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Exhibition Works
Dimensions of Digitization
ISOVIST Gallery at CCAM
April 4 – July 30, 2024
This exhibition launches the ISOVIST gallery at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) at Yale.
In geometry, the isovist is the total space you can see from any point where you are standing. The choice of where to stand, and where to look, is part of your process as a body in space.
Process is also inherent to the prints, weaves, and permutations to explore in Dimensions of Digitalization.
Like much of the work produced and presented at CCAM, these processes often involve collaborations across time, media, and cultures:
Iskra Velitchkova’s experience of reading Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris. Dmitri Cherniak’s generative afterimages of pioneering predecessor László Moholy-Nagy. The threads, digital and physical, woven between Anna Lucia and the quilters of Gee’s Bend. Marcel Schwittlick’s drawings with light, based on years and years of gestural recordings.
The algorithmic undergirding of much of the work in the gallery is itself an inherent part of the process, generating unique artworks that are part of a larger whole.
Process is something we might not see, but that we can sense with our full bodies in space, in relationship to the work.
We invite you to do both from your personal isovist in the gallery.
Curated by Dana Karwas and Ben Simon
Download Press Release here
ISOVIST Gallery at CCAM
April 4 – July 30, 2024
In geometry, the isovist is the total space you can see from any point where you are standing. The choice of where to stand, and where to look, is part of your process as a body in space.
Process is also inherent to the prints, weaves, and permutations to explore in Dimensions of Digitalization.
Like much of the work produced and presented at CCAM, these processes often involve collaborations across time, media, and cultures:
Iskra Velitchkova’s experience of reading Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris. Dmitri Cherniak’s generative afterimages of pioneering predecessor László Moholy-Nagy. The threads, digital and physical, woven between Anna Lucia and the quilters of Gee’s Bend. Marcel Schwittlick’s drawings with light, based on years and years of gestural recordings.
The algorithmic undergirding of much of the work in the gallery is itself an inherent part of the process, generating unique artworks that are part of a larger whole.
Process is something we might not see, but that we can sense with our full bodies in space, in relationship to the work.
We invite you to do both from your personal isovist in the gallery.
Curated by Dana Karwas and Ben Simon
Download Press Release here
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #125, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #063, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #077, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #059, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Five Little Secrets from Escape #5, 2023
Plotted in pen on paper
Iskra Velitchkova
ToSolaris #72, 2022
Pigment print on metal
Iskra Velitchkova’s Imagined Worlds
Iskra Velitchkova’s online moniker of “pointline” seems well-earned when viewing the works that compose both ToSolaris and Escape.
Escape starts with architectural forms, rendered plainly in black and white lines, and then breaks out of them. Four different iterations from the series are displayed here, along with a 5th piece from the same algorithm, but rendered directly in pen on paper, with no digital counterpart.
ToSolaris was inspired by the book Solaris by Stanisław Lem, about an imagined planet. According to the artist:
After going several times over the book, I broke it up into episodes and I began to sketch scenes with the code. The different sketches are not directly representational, however; they allude to scenes. It feels personally like the next step in my personal exploration of narratives in generative art. My goal is definitely not to represent literally the story with code; rather, I want to create an algorithm capable of expressing the central themes of the narrative in a condensed form.
Anna Lucia
33 Million #6, 2023
Embroidery on canvas
Anna Lucia
33 Million #22, 2023
Embroidery on canvas
Anna Lucia, Quilters of Gee's Bend, Robin Kingsbury
Generations #466, 2023
Quilt by Robin Kingsbury made from a digital artwork created by Anna Lucia and the Quilter's of Gee's Bend
Escape #125, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #063, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #077, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Escape #059, 2023
Archival pigment print
Iskra Velitchkova
Five Little Secrets from Escape #5, 2023
Plotted in pen on paper
Iskra Velitchkova
ToSolaris #72, 2022
Pigment print on metal
Iskra Velitchkova’s Imagined Worlds
Iskra Velitchkova’s online moniker of “pointline” seems well-earned when viewing the works that compose both ToSolaris and Escape.
Escape starts with architectural forms, rendered plainly in black and white lines, and then breaks out of them. Four different iterations from the series are displayed here, along with a 5th piece from the same algorithm, but rendered directly in pen on paper, with no digital counterpart.
ToSolaris was inspired by the book Solaris by Stanisław Lem, about an imagined planet. According to the artist:
After going several times over the book, I broke it up into episodes and I began to sketch scenes with the code. The different sketches are not directly representational, however; they allude to scenes. It feels personally like the next step in my personal exploration of narratives in generative art. My goal is definitely not to represent literally the story with code; rather, I want to create an algorithm capable of expressing the central themes of the narrative in a condensed form.
