My Top 9 | Rodeo

My Top 9 | Rodeo

(o) - Rodeo

The early concept art for a new hand made VR sculpture to be exhibited in Tokyo Jan 2025.

My Top 9 | Rodeo

Mantishaman

Claim your mantis shaman here.

My Top 9 | Rodeo

Anonybox

It's an empty box you can display in AR or Metaverse spaces or wear on your head on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metageist_/ https://www.instagram.com/ar/1133092271343281/

Obsidian Mirror

Obsidian Mirrors were mystical artifacts of the ancient Aztecs, crafted from volcanic glass and used by priests and shamans as tools for divination. These...

The Chain

The Chain is crypto-art. The Chain is an art chain of Ethereum-based NFTs artistically and cryptographically linked together.

/SPATIAL | objkt.one

Exhibition 24.04 - 01.05 , Tech Contemporary (Copenhagen) “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” - Lucio Fontana, Manifiesto Blanco, 1947 /SPATIAL (“slash-spatial”) is an exhibition at a critical juncture - the moment where the narrative of art meets the rise of Spatial Computing. To mark this moment, fourteen leading 3D and VR artists reflect on Spatial Computing by reinterpreting seminal works by art’s original Spatialist, Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968). /SPATIAL is a homage to Fontana and his revolutionary vision that art should transcend the canvas and meld with science and technology - a vision which echoes today in the rhetoric of Spatial Computing. Fontana's manifesto, penned in 1947, was a clear call for a new art form, one that would rupture the static surface of the canvas and venture into the dynamic realm of space. His series “Concetto Spaziale” (Spatial Concept) is emblematic of this vision, where the act of slashing the canvas was not one of destruction but an invitation to consider the infinite of the cosmos. Fontana's own words encapsulate this desire: “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” Now, in the time of Spatial Computing, we witness this desire shift into the digital realm. Apple CEO Tim Cook characterizes the technology as a “paradigm shift,” allowing us to interact with computers more intuitively and immersively than ever before. The Vision Pro was proclaimed as "The first computer you look through, not at." It is Cook’s expression of the hope that we’ll metaphorically slash through the surface of our devices, through the barrier between the digital and the physical. Spatial Computing envisions an incision across realities much like Fontana's incisions across dimensions. Fontana foresaw the need for an art that resonates with the spirit of such a new age. He stated, “What is needed is a change in both essence and form. What is needed is the supersession of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It is necessary to have an art that is in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit.” In /SPATIAL, fourteen artists engage with Fontana's legacy and this new spirit. All have selected works to reinterpret in the context of Spatial Computing and each artist's creation is a personal response. They translate Fontana's Spatial Concept into three-dimensional digital spaces where the boundaries between the virtual and the material are increasingly blurred. The resulting exhibition is based firmly in the Extended Reality (XR) file format of .glb, as the artists search for digital media that cuts across all opening dimensions. Together, the fourteen works highlight the leading-edge of cross-reality creation and act as a profound commentary on the digital incursion into our material existence. “Neon Garden (San Francisco)” by virtual reality artist Pearl Hyacinth takes its inspiration from Fontana’s “Structure in Neon for the 9th Milan Triennial at the Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan 1951”. Hyacinth scanned the statue in the San Francisco Botanical Garden flower conservatory, then took the scan into Gravity Sketch in VR and drew the curves - emulating the neon piece by Fontana. The Surrealist references of Hyacinth’s influences Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington can be seen throughout the monumental .glb piece. While Hyacinth still works with paper and physical gallery spaces, like many of the /SPATIAL artists, she sees cyberspace “as permanently locked into her process.” Her works like Neon Garden (San Francisco) take objects from the physical world, transmute them, and imbue complex layers of digital meaning. A similarly multi-layered process can be found in “Sony Bravia with Sand Mound (After Fontana)” by Dev Harlan. Dev works in sculpture and digital media to engage with landscape, technology, and anthropogenic change. He uses photogrammetry to produce 3D models of found materials and objects. For the /SPATIAL piece, Harlan combines sand, stone, volcanic gravel, shredded PCB, and e-waste, then makes large virtual cuts in the surface of the 3D model. This directly references Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” - the screen becoming a contemporary corollary for the traditional canvas. While Fontana’s consistent language of the cut or laceration is interpreted as a rejection of