Darcy Gerbarg

DARCY GERBARG

Front cover: Infusion (detail) 2024, 54 x 96 in.

InsdIe Front and back cover: Blew Over 2019, 40” x 72” diptych

Gerbarg with DVI Series 1#9 1980, 108 x 144 in.

Darcy Gerbarg Space and Time

Essays

Karen Wilkin, Cynthia Goodman and Melissa Yuen

June 1- 30, 2024

Reception: June 1, 2024, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

The Lockwood Gallery

Darcy Gerbarg: Space and Time

June 1 - 30, 2024

Opening reception, Jun 1, 6-8pm

Michael Lockwood, Gallerist

Alan Goolman, Curator

Essays by Karen Wilkin, Cynthia Goodman and Melissa Yuen

Process Exhibition

June 10–September 19, 2024

Reception September 12, 2024, 6-8pm

The Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery

Syracuse University Art Museum

Joseph I. Lubin House

11 E 61st St, New York, NY 10065

© Darcy Gerbarg 2024 All rights reserved

ISBN: 979-8-9907345-0-0

This book has been typeset in Century Gothic Pro Designed by DVI Ltd. and John Goodrich

Printed by Eastwood Litho

Special thanks to Professor Margie Hughto, Syracuse University, for her friendship and support

AR enhancement partner: illust.space

Illust is an augmented reality platform for artists to publish their works of art into the physical world. The Illust platform hosts 1,000’s of works from some of the leading creators in art, music, and culture providing fans and patrons with an accessible experience with this new medium.

Darcy Gerbarg

Selected Work

Essays

Karen Wilkin, Cynthia Goodman and Melissa Yuen

June 10 - September 19, 2024

Reception: September 12, 2024, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Coalition of Museum and Art Centers

Palitz Gallery

Lubin House, 11 E 61st St

New York, NY 10065

Syracuse University Art Museum Staff

Emily Dittman

Interim Director

Melissa Yuen, Ph.D.

Interim Chief Curator

Dylan Otts

SUArt Preparator

Andrew Levy

Lubin House Director of Operations

Darcy Gerbarg

Selected Work

Process Exhibition

June 10–September 19, 2024

Reception September 12, 2024, 6-8pm

The Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery

Syracuse University Art Museum

Joseph I. Lubin House 11 E 61st St, New York, NY 10065

Essays by Karen Wilkin, Cynthia Goodman and Melissa Yuen

© Darcy Gerbarg 2024 All rights reserved

ISBN: 979-8-9907345-0-0

This book has been typeset in Century Gothic Pro Designed by DVI Ltd. and John Goodrich

Printed by Eastwood Litho

Special thanks to Professor Margie Hughto, Syracuse University, for her friendship and support.

Foreword

Melissa Yuen

A pioneering digital artist, Darcy Gerbarg trained as a formalist in the 1970s. She has made the act of painting—deliberately defined broadly here—her life’s work. Long interested in technology, she has also continually sought out the latest innovations in computers to incorporate into her studio practice. The works included here represent not only her longstanding engagement of making artwork in virtual reality, but also the advances in technologies that allow her to further her process in innovative ways.

Gerbarg began painting digitally using computer paint systems from the late 1970s onwards. First, she used Alvy Ray Smith’s 24-bit paint system, in the mid 1980’s turning to a custom paint system written for her by Eugene Miller.1 While these programs allowed Gerbarg to create full-color, digital paintings long before this technology was commercially available to the public, they did not allow her to explore painting in three-dimensions.

The advent of more sophisticated technology in the form of immersive virtual reality allowed her to begin experimenting with this. As a visiting artist in Ken Perlin’s Future Reality Lab at NYU, she could use the newly developed VR technology with Tilt Brush software, which relied on external sensors installed around a room to capture her movement. By using this new technology, she was able to move beyond painting on a flat surface. In March 2016, Oculus VR (now Reality Labs, a unit of Meta) released its first direct-to-consumer VR headset, known as the Oculus Rift.

This product revolutionized Gerbarg’s studio process. Instead of traveling to the NYU campus, she could now work in her studio, spending as much time as she’d like in VR creating her threedimensional paintings. On view in Process are her earliest and most recent experiments in the virtual realm: Beloved Trope and Infusion respectively.

Whether she is painting in two or three dimensions using different paint systems, Gerbarg approaches each composition in the same way. She begins by selecting a color or a brush size and making brushstrokes. She notes, “I keep my mind open and let my mind drift. I am focused consciously on formal concerns of color and its placement in space. I have an awareness of presence in the virtual world, like in a dream.” 2 [Excerpt from Process exhbition catalog]

1 Darcy Gerbarg in conversation with the author, January 30, 2024.

2 Ibid.

Darcy Gerbar: Selected Work

Karen Wilkin

It has long been a given, in discussing modernist painting, to say that the artist’s role is not to report on what has been seen, but instead to reveal what cannot be seen. Working more or less faithfully from perception or producing something that appears to be more or less faithful to perception, as artists in the west were traditionally trained to do for centuries, has never disappeared. It can be argued, in fact, that at the moment, scrupulous illusionism and academic correctness are more prevalent among young artists than they have been since the days of the academy, but it is nonetheless true that since the middle of the 19th century, the once dominant idea that art is mimesis has not been the sole conception of what a painting can be. Despite the recent surge of plodding renderers for whom accurate illusionism overwhelms most other considerations, since the mid-1860s, formal invention has been valued as highly (and sometimes more highly) than skillful replication of appearances, whether a painting alludes, however tangentially, to something recognizable or whether it makes reference irrelevant.

