their casting of flowers as protagonists. The flowers are transformed from subjects of study to leading characters.

In Beaude Studio’s photographs, flowers wear, flowers pose. Studded with jewels, they are photographed like models.

EYES ON: Frank Mazano’s recent video collection on FellowshipTrust

Weirder than weird, the collection of videos titled Current Value by Frank Mazano was a part of the Post Photographic Perspectives II — Acceptable Realities show presented by Fellowship. The wider show was centred around “the use of AI to interpret the world in which we live, and to question how we represent it.” But Mazano’s videos do much more than question the world we live in. They reveal a parallel world — gnarled and pink, made up of flesh and trash.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

When you see an AI generated video that makes you feel this icky, that conjures such a distasteful feeling in your tummy, it’s worth taking a step back and trying to figure out why. Why these videos in particular? Dystopian AI videos with the same deranged, distorted faces are being pumped out like no tomorrow. So that’s not it.

Instead, in these videos, most scenes aren’t that shocking at first. They feel very everyday. Images melt into denigration. What begins as true, is slightly twisted with each frame, as new faces are switched out for old ones. Images fluidly become something else — butts into portraits — the ease with which they arrive to the final underbelly is the horrible part.

Handwritten Digital Notes

EYES ON : The Are.na Channel: I miss knowing what everyone’s handwriting looks like

If you aren’t addicted to the Are.na Explore page, you are doing the internet wrong. Like a social media site, but better, Are.na offers the chance to discover, categorise and then remember bits of digitised culture from across the internet.

One of the most endearing Are.na channels is “I miss knowing what everyone’s handwriting looks like.” Crowdsourced by its maker, the channel is made up of images of contributors’ hand written notes, each referencing their own script.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The channel oozes nostalgia. But in quite an unusual way.

Mementos of a pre-digital age, a person’s handwriting is implied to have revealed something of one’s character. Now, on a handwriting-free platform, a call is made for members to reveal that unseen side of themselves.

So, on a platform built to collect digital mementos, people contribute everyday examples of their script in an attempt to bring back that forgotten form of intimacy.

It’s pure sentimentality. It’s an example of harnessing tech to record something lost (because of tech), for no other reason other than that it’s missed.

The Everyman’s Show

EYES ON: Kim Shui’s decentralised show

When Kim Shui began her career as a fashion designer she knew nobody. Without connections she started with a blank slate and zero traction. Shui claims that what brought her success was not knowing the right people but tapping into all the people. She ascribes the popularity of her brand to social media and the type of practice it produced — what she calls “co-creation.” Her clothes respond to her digital network and vis-versa.

To take this symbiotic relationship one step further, Kim Shui’s SS23 show was “decentralised.” It sourced talent, music and some designs from the internet, and was even held in the archetypal public space — Grand Central Station. Our favourite piece in this decentralised puzzle was the Pixel garment, which whipped 784 submissions of original content into a printed gown.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Although the concept of a decentralised fashion show is interesting in itself — in that it dismantles conceptions of traditional creative direction or the “star” designer — more interesting is Kim Shui’s framing of her decision to distribute her creative power as one she’s been making all along, through social media.

We all know the influence social media has on trend-making. At this point, influence is too mild a word to describe the relationship design trends have with social media. And so, for Shui to think about her brand’s relationship to social media as one that has always allowed it to be decentralised, founded in “co-creation” (ie. that the power of decision has always been spread across every user), is extremely prescient.

DRAUP SPOTLIGHT

Antheia has SOLD at Christie’s — to fellow exhibiting artist, AI poetess Sasha Stiles.

As the first time digital fashion has sold at auction, the Future Frequencies sale, curated by Christie’s & Gucci, was a historic venture for digital couture.

Check it out.

EYES ON: VETEMENTS SS24 collection

This year, the fashion world found its newest muse — AI. Enlisted to explore new designs, or just to stay new, AI has been all over the place. But in VETEMENTS’ SS24 collection, the brand supposedly took a contrary stance, and created an "ANTI-AI" collection.

The collection is made up of wildly large clothing. From evening dresses to streetwear, each piece plays on an exaggerated essence. But where’s the AI? According to the creative director, Guram Gvasalia, the larger than life sleeves is where its located.

He says, “I wanted to create physical objects that would look and feel like AI-generate units” but then be executed with the quality and crafstmanship which “can only be done by human hands and with a passion that no machine can have.”

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

This all seems like a bit of a reach, like an excuse to say the word AI without having to have anything to do with it.

What does it actually mean to be Anti-AI in fashion? What does that even look like in a piece of clothing?

