Marjan Moghaddam - PREVIEW (draft 1)

preview UPDATE brighter images August 25th

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Marjan Moghaddam (USA / Iran) an artist’s statement

As a computer-based artist and animator, I have been working with new emerging technologies since the 1980s, employing technological and visual innovation with a distinct signature. I approach my work as an artistic collaboration with the computer, in which I explore the sublime and metaphysical aspects of digital ontologies, in recognition of its nascent and Golemic potential.

In this paradigm, I see a reflection of our own evolutionary process and our potential expansion beyond our current modes of existence in Post Humanist ways. This to some extent is the natural and inevitable journey of art, which has historically explored these greater existential ideas throughout the ages, and is now transposing them into a technological dimension.

I am actively engaged in rethinking form for painting in the Post Millennial era, in a manner that reflects our hybrid digital and physical life.

Working with still and animated projects that I describe as digital paintings, I define a pictorial space that is 3d CG and cinematic, with text and special effects. In contrast to the over-commercialization of new media and the resulting shallow culture it has produced, my works insist on a deeper dialog in which global, personal, political, technological, and philosophical dimensions interact poetically and powerfully in sublime narratives. The resulting work is sometimes akin to high fidelity, cinematic, Postmillennial, illuminated manuscripts with special effects.

Venus and Her Adonises, 2012. Digital Painting, 50� X

wood feature films, and VJ culture. I also write textual streams that are embedded in various pieces, using found text, personal chats, deconstructed writing, essays, poetry, and storytelling.

These writings are inspired as much by the Sufi poetry of my Persian ancestry, as they are by contemporary social media style text. Each piece employs meticulous, high-fidelity, digital visuals, emphasizing miniature details and rich embedded worlds that are revealed only when the pieces are seen up close and in-person, as a physical approxi-

I work primarily with 3d modeling and rendering on the computer, using Motion Capture of improvised dance and direct audio-triggering of various parameters, working with the same technologies employed by commercial CGI, video games, Holly-

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21” Edition of 10, 89” X 37”

mation of computer-based fractals or zoomable maps.

and animate my characters for both still and time-based projects, using keyfra-ming mixed with human motion data, in addi-tion to audiotriggering (a form of technological synaesthesia in which sound drives visual deformations). These bring performative aspects into the digital process which imbues it with a living, shamanic quality.

Other channels of motion or textures may be entirely computer-generated, using fractals and procedurals. Backgrounds and vignettes mix physical and digital hand painting with fractals, Gold, (background detail) in addition to scientific and data images from NA-

I take a hybrid approach to the creation of my visuals, mixing artistic techniques with generative and algorithmic ones, allowing a reciprocal process in which human creativity interacts with its machine counterpart, a process that reveals its own inherent metaphysical dynamics. For instance I model my 3d characters using figurative sculpture mixed with generative techniques, in what I call a 3D Digital Cubist style. I then pose

Mixed Media on canvas, 2012

Feels So Good, 48” x 60” Acrylic

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Embrace with Interference, 2012, Digital Painting, 50” X 20” Edition of 10, 60” X 30”

SA, USGS, and other research institutions, as a painted form of digital and data-driven impasto.

My own experiences as a political refugee of Iranian descent, who lives in New York City, form the basis for some of the political and feminist dimensions

in my work, as I create space in my American narratives for other cultural personas that blend into a global stream of ethnicity and nationality.

The primary thematic premise for these narratives is a heroic, political, global, cathartic, and expres-

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sionistic premise in which imagined worlds of great monumentality mirror a collective and individual zeitgeist that is emerging out of our contemporary hybrid machine and human paradigm.

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An interview with

Marjan Moghaddam Hello Marjan, and welcome to ARTiculAction.

I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? Moreover, what could be the features that mark an artworks as a piece of Contemporary Art? By the way, do you think that there's a dichotomy between tradition and contemporariness?

Hello. Art to me exemplifies the highest state and form of creativity within any society, and as such it represents each historical era’s particularly unique contribution to the mimetic and genetic evolution and expansion of our civilization.

By “highest” I’m referring to all aspects of the work, from the conceptual and philosophical, to its form, material, process, innovation, function, technique, impact, style, and aesthetics. And if I had to further define highest, I would explain it as elevated or advanced as in beyond the routine or elemental and rudimentary levels of a particular function. I also lean more in the direction of the Sublime in Art.

Marjan Moghaddam

Would you like to tell us something about your background? You were a student at NYIT during the Alvey Ray Smith era of pioneering Computer Graphics innovations, and you have been working with the technology since then: how has this experience -an amazing experience, I daresay- impacted on the way you current-ly produce your artworks?

I had watched great destruction as a result of reactionary traditionalist forces, a drama that sadly continues to get played out in the Middle East and also occasionally even here in the US till this date.

For me technology promised a different world, in direct contrast to the destructive traditionalism I was escaping, and the pioneering and progressive aspect became an important tendency for me in my work, which I have kept till this date.

I think for me it has come to define a purely idealistic, visionary, and pioneering approach to the technology, which to a large extent also came to define early computer art, and also the early Internet 1.0 era and generation as well. At the time I landed at NYIT in 1979, I had just left Iran, my country of origin, as a political refugee after the Islamic Revolution there.