How, then, do we discuss Darcy Gerbarg’s work? It is obviously non-representational and made in untraditional ways. To complicate the task, her elusive images can seem to belong to the history of recent painterly abstraction, but it is self-evident that they could exist only in the 21st century. Gerbarg’s work not only speaks to the present moment, but it also announces unequivocally that it is wholly dependent upon up-to-the-minute technology. Yet these vibrantly colored, hard-todescribe compositions prove to be rooted in perception, just as the paintings and drawings of traditionally schooled artists were, in the 19th century, albeit with notable differences. Although Gerbarg’s images seem to capture gesture and manipulation, they are made without the action of the hand. What is more important, the perceptions that trigger them are not interrogations of our surroundings, but of invented “places” and “situations” that don’t exist in the world around us. Gerbarg invents her own reality and experiences it virtually. She presents her observations (or more accurately, selections) of her experience to us, offering a contemporary version of the modernist directive to reveal the unseen. At the same time, notwithstanding her mastery of what could be called “alternative” processes and techniques, and despite the unignorable visual evidence that her works could exist only as the products of state of the art technology, it is clear that Gerbarg is engaged in a conversation with the adventurous abstract art of the recent past, particularly

with Color Field painting. It’s not an overstatement to say that she has been exploring ways of translating some of Color Field’s fundamental assumptions about the primacy of chroma into new, technologically driven terms.

Gerbarg is a pioneer of putting digital technology into the service of ambitious pictorial art. She eagerly embraces new material and conceptual possibilities, spurred by the perpetual questions “what can I do with this?” or “what can this make me do?” She uses her sophisticated equipment and arcane processes simply as tools – newfangled devices that allow her to “paint” in unexpected ways and provoke fresh considerations of space, color, shapes, affect, and all the rest of it. Gerbarg’s expertise in the digital world is impressive, but she is also well versed in the legacy of post-war American abstraction, having become familiar with the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, and Larry Poons, during her formative years as an artist; she is equally knowledgeable about the work of her contemporaries who responded, as she did, to the legacy of these innovative painters, but with more conventional means. Like them, Gerbarg has made color a main carrier of emotion and meaning in her work, sometimes treating color relationships playfully, sometimes with profound seriousness, always exploiting our involuntary associations with different hues to orchestrate mood and atmosphere. Add to that the visible echoes of film, animation, and vernacular culture, in general, plus our collective awareness of science fiction, in particular, filtered through a process that seems to be infinitely mutable, providing apparently infinite varieties of imagery and permitting endless readjustment of scale, color, proportion, and point of view.

Process, of course, is only a small part of the story. Gerbarg describes her enigmatic compositions as being “cropped out of virtual space.” Her images begin when she immerses herself, visually, in a three-dimensional fictive world; she enters a virtual “room,” that surrounds her, a space that she can survey from infinite viewpoints. It’s as if she were a conventional landscape painter striding out to work en plein air from the motif, armed not with a sunhat, a portable French easel, and a paintbox, but with special goggles and a computer. The distinctive qualities of Gerbarg’s fictive universe are entirely her invention. She controls the quality of light, the colors, and the character and relationships of the various pictorial events, and then plays with scale, perspective, proportion, and occasionally, hue, in the two-dimensional images that she extracts from her virtual surroundings. The results can evoke everything from alternative worlds, to explosions, to rocket launches, to the trajectory of rockets themselves, even to our conceptions of a futuristic, science fiction inflected universe. Yet Gerbarg’s images can also trigger associations with the work of

Beloved Trope 2017, 54 x 96 in.

such innovative abstract painters as Vassily Kandinsky and Joán Miró. Their abstract paintings, constructed with free-floating invented elements, offer important precedents for Gerbarg’s approach. The enigmatic elements that populate her images, like those in Kandinsky’s and Miró’s paintings, are simul-taneously believable and unlike anything we might encounter in our quotidian experience.

Although all of Gerbarg’s images have their origins in the all-encompassing, fictive “working space” that she inhabits virtually, individual works, seen together, suggest widely varied conceptions of pictorial allusion. Throughout, she plays with the tension between the literal flatness of the image with which she presents her slices of fictional space and the potent illusions of three-dimensionality and perspective that her methods allow. In some works, free-floating elements, like curls of paper or animated demonstrations of non-Euclidian geometry, seem to drift against an indeterminate expanse whose density and color sometimes suggest variable distances or changing qualities of light. In others, detached “strokes” silt up the entire surface, overlapping loosely, like coarsely woven fabrics. Still others suggest highly stylized landscapes from our own planet, fleeting references to views over the ocean or dramatic skies, without losing their inherent abstractness or otherworldliness. In Gerbarg’s recent work, space has become more complex, reading less as a continuous, dense, colored surface (perhaps the equivalent of a stained canvas) than as a pulsing zone of unstable hues, home to lively, air-borne shapes that twist and arch athletically. Those shapes can fray, dissolving into parallel striations, like over-sized brushstrokes, adding a subliminal connection with the materiality and physicality of traditional painting to the frankly man-made aspect of the images. Jules Olitski, speaking about his aspirations for his paintings, said that his ideal would be to have color hang in the air, an idea that led him to use a commercial spray gun to make seamless expanses of subtly modulated color. Gerbarg, who says that she is “fascinated by where color sits in space,” seems to have put current technology into the service of a similar wish, making brush-loads of color hang in the unfettered space of her virtual “room,” capturing them, and printing them out for our delectation.