If by AI Guram Gvasalia just means non-human sized, then sure. But of course clothes made with human hands are made with more “passion” than clothes made by a machine. Who in their right mind would disagree. Passion has little to do with AI.

So, what are these clothes actually standing against? In adopting a stance that is impossible to see in its clothes, the collection’s use of the word AI is rather meaningless —  a bogeyman for a slew of other things (or nothing?).

To top it off, and reveal how strongly these Anti-AI beliefs are held, the collection’s press release was “finished off by Chat GPT.”

What? That says it all. It’s confused. Where’s the conviction? Why unnecessarily use AI to explain your Anti-AI stance if it could be written by human hands. With passion.

Fashion’s a Joke

EYES ON : Meaningful Existence and other ironic outerwear

Long before any scandals, Jonah Hill’s clothing brand, Meaningful Existence, launched with the simple goal to “spread joy throughout the universe by monetizing happiness.” A blatantly satirical brand, Meaningful Existence revolves around Hill as the “Profit Ezekiel Profit” (two “profits” to ensure no one is actually duped). Hill is the supposed leader of a cult, echoing the claims of established wellness and lifestyle brands.

With quotes like, “material goods and possessions are fundamental to living a Meaningful Existence. We could all afford to buy a little more”, the brand is no more than a means of making a point. It’s a joke, taken to its furthest extreme.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

To criticise the system that sells you things that are said to change your life, the brand sells you things they say will change your life. It’s full circle ironic. It starts and stops with the point. The words are borrowed from cult brands seen on instagram along with the fonts (see Maya Man’s Fake it Till You Make It for a full spectrum of that visual dictionary). All design choices are sacrificed for the point.

With brands like this popping up everywhere (Hill’s brand is not unlike the hugely popular brand Praying), we find ourselves increasingly in a hellish world of ironic self reflections. In this world, clothes are more likely to comment on culture than to actually become culture. Like many things today, so drenched in irony, we can’t even take our clothing seriously.

Art Made on Digital Streets

EYES ON: Digital Street Art

“Digital street art” is popping up all over social media. Art made through mixed reality tools, blending the physical and the digital, these videos take real environments and infuse them with visual elements reminiscent of the culture of street art. Now, fast-moving, fantastical and engrossing like a reel, “digital street art” has been hailed as a new, dynamic medium, which takes street art to new heights. Easier than ever to make, digital street art is meant to increase access to the art form.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

But can we just call it street art because it includes a street? Street art isn’t meant to be easy to make. Neither is it meant to be out of this world.

Street art, in its original context, is political. It’s about public spaces, and ownership of those spaces. And so, a large part of it is about the very real physical site of the art and what that means for how, and by whom, it is viewed. People walk past it, forced to view something they might not want to, confronted by a visual conversation started by the people living in that specific space.

Whereas, in the digital, viewing street art is entirely consensual. Digital street art is pure entertainment. It’s non-confrontational — no stakes, no consequences — it’s about no one and nowhere.

DRAUP SPOTLIGHT

Our COLLECTION #00 from new angles

In the digital, 3D is all about lighting. So, we’ve created new controls in our wardrobe to give new views of our clothes in different lighting environments.

Check it out.

EYES ON: The World of Fake Digital Luggage

A few weeks ago in a comical twitter thread, @co1born, the founder of the Museum of Crypto Art, presented his latest product, “the first FAKE Louis Vuitton digital collectible.” This release was in response to the widely shared sale of Louis Vuitton’s $41,000 Treasure Trunks (a digital twin that comes with a physical LV trunk).

Not unlike the legal drama that took place a few months ago between MetaBirkins NFT vs. Hermès in which Mason Rothschild, the creator of the digital bags, was banned from selling them, the FAKE LV trunks were swiftly removed from OpenSea.

Digital bags have become the battlefield on which IP wars are taking place. And how strange is that, when in practice there is no need for bags in the digital as we have no belongings to carry around.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The fight over IP — waged by brands against their fakes — is pervasive in physical luggage departments and has now been cleanly translated into the digital. This, at first, seems a little ridiculous.

The power of a fake in the physical world is that it does the job but is without the price tag. Most people can’t tell the difference between a fake bag and a real one, and to many people it doesn’t matter all that much. If it “works”, and can be passed off as the brand’s own, then it’s good enough.

In the digital, bags don’t need to “work.” Instead, the mechanics of the world of luxury are fully revealed and bags are reduced to what they truly are — pure brand affiliation. All the value of a trunk is distilled into one flimsy branded image of a suitcase. In the digital, the designer bag is taken to its furthest conclusion, and functions in a way not dissimilar to carrying around a sign with a logo on it.