Anna Lucia
33 Million #6, 2023
Embroidery on canvas
Anna Lucia
33 Million #22, 2023
Embroidery on canvas
Anna Lucia, Quilters of Gee's Bend, Robin Kingsbury
Generations #466, 2023
Quilt by Robin Kingsbury made from a digital artwork created by Anna Lucia and the Quilter's of Gee's Bend
Anna Lucia’s Generative Craft
In both 33 Million and Generations, Anna Lucia explores the intersection of algorithmic digital art and traditional craft. In 33 Million, Lucia built a digital algorithm to create works that could be embroidered, gesturing to traditional folk patterns but with a distinctly modern, glitched aesthetic. She then embroidered iterations chosen by collectors, like the two seen in this exhibition.
In Generations, she collaborated with the world-renowned Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective to merge their distinctive style with the possibilities of algorithmic art. The quilters shared their process with Lucia, who in turn created an algorithm to generate digital quilts that share key elements with the source, yet are unique and surprising in their own way.
Lucia and the current members of the collective then worked together to select 500 digital “quilts” to compose the final series of works. Robin Kinsbury, whose son, Wilson Price, collected Generations #466, then quilted her own version based on the algorithmic output.
Six embroideries from 33 Million were exhibited at the Untitled Art Fair in December, 2023.
In both 33 Million and Generations, Anna Lucia explores the intersection of algorithmic digital art and traditional craft. In 33 Million, Lucia built a digital algorithm to create works that could be embroidered, gesturing to traditional folk patterns but with a distinctly modern, glitched aesthetic. She then embroidered iterations chosen by collectors, like the two seen in this exhibition.
In Generations, she collaborated with the world-renowned Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective to merge their distinctive style with the possibilities of algorithmic art. The quilters shared their process with Lucia, who in turn created an algorithm to generate digital quilts that share key elements with the source, yet are unique and surprising in their own way.
Lucia and the current members of the collective then worked together to select 500 digital “quilts” to compose the final series of works. Robin Kinsbury, whose son, Wilson Price, collected Generations #466, then quilted her own version based on the algorithmic output.
Six embroideries from 33 Million were exhibited at the Untitled Art Fair in December, 2023.
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #92 (Luminogram) #3, 2023
Laser light plotted on 255g FOMA Fomabrom Variant 111 Baryta paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #92 Process works x 3, 2023
Laser light plotted on photo paper
Composition #92 (Luminogram) #3, 2023
Laser light plotted on 255g FOMA Fomabrom Variant 111 Baryta paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #92 Process works x 3, 2023
Laser light plotted on photo paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #86: It is what it is: #48, 2023
Laser light plotted on Ilford Multigrade RC Pearl paper
Composition #86: It is what it is: #48, 2023
Laser light plotted on Ilford Multigrade RC Pearl paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #86: It is what it is: #13, 2023
Laser light plotted on Ilford Multigrade RC Satin paper
Composition #86: It is what it is: #13, 2023
Laser light plotted on Ilford Multigrade RC Satin paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #86: It is what it is: #97, 2023
Laser light plotted on Ilford Multigrade RC Satin paper
Marcel Schwittlick
Composition #86 IIWII Process works x 3, 2023
Laser light plotted on photo paper
Marcel Schwittlick’s Luminograms
Marcel Schwittlick’s primary tools are software he writes and vintage plotter machines he collects and puts to work. In contrast to many of his works, which make use of specific, colorful vintage and custom inks, his luminograms are plotted directly with light onto photo paper and then developed in a photographic process.
The arrangement of lines and ordering of dots is largely random, adapted from a possibility space of millions of mouse movements he’s recorded over the past decade.
For the works in both Composition #86 and Composition #92 (as well as the sketches created in his exploratory process, lower down on the wall), Schwittlick converted his Berlin studio into a darkroom and used a laser pen affixed to his plotter, precisely controlling the final image through variables like voltage and drawing speed (how quickly the laser moved across the paper).
These series build on the concepts of Generative and Concrete Photography. In this tradition, the photograph is literally a portrayal of the technique and the parameter space made possible by the tools and the software. There’s nothing to abstract from, it simply is what it is.
Works from Composition #92 were exhibited at the Paris Photo fair in November, 2023. Works from Composition #86 were exhibited at the Untitled Art Fair in December, 2023.
Dmitri Cherniak
Light Years #17, 2022
Photogram on silver gelatin print
Dmitri Cherniak
Ringers #962: The LACMA Iterations, 2023
Silkscreen print
Dmitri Cherniak’s Exploration of Automation
Dmitri Cherniak says “automation is my artistic medium.” His LACMA Iterations silkscreen is an exploration of his Ringers algorithm – various permutations of string tied around pegs. The middle square of the grid is Ringers #962, which is in the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) permanent collection. The surrounding squares show how that specific version of “string tied around pegs” could become more and less complex, being constructed and deconstructed for the viewer.