Whatever the variations in Gerbarg’s images, they can generally all be described as exploring how color can be presented in different ways, in an illusory environment. She may have learned about the expressive power of chroma from the Color Field painters, but she has rejected their insistence on the flat expanse, on color so disembodied that it exists only as a visual phenomenon, soaked into the canvas itself. In her work, deadpan illusions of colored strokes and shapes break

Untitled 2017, 18 x 18 in.

Untitled 2015, 18 x 18 in.

Infusion 2024, 54 x 96 in.

loose of their confines and float freely in space. Yet however dispassionate Gerbarg’s images appear to be and whatever associations they provoke with the familiar, the other- worldly, or the futuristic, their strongest impact is as paintings – paintings admittedly devoid of material articulation, but that nonetheless depend upon unexpected orchestrations of saturated color and surprising confrontations of personable but unnamable shapes. We can enjoy her work for its pictorial merits, but it also makes us think about the expanding possibilities of once undreamed-of inventions. And it makes us wonder what Gerbarg will do next.

Karen Wilkin

New York, April 2024

Enlisted Entropy 2018, 54 x 76 in.

DVI Series 1 #9 1980, 108 x 144 in.

Darcy Gerbarg painting in VR, 2017 Future Reality lab, New York University, Courant institute of Mathematical Sciences, Director Ken Perlin

Darcy Gerbarg

The artist is challenged to marry creative vision with a practical application of the technical expertise developed over years of dedication and discipline. If this leads to accomplished, even visionary work, then the sacrifice of time has been justified. Looking back over the artistic development and career of Darcy Gerbarg, one can see that it has indeed been worthwhile. Gerbarg is an artist of idiosyncratic talent within very specific parameters. She would in most quarters be considered a painter although her major work of the last decades falls well outside the context of traditional creative means. Her vision has evolved into an expansive and speculative perspective on her role as an artist and the path down which painting was meant to travel all along. This is away from a dependence upon material applications, and toward digital painting, in which the artist draws with colored light in three dimensions, creating seemingly metaphysical forms in experiential space.

Think of a painting that is designed and constructed and perhaps one imagines a painting that has lost its sense of adventure, and its soulfulness. Neither could be farther from the truth. Gerbarg’s esthetic is one that has been developing for decades, emerging from, and commingling with, gesture, scale, and materiality. Her vision was digitally oriented for years before the technology caught up with it. For decades prior she was using computers to construct imagery that would have to be printed out onto color slides and projected upon canvases stretched flat on a painting wall, to achieve a manual approximation of the appearance of digital forms. These were exhibited from 1979 to 1989, their final and most noted exhibition at The Fine Arts Gallery of Long Island in Hempstead.

In the years since then, Gerbarg has continued her search for new technical means by which to produce the paintings she wants to make, and her labors have borne fruit. Her “Syracuse Pictures” series range in scale from the intimate to the grand and are printed on canvas. Their imagery originates from the merging of an electronic painting system she uses in a 3D Virtual World, called Tilt Brush by Google. a new technology that allows the artist to enter a three-dimensional world with a VR headset and handheld controls to virtually sculpt colored light into painterly marks. The main action is portrayed within either a white or black void, within which Gerbarg paints a 3D virtual light sculpture around herself, the full reality of the artwork simultaneously has the scale and color of the marks, which float in space. She creates a perspectival interior view that translates directly to the spectator without resorting to spectacle. Gerbarg’s expression becomes instinctual, incorporating perspective, with color, scale and form. She then uses the camera option to frame and crop and harvest selections that she further transforms via Photoshop, enhancing the backgrounds, perhaps tweaking some of the colors or aspects ratio of the final picture, presenting her accrued marks as gestures in the direction of a narrative.

Stepping back from the work and viewing more than one picture at a time, it becomes easier to visually identify and categorize the marks according to their stature, color, and quality of action. Faced with these works, one interfaces with their dynamic painterliness, scale of depth, and their connection to the ambiguous elements manifested by works of abstract art in history past.

The ease of a means of production does not always signify its predominance over historically recognized ones. Yet its use by specific practitioners, pioneering its role, will serve to make a strong impression on the art world and general audiences alike. Darcy Gerbarg’s Syracuse Pictures are not her first digitally made works, but they do not require a support structure other than the aesthetic attention they deserve.

The quality of Gerbarg’s mark-making, aided by digital media, accentuates both the traditional gesture as well as the enveloping area into which it is placed. The benefit of the media is an overarching organizational principle, in which the gesture is not merely a tacit and instinctual act, accruing meaning as it piles up material, but is itself transformed into a synergistic and syntactical language of forms. Gestures become glyphs that become characters, not merely building something but inhabiting it as well.

The benefit of working in such a distinct yet expansive manner is that it gesturally sets the stage, and actually does place the artist within an evolutionary context, transforming the easel into a field of endeavor that is nearly cinematic, emboldened by strategies that will come closer to bearing a far more satisfying aesthetic fruit than any other. Gerbarg is specifically dedicated to establishing its use to create dynamic artistic forms that do not bend toward spectacle, as has been the case in mainstream pop culture’s purpose for it. The absolute visuality of our mainstream popular culture has been directed toward this for decades, progressively involved with narration rather than impression. The bias that directs this agenda implies a doubt that new media can substantially add to the forms that already exist in art history. Gerbarg’s accomplishment proves this bias wrong while simultaneously pioneering a discipline that can only lead artists, and the rest of us, toward the future of art.

Nots AR Enhanced Painting 2018, 24 x 24 in. Collection Bonnie and Michael Hagan

“[Darcy Gerbarg’s] work pulls you into two-dimensional space in a new and powerful way, not subject to the Central Dogma but using it.”