The digital luggage-sagas are interesting because they shed light on what we really value about brands in the physical world. In truth, the sagas reveal how simple we all are, how motivated we are by status symbols. And that all of this is no different in the digital world, only that the bags are actually symbols and not real objects.

Unreal Dresses

EYES ON: The Painted Dresses of Vittorio Raggianini (Italian, 1858-1939)

The Italian artists Vittorio Raggianini is best known for his romantic genre paintings depicting wealthy woman of the late 18th century. Entertaining themselves in stately room after stately room, his subjects are young and beautiful and quite notably, dripping in silk.

An age-old symbol of wealth, silk dresses have been popular throughout the history of art, and in particular portraiture, for all that they communicate about their wearers. But, something about Raggianini’s paintings aren’t like others. In his, the dresses wear the women. Somehow, silk becomes the standout subject. And it’s not just any old silk. No physical dress could look like that. These dresses shine with an otherworldly brightness. Their representation exceeds all reality.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Although these paintings might seem quite outdated, with extraneous links to fashion today, they are still very relevant to how we approach representing our clothes.

Like these painted garments, digital fashion is also essentially representations of clothing. Like with these painted garments, with digital clothing we can also go beyond the constraints of physical material and play within entirely new realms of creativity that alternative fashion-mediums provide. Here it’s paint. For us it’s a multitude of digital tools.

That’s all to say, it’s myopic to think that just because we are using new tools we are exploring entirely new territory. We have been dealing with visual representations of clothing for centuries. And Raggianini’s blown-out painted dresses are just a small, shiny example of that.

Beyond Biology

EYES ON: Lucy Hardcastle’s Spora

Lucy Hardcastle’s recent project Spora was made in collaboration with photographer Maisie Cousins. “A mesmerisingly visceral exploration of hidden feminine alchemy”, the projects consists of slow-moving images of close-ups of the female body, detailed with animated CGI elements.

As skin becomes silicon, these bodies mutate from something real to something else. That something, is a new hyper real, hybrid female form. Flesh infused with fantasy.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The project uses the unreal to capture a spirit of the real — the unnatural to communicate the all too natural. Dotted with plastic accessories in fluorescent colours, the female bodies starts to adopt all new characteristics. They move and grow with mystical qualities. Skin becomes wondrous.

To describe their project, the creators use the word “alchemy”, which to us, is a nice way to think about these bodies as they undergo digital tinkering. Alchemy or Medieval chemistry is concerned with the process of near-magical transformation from one substance to another. Historically undertaken as a process to produce precious metals or elixirs to achieve forever-life, in these images, digital alchemy is preformed to produce bodies which exist in a sticky intermediary space between biology and the bizarre.

DRAUP SPOTLIGHT

The COLLECTION #00 garments coming out the minter never cease to surprise us. Each unique, it’s worth keeping an eye on what the generative algorithm produces in every new piece.

A few of our favourite garments recently minted…

The last dress DRESS#150 and a great orange lining on PANTS#151.

EYES ON: 0% Food by XK Studio

0% Food is a visual “research” project by XK Studio. It uses the question of whether machines need food as a springboard (or excuse) to design a virtual feast fit for a computer.

Of course in fact inedible, the project presents appetising renders of a technologically-dipped meal plan.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

This project was chosen for obvious reasons. The images are hard to take your eyes off. Plump, sharp and bright, they’re pure indulgence. Like “food porn”, 0% Food plays with our greed, retrofitting it for the digital. The project does this by replacing what would usually entice us in an image of food with sheer 3D technical talent.

But is that explanation enough? Our instinctive and immediate appeal to these images is so strong, so notable, that it might be worth spending a long time with these images to figure out just what’s so appealing about them. Is it the crispiness of food translated into the crispness of an image? Something of our reaction to these images feels important to understand as more and more tech-tinted creations fill the internet, keeping our attention hostage.

Collateral Portraiture

EYES ON: TVs from Craigslist by Penelope Umbrico

For her project TVs from Craigslist, the artist Penelope Umbrico collected images of TV screens for sale on Craigslist across different cities. Within many of these screens lay embedded self-portraits — reflections of their sellers in the act of capturing the TV, and so reflections of their personal lives and homes.

More than that, inside these images there exists a blurry intimacy — one that has travelled across multiple screens, many times transmuted, one that we are privy to, but by mistake.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

It’s always fascinating to see the inside of other people’s houses. It’s thrilling to see how each other lives, especially if that glimpse is unrehearsed and accessed without invitation. Pictured in vulnerable positions — often unclothed or surrounded by shameful mess — the sellers stuck in these screens are seen as they truly are. They are likely unaware of their own reflections.