Interestingly enough I actually mention that in my David & Goliath painting and David & Goliath Still Can’t Fight animation, that the west had the myth of Oedipus, the son killing the father, and the East had Rostam and Sohrab (Persian myth), the father killing the son. So the patricide of the west became progress, and the infanticide of the east became 5

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tors and write papers about their artistic practice to introduce these techniques into CG for more lifelike results. Even back then scientists and engineers had to go and mine the work of artists to be able to bring life into CG, because technology alone couldn’t deliver it. What I was doing in the 80s was very punk, feminist, expressionistic, visual and figurative in stark contrast to the abstract and geometric computer art then. I was animating with chopped up and reassembled video of performance artist Vava Vol for instance, in a piece titled PMS, and you couldn’t possibly do something that was more radical in the computer scene at that time, which was mostly made up of male engineers.

By the 90s I was using fractal animations, as a type of new landscape I called “Chaoscape” in installations and even performance by having them projected on me, in my “Contemplation of Chaos” piece which I also showed at Password Ferdyduck, an early computer art show at Postmasters Gallery.

I also collaborated with the legendary, late, electronic musician Lefferts brown who did the amazing music for this series with ARP synthesizers. You can see some of this work on a short ZDF piece on me from that time (https:/ /www.youtube .com/w atch?v=t_A_ncQ_RU&index=27&list=UUuvsl_jrkkuthq0xwuTW EFw) And then I created a whole virtual version of that performance with a 3d avatar of myself for the early web, as the featured digital artist for the launching of the Dotcom Gallery and International Forum for the Digital Arts in ’95-‘96, which was the first internet-based, fine arts gallery. It’s interesting to note that all this work back then was totally nonobject based art. Animation on the web was so rare at that time that I actually ended up as one of the first 100 people to do gif89a animation on the web, and my websites went viral, even though we didn’t use the term then. New York’s Silicon Alley back then was very heavily involved with art, unlike today, maybe because everyone was such a visionary, so people from Prodigy Inc. and even Josh Harris CEO of Jupiter Communications were supporting my work.

traditionalism. But increasingly technology is dissolving that, so both the east, or at least parts of it, and the West, are embracing technological advancement and progress simultaneously.

After NYIT, I didn’t really have access to the VAX super computers anymore and I was working with early Paintbox systems, commercially. It wasn’t till later in the 80’s when the Amiga came out, with a demo of Andy Warhol digitizing Debbie Harry, that I started to actually make art at home on an Amiga computer. But even then, my work was different, because I was doing figurative work, when most early computer art, which was created mostly by scientists, was abstract or geometric at that time.

In terms of commercial animation, people like John Lasseter had just started to study Disney Anima-

By the late 90s I was doing my Adorations series, which was the first time I tackled high resolution 3d 6

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CG for large prints. I had interviewed legendary cyber punk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling for a magazine, as an excuse to meet them and talk to them. I loved the premise of the book, an Artificially Intelligent program going back in time to discover its origins in a re-imagined Victorian England in which Babbage’s Difference Engine had ushered in a computing revolution paralleling our own. For me, it became an interesting Post Humanist premise, what if the same AI at a future point, was searching its origins, visually and artistically in all the technological extensions of the body and humanity, e.g. motorcycles, phones, and even Pacman? And here I have to add that I’m not just a product of art history and art theory, but also very much communications, cyber and computer theory, thus the Norbert Weiner references. The mother and child pairings, hinted at this Post Humanist evolution and also classical painting as the origins of representative 3d Euclidean space, which was also a technological mandate of sorts for realistic 3d CG back then.

“Adoration of PACMAN” from this series won an ASCI award in 1999, other pieces were widel exhibited, and later I did “Adoration of Telephone”, it took me literally 6 months to model a 3D head that I knew would fill a 40” composition. I had done plenty of 3d CG character work professionally, since in addition to my fine arts projects, I worked in commercial high end CG production for almost 3 decades, but I knew this would call for a much higher level of visual and lifelike realization. Getting a natural gaze for a 3d CG character was really tough back then. The first Final Fantasy movie had just come out in 2001, and despite all the impressive character modeling and animation, everyone was critiquing the unnatural gaze of the characters. I found myself really studying classical sources to get the gaze right, and modeling the head polygon by polygon for 6 months. And not only was I pushing the technology and theory of the time, but I was delivering a lifelike head and gaze that was sublime, with a CG head that had an embedded keypad and fractal dermal pigmentation, representing an AI. The finished piece went into Siggraph 2003 Art Gallery, and then travelled to galleries and museums all over the world for se-

Exhibition, David & Goliath 2012 Digital Painting, 50” X 25” Edition of 10, 78” X 39”

veral years as part of Siggraph’s 30 Year Anniversary Computer Art Gallery.

After this I eventually moved on to the visual music series in the 00’s, creating animations, performances and stills out of early audio-triggering technologies. VJing software had just started to implement this technology, but I was interested in taking it much further than just 2d processing, by actually bringing it into the 3d CG pipeline from the modeling, to scene, to finished animation as a way of experimenting with a blend of human artistic elements and computer-generated ones, and a form

Jennifer Sims

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early Glenn Branca, he had the same sort of explosive and unpredictable quality. Once again, at a time when most people were doing ambient electronic tracks for computer animations, I was using jarring, dissonant, and improvised guitar.