Alvy Ray Smith

A Biography of the Pixel, 2021

“I am fascinated by where color sits in space, by visual complexity that may incorporate real and virtual elements, captured as a two-dimensional painting on canvas, or experienced in a fully immersive 3DVR world.”

Darcy Gerbarg 2022

Over View 2019, 32 x 32 in.

Dream 2024, 40 x 54 in.

Darcy Gerbarg’s Pioneering Digital Pathway

Cynthia Goodman

With her enthusiastic and fearless embrace of the most sophisticated digital tools in the late 1970s, computer technology has been intrinsic to Darcy Gerbarg’s artmaking process for almost 50 years, and she is internationally recognized as one of the leading pioneers of the computer art movement. When she began using digital media in 1979, few other traditional artists were adventuresome enough to do so, and the very validity of using a computer to make art was often belligerently challenged. As she has recalled these early years: “At that time, no one I knew in the Art World had any interest in computer art and they certainly didn’t know any artists who were using computers, except me. Many artists I knew would distance themselves from me at gallery openings because I was using computers.” 1 Yet despite the overt rejection of her artmaking process, Gerbarg was not deterred and determinedly pursued every opportunity available to explore the capabilities of advanced digital software systems.

A great deal of her ingenuity involved her ongoing research to find recently developed software programs that could enhance her artistic concepts. And once she had access to a new technology, her work evolved by exploring and incorporating the potential of the new capabilities into her artwork in varied output options. As a consequence, Gerbarg’s digital prowess is inextricable from her ingenious discovery of new technologies as well as her ability to make herself welcome in seemingly unlikely research settings for a fine artist.

Her tireless quest to identify new technologies also led her to meet most of those at the forefront of the digital media and animation worlds. In 1979, for example, she had read Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith’s landmark paper on the Color Cube, and simply called him at the New York Institute of Technology, where he was doing research. Her initiative led to a critical formative interchange with one of the industry’s leaders. Subsequently, Ephraim Cohen, another pioneer at NYIT, invited her there to work with Smith’s 24-bit-paint system. As Gerbarg has recalled, “It was the perfect tool for me. I was hooked.” 2 And once seduced by the capabilities of digital paint, she continued to seek out other paint systems around the country. Beginning in the early 1980s, she became a visiting artist in prestigious research labs that were developing the first software tools for computer graphics, 3D modeling, computer animation and robotics including MAGI Synthavision and Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Robotics and Manufacturing Research Lab, founded by Dr. Jacob Schwartz. Today this facility is called the Future Reality Lab and is under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Perlin.

Quickly mastering the essential digital skills, Gerbarg has also been active as a teacher. Starting in 1980, as an adjunct professor at New York University, she taught the first Computer Art courses for artists in New York City. In 1984 using her own custom-built-24-bit-paint-system, written by Gene Miller, her longtime collaborator, and Movie BYU, she taught these classes in her Chelsea loft in New York City. In 1986, she started and directed the world's first MFA in Computer Art Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In addition, Gerbarg was an adjunct professor in Computer Art, at SUNY Stony Brook, where she initiated their first computer art courses.

In 1979, she began attending and contributing to the annual SIGGRAPH or the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery conventions. These yearly SIGGRAPH meetings attracted the leading computer animators, scientists, educators, and artists. Gerbarg became an active participant and played a pivotal organizational role in the SIGGRAPH conferences, by chairing the first and co-chairing the second SIGGRAPH Art Shows.

Going to SIGGRAPH was a much-anticipated event, where attendees could see and learn about the latest computer graphics achievements. The excitement was palpable at SIGGRAPH, where industry icons were debuted such as the animated Luxo Junior lamp that has become emblematic for Pixar’s cinematic achievements. Everyone ran around from educational sessions to the exhibit floor to the art show, excitedly asking colleagues, “Did you see…did you see?” This environment was very much what nurtured an intoxication with digital capabilities for Gerbarg and many others including myself.

Despite the appeal, the mix of science and art exhibited at the annual SIGGRAPH art shows contributed to much of the confusion plaguing early computer art. Unlike other art historical milestones, the first time that a computer was used to make art is difficult to pinpoint. However, it is widely recognized that in 1959 when the Calcomp digital plotter, the first commercially available plotter, became available, the era of computer graphics was ushered in. Most early computer graphics were made by scientists and engineers using the tools for functional applications in fields such as engineering and aerospace. Subsequently, the graphic designs of these scientists and those of the limited number of artists, who had access to the requisite digital tools, were grouped together under the misleading misnomer “computer graphics” and exhibited side by side. No wonder that defining computer art was initially difficult. This very confusion contributed significantly to the reluctance of the traditional art world to accept computer artwork by Gerbarg and her peers.

Me Too G Arrangement 2023, 32x 32 in.

However, to describe Gerbarg simply as a computer artist belies both her training and the very way she approaches and thinks of her work. Despite her computer graphic accomplishments, Gerbarg is intrinsically a formalist artist, strongly influenced by First and Second Generation Abstract Expressionist painters, many of whom she came to know in New York. She was educated traditionally in her undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently in New York after graduation at the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. At that time, Mercedes Matter, heavily influenced by her studies with First Generation Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, directed the curriculum. Gerbarg readily recognizes her conventional art training. In her words, “I am a painter, coming from a more traditional art world background, not this technical community. I have always believed that the final art piece, that an artist created was the artwork, and that how it was made, while integral, was not the main point.” 3. Throughout her accomplished career, Gerbarg has continued to create artworks with traditional techniques as well as digital technologies. Many of the compositions she creates in her 3D worlds also take shape as paintings or prints on canvas. She has also experimented with viscosity etching, silkscreen, clay, and tiles.