Umbrico, herself, isn’t sure of that. She points to the incentives behind putting these super intimate self-images on the internet when she writes, “But thinking about the promise, and ultimate absence, of intimacy that the internet fosters, I can’t help thinking there’s a subconscious undercurrent of exhibitionism here; a plea for attention.”

A View Of The Web

EYES ON: 1:1 by Lisa Jevbrett

Created in 1999, Lisa Jevbrett’s project, 1:1 was a data visualisation project which aimed to record every website in the world on a single database. To do this, “crawlers” were sent out onto the Web and told to store any website address that they stumbled upon.

By 2001, it became clear that the database wasn’t exactly representative of the Web, with websites popping up faster than the database could possibly be updated. But, in the years that followed, second and third databases were developed to fill those gaps of knowledge and trace the Web’s growth, making for a more accurate portrait for what was the early internet at the time.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

What does a portrait of the internet actually look like? What features stand out as characteristics? Jevbrett’s project asks that question. And to answer it she offers 5 different interfaces through which we can engage with the data — Migration, Hierarchical, Every, Random, Excursion. Each interface takes a different perspective, and so offers a different face of the Web.

At the time, these portraits gave an experience of the internet unlike any other. As Jevbrett writes, “they are a new kind of image of the Web, and they are a new kind of image.” Much like now, the Web was experienced predominantly internally as users jumped from search engine to website to website. It was navigated through narrow personal tunnels. Jevbrett’s Web portraits jog us out of this perspective. They force us to think topographically, or even structurally about the shape of it all. “They are a new kind of image” because they offered a completely novel way of imagining the internet.

DRAUP SPOTLIGHT

There are only 12 hours left to purchase BUBBLES on ZORA.

Here are a few of our favourite ways to wear the CAPE…

EYES ON: MSCHF X

Mschf, the art collective/ brand known for creating an extraordinary roster of inventive and witty products (famously the big red boots), never makes the same thing twice. Their inexhaustive creativity is almost as striking as how often they get things right. With an unflinching finger on the pulse of all things fashion, art and internet culture, each mschf drop is as thoughtful and daring as the next.

One particularly amusing drop was MSCHF X, a drop which explored what they term the “Collaborative Continuum” or the ubiquity of brand collaborations in today’s world of fashion. So common are collaborations, the project describes, that gradually, we move into a world in which they don’t matter. Streetwear brands lose their sovereignty and merge into one uber-brand, with ”interchangeable names and use cases.”

To prove their point, MSCHF X does just that. It boils down a long list of brands into one single t-shirt collab, one with a laughable amount of “X’s”. The product — a t-shirt built from patch-worked labels — materialises what they humorously call the “ouroboros of usage rights.”

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

“The platonic ideal of 2020 streetwear in its entirety.”

“This is the last shirt you’ll ever need.”

Clever phrasing aside, MSCHF X’s t-shirts put its cultural criticism into practice. Each t-shirt is a random combination of 10 brands, all at once. But this creates a garment that’s almost shockingly not that unfamiliar.

Logos, usually pasted on chests and intended to emit an individual brand identity, are churned up, mashed together and placed everywhere on the t-shirt. All at once, weakened and illegible en masse, the logos are exposed as meaningless by each other.

Virtual Compassion

EYES ON: Michael Samyn’s Compassie: A Pietà in Virtual Reality

The Pietà — the scene in which Jesus’ dead body is removed from the cross and laid on Mary’s, his mother’s, lap — is one of the most depicted scenes in Western art (maybe most famously by Michelangelo). The scene is heart-wrenching. It encourages an extreme feeling of compassion for Mary as a mother; one that has been drawn on in art to deepen a viewer’s Christian faith for many centuries.

In Samyn’s version, “Compassie humbly attempts to follow and continue that tradition” by putting you in Mary’s position via VR:

“Earth, saved by the sacrifice of your son. You are his mother. Nothing can erase your sorrow. You gaze into the abyss and weep forever.”

Through his virtual Pietà, built in a fitting ‘BC environment’, Samyn’s experience uses a perspective-adopting technology, VR, to do what artists for many years have aimed to do: encourage a faith-strengthening empathy in their viewers.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

One of the most interesting things about this project is its sincerity.

Samyn writes “The biggest challenge for me as a contemporary artist was to create a traditional scene without adding a modern twist. I wanted this piece to be sincere and respectful. I wanted it to become part of tradition, rather than breaking with it. That turned out to be much harder for me than making a joke about conventional themes, or contrast them with pop culture aesthetics, or adding critical notes.”