These pieces made it to many festivals, and it’s a bit hard to appreciate how unusual they were at the time, because of their influence and subsequent prevalence today. For instance, Computer 69, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFq_szPkhgo &index=33&list=UUuvsl_jrkkuthq0xwuTWEFw) which I did in 2006, was in over 20 international festivals, at the time. I remember festival directors would just email me and ask for it directly. So much used the look and movement of it since that its now alost a standard CG visual, but when I did it in ’06, it was pretty rare and unusual. Just last month I saw a friend, a younger digital artist, use a background that was very similar for her Twitter pic. I don’t think she even realized she was referencing an early piece of mine.

of technological synesthesia. In addition to the animations I also performed live with a laptop, improvising with some of this technology that I had developed, and a lot of the grants that I got back then were for this work. Interestingly enough, recently IFAC picked Red Sonica Whisper, and a few similar sonically sculpted pieces from this older series to sell on its online gallery at 1stDibs.

This all brought me to Scab, 2009, which was I think possibly, the first time a 3d CG character was driven both by Motion Capture of improvised dance and audio-triggering simultaneously. I did the piece based on my own experiences of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which itself was a pretty novel premise for a cutting edge CG animation, then, or even now. When it made it into Siggraph 2009 Computer Animation Festival and DVD Review (Best Of), I was really shocked. It had this jarring music, a blend of Adam’s guitar and Lefferts Brown’s percolating ARP synethesizers, and a subject matter that was not typical for CG. I had originally expected it to be shown in art galleries, because I never thought CG contexts would go for it, yet they did, much to my surprise. Afterwards someone from ILM who was one of the organizers that year, congratulated me privately for doing a piece like Scab and innovating so much technologically and stylistically with such a powerful emotional premise. It meant a lot to me, because he understood how much work it took, and people with my skills usually don’t do this kind of work.

For some of this series I collaborated with Williamsburg avante jazz guitarist Adam Caine, whose dissonant guitar improvisations reminded me of

And with my recent Of Revolutions series, I’ve been continuing to innovate, by bringing in a very uncompromising socio political and emotional mes-

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Shot in Iran, detail, 2012 Digital Painting, 55” X 20” Edition of 10, 89” X 32”

sage into a highly expressionistic series, in direct contrast to some of the current trends in contemporary art and also in digital and technology art.

This series also continues to push conceptual, technological, stylistic, and aesthetic boundaries.

I’m also a tenured and Full Professor of CG and Animation at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island

Jennifer Sims

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Shot in Iran, 2012 Digital Painting, 55” X 20” Edition of 10, 89” X 32”

University, so I have continued to remain active throughout the years with research and development in the field as well. So I haven’t really stopped pioneering; I’ve just gotten a lot better at it after 3 decades.

artistic in this type of work, because it’s very generic and dead, and it doesn’t really advance the art form in any way shape or form. The medium is still very new; it’s not as if we’ve tried everything, so that we could say it doesn’t matter because we are post it. It matters, and we’re still emergent, not post anything.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

For the figures I model 3d CG characters in what I call my Digital 3d Cubist Style. In the same way that Cubism at the start of the last century reduced figures and objects into their most basic geometric 2d forms, I use a similar, but 3d premise, by building figures from basic Platonic solids, such as cubes, pyramids, spheres etc. I’m also referencing contemporary figuration styles such as Transformers, Bots, Mechs, or the space suits of Halo (video game). They also represent the way our identities and humanity is quantified as it is transposed into digital space.

I’ve used different techniques for different series, so I will concentrate on the current “Of Revolutions” series from recent years. I worked with a dancer, Yu Chien Chen, who improvised dance and martial arts movement which we developed together and Motion captured as data that I then applied to my figures. For me there’s a huge difference between an artistic performance as movement art, versus using a stock motion or walk cycle from a commercial library. I see many CGI animations in galleries and museums that rely on stock walk cycles and stock 3d characters from commercial libraries. For me there’s really nothing

After modeling, I then create elaborate virtual sets with analog and digital painting and this is where I either stage stills or elaborate animations as part of redefining form for digital painting. I deal with both still and animated constructs for digital painting. I do the text in a purely spontaneous, stream of consciousness sort of a way, grabbing 10

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Sometimes Up, Sometimes Down, 2014, Animated Digital painting. 1080p HD, Single Channel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 3 Minute Loop. Musical score by Kyle Bobby Dunn.

my social media posts or chats and texts, Wikipedia entries, or I write poetry, prose and even essays, mostly in English, but sometimes also in Persian. I usually work in smaller magnified regions, so the writing is informed by the visual space around it.

That’s how I create all the miniature worlds in the large physical pieces, working in 4” segments at a time, for a 90” piece. With the animations the writing happens with the motions, so if a movement triggers a cinematic memory I bring it up as text.

or Marilyn Minter use in their Video art. And this is an extension of the slow motion that started with Sam Pekinpah’s cinematic hyper violence, and then evolved into the Bullet time of the Matrix, and is now a very contemporary temporal adjustment in media art.

I then show this work either as large archival prints on Digital C or aluminum, or as 1080HD animations.

And another recent innovation is that I felt very frustrated with the limited bandwidth of Media Players and Blueray for high resolution HD, so with the help of engineer Bradley Laboe, I have developed a small custom computer (only 3”) that can playback my 1080HD animations at 50 MBps, so that you can see all the high resolution and miniature details that I put into these animations.

I’m very happy with this setup and just did some shows with it at Select Art fair. I finally feel like I have Jennifer Sims the quality that I demand.