Since 2016, her primary compositional medium has been Google’s Tilt Brush, a room-scale-3Dpainting-virtual-reality-application-software. From the onset, Gerbarg welcomed not only the new capabilities which this program affords but also the new viewing experiences for those who observe her work wearing headsets like the Oculus or on computers and iPads.

When she started using this software in 2016, soon after it was released, it required computational power which she did not have in her studio to support the program. Consequently, she had the software installed at the Future Reality Lab, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at New York University, directed by Professor Kenneth Perlin, where there was the technical expertise to set it up and run it. When the Oculus Quest goggles became available, Gerbarg was able to “paint” with Tilt Brush wherever she could set up her powerful gaming laptop and use her Oculus goggles.

In this 3D format, her artworks can be explored from all angles by moving around and through her sculptures or by flying to view them from above. Although somewhat disconcerting at first, these aerial views offer an exhilarating and liberating new way to experience digital art. In essence, breaking new ground by utilizing new tools is at the heart of what inspires this artist to continue to experiment with cutting-edge technologies. As she has explained, “I not only create art in a Virtual World but I create new ways to view and enjoy my artworks, in Virtual Worlds, as AR objects and AR Enhanced Paintings on Canvas.” 4

Gerbarg began enhancing her works with AR components not long after she started using Tilt Brush in her Inside/Outside series. Using the camera on her cell phone, she took numerous photos of the mountainous landscape and lush gardens outside her Catskills home as well as interior shots of her studios and homes in both the country and her Chelsea loft. Once she has a screenshot of an interior or exterior scene with the AR object that she wants to incorporate, she brings the element into Photoshop and turns it into a painting. She also uses AR to expand the viewing surface of her paintings by providing a 3D element that viewers can focus on protruding from the works hanging on the walls. This AR capability also allows her to easily situate her sculptural forms in both indoor and outdoor settings.

Temporal 2017, 54 x 96 in.

AltspaceVR was a free platform available on most VR headsets that consisted of a series of gallery spaces, where people could spend time interacting as customized avatars. Until Microsoft stopped supporting it in 2023, AltspaceVR provided a wonderful social opportunity for assembling new and old friends in VR worlds. Gerbarg frequently participated in AltspaceVR events as a way of making her art available to a wide international audience.

During Covid, Gerbarg welcomed the ability to participate in other online communities, events and art shows including Burning Man. This well-attended festival, which has attracted devotees each year since 1986, was one of many major events that held an online version in 2020 and 2021. Instead of trekking to and camping in the desert, visitors could be transported to the festival’s activities with much less effort, either on their computers and iPads or else via Oculus and other headgear. Gerbarg’s Burning Man gallery installation, which was accessible through a portal on the Burning Man website, included a selection of her brightly colored, lyrical, abstract, digital paintings and sculptures installed in a vast 3-D space. Visitors could experience her installation either on the ground or else airborne at varying heights, since empowering visitors to fly above and through her artworks is one of the capabilities that could be activated in her gallery. Her exuberant light sculptures, which are constructed of curvilinear swathes of colored light brush strokes, that might appear later in her 2D paintings, were accompanied by spatial audio created by composer and sound engineer Chase Chandler. In addition to the artworks, her captivating display included several horses, which visitors could ride through her installation by directing laser pointers to find the designated target on the horse’s bodies. This capability delighted participants who experienced a sense of weightlessness as they rode through the artist’s 3D space. And, once again, Gerbarg who was an avid equestrian since her childhood found a way to imbue the familiar with unexpected digital prowess. Viewers were also welcome to take snapshots and selfies during their visits. In her various installations, while visitors walk around and through elements from her colorful abstract paintings and sculptures, they get a glimpse into the artist’s pictorial process. Gerbarg’s gestural compositions, which are situated in different settings enhanced by real world elements such as landscapes and architectural fragments take shape first on a virtual canvas and then on traditional canvas. Although her compositions initially seem to be the antithesis of traditional computer-generated art forms, once viewers don the Oculus headset and enter her 3D world, they come to an understanding of how computer technology can enhance and inform even the most lyrical artworks. In Gerbarg’s 3DVR installations, viewers also get to see the large-scale paintings on traditional canvas that is often her final medium.

By co-existing in the real and virtual worlds, Gerbarg’s body of work is informed by an omnipresent duality. Yet despite her otherworldly musings, Gerbarg is essentially a formalist painter

who focuses on the tools she is working with and selects line and color based on where they sit in space. Instead of physical paint, her medium is colored light which she applies by moving rhythmically through space, using a digital rather than a physical brush. Also using the internal digital camera, she crops out pictures from the 3D models she is walking in. Along the way she can add or remove elements like brushstrokes with various Tilt Brush commands. In this compositional process, she takes as many as 100 photos using the camera function of her software and then, in Photoshop, turns them into paintings.

Bittersweet line 2024, 54 x 96 in.

Wearing a headset tethered to a computer and wielding the Tilt Brush controls, Gerbarg’s compositional process requires computational adeptness. As the artist has explained:

When I paint the 3DVR painting the computer actually saves all the data as a 3D Unity model that I can output to my phone in full color. To use my unity Tilt Brush 3DVR model on my phone, I click the icon for one of the models. Then I point the phone's camera toward the floor until I see a section of a grid…I then tap the grid, and the model appears in the space around me using the phone's camera viewer. I can only see the parts that are in front of me, so I turn around with the phone to see other parts of the model…To move the 3DVR Unity model, I again turn the camera toward the floor, but in another direction, and tap the phone again to place the painting model in a new location. 5

Gerbarg has clearly mastered the orchestration of this somewhat cumbersome creative apparatus that is essential to her working process and final 3D output.