Meanwhile, his Light Years series (#17 is on display in this gallery) is a deep collaboration with the oeuvre (and estate) of pioneering Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy. Using specific motifs that recur in Moholy-Nagy’s work (especially train tracks and telephone wires), along with some of his methods (photograms), Cherniak created a series of 100 works that pay homage to Moholy-Nagy while being distinctly his own.
The 100 works in Light Years were created through a code-based generative system, then hand-prepared, printed to a film negative that was used to develop the image as a silver gelatin print. 12 works from Light Years were exhibited at the Paris Photo fair in 2022. Three works from the series are in permanent museum collections: Buffalo AKG, LACMA, and ZKM (Center for Art and Media in Karslruhe, Germany).
Yawanawa & Refik Anadol
Winds of Yawanawa #804, 2023
Data painting
Refik Anadol’s Data Paintings
Refik Anadol’s data paintings have become icons of AI art – most notably occupying the MoMA lobby for nearly a year with Unsupervised. For Winds of Yawanawa, he partnered with artists from the Yawanawa community, indigenous to the Brazilian Amazon.
Each of the 1,000 unique works in the series incorporate the works of young Yawanawá artists while harnessing real-time weather data from the communities of Aldeia Sagrada and Nova Esperançay in the Amazon rainforest.
Eric de Giuli
Atlas #106, 2023
Infinitely zoomable generative video
Eric de Giuli
Atlas #179, 2023
Infinitely zoomable generative video
Eric De Giuli’s Infinite Videos
Eric De Giuli is a physics professor artist, primarily focusing on dynamic digital art like the Atlas series exhibited here. Each piece in the Atlas series comprises an endlessly zoomable composition of intricate generative videos.
At full view, each individual video is barely distinguishable, instead appearing as part of a mosaic-like grand composition. But as you zoom in, you begin to see more and more detail from each screen, until you could go all the way into the simple oscillations of any particular video without losing any resolution at all. The two pieces shown here, Atlas #106 & Atlas #179 are each exhibited at 3 different levels of zoom to allow the viewer a chance to experience the depth of these works.
According to the artist, “Atlas asks the viewer whether complex systems that may initially appear calm and organized, are instead uneasy products of competing tensions, unpredictable because a slight imbalance can set into motion a chain of events that irrevocably changes the system behavior.”
We heartily encourage all visitors to go home and explore Atlas iterations on their screens to zoom in and out and let them run on for extended periods.
Dana Karwas
The Golden Record Space-Time Cuckoo Clock, 2024
Animation, infinite
The Golden Record Space-Time Cuckoo Clock is a generative artwork that lives forever. In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, into the solar system. Affixed to each of these space probes is a golden record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it and decide to play it. The clock is based on the Sounds of the Earth recordings from the Golden Record. The clock launches a 3D representation of a sound into orbit each hour. Every fifteen minutes the cuckoo clock lets you know that it is alive by activating the objects into a synchronous rotating chaos.
Instructions for use: Walk away from the piece and return a few hours later to see how far time has traveled. Try to lean the clock as each object is in its own space time.
Sounds from the Golden Record Include: Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder; Mud Pots; Wind, Rain, Surf; Crickets, Frogs; Birds, Elephant; Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter; The First Tools; Tame Dog; Herding Sheep; Tractor; Morse Code, Ships; Horse and Cart; Train; Tractor, Bus; F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Lift-off; Kiss; Life Signs, Pulsar
Sound Credit: NASA
Wai Hin Wong
Sea Jetpack, 2024
Sea Artifact
Located in the main lobby of CCAM
An underwater sea jetpack. The jetpack has 4 major components: thruster, dive tank, battery, and controller. All the parts are carefully sealed so that it can withstand the water pressure under 30ft. The thrusters can generate more than 20kg thrust power that allows the human body to travel at the speed around 1-2 meters per second under the water. The wire seal controller can control the distribution of the power to thrusters that allow human body can go left, right, forward, backward in the water. The project research was supported through an independent study Yale School of Architecture project with faculty advisory Dana Karwas. The project production was supported by a CCAM Studio Fellowship received by the artist. More info here: https://yaleultra.space/sea-jetpack-1
Kaifeng Wu
S.T.A.R. Watch, 2023
Space artifact
Located in the main lobby of CCAM
The ISOVIST gallery is open by appointment to the general public Thursday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM (email ccam@yale.edu), and to Yale community members Monday to Friday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.