It’s interesting because a collector recently asked for a frame from “Sometimes Up, Sometimes Down” which she had seen at a show. When I asked if she wanted a particular line of text, she said it wasn’t the text so much as the feeling the movement evoked with the text, and that’s exactly what I aim for. I also slow down the Mocap data as a mathematical scalar operation, which makes them slower than the Phantom Gold Video camera that Bill Viola 11

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David & Goliath Still Can’t Fight, 2014, Animated Digital painting. 1080p HD, Single Channel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 14 Minute Loop. Musical score by Kyle Bobby Dunn.

Now let's focus on your art production: I would start from Venus and Her Adonises and Embrace with Interference, an extremely interesting couple of projects that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, and I would suggest them to visit http://www.marjan.com/html/Gallery.html in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of these works?

The time factor for my pieces can be several years.

For instance “David & Goliath Sill Can’t Fight” was 25,000 frames which required 6 months of continuous rendering on a donated Render Farm, which I did spread over a year. The full production happened over the course of several years.

The still paintings have taken as long as 6 months sometimes, just rendering something like “A Scattering of the Desiring Machines” at 90” as a single image can take a week, and I have to do that many times as I tweak and refine. But that’s also very much high-end 3d CG, especially when you are just one person doing everything, instead of a team of 200 people like some of the bigger Hollywood or video game studios. But for me, process informs my work greatly, as a result much of it emerges from doing the work myself, as opposed to getting other people to do it, and that’s why my work has such a strong personal, emotive, and visual signature.

I think it’s very interesting that you picked these two pieces, because they both deal to some extent with relationships. “Embrace With Interference”, started with a hugging or embracing moment suggested by the Mocapped improvised dance. I then modeled (sculpted) the character that is a pyramidal figure mixed with a vector version and point cloud data which I use for special effects and dynamics. This pose became a powerful symbol for the non-physical aspects of a relationship, from online pickups, to how 12

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relationships evolve through chats and texts, and how an entire relationship can now take place mostly outside of physical space, so here we are, embracing noise as opposed to something physical.

Embedded in the stylized, black and white, background, noise pattern, are short snippets of text, chat, comments, and poetry about relation-ships.

I did this piece from what I thought was a quintessentially feminine perspective, but it’s very popular with men when I show it, especially Millennials, who seem to really connect to it. This piece was also selected for inclusion in “All Night Bookstore”, a fine arts book collaboration between visual artists and writers put together by curators Lee Wells and Kaytie Peyton. Rebecca Nissan, a young writer, wrote a short story about an online relationship based on this piece for that book.

Venus and Her Adonises, was pretty much what I call a straight up Feminist piece for me. The piece was also in the Backlash show in Soho 20 gallery in Chelsea in 2012, which was an outcry by Feminist artists against the attacks on female reproductive rights in the US. For me there’s no way to address reproductive rights without simultaneously addressing sexual rights. I started with the Venus and Adonis premise, which for me is about the cougar aspect of femininity, as a contemporary feminist paradigm, because its sexual desire past fertility years, so it’s purely for pleasure, as opposed to an unconscious procreative urge, or the procreative desiring machine as I call it. And perhaps this is really the hallmark of my generation that many early pioneering computer people started to get into anti-aging and life extension in the 90s as another form of coding and hacking another information system. This then became its own theme within Post Humanism, which then spread to the general culture, and now body hacking and anti-aging are established and mainstream as Post Millennialism.

Venus and Her Three Muses, 2014, Animated Digital

Single Channel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 6

which means “Oh life”, while in the US women say “Oh My God”, it’s as if in the east we gasp for life, and in the west, for god, during orgasm. And being Eastern and Western, I’m aware of both experiences. So the piece developed many levels of meaning, and once again, I’ve seen both men and women take many pictures of this piece when I show it, and then read and explore it quite inten-sely. The Adonsies have embedded “dick pics” you can only see in the physical print (too small to see in the photos of it), and there’s also a headless, life size nude selfie of me in it, which I took when I turned 50, in fact it says “Venus with a digital camera at 50”. Many of these ideas I then conti-nued to work with in the animation “Venus and Her Muses”, which has a Jennifer suggestiveSims sexting session,

So the piece tackles this subject from many perspectives, bringing up my own personal experiences with aging, abortion and childlessness, alongside sexual desire and pleasure freed from the machine in the Deleuze and Guattari sense. But as I was doing the stream of consciousness writing with this piece, other ideas came up, like how in Persian women say “Akh Joon” during orgasm, 13

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painting. 1080p HD (21 X 9),

Minute Loop. Music, temporally adjusted rendition of Davinyl’s “I Touch Myself”. search the missing significance to a non-place...

I am sort of convinced that some information and ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature...

What is your point about this?

while the figures dance a la Mannerist Muse paintings, I should add I’ve always wanted to animate paintings, haha. I’m also very much re-appropriating the patriarchal premise of muses, clearly the same applies to women artists freed from sexual and reproductive oppression.