Although she has used the camera on her mobile phone to incorporate interior elements from her home and studios as well as exterior landscape elements in her paintings, the floriate forms in the artist’s 2023 series of flower “Arrangements” are the most literal naturalistic forms to appear in her oeuvre. These works were an outgrowth of her study of Ikebana videos online when she was housebound during Covid. At this time, she stayed away from her NY loft and was based in her home in the Catskills. Fascinated by the structure of these Japanese still life arrangements, she wondered if she could capture the essence of these intricate-improbably-balanced compositions in 3D via VR and AR. Throughout this series of floral arrangements, the brightly colored canvases are adorned with either single large blossoms or else groupings of flower- adorned stems. The lilting leaves and whimsical blossoms of these errant floriate forms seemed to signal a new direction for the artist, but this change was fleeting.

Gerbarg’s most recent series of paintings, which she began in late 2023, were primarily inspired by reading the recent biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Musk’s interest in spatial exploration paralleled her own fascination with science fiction and outer space since childhood. This background also explains the artist’s affinity to new technologies that led her to explore other dimensions such as 3DVR in her artworks, and by doing so, breaking the restrictions imposed by twodimensional compositions.

In March 2024, Gerbarg’s fascination with rockets and outer space inspired her to take a trip to Boca Chica, Texas, on the Mexican border, where SpaceX has a launch site. According to the artist, the

Energize 2023, 54 x 54 in.

new look and palette in her most recent paintings, the Blast Series, was inspired by her interest in space in general and by the videos of Musk’s rockets taking off, in particular. In her works such as Disruptive, 2024, large swathes of pastel color punctuated by darker planes appear propelled into space by some inner force like the impact of rocket blasts. The forceful lines and the way they are arranged simulate the energy under a rocket when it is blasting off. She was also thinking in terms of the energy and light when a rocket is launched and used her digital brushes in a slightly different way to convey this effect. Her new palette was inspired as well by the different coloration of the Texas terrain where the rockets take off. As she explained, “When I took the snapshots and did the crops, they were unintentionally different kinds of landscapes, and bore an uncanny resemblance to the terrain where all the rockets are in Boca Chica, Texas…flat and grey.” 6. These recent pictures look so different than earlier ones simply because she had other things in her life that she was focused on. As Gerbarg explained in conversation with me, “Whatever is going on in your life and is on your mind, comes out in your work.” 7

Although reading Musk was the primary impetus for this series, Gerbarg’s long-standing inquisitiveness about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, a fascination with how Isaac Asimov’s predictions and those of other science fiction writers come true, and being a longtime Star Trek fan, also factor into her current innovations. As to her next focus, all that is certain is that it will be complementary to whatever new technology she is utilizing and also reflect whatever she is preoccupied with at the time.

Cynthia Goodman April 2024

1 Darcy Gerbarg, conversation with the author, May 10, 2004. Darcy and I have had countless conversations over the last 40 years not only about her art and art-making process but also about the evolution of the digital art world from its inception.

2 Darcy Gerbarg’s presentation, Zoom SIGGRAPH Art Show Panel, 2022.

3 Ibid.

4 Artist Statement in Darcy Gerbarg: A Series of Arrangements, Arts Society of Kingston, 2023.

5 Artist Statement, 2022.

6 Darcy Gerbarg, conversation with the author, March 15, 2024.

7 Darcy Gerbarg, conversation with the author, October 24, 2023.

Marginalization 2020, 54 x 110 in.

Expectations Gold 2018, ceramic sculpture, 15 x 18 x 4 in.

Mystic Arrangement 2023, 34 x 34 in.

Art of Our Time

Darcy Gerbarg is an abstract Techspressionist painter who uses and explores the latest digital technology in her art practice.

Gerbarg began using computers as a tool in her creative process in 1979. At that time, the art community showed little or no interest in the relationship between art and digital technology. Gerbarg’s exploration and fusion of digital technology and traditional art techniques, pioneered the use of certain digital tools in the fine arts, including paint systems, VR and AR.

Throughout her career, Gerbarg sought out and invented ways to get her digital images “out of” the computer into physical art media. As she was exploring fast changing digital tools, she pushed the boundaries of art techniques. In Krishna Reddy’s studio, she developed her own process for transferring digital images via photographic separations, to zinc plates for viscosity etching. With Ronnie Henning, she silk-screened her images onto paper and with Margie Hughto, screened them onto ceramic tiles and wet clay slabs. In addition, she worked with Milliken Carpet to make carpet tiles and Formica to turn her images into Formica’s laminate sheets. In 1980, 3M printed two of Gerbarg’s large scale digital paintings on canvas, using their digital 3M Scanamural architectural spray-painting machine. The piece Series 1 #9 was exhibited at the SIGGRAPH conference in Seattle in 1980 and presaged the first SIGGRAPH Art Exhibition which Gerbarg mounted in Dallas Texas in 1981.

From the 1970’s through the 1990’ the big question about the images made using computers was “Is it Art?” Thank you COVID for dragging civilization into the digital age. With no place to go people overcame their disdain and started looking at art on their computers and mobile phones. Museums and galleries, struggling to redefine themselves, turned to digital technology for solutions.

Since 2016 Gerbarg has been painting with digital colored light in 3D, using VR goggles and Tilt Brush software. Having learned about cropping images in Larry Poons’ studio in the 1970’s and 1980’s, she adopts this technique for cropping out pieces of her 3DVR light sculptures into rectangular sections which she imports into Photoshop and transforms into 2D digital images. These digital paintings can then be completed in various 2D art media: canvas, paper, ceramics, etc. Or she can export the 3DVR light sculptures, as AR objects, to place in her environment and

photograph sections of them in nature or indoor locations. Often these photographs are posted on Instagram: @gerbarg. Sometimes they are printed on canvas.