traditional art forms, it also reveals the basic material properties of the art object. For Harlan, the cuts across the digital screen reveal the material properties of the screen as an artistic medium. After the illusory space of the surface has been disrupted, the screen is reduced to a technological artifact, containing metals and materials sourced from a global extractive supply chain. In “Earth Reversed,” Lauren Moffat also uses meticulous 3D scanning to sublime effect. The work reexamines Fontana’s ceramic pieces - and acts as a dialogue between the visionary futurism of Fontana and the advanced tools and media we perhaps take for granted today. To create Earth Reversed, Moffatt started with a 3D imprint of a linear space, a patch of mud which retained the tire marks, paw prints, and debris gained over time. To Moffat, these act as metaphorical repetitive slashes of time and nature into the “canvas” of the mud surface. Moffat then abstracts the imprint from its photorealistic original to twist and sculpt it into a geometry with no beginning or end. She projects a digitized version of the physical texture onto her sculpture using UV mapping tools. Her immersive work explores the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life. Just as Spatial Computing opens up space to create a new dimension, Moffat’s work becomes an endless digital layer beyond the material plane. In Mattia Cuttini’s “Nothing to Lose”, we see an interpretation of Fontana's pioneering spirit, his place in Italian art history, and his innovative blending of art with materials and technology. Seeing Fontana's work at the Museo del Novecento in Milan resonated deeply with Cuttini. This firsthand experience of Fontana’s experimental approach, like the slashed canvases and the use of neon lighting, spoke to his own multimedia practice. Like Moffatt and Harlan, Cuttini uses a wide range of tools like photogrammetry to capture and transpose material objects into a 3D medium. In Nothing to Lose, Cuttini deconstructs and reinterprets Fontana’s iconic slashed canvases through a digital reverse-engineering process. He analyzes high-resolution photos of Fontana's original pieces using AI to extract the 3D forms and curves of the cuts and folds in the canvases to capture their underlying shapes and structures. Mattia aims to create a visual instruction manual deconstructing Fontana's conceptual artistic process, by doing that, better understand the spatial compositions Fontana created. In Alex Adkinson’s work “Spatial Concept: Render Shard”, the lacerations of Fontana’s Spatial Concept echo concepts of color, time, space, and material in ways that presaged our current digital age. Fontana’s iconic repetitive slashes and piercings become the key points of contact in Adkinson’s piece. The artist uses 3D scanning with photogrammetry tools and custom pipelines with neural radiance fields and techniques like Surface Aligned Gaussian Radiance Fields (SUGAR). Adkinson incorporates these scanned meshes into his digital environments, as well as his more minimal pieces like Spatial Concept: Render Shard. They become architectural forms which blend physical scan data with digital structure - and, like in Spatial Concept: Render Shard, often use subtle animation to immerse us further. While Adkinson animates Fontana’s slashes, Leah Smithson turns them in on themselves to become wormholes. Her work "Aperture I" brings Fontana's Concetto Spaziale: Natura 1967 together with her fascination with a newly discovered giant ring of galaxies, and is elevated by Smithson’s practice in using the human form. Four contorting and twisting bodies defy physics, culminating in a visual representation of piercing the veil of spacetime. For Smithson, perforation and slashes are a fitting representation of a door to infinity - they are of creation, not destruction. Aperture 1 becomes a visual exploration of the expansiveness of human potential within the sublime vastness of the universe, connected to the fundamental cycles of life, birth, death, and everything in between. Micah Alhadeff similarly uses the distortion of the human form in “Thorns”, referencing Fontana’s proclamation that he had “created an infinite dimension.” Alhadeff’s practice is firmly rooted in Glitch art, it uses a process of distortion and then reconstitution. He converts a 3D model into RAW data, modifies it, then converts it back towards the original. In Thorns, the human form is ripped apart using sonification and audio-editing effects. The figure reaches to the sky as it is glitched, slashed, and displaced, then digitally reassembled. For Alhadeff, the process explores ideas about fantasy and the digital body, and how technology invades and changes our primordial frequencies. The human form is abstracted further by Masbaco in his work “Dots.” Inspired by how Fontana used poetic and conceptual art to provide access to another space, Masbaco takes inspiration from Fontana's sculpture series Natura. For Masbaco, the horizontal gash in the Natura sculptures is the physical trace of a movement, implying the motion and energy of the art-making process while also suggesting the opening