Another interesting works of yours that have particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words are from the the David & Goliath series... By the way, I can recognize that one of the possible ideas underlying this work is to unfold a compositional potential in the seemingly random structure of the space we live in... Even though I am aware that this might sound a bit naïf, I am wondering if one of the hidden aims of Art could be to

I strongly believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, so the compositional potential that you speak of can communicate tomes in a particular era. I deal with everything as an information system, not just computers, from the physical universe to culture, art and also us, as biological systems, and as an expansive consciousness that has entered into, and is experiencing everything, 14

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David & Goliath 2012 Digital Painting, 50” X 25” Edition of 10, 78” X 39”

in a biochemical construct called the brain and the body. So on many levels yes, myths are encrypted into us epigenetically speaking, we now know that, not just as a Jungian metaphor, but as actual gene expression. David and Goliath is mimetically and genetically encrypted into us and many cultures that contain what I call the Abrahamic code, and my piece is about the evolution of this meme/gene, or even possibly base algorithm we’ve been iterating as revolutions, be it political or for that matter artistic or personal. Which brings up the question,

is our current standstill because we are stuck, are we remixing it, have we subverted the myth, are we beyond it, or are we transcending it? I think that many of these hidden aspects that you mentioned are fully driving all aspects of our experiences, whether we’re aware of them or not. And maybe I pick up on this because I’m operating from a spontaneous and stream of consciousness premise, the way the Surrealists did it, and using so many symbols, that I’m sort of channeling the zeitgeist. I think when Jennifer you look atSims archaic Homo Sapiens, they 15

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reality or arguably even the Divine as Plato would have it. Or perhaps to use science fiction as contemporary mythology, its Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001, in which a highly evolved alien species triggered a major evolutionary shift in our primate ancestors and we’re still connected to this multi-dimensional, alien source somehow (a popular meme on You Tube). And then the Reflexivity theory of the 80s and 90s has become what Robert Lanza calls Biocentrism in our world today, so we recognize that consciousness is at the center of our experience of the universe, and that the brain may not originate consciousness, but rather, receives it, the way a computer or TV displays media it did not originate. But where does it come from, that could be the “non-place”, or a quantum realm we get hints of, theoretically, but not actually; we see signs of it.

“David & Goliath Can’t Fight”, was also in a political art show titled AgitPOP in Chelsea, curated

by Anthony Haden Guest, and also the Mykonos Biennale, in addition to public art shows like the Dumbo Arts Festival in NYC. It was just showed at Gallery Vanessa in Paris, last month, and is at the LA Film Festival this month. So the series connects synergistically with similar threads in contemporary art. So some people are engaged in deciphering these ideas, even though it’s not mainstream right now.

I have to say that I have highly appreciated the deep synergy between Art and Technology that you have been capable of establishing in your works, as in the recent Scattering of Desiring Machines and David & Goliath Still Can’t Fight: as you have stated once, “I aim to achieve the sublime in art with computer-based tools" ... and I'm sort of convinced that new media art will definitely fill the dichotomy between art and technology and I will dare to say that Art and Technology are going to assimilate one to each other... what's your point about this?

appear as pretty simple beings/systems, until about a 100,000 years ago, when both art and burial practices, both of which hint at a non-physical place outside of this world and life, evolved. Now people like Dr. Michael Newton and other psychiatrists who have done past life regressions, seem to suggest that this is when reincarnating souls, or nonphysically-based consciousness, entered into early Homo Sapiens, and what they brought with them into these bio systems was art and burial practices, which is symbolic of creation and a metaphysical

Thank you, that synergy is very important for me.

I grew up studying classical art, in addition to science and math in Iran, in primarily international schools. My father, a great man, was an intellectual of sorts, with a real love for classical art, science and philosophy, so these were important influences 16

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for all of us. My younger brother who sadly passed away 2 years ago, the late Dr. Baback Moghaddam, grew up to become, first a punk rock guitarist, and then a mathematical genius who was a star of the MIT Media lab in the 90s. His research and work became highly influential in the field of Facial Recognition, in fact his ground-breaking PhD dissertation on the subject has the highest number of citations of any paper in the field till this date.

He was also part of the algebraic geometry group at MERL, working with this new discipline, and a total genius with it according to other renowned mathematicians who spoke to me after his passing.

He was a Principal Scientist at JPL NASA at the time of his passing. Needless to say, a very big part of me died when he passed away, and I’m still not fully over it yet.

The reason that I bring up Baback, who was like a twin sibling to me in childhood, is that his first love was music, and he was an avid photographer and loved art, and his field, Machine Vision, involved aesthetics, visuals and even art to some extent, using math and computer technology. And I, as an artist use computers, technology, math and geometry, plus elements of generative and algorithmic visuals, and I was heavily influenced by him as well. So I think that was really our upbringing, which reconciled art, science and technology, in addition to our culture of origin in Iran, where the art has a very strong geometric component, and where mysticism, art, music, science, medicine, geometry and algebra have historically interacted more comfortably, and didn’t quite undergo the modern western separations as radically. But we both dealt with the potential sentience of AI, him from the scientific side, and I from the artistic, and that’s something that comes up in “Breakaway God of Revolution: I Am Not Crowdsourced”, which is really about how codebased and Golemic we are.

David & Goliath Still Can’t Fight, 2014, Animated Digital

But also much of the great works of western art from the Renaissance were technology art of their era. Davinci was very much the art and technologist of his time, and even Michelangelo, although he’s seldom ever aknowledged for it. I once read in a journal that laser caliper measurements of the Medici tomb showed that all the dimensions were divisible by the irrational square root of two, now

that’s not an accident. Even Man Ray or Nam June Paik were advancing the technological aspects of their respective media. So this idea of art and technology was inherently interconnected both in the east and west, until they separated in the post-modern era, when science education started to omit more art, and art education started to omit more science,Jennifer as a resultSims of specialization and advan17

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painting. 1080p HD, Single Channel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 14 Minute Loop. Musical score by Kyle Bobby Dunn.

ced education in a complex society. But this also created artificial divisions that don’t make sense to many practicing artists; especially techno-logy based ones such as me. And I’m also an academic, so I deal with not just art history but also media history. So yes, new media art is bringing back and reconciling some of the inherent interre-latedness between both again.

