Interview 1 // Colin Goldberg

Hello, my name is Roz Dimon. I'm an artist who has been working with technology with my work since 1984. And I'm here today with artists, Colin Goldberg, and he actually coined the term Techspressionism in 2011, and is the co curator of Techspressionism 2021 and international juried exhibition opening in summer 2021 at Techspressionism.com Hello Colin.

Hey, how you doing, Roz. Thanks for asking me to come to the interview.

Good to be with you. So, Colin. Tell us a little bit about your background, you know where you were born, where you live and practice now and maybe your cultural influences. Yeah. Sure.

So I was born in the Bronx in 1971. And I grew up out here on the East End of Long Island, where we both are actually grew up in Southampton, and my dad taught chemistry out there at Southampton College that we ended up moving out to that area. And now I live a little bit further west on the north shore of Long Island in a town called rocky point with my wife Donna and our daughter. I. So, as far as cultural influences go. I have a mixed heritage. So my mom is of Japanese ancestry and my father is of Jewish ancestry. And I would definitely, I would say that my, my grandma Kimi a was definitely a major influence on me as an artist. She was trained in Shoto which is the art of Japanese calligraphy, and she taught that in Hawaii where she lives and also in Japan. Where she emigrated from when she was 16.

Colin Goldberg

Her maiden name was actually Noguchi. So sometimes I like to think that maybe I'm a distant relative of Isamu Noguchi but no evidence of that.

Oh, interesting. That's really interesting. Thanks. So, Colin, what made you become an artist, or when did you know that this is what you wanted to do in your life.

Well, I always kind of got lost in drawing when I was a kid, and I guess I'm just one of those people that never stopped. You know I was kind of involved in art all through high school and voted class artists when I graduated Southampton High School back in 90. And then I went on to SUNY Binghamton for my undergrad studies and I really wasn't sure if I was going to be an art major I was also considering computer science.

Colin Goldberg

But, you know, there were a couple things that happened while I was in school that definitely put me on the path. You know one of them was that in the summer. After my junior year I did an internship working with an artist named Steve Miller who's part of our Techspressionism group. And I was his studio assistant out in Sagaponack.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, that, yeah that was a really amazing experience. It was, you know, the first time I saw the inside. Yeah. Of like a working artist studio I you know only really been exposed to the work of my professors, prior to that, so I got to sort of see how the his studio operated from a business standpoint. And I also got to learn so screen printing. And there was another assistant there by the name of Robert Bardin, who is like an amazing printer. He actually printed for Andy Warhol for many years. And, you know, that experience. You know definitely provided some inspiration. Yeah. That was the inspiration to become an artist and it was really interesting to hear him tell stories about how he worked with Andy and stuff like that.

Colin Goldberg

You know definitely you know my, my undergrad painting professor also are actually had two professors but one in particular, a guy that by the name of Angelo Ippolito was a big, you know, influence as far as, you know, making me want to be an artist or, you know, follow that path, and he was a, he was a second generation New York school abstract expressionist painter. So he, you know, he was the person really responsible for getting me interested in abstraction.

Colin Goldberg

And I remember when a student asked him in class, what his work was about. And he said, it's about paint, you know, and he kind of believed that like, it was someone else's job to interpret the work and his job was just to, to paint and make the work. And there's kind of a funny story I have about my, my two painting professors. So I had two professors, Ippolito and Shapiro. And I remember Shapiro telling us, you know, it's great to be an artist, but if you have the brains to be a dentist, go be a dentist, you know?

Colin Goldberg

And then Ippolito told us, you know, if you want to be an artist, go to New York and give it a shot, you know? And he actually, he emigrated to New York from Italy, when Mussolini was in power. And, you know, he came here to this country, you know, to find a better life and, you know, kind of lived and worked downtown and knew, you know, Pollock and that whole crew of people. He came around, you know, slightly after the first generation of the New York school painters.

Colin Goldberg

So, you know, when I graduated, I pretty much took Ippolito's advice and, you know, moved to New York, moved into my first studio.

You didn't become a dentist? No.