For many years, Gerbarg has been creating art exhibitions with her 3D and 2D artworks in a 3DVR world, visited by avatars. This is not the same as the traditional gallery and museum 3D art galleries, which can only be seen on a computer screen.

Gerbarg has also pioneered AR enhanced paintings on canvas. Pointing a mobile phone at a QR code and then at one of her paintings, the 3DVR sculpture materializes out of the painting into the room where viewers can walk within It, to experience the 3D AR object all around themselves.

The work Gerbarg creates, using digital technology available today, is the art of our time.

Iceclif 1990, 56 x 56 in.

1980-1990 Press and Reproductions of Art Works

1990 "Tolvulist" Myndlist, Morgunbladid Fimmtudagur, April 19

"Tolvulist" Morgunbladid Midvikudagur, April 11

1989 New York Times, Sunday, October 8

Newsday, Weekend Part 111, September 22

1988 “Creative Computers,” Newsweek, April 25, 1988, p. 54-55

“New Tool Turns Computer Screen to Canvas,” Daily Freeman, July 6, 1988, p. 7

“Computer Graphics: The New Canvas of the 80’s,” The Village Voice: Fast Forward p. 5-6

1987 “Artists and Computers,” PIX, A Supplement of American Artist

1986 Digital Visions: Computers and Art, Cynthia Goodman, PhD., Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Publishers, NY p. 75,

Computer Images, Time Life Books Grolier Encyclopedia, Science Supplement 1986, p.105,106.

1985 Immagini con il Computer, (le techniche, l’arte), Abbado Morda, Rocca Arnoldo Mondadori, Editore Milano, p.165

Popular Computing, November

Byte Calendar

1983 Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Computers, Peterson, Reston Pub. Co., InfoWorld, April issue

Computer Graphics World, ‘Digital Portfolio,’ September

1982 “The Arts,” Omni Magazine, March

Popular Computing, December

Psychology Today, December

“New Works in Clay at Syracuse,” Ceramics Monthly, April

“Computer Graphics,” Newsweek, July

The Computer Image, Addison-Wesley

“Clay Sculpture Renaissance,” Dallas Times Herald, October 27

“Computer Art Exhibits Intriguing, Vital,” Toronto Star

New York Times, November 21

1980 Computer Graphics World

On Edge 2019, 54 x 78 in.

They represent the experience of the artist wandering in a landscape of darkness that she knows she can make bloom with displays of astonishing, refulgent color. They are experiments; they are offshoots of inward exploration; they are consummately digital inventions…

Seph Rodney

Float By 2024, 54 x 86 in.

Mark Borghi Gallery, Palm Beach, 2018

Future Reality Lab, Courant Institute, New York Institute

Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles, 2019

AR in the Catskills

Barzin residence, Florida

Gerbarg is an abstract Techspressionist artist, who paints in a 3DVR world with colored light, creating AR and VR Artworks and Interactive, Immersive Environments, as well as works on canvas, paper, and ceramics.

She curated the first SIGGRAPH Art Shows in 1981 and 1982 and launched the first MFA Program in Computer Art in 1986 at The School of Visual Arts, SVA, in New York City.

Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs internationally. It is in corporate and private collections.

Her latest work includes AR Enhanced Paintings on Canvas.

Gerbarg also exhibits her work in 3DVR Art Galleries and Exhibitions in spatial.io and artgatevr.com.

Anecdotal Allusion 2024, 40 x 76 in.

Darcy Gerbarg doesn't just do 3D in VR; she is multidimensional and hyper-real as a person and creator. She’s an artist, a techie, an academic, a rider, an author. Her artistic horizons widen at the rate of Moore’s Law. She was already this way when we first met many years ago, in the 1980s, at a conference in Hong Kong, full of somber telecom engineers. The Internet hadn’t been started yet, mobile phones and personal computers were in their infancy. And yet here was a young American woman, pioneering as early as 1979 the creation of art by a technology that hardly existed. She was comfortable with the new tools. She did computer graphics, then computergenerated paintings. Her canvases grew in size and expressiveness and received much attention. She was involved in digital TV standards and 3D animation. And she was in academia, teaching in and running programs at NYU, Columbia, and Stony Brook. She started the MFA in Computer Art at The School of Visual Arts, which was the first in a college of art anywhere. She was a visiting artist at NYU’s Courant math institute. She ran the Marconi Society at Columbia Engineering. Her art is vivid and strong, and soon covered walls in my own home. And she kept progressing, just as the technology, with new work, techniques, and exhibitions, never still, always amazing.

Eli Noam 2024

Installation shots of Jade and Sandy at Eli Noam and Nadine Strossen residence, 2009

Formal Rigor 2018, 44 x 38 in.

Gerbarg studio, 1980s

Gerbarg studio, 1990s

Gerbarg studio, New York City, 2016

Gerbarg studio, New York City, 2024

1

May

1982, 40 x 38 in.

Darcy Gerbarg

Exhibitions and Presentations:

2024 Art Gate Inter national 2024

2023 ASK, Art Society of Kingston, 2 artists exhibition, The Arrangements Series

2022-23 ART.NOW EXHIBITION 2023, Hearst Galleries, NYC, New York

2020-23 Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden, AltspaceVR (AltspaceVR shut down 03/2023)

2022 NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL OF DRAWING, PAINTING AND SCULPTURE: 2022 Alumni Online

Exhibition, NYC, NY - Awarded prizes for two paintings.