Depicting Christian symbols through digital technologies in a non-ironic way is not easy. Firstly, it goes against our preconceived conceptions of the modern medium. Compassie doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in VR before. Perhaps a product of the period in time in which VR art has been made, using VR to depict such a historical, spiritual scene seems like it is bound to be in jest. But in fact, Samyn finds a perfect fit for a Pietà. His approach leans into the central functionality of the technology; he uses it to offer a very genuine and raw experience of grief through someone else’s eyes.

Fashioned Bodies

EYES ON: Éamonn Freel’s body perspectives

An artist, self-taught in 3D animation, motion capture, and VFX, Freel has created and directed work for multiple brands which often delves into “fantasy dream worlds, pop culture parodies, and abstract social commentary.” Most compelling, maybe, is his fresh and gross exploration of body modification and how it correlates with fashion.

Take a look at the images from Underneath the fashion: an exploration into fashion and body shapes by Éamonn Freel & Vanessa Reid for Re-edition magazine. Traditional high fashion editorial photos transform into grotesque and unsightly generated images in which the models keep their silhouettes, which are now carved out of skin.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

These images are so engrossing because of how abject they are. They’re abject because they sculpt flesh in unnatural ways. But they’re also abject because they reveal something very true and distasteful about the extent to which we are willing to transform ourselves for the contemporary cool. Those mutated bodies make us feel icky partly because they expose just how far we can take dressing up ourselves.

DRAUP Spotlight

3D VIEWS ON EVERY OPENSEA GARMENT

With a link to view in 3D in every garment description on OpenSea, an entirely new and dynamic experience of our collection is made available to everyone.

The garments transform into optical sculptures when viewed in this way.

Try it out for yourself!

EYES ON: Jonas Lund’s Paintshop

“The Paintshop is a real-time collaborative painting tool offering you the possibility to sell your artworks and buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices.”

A conceptual art project with an extraordinarily fun and interactive side, Lund’s project offers a common digital canvas for everyone to use. At any point, a painter can sign the communal canvas, selling it as their own on the marketplace. An extremely well-oiled machine, the project takes the digital creations, prints them on a real canvas and then sells them for a price deduced by the Paintshop Rank™ algorithm.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The Paintshop is a tool that enlists us all in the factory-like production of a commercial art world. As a closed, self-sufficient system that supplies everything from the creation tools to the buyers — the shop is able to set its own abstract rules for how things work, and so how it acquires it 50% commission. With price points dictated by an illusive algorithm and artistic ownership claimed by anyone at any time, The Paintshop’s entire creative economy is very randomly propped up. Work is compensated in nonsensical ways.

And so, with comical marketplace filters like “quality”, the project, in its widest sense, makes clever fun of how we produce and evaluate works of art in the real world.

Love on the Internet

EYES ON: Group Z’s LOVE

In Rhizome’s endlessly engrossing Net Art Anthology, you can find Group Z’s LOVE — a project consisting of HTML files all exploring the theme of love.

Created by Michaël Samyn (the one man show behind the “collective” Group Z), the work stitches images, texts and GIFs into a maze-like experience of love for the Netscape 2 browser. Small red arrows on the corners of the browser allow users to navigate through the slides in a semi-random configuration, giving different story arrangements each time, that much like love, either repeat themselves or come to an end.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Outside of the weirdly attractive qualities of its janky 90’s web aesthetics, there’s something interesting about LOVE’s browser architecture, formulated to give an experience of the many faces of love. In experiencing the different slides in different orders, each time, images find different contexts just as symbols take on different meanings. In gamifying how we move through the slides of LOVE, we are investigating how we interpret the crudest, packaged images of love on the internet.

As Samyn says, “in some places, love is this intimate thing you share with another person by candlelight, and then in other cases, the candle might be used for whole other purposes, like in de Sade or something.”

Inflated Design

EYES ON: The Humble Masterpieces exhibition in Second Life by Luca Lisci

Jaded by their ubiquitous use, objects like the pencil, the paperclip and the Post-it Note are not properly appreciated as design objects. They are excluded from our mind’s sphere of high design. In 2004, the MoMA put on an exhibition titled Humble Masterpieces which reframed some of these everyday objects as the wonders in design that they are. Snapping us out of the everyday, it encouraged a fresh look on the old by presenting these objects with an emphasis on the design qualities that made them so popular in the first place.

Alongside this exhibition popped up a virtual sister exhibition in the online world of Second Life. With identical way-finding signs from branding to font, the virtual exhibition worked under the same principles as the real one — it too aimed to reveal the extraordinary side of our everyday objects.

But for some reason there’s something going on in the virtual exhibit that’s maybe more interesting than the physical — something weird, something funny, that’s really hard to pinpoint.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

In the Second Life exhibition, which is set in a James Bond-esque modern building in the middle of the ocean, the objects are blown up to a ceiling height. Escaping their glass cases, the objects stand tall. Maybe it’s the dramatic setting, maybe it’s the grand scale, but in the virtual, this exhibit becomes comical.