By the way, it goes without saying that modern technology -and in particular the recent development of infographics- has dramatically revolutionized the idea of painting itself: this forces us to rethink to the materiality of the artwork itself, since just few years ago an artwork was first of all -if you forgive me this unpleasant classification18

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Sometimes Up, Sometimes Down, 2014, Animated Digital painting. 1080p HD, Single Channel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 3 Minute Loop. Musical score by Kyle Bobby Dunn. a manufactured article: it was the concrete materialization of an idea...

But there are aspects that are totally non-material also in completely new ways. For instance I did “Digital Mobile Selfie Portrait”, as a new type of a self-portrait that represented me, not just as a physical form, but as data sets and customized feeds in what I termed the Mobileverse. In fact, this concept was so important for me to articulate, that I then wrote an essay explaining it, which was then published to the Think Tank web site for the Mobile and Humanity Conference in Chicago. The digital painting then went on to win the Audience Choice Best of Show Award at the Microsoft Center Art show for the conference this last Fall, and was part of a travelling exhibit for a few months. But the concept, in brief, was that I am no longer a physically-based persona, because my Golemic representation has now evolved beyond me, and is behaving independently of me in the Mobileverse, in your newsfeed and other ones, based on your specific customizaJennifer Sims tion.

I agree. While there’s a heavy focus on materializing the digital in digital sculpture, there is also a reverse movement simultaneously, that is moving away from the material with non-object based art and augmented and virtual reality, these have been inherent tendencies since the early days of computer art, it’s all pretty routine at this point.

I think many aspects of materializing the digital, especially in terms of digital sculpture are a necessary technological development in our time.

But other aspects of it are driven by market forces and manufacturing interests which are using art to push 3d printing into the consumer and home markets and make it as ubiquitous as 2d printing, and those can have a negative impact by limiting what art has to say.

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Mobile Selfie Portrait 2013, Digital Painting, 27” X 36”

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Breakaway God of Revolution: I Am Not Crowd Sourced, 2014, Animated Digital Sketch. 1080p HD, Single Cha

So I, as a data set, have become the hero of a thousand faces that Joseph Campbell spoke of, in this Mobileverse. I also explain the selfie pose itself as a metaphoric arrangement of the data based on the gestural aspects. So it is a type of crowdsourced identify and reality that’s also merged with the machine and elements of Artificial Intelligence that are increasingly mediating this crowdsourcing. None of these social media and crowd-sourced as- pects were anticipated in Second Wave Cyper-punk or Post Humanism, although both included non-object art, so these are all recent Post Millennial paradigms. So what you see in the painting is a totally nonphysicalized version of me, as selfies embedded in the various mobile panels, and also, what I see and experience through my customized feeds.

And when you take my animation “Sometimes Up, Sometimes Down” which has been shown as part of a group exhibition of digital art curated by Lee Wells at several galleries and at Cutlog Art fair during Frieze NY week most recently, its technically a 1080HD file as part of a playlist of other 1080HD files, on a USB stick, that then gets played and projected in galleries either off a laptop or media player, in other words a group art exhibition on a USB stick, take a moment to consider that.

Your art practice strictly connected to establish a deep, intense involvement with your audience, both on an intellectual aspect and - I daresay on a physical one, as in the extremely stimulating Shot in Iran and Breakaway God of Revolu-

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nnel Video/Computer Animation with Music. 6 Minute Loop. Musical score by Kyle Bobby Dunn.

tion: I Am Not Crowd Sourced. So I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process both for creating a piece and in order to "enjoy" it...Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

can personally identify with the ideas in the work, there’s a deeper connection, than when they just intellectually grasp it. “Shot in Iran” tells the story of a violent massacre of soldiers that I witnessed during the Islamic revolution in Iran.

The autobiographical story then becomes other transgressions, the subsequent breakdown of my family, and the evolution of these experiences over the decades. These reverberate through my experiences as a political refugee in NYC, which is also very much about this new multi-ethnic, global diaspora that most developed countries now host.

And for me, even if I did traditional painting, I couldn’t do this piece that way and have it be “now”, it’s only when I do it in this digital and CG way that references the hyper violence of Holly-

I think there’s always a personal dimension involved in the work, because we’re never fully as detached or objective as we try to be, body dynamics always create a personal aspect and differentiation in terms of how we experience everything in this world. I think the personal aspects make it more compelling, what would Jospeh Beuys’ felt and lard installations be without his personal experience? Also, when the audience 22

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action movies and video games, that it becomes a quintessentially “now” artistic statement imo.

I describe the process of moving beyond this experience as forgiveness in slow motion, which really requires time, and getting to the other side, which is an alchemical transformation as Carl Jung would say. But the piece has a major impact on viewers, I’ve seen people moved to tears at shows, and it’s perhaps one of the most emotionally powerful and intense works that I have ever created.