2022 MIAMI RIVER ART FAIR 2022, Art Basel Miami week, Miami, Florida

2022 ARTBOX.PROJECT MIAMI 3.0, Art Basel Miami week, Miami, Florida

2022 TECHSPRESSIONISM - DIGITAL & BEYOND, Southampton Art Center, New York

2022 Inter national Fine Art Cannes Biennial 2022, Cannes, France

2022 Inter national Contemporary Art Biennale Basel, Basel, Switzerland

2022 Inter national Art Fair Carrousel du Louvre, Paris France

2022 ASK, Art Society of Kingston, Kingston, New York

2022 ROOST STUDIOS PRESENTS "VERDANT," New Paltz, New York

2021-22 ART GATE INTERNATIONAL 2022, EADT Gallery Exhibition, ArtGateVR, Metaverse

ArtGateVR Biennale 2021, ArtGateVR, Metaverse

2021 CODAsummit 2021 - CODAworx, Scottsdale, AZ, November

2021 DRHA Annual Conference - Online and Berlin, Germany, September

Digital Matters: Designing/Per forming Agency for the Anthropocene

2021 Art Gate 2021, EADT Gallery, Darcy Gerbarg, Techspressionist paintings, April

2021 Recto-Verso Laval-virtual Festival, online, April

https://rectovrso.laval-virtual.com/en/2021-artworks/ (catalogue)

Musée-École de la Perrine "Virtual exhibition/real exhibition: online art," Laval, France, July

2021 “Along the Rivers Edge,” Thousand Islands Art Center, Thousand Islands, New York

2020 Hamptons Virtual Art Fair, September 2020

2020 CADAF Inter national On-Line Art Fair, June

2020-21 BRCVR, Bur ning Man online, Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden, AltspaceVR

2019 Point of Contact Gallery, “T ime Changes Everything”, Syracuse, New York (catalog)

2020 The National Arts Club and NYVR Meetup, AltspaceVR, Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden

2019 Castelli Art Space, one-woman exhibition, Los Angeles, Califor nia

2019 CADAF Contemporary and Digital Art Fair, Miami, Fl, December

2019 The Mercantile Gallery, Syracuse, New York

2019 Woman Made, Chicago, Illinois

2018-19 Mark Borghi Fine Art, Palm Beach, Florida, Hamptons, New York

2018 The Yard - Columbus Circle, NYC, New York

2018 Clio Art Fair, NYC, New York

2017-19 Mishkin Gallery, Small Works Baruch College, NYC, New York

2017-19 Catskill Art Society Member Exhibitions, Livingston Manor, New York

2017 FOCUS: “Technology: Friend or Foe”, WAAM Curated, Woodstock, New York

2017 Woodstock Art School, Woodstock Monoprint Invitational Exhibition, Woodstock, New York

2017 Henning Studio Show, 4W 43rd Street, NYC, New York

2016-18 High Line and West Chelsea Artists Open Studios, NYC, New York

2016 EADT, Experiments in Art and Digital Technologies, Creative Technology Week, NYC, New York

2015 Gallery440, Juried Exhibition, “Off the Press”, Brooklyn, New York

2015 WAAM Juried Exhibition, Woodstock, New York 2015,University of Pennsylvania, Juried Alumni Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2014-15 Berkley College Gallery, “Open Studio Artists: Henning Screen-print Workshop”, Brooklyn, New York

2014 Art Silicon Valley, San Mateo, California

1990 United States Cultural Center Gallery, one-woman exhibition, USIA, Reykjavik, Iceland

1989 “Electronic Print” Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England

1987-88 “Computer Assisted: The Computer in Contemporary Art” Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA

1986 “artware” Kunst und Elektronik, Dusseldorf, W. Germany

1984 Cadre, Computers in Art, Design and Research, San Jose, California

1980-86 SIGGRAPH Art Shows, Seattle, WA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; other

Telated 2024, 30 x 42 in.

Museum Exhibitions:

2019 Palos Verdes Art Center, “Cover These Walls: International Design Entries,” juried competition, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

1992 SMCA Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1991-92 The Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts

1991 “Digitized Manipulated: National Exhibition of Computer Images,” Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, CO

1990 “Infinite Illusions: The World of Electronically Created Imagery,” Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

1989 Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, one-woman exhibition, New York (catalog)

1988 “Computers and Art,” IBM Museum of Science and Art, New York City, New York

1987 “Computers and Art,” Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York

1986 San Jose Museum of Art, CADRE Exhibition, San Jose, Califor nia

1984 Siemens Museum, München, Ger many

1984 Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, New York

1983 ‘Electra,’ Musée d’Art Moder ne de la Ville de Paris, France

1981 “Ways in Space, New Art Technology,” Downey Museum of Art, Downey, California

Art Exhibition Catalogues and Books:

2023 The Arrangements Series, ASK, Kingston, New York 2023

2022 The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, NYC, New York

2022 Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond, Southampton Center for the Arts, Southampton, New York

2021 A Biography of the Pixel, Alvy Ray Smith, MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts

2019 T ime Changes Everything, Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse, New York

1989 Darcy Gerbarg, Paintings and Prints 1980-1989, FAMLI, Fine Art Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, NY

1981 New Works in Clay III, Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, August 14- October 18, 1981

Education:

BA University of Pennsylvania

New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture

MBA Stern, New York University

Ticated 2024, 24 x 34 in.

Information: http://www.darcygerbarg.com · http://www.instagram.com/gerbarg

Contact : director@darcygerbarg.com