It’s a funny thing to do to create a digital version of an exhibition which is looking to shed light on the very physical design elements of useful objects. It’s destined to be silly. The goal it sets out for itself is almost absurd.

It’s like if the MoMA curated an exhibition on object-design but instead of choosing to present the selected objects, they replaced them with balloon animals of the objects, inflating every design element beyond recognition.

A Fashion Brand’s Media

EYES ON: Diesel + Public Pressure’s FASHION NFT

In partnership with Public Pressure, the brand Diesel released “Fashion” — an audio track by HoneyLuv with an accompanying artwork by Nic Paranoia. Sold through Public Pressure’s platform — a platform dedicated to “DIY music distribution” — the 1200 pieces were sold out in 4 hours. And this is only the first of 4 NFT drops in which Diesel will explore the cross-breeding between Web3, music and fashion.

Reminiscent of the times when music was always paired with art, like a CD and its album cover, the drop offers an updated, mixed media method of sharing music and culture with fair compensation for the artists — all under the Diesel brand.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Diesel has a history of being forward-thinking and bold in communicating itself through its advertisements and collaborations. This is especially true since Glenn Martens was appointed as the Creative Director of the brand.

“I’d rather be somebody’s shot of whiskey than everybody’s cup of tea” – Jocke Jonason, (the advertising director responsible for many of Diesel’s most groundbreaking campaigns).

Whilst many traditional fashion brands are shying out from the Web3 space, or making moves so shy they might as well be out, Diesel maintains its identity and boldness through a true interest in digitally native platforms, but also by adopting a digitally native concept of its own brand.

Diesel is a fashion brand, but in this NFT drop there are no clothes. Instead, through coupling sound, image and fair artist compensation, a purchase of this NFT becomes a purchase of style. In blending creative borders and again breaking conventions, Diesel is rethinking fashion in the digital.

Paintings Seen Before

EYES ON: Michael Todd Horne’s show

The new show at Saatchi Yates in London brings the work of Michael Todd Horne (known as Bijijoo on TikTok) out of our screens and into a gallery setting. The show consists of works that delve into Bijijoo’s world of “monsters and characters”, the creation of which have garnered him a huge following on TikTok.

Labelled a cult artist, Bijijoo uses weird and wonderful painting techniques (both traditional and digital) to depict his even weirder and more wonderful creatures. Textured and 3D, his painting presents an unnerving, even sickly, look-back at childhood memories.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

More popular online than in the art world, Bijijoo shares his many painting techniques with his fans. His process is transparent through his platform. In an art world where processes tend to be covert and art galleries aggrandise them to the point of incomprehensibility, that’s refreshing.

Knowing how a painting is made from start to finish, following along throughout the process, creates a different kind of relationship between the viewer and artwork. Seen before on our own screens, we know these paintings already. A sense of intimacy, of shared interest, of nostalgia for their beginnings is well in place before we even make it to the gallery.

That pre-generated closeness with the paintings — provided by social media — marks a very real shift in how we increasingly relate to artists, and their work, online. Take one look at NFT Twitter. It’s full of personal odes to artists’ processes and their newest outputs. People are as invested in artists’ career trajectories, in who they collect themselves, and in what they do on the weekend. New kinds of relationships are being built through the sharing of creative processes online.

It’s Alive! And It’s Demanding

EYES ON: Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Good Morning

Good Morning is an NFT artwork that requires its owner to visit it periodically for it to stay alive. If 24 hours pass without it being visited, the artwork fades to a blank screen, and dies.

Good Morning is actually the complement to Good Night, another piece by McCarthy that flips that dynamic. In Good Night — “an NFT-based performance for one person at a time” — the artist is the one to check up on the collector. As McCarthy explains, the performance goes as follows: “Every night before I sleep, I will text you good night. The performance continues as long as I am alive. When you no longer want to experience the performance, you may transfer it to someone else.”

Like Good Night, the purpose of the Good Morning piece is to dig into the relationship between a collector and artwork.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Conceptually rich, Good Morning is a real pain — it asks for time and consideration that most other pieces of art don’t. But in demanding such effort, the piece brings up many questions around the forces that give objects, especially digital objects, their value. Why visit the Good Morning artwork? because if you don’t it might lose its value? if you don’t it might die?

With the added potential of death, this so-called “living NFT” brings with it a whole lot of responsibility that pushes us to consider why we even care about digital objects in the first place.

