A mass of speedo-clad elastic men floating in space—just human enough to be unsettling. They don’t move of their own volition but, rather, succumb to the physics of zero gravity, writhing and contorting around each other. It’s as as if an astronaut has sneaked her childhood collection of Stretch Arm
When the internet was born the French artist Anne Horel was watching. In fact, I think it swallowed her. She exists now mostly as images stuck in looped emoji dances that are scattered around the web. Where she goes, rainbow fonts and pizza slices follow, spiraling off the screen in a ditz as they m
As I tool around with the cascading confetti waves of web developer Jaume Sanchez Elias’ Polygon Shredder, I feel a bit like Moses parting the red sea. Except this sea isn’t just red, but also blue, yellow, white, and I think I saw a little chartreuse in there. If you ever had a pet tornado in the ‘
A building constructed of concrete slabs with a sign reading “Hyper GIF 3D Gallery” awaits you beyond pixelized trees. An open door beckons. Within it, a description of the current show declares “Akihiko Taniguchi, solo show of GIFs.” keep digital art within a virtual space This is the entrance to
Richard D. James (better known as Aphex Twin) has often seen his songs associated with disturbing, warped bodies. In the early ’90s, the label he co-founded and that produced his music, Rephlex Records, described his style as “braindance.” Pitchfork‘s Paul Cooper wrote about this terminology in 2002
It is easy to pine for the old web. The past is in the past, temporally shielded from our attempts to fetishize it and incapable of reaching through the screen to knock some sense into its eulogists. This is how the nostalgia-industrial complex, the one sector that will never take enough of a pause
I went to college in a rolling campus up on a forested hill, where the woods served as a playground on bored Sunday evenings, and frequent late-night power outages meant sneaking into empty administrative buildings, or finally searching for that deserted amphitheater tucked away in the forest, resig
These are great times for the weird internet, which is a little strange because it’s all so respectable. Sure, there are still genuinely weird sites like oj.com, but they are weird precisely because they are retro. It’s probably for the best that we don’t live in the era of make-your-own-Geocities a
To answer your question, Mr. Dick, yes, androids do dream of electric sheep. Or, at least, artificial intelligence does. And it’s less sheep and more like an insectoid nightmare of sheep as seen through a faint kaleidoscopic filter. We are fascinated and disturbed, Mr. Dick, but the future isn’t qui
Always having their heads in the past has meant that archivists and museum organizers are generalized as old curmudgeons who can’t see the future through the coat of dinosaur dust on their glasses. But the MoMA continues to earn the modernity label embedded in its name, as an emblem of what a museum
See contenders for the Iron Throne in low-poly perfection Low-poly art is the perfect form for key citizens of Westeros Take a look at these beautiful low-poly Game of Thrones portraits This low-poly art series features characters battling for the Iron Throne
The ’90s was truly the last analog decade. When the new millennium rolled around we all made the switch over to digital as if it were commanded by time itself. It was a gradual process: the first 3G networks appeared in 1998 to pave the way for the ubiquity of all-purpose mobile phones; Apple introd
Remember Hollywood Squares, the 1990s American quiz show in which panelists—including a definitely-not-high Whoopi Goldberg—were seated in three stacked tiers, each of which contained 3 boxes? There were audience participants, sure, but Hollywood Squares was really about the interaction between the
Pioneering digital artist Miguel Chevalier discovered within Islamic art a language similar to his own. His interest in the generative image, ornate designs, virtual cities, and especially algorithmic art has commonalities with the symmetrical geometry seen in Persian rugs, and mosques such as Jama
In the darkest recesses of literary nonfiction graveyards there exist half-crumpled manuscripts musing, to the night sky, what sort of art the mindless automaton antagonists of Legend of Zelda might make. Muse no longer, undergrads: here is the exact manifestation of your dreams. The cabal of “compu
Glitch art comes in all shapes and sizes, and much of it is very, very bad. (Google it and you’ll see a lot of low-rent ghost imagery and, um, that one dreamy picture of Kurt Cobain?) The work of Wayne Edson Bryan cuts a different figure, though. It starts with process: Bryan actually hand-makes the
Digital artist Dave Fothergill has created a cheery glimpse into hell this Monday morning. Utilizing the 3D animation software Maya, he’s created a video of what happens when a crowd breaks out into a run, the only issue being that there is an enormous metal propeller in their way. You can guess wha