I remember showing it at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, a great venue and forum for digital art which has been a decades’ long labor of love on the part of its director Rex Bruce. During the show, a man came up to me and identified himself as a published poet, and he told me that the piece had all this violence in it, yet it had this great serenity that made him want to crawl into it and soak it in, and he asked me why that was. I told him it was the sublime in art, in very much the classical way in which Kant or Schopenhauer dealt with the sublime, and that’s a bit different than the contemporary Techno Sublime of a merely mesmerizing, looped CG animation.

It’s also not the pleasantries of the New Age, you can’t get it from that, this only happens with work that has these extreme, yet profound juxtapositions in it, and perhaps more than Eggleton’s beautiful and ugly, but also violence and serenity. But Kant and Schopenhauer didn’t live in an era of wall-towall, realistic, hyper violence in movies and games, or terrorist beheadings on You Tube for that matter, in which everybody experiences their powerlessness before terrifying things from the safety of their chairs all the time. So you have to go beyond merely evoking just visual terror, or a type of Terribilita in terms of Renaissance and Baroque art, and bring in many more levels of ideas that come in to play philosophically, visually, culturally and also Post Millennially, which is about this technologically facilitated diversity and simultaneity in our hybrid digital and physical world.

This is what I tried to do in this piece, especially with the poetry, prose, and metaphoric and allegorical imaging in it. And strangely at this show, everybody thought I was a man, because they didn’t think a woman could do this kind of work. Well, women can,

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because we are complex, not one-dimensional, and so is our aesthetic, we don’t all do flowers, birds, and dolls, you know.

At the same show I recall a group of young men who came in during the opening, which was part of LA Artwalk and gets thousands of people.

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They very much looked like gang members and converged in front of this piece, which made other viewers very uncomfortable; because they stepped away a bit fearfully perhaps. On some levels I understood why they picked this piece to look at, because they too understand violence personally, but I was surprised to notice that they spent a lot of

time reading and absorbing it and then the most amazing thing happened, because their expression and whole body language changed, it was like they suddenly opened up to the same greater and unquantifiable thing that this particular type of sublime art puts us into contact with. This is the power of the personal aspect for both the artist and 24

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the viewer; it brings people from so many different worlds together to experience it in meaningful and transformative ways.

But things have changed, especially as Lyotard’s postmodern concept of the sublime as “representing the unrepresentable” has evolved into this generic form of abstraction in our world today. At some point this representing of the unrepresentable became so much ambiguity and so much diffusion that the work no longer takes a stance or communicates anything specifically for fear of alienating someone or something, and that’s where it is at now. This of course makes sense, because work that is this diffuse has the highest market share in terms of sales, for dealers can pitch it in different ways to different collectors based on their interests, and a wider group of art critics can project any ideological agenda or theory on to it, regardless of whether the work warrants it or not.

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In fact when I joined the Occupy Wall Street Art show at the JP Morgan building down in Wall street, during the original Zuccotti park occupation in 2011, I did “David of Zuccotti Park”, which was one of my CG figures in a video game-style, combat contrapposto of sorts, after Michelangelo, with political slogans handwritten all over it. Like the Florentine utopian state of course, Zuccotti collapsed, but the ideas may potentially change our world too, the way Renaissance Florence did.

This is about commodification and financialization of art as yet another investment market, so there’s no room for the personal in this kind of art or for that matter the sublime.

Your recent and extremely stimulating “Of Revolutions” series explores the theme of uprising on a personal and political level often deal with socio political aspects of our everyday reality: even though I'm aware that this might sound a bit naif, I have to admit that I'm sort of convinced that Art could play an effective role in sociopolitical questions: not only just by offering to people a generic platform for expression... I would go as far as to state that Art could even steer people's behaviour... what's your point about this? Does it sound a bit exaggerated?

But you can barely see this socio political potential of art by looking at what is in the galleries and art fairs right now, or at least here in the US. And I think it’s ironic, that I, as a digital and technology artist, have decided to tackle it head on, because this is what many expect non-technology artists to deal with. And much of technology art right now is also beholden to corporate high tech sponsors, so there’s more of a focus on the gimmicky wizardry of technology, as opposed to depth or socio political content.

Or, there’s all this generic and decorative Glitch style of abstraction, all of which makes me ask the question, is this really the highest expression of creativity during these critical watershed years now?

Clearly it’s not, not for me.

I totally believe art can play a significant part in the cultural and potentially cataclysmic changes that we are going through now, and truly steer people as it has in the past, historically. In fact, many of the greatest works of art in the West, such as Michelangelo’s David, and in the East such as Ferdowsi’s Shahanameh (Persian illuminated manuscript with calligraphy and miniatures), even Picasso’s Guernica were highly heroic pieces of socio political art, that did steer people.

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Unfortunately, new media art is not immune from these market forces, and if anything it may be feeding it as Astra Taylor has pointed out in her book “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age”. Her argument, which I agree with, is that the internet and new media have resulted in a very shallow culture, in stark contrast to the idealism of the original pioneers, which I was a part of. This is because, as she puts it, the digital economy has a tendency towards monopoly that makes commercialism less visible and more pervasive. And if you were to take the idealism of Mitch Kapor’s original essay on the internet as a utopianist global village, and fast forward it to our era of web-enhanced NSA spying, and an internet awash with kitten videos, epic twerking fails, and technological monopolies that threaten the very populist aspects of W3 Consortium open source ideals, you kind of have to agree that something went seriously wrong in this trajectory towards a greater utopian web. And much of this banality and mediocrity is promoted by the Corporate State, propagated by the media, and now sadly dominating contemporary art.