WHOSE EYES: Sophie Stalder, Intern @ DRAUP

The Images We’ll Loose

EYES ON: Sey Min’s Climate Change Impact Filter

Sey Min’s piece Climate Change Impact Filter, created as part of Google Art and Culture’s Heartbeat of the Earth collection, uses data visualisation to help us grasp the immense loss that will come with the warming of our planet.

To visualise this tragedy, the project presents a huge data set of images of our planet’s biodiversity. The images swarm together in 3D space, as alive as the life they depict.

On the sidebar, we are confronted with a thermometer marked with the earth’s rising temperature. As you increase the temperature, the images of life, filtered into species, disappear.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

As Sey Min writes, “awareness of the problem does not always mean understanding the impact.”

In this project, as we experience the diversity of images dwindling, there is an overwhelming sense of loss — both visual and visceral — and the impact is felt. This sense of loss, as Sey Min explains in her project breakdown, is directly created by us. It’s all our doing, in reality and in this simulation. In designing an interactive temperature slider, that you are required to adjust in order to move through the experience, the effects of our actions are clearly laid out and undeniable.

Fanatic Fashion

EYES ON: Elvis wearables

When Elvis’ iconic jumpsuits were sold under the brand “The Elvis Legacy Council” as digital NFT wearables, a whole new level of kitsch was brought to the world of digital wearables and legacy IP.

“A one-time investment for a lifetime of Elvis” — the setup included much more than just wearables, throwing in “unique metaverse experiences, exclusive in-person Graceland tours, Memphis experiences, and many more!”

The idea behind the collection is that Elvis-items — from the Jailhouse Rock outfit (1957), to the American Eagle jumpsuit (1973) — are often trapped in private collections, out of reach from their fans. These digital wearables bring Elvis to the people.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

In immortalising Elvis’ clothes as digital collectibles, and proliferating the image of his iconic costumes, something interesting arises; it’s as if we are faced with double the kitsch: the memorabilia of memorabilia.

With details placed “accurately” on each digital garment to the exact rhinestone, the deep admiration of Elvis’ fans — the mania — is transferred into the clothes. They are complex digital objects: symbols through and through, a love for Elvis is both expressed and possessed in the digital jumpsuits.

An Alternate World

EYES ON: Lawrence Lek’s Unreal Estate

The simulation artist Lawrence Lek created Unreal Estate as the 9th chapter of Bonus Levels, a series of simulated scenarios in which alternate realities are explored. Borrowing from the video game concept of a “bonus level”, where rules are suspended, each architectural virtual space (or so-called chapter) weaves in existential science fiction to reveal some truth about our reality.

Set in London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Unreal Estate’s “what if” scenario imagines a world in which the academy building was sold to a Chinese oligarch and recreated on a private island.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

With a voiceover that follows the directions of a Russian oligarch’s daughter instructing others on how to run an efficient household, we understand this building within the architecture of wealth.

Teeming with art, The Royal Academy in this new context is no longer a historic site for Art education. It has been bought. With a Jeff Koons bunny proudly placed in the courtyard, each piece of art is no more than a reflection of wealth.

Framing "simulation as institutional critique", Lek’s work reflects on London’s housing crisis and its exacerbation by the inflow of international wealth. By singling out The Royal Academy in this chapter (a building with a precarious rental contract), a possible dystopian fate — where wealth trumps culture, or even is culture — is examined.

EYES ON: PARADIGM’s “The Open Tabs interview”

PARADIGM trilogy is a 3-part digital only magazine created by Katharina Korbjuhn. It covers what Korbjuhn describes as “cultural theory wrapped in fashion” — the fashion industry from a nuanced contemporary perspective.

The second issue, “Man vs Machine”, captured our attention for obvious reasons.

Much more than a hackneyed “machine” edition that poses tedious questions like: “Will AI take over the world?”, this issue takes a personal look into tech’s influence on fashion-adjacent subjects, using the language of memes, digital collage and short form writing to guide readers to examine how we think, learn about, and absorb fashion’s cultural ephemera digitally.

Our favourite feature of the issue was: “The Open Tabs Interview”, which took screenshots of peoples’ most recent open internet tabs, and called it an interview.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Of course not an ‘interview’ at all, a screenshot of one’s open tabs is maybe much more revealing than an interview could ever be. An exposing digital artefact, open tabs trace the unconscious interests of a person as they take their daily journey through the internet. Salacious or banal — they’re telling.

Less the contents of these ‘interviews’, the format of encountering someone through their tabs is what we find most interesting. It’s not only fun and inventive, it captures something very specific about a person: their mind as seen through their searches.

P.S. Check out the same issue’s feature on imagined Schiaparelli ads made with AI image generators.