up of new areas where art can exist. Masbaco’s rendition of a human-like figure pulsates in a cloud of rubies and marble as a rhythmic recreation of a form, a volume, and a texture. Much like Alhadeff, sound is an essential component in Masbacos’s work. It marks moments of opening and closing, presence and absence. Pulsing sound and glitch movement are also important motifs for Fractilians in her work “Hyperlink Protectors.” The artist was fascinated by Fontana’s conception of his slashed canvases as portals or "doorways towards infinity." The idea strongly resonates with Fractillians’ own artistic philosophy of exploring the liminal spaces between order and chaos, the known and unknown. For Fractilians, Fontana's cuts into matter were the perfect embodiment of breaching those boundaries into new creative realms. In Hyperlink Protectors, Fractilians depicts a protector entity guarding the threshold of the portals Fontana opens up with his slashes. Inspired partly by her Venezuelan heritage, the artist’s digital mythology evokes a rich dreamscape with its own guardians protecting the doorways to the other side. Similarly “Incisions” by Alphacoded appears as a structure from another world. Inspired by the clean slashes of Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, and the perforations in his sculpture Pillola, Alphacoded reworks these motifs into a swirling, indefinable form. An interplay of sliced white blades concentrates around a pierced red oval shape in the middle, accentuating the artwork to create an actual dimension of space. This gives the viewer the impression of spatial tranquility, of cosmic rigor, but also of something ominous. A form with both brutality and simplicity. Like Alphacoded, Untitled, xyz senses something ominous in Fontana’s “Ambiente spaziale a luce nera” (1949) and “Natura” (1959–60), and reinterprets this unease in the work “Vital Sign.” For Untitled, xyz, the gashes in Natura reflect a somewhat cautionary window into an uncertain spatial future. Geometric artifacts of the new age are intentionally disfigured in an effort to evoke a human connection - a “vital sign,” according to the artist. Untitled, xyz was inspired to make Fontana’s incision into the 3D architectural elements he uses across his practice. In Vital Sign, weighty ancient columns are suspended in the virtual air, with melted edges and pixelated matter bearing the violent trace of the artist’s forceful manipulation. The work is simultaneously corporeal and astral. “Escultura Espacial” by Aura returns to Fontana’s Scultura Spaziale, as the artist works to reflect Fontana's morphology and textures. Aura is known for her work creating hallucinogenic environments by simulating fluids in space. In Escultura Espacial she focuses on shaping the body and texture of an organic form to explore Fontana’s volumes and the void-like jabs cut through it. Audio components punctuate moments of visual absence, and mark what Aura see’s as Fontana’s digital space-time - time that is not only filled visually, but also sonically. For her, the work creates “spaces that seem varied and flat, but in reality hold a cosmos of information from beyond.” Morteeza’s “Ethereal Edges” brings the artist’s preoccupation with the intricacies of human emotions. He translates Fontana’s search for balance between tangible form and intangible space into an undulated, knotted form which seems almost all too human. Twisted, deflated limbs seem to be mounted on a framework of industrial bars. In contrast to Fontana's interest in eliminating the artist's physical presence to draw attention to the natural phenomena surrounding, Morteeza's underscore the humanity of the creative process. Ethereal Edges serves as a reflection of the intricate relationship between man and the forces that shape our existence. Finally, for Metageist (Lee Mason), Fontana’s work prophetically heralds modern digital and spatial media. Therefore in “Quadrant”, Metageist takes this media to its fully abstracted conclusion - an utter rejection of prerequisites of art. Quadrant represents the infinite horizon that spreads out before us in the most minimal, technically achievable environment. Using only 38 kb of data, Metageist animates a simple quadrant through space to act as a third, and then a fourth, dimension in space and time. Constantly iterating with shapes, frames per second, and materials, the final piece is best viewed in VR, where you can stand “inside” a temporal digital space that reflects the HDRI of the environment in which it is displayed. The diversity and impact of all fourteen /SPATIAL works is a testament to the ongoing relevance of Fontana's vision. It is a reflection of our current technological zeitgeist and a critical consideration of the ways in which Spatial Computing can and will expand our understanding of art, digital media, and the material world. As .glb format artworks, these pieces expand into multiple virtual environments and dimensions, just as Fontana sought to expand art through the canvas into the cosmos. /SPATIAL celebrates art that is in harmony with the immersive spirit of our times. Damir First Bay Backner April 2024