There has been a type of conceptual, political, philosophical, emotional, and visual neutering of art that has been driven simultaneously by market dynamics, in terms of the new investor class, and in the case of the US, by the toll the Culture Wars have taken, in the way art in public spaces or museums must now avoid any kind of “triggering”. And avoiding potential triggers could include many things. Let’s take a moment to consider what if Beethoven’s 9th had to tone down the brass section because it would be jarring to some, or Soutine’s Meat Carcass had to be avoided because it could scare and upset children or Animal Rights groups?

What if Kiki Smith’s Pagan Goddesses or Carolee Schneemann’s feminist art had to be omitted for fear of offending Christian Fundamentalists? And of course a Diego Rivera mural could potentially have the US Tea Party declaring a Communist invasion.

But a lot of this neutering is already happening, and this explains the popularity of abstraction right now as really the best and safest expression of what the new investor/collector class wants, and also what curators who want to hold on to their jobs in economically challenging times are showing.

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This is the Zombies On the Wall that NYC art critic Jerry Saltz recently complained about in an article of the same name. But almost every period in art history that saw an excess and celebration of the banal and mediocre was then followed with an explosion in the revolutionary and uncompromising, in terms of idealism and vision.

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It’s really the Hero’s journey of art. And this is what I’m more interested in. I have a higher purpose than delivering current trends in the art market, and for me it is about meaningful and sublime work, and also innovation with technology art.

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and portraits were the height of popularity with collectors, in academia, and also the museums, but that isn’t what we celebrate from that era, instead it’s the revolutionary work of the early modernists, which advanced culture and civilization, not the generic routine landscapes and portraits. History is made 50 years into the future as they say; the rest

At the turn of the last century, traditional landscapes 28

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is the usual filler for the mimetic engine. The current young darlings of the auction houses are like the celebrated salon painters of the late 19th century who dissolved into historical obscurity, they are not the revolutionaries of that era like Manet, Gaugin or Van Gogh.

During these years your work has been exhibited extensively at various international galleries, museums and festivals and moreover you have received numerous grants, such as Rockefeller Fund, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Experimental Television Fund... It goes without saying that positive feedbacks are capable of supporting an artist: I sometimes happen to wonder if the expectation of a positive feedback could even influence the process of an artist, especially when the creations itself is tied to the involvement of the audience... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

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But I have to say when there is reciprocation I did not anticipate it’s a huge reward for me personally.

For instance when I did David & Goliath, I wanted to create this monumental digital painting that was my personal experience and global commentary about our moment in history. And I thought that perhaps I would get to show the work, but can’t say that I expected it to “sell”, because of its premise. But someone from the high tech industry saw it online and was very impressed with the quality and vision, which he thought he was not seeing in the digital art at the galleries.

I’m really grateful for the exhibition, granting, and even collector support that I have received.

Considering that I’m in the minority on almost every level; ethnically a minority in the US, a woman artist, a technology artist, dealing with art of the sublime, with political and emotionally charged content, it’s an outright miracle that I’ve gotten this far, and perhaps a testament to the fact that the art world is not exclusively at the mercy of these new market dynamics.

He chatted me online to buy it, alongside another piece, and then I told him about the embedded text etc. which is not visible in the pictures on the web, fully expecting him to cancel the order. But he didn’t, he said he wanted it as is. When the pieces arrived, he emailed me: “LOVE. LOVE. LOVE”. He even sent me pictures of the pieces hanging in what he calls his music room. That really meant a lot to me, because it gave me hope for art’s future. Some people are gravitating towards the same meaningful and revolutionary ideas in our world that are outside of the establishment, whether they be collectors, curators, artists, lawyers or writers etc. It’s almost like an early modernism again, because you don’t see it reflected in what is popular. The corporate oligarchy hasn’t shut down everyone yet. The free and revolutionary spirit is alive and well, despite everything.

But usually I try not to think of an audience, because then I edit myself for that audience and lose my ability to operate on other levels. For instance a certain well established dealer told me that he thought “David & Goliath” and “Scattering Of the Desiring Machines” were, despite being digital, two of the most powerful contemporary paintings that he had seen, but he also told me that my work really didn’t fit into what he was showing at his gallery. That’s of course hard for me as I set out to start the next pieces from this series, because I’m human and I too get tempted to do things that deliver the market, but I have to step back and remind myself that I have a higher purpose and put it out of my mind.

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Exhibition, David and Golia Can't Fight

And the revolutionary media of our world can also be the true revolutionary spirit of our world at the same time, and that is what I’m trying to do.

Art store, separately from my gallery work. I’m also approaching Venus from another angle in the new pieces, a bit of a departure. So, I think it’s safe to say there will be more innovation, politics, feminism, expressionism, revolutionary and also more art of the sublime, in other words, more of what I do.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Marjan. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

And Thank you for this interview, I have really enjoyed this thought provoking, timely, and important conversation, much appreciated.

Well I’m currently building a home Mocap studio for better and faster integration of Mocap directly into my 3d scenes. I’ve also created what I have termed prints for the 99%, lower cost prints in direct response to people who complained that they couldn’t afford my pieces and really wanted some, and some of these will be sold through the Amazon

an interview by Dario Rutigliano, Curator articulactionart@email.com

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