Kate Cooper’s Fleshy Perfection

EYES ON: Kate Cooper’s Rigged

Kate Cooper is an artist and co-founder of the organisation Auto Italia. Her work examines the hyper-commercialised images that mark capitalist image production, and the work that goes into making them.

In her project Rigged, Cooper uses CGI techniques to create images of “perfect” bodies, flawless digital females, which surpass anything physically possible. In discussing these types of images, Cooper talks of her “desire for them but also their inherent violence.” Her interests lies in our relationship to the images — how we “read” them — more so than what they actually contain.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

In Rigged, these digital bodies were exhibited just like consumer products, on wide billboard-like screens. Their massive presentation recalls advertising formats of cityscapes.

Through its display, Rigged goes beyond the subject of body politics. By introducing the factors of space and scale, we are asked to consider our own physical relationship to the digital bodies pictured, the physical images, as well as the wider infrastructure that creates and displays them.

We are pushed to view these crafted bodies not as purely representational, not as abstract reflections of societal standards, but also as real objects that shape space.

A Conscientious Companion

EYES ON: Trippin’ 50, a calendar for travel in a new world

Trippin’ is an independent platform collaging guides, stories, podcasts and films to facilitate thoughtful world travel. Created by “a global community of diverse voices that are shaping today’s cultural landscape”, it seeks to project local voices to inform better travel practices.

Through tailored guides like Trippin’ 50, which highlights 50 in-person events across the globe that are contributing positively to one of its sub-themes (“innovation”, “sustainability” or “driving diversity” etc.), the dots between local and global are connected, bringing an individual perspective to the world’s cultural landscape.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Aside from the valuable content it offers to its patrons, Trippin’ is interesting because of how coherent it is in its outlook, and then its communication of that outlook. The platform’s voice, its web design, its tools and tags: each part of it works to help its users navigate the world of travel through the lens of contemporary issues. With international contributors — laid out to cover all corners of the globe — it’s designed as a guide conscious of the world its offering advice on.

WHOSE EYES: Dominique, Graphics @ DRAUP

EYES ON: M/M Paris’ The Alphabet (2001)

M/M Paris is an infamous graphic design agency that works across the worlds of fashion, art and music. Their project The Alphabet establishes the lesser-seen crossover between modelling and typography.

A play on the word ‘type-face’, photographs of models taken by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin were cut into pieces and reassembled into the first letter of each of the models’ names.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

The letterform historian Paul McNeil (who made a book about M/M Paris’ experimental typefaces) describes this project as “an extraordinary collection of letters which play with relationships between reading and looking, while also commenting ironically on the commodification of the female form.”

Playful in so many ways, The Alphabet flips our eyes back and forth between text and image, between body and letter, and between meaning and nonsense.

Iconic Footwear

EYES ON: SUCUK AND BRATWURST’s Ancient Trainers

The Berlin creative collective SUCUK UND BRATWURST created a campaign that cast the Nike sneaker as museum collectible. Pressed into stone, the sole of each Nike shoe blends seamlessly into imaginary ancient objects.

Made up of the same precious materials as the devotional objects, the campaign suggests that the sole of the Nike shoe is as valuable as any museum-grade item, and so should be collected like one.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

Photographed in just the same way as a museum object (grey background, no distractions), these ‘artefacts’ exude ancient value. Rendered sacred and priceless, part of what makes these images so convincing is how well they borrow from the language of museum presentation to communicate historic value.

The Nike soles are heralded as modern rituals, perfectly fused into objects of the past.

The Impressionist JPEG

EYES ON: Dan Hays’ Digital Landscape

Surprisingly, Dan Hays’ Colorado Impressions are oil paintings.

Using a series of images of the Colorado landscape that the artist found on the personal website of a local man with oddly the same name as his (another Dan Hays), Hays created these paintings from across the world in his studio in London.

Overly pixelated and steeped in high tonal contrasts, the paintings reflect on the visual information compression that has come with the widespread adoption of the compressible image files, JPEGs.

WHY WE’RE WATCHING:

In stripping away information to imitate poor digital image quality, Hays’ paintings reference the mediated image that defines the digital age. But more than that, in rendering the landscapes in oil paint, Hays’ finds their context in the wider history of image-making:

“There is a parallel between the way computers compress images with “JPEG” and the way that the Impressionists or Cézanne strove to reduce the amount of painted information to aid in speed of production and capture, yet also to reveal the essence of a scene.” - Dan Hays

So, in reducing the visual information of the paintings to recall similar abstract landscapes of the past, a bridge across more than a century of images is built.

WHOSE EYES: Velimar Molina, Socials @ DRAUP