No, I didn't, you know, much to my parents' chagrin. They were both chemists, you know, but they, they were, they've always been supportive of me, you know, you know, following the path that I chose. So, you know, and, and so, and I moved to Brooklyn when I graduated to Williamsburg back in, in 94.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, something happened there too, that was definitely a pretty major change, that happened in terms of influencing my work was that when I first moved to Brooklyn, I was coming back from a temp job and I was wearing a suit and coming back underneath the Williamsburg bridge, I got jumped and I got my jaw broken in a couple of places. And this is like before, you know, Williamsburg was gentrified. It was like chop shops, garbage on the street and stuff. And I lived in sort of like a, an old bank building that was not a hundred percent legal live workspace.

I was renting from another organization.

And in abinet like in my midicle. And I would say I would say that was not in my type of business. And you know, that was not an environment that I would want to understand. And that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to. And in my program, that was not an environment that I would want to come back to.

Colin Goldberg

Into digital work. I was doing, actually, it was, this is before the web, so I was doing CD-ROM development at a multimedia

Shop, yeah, back in, and I was doing director

And lingo and all that stuff, so, and then, you know, got involved in web work really early on, but that was in that same neighborhood in the East Village, so, yeah, so I've always kind of, like, had my foot in both worlds as far as, you know, commercial art and my own personal practice, and I think those two sides, you know, really inform one another in a lot of ways.

Oh, I totally agree with you, absolutely. Great. Now, I, by the way, I changed it from split screen, so you're more in speaker view, and people can see your background a little bit bigger on the screen. The next question was, I had was, you know, who and what were your influences? I think you've spoken about that a little bit. Do you want to elaborate more on that? And I think the whole commercial and fine art aspect is really interesting, too, but whatever you want to say.

Okay, yeah, I mean, well, definitely, you know, like, the influence of my grandmother and show to calligraphy, I think, was an influence on my painting style. The works works behind me are a couple paintings in progress right now and a lot of the my approach to painting is kind of like a mash-up of you know a calligraphic approach and gestural sort of painting that you know was kind of inspired to some degree by the abstract expressionist painters and so and so forth. But, you know, also Japanese woodcut artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige influenced my work in terms of the line quality they have, and sort of their compositional style.

Colin Goldberg

You know, on the western side, definitely, Abax painters, they're really, like Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, you know, their sort of gestural approach, I always found really interesting. You know, Klein always, you know, denied that there was any sort of influence of Japanese calligraphy on his work. But, you know, and there's an interesting connection with Franz Kline and technology in that the big black and white paintings that he's famous for that are just these big, bold brush marks, they actually have technology as part of their story in that, you know, he got to a point where he had sort of like an artist block. He didn't, you know, he just couldn't come up with any new ideas. And he was friends with Willem de Kooning. So he went over to de Kooning's studio. This is like, I believe, the 50s.

Colin Goldberg

And de Kooning had a Bell, I think it was like a Bell Panopticon opaque projection. And he had a projector that, you know, this was like the newest tech at the time that you could enlarge an image up onto the wall.

Yeah.

So Klein had been making these little drawings, charcoal drawings of like chairs and pieces of furniture. And he took one of them and blew it up giant onto the wall and took a little tiny section of it. And then he sort of painstakingly reproduced it on a giant scale. And that's how, that's sort of the origin story of those paintings. So like, you know, I had always pictured him like this crazy man, you know, like throwing paint and giant brushes or knives. But it really like it was very painstakingly composed. And, you know, the technology of the time was involved in it. So, you know, when I heard that story, it really struck a chord with me that, you know, a lot of times there will be technology involved in an artist's work. It's just not overtly evident. Like I know a lot of Frank Stella's work.

Colin Goldberg

Yeah. But you know, it's just not did it really play out in the way that it did in that case. You know, it's

Just not at all on the same level ofand

So that's one of the things that it was really hard to elucidate. You know, it's just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. You know, it's just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. You know, it's just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. It was just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. It was just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. It was just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. It was just not an image that was actually done in the way that it was done. To feel like you know the ability to experiment with large format inkjet printing and printing on top of painted surfaces as you know legitimate essentially as it's still a painting you know if a rosenberg painting with a photo silkscreen on top of it is still called a painting then to me you know a painting with an inkjet print on top of it is also still a painting it's just you know 30 years later so yeah I would say like you know the influences are fairly fairly diverse you know and certainly at you know the digital realm in general wireframe models cyber cyberpunk literature like william gibson all that

Sort

Of stuff you know certainly star wars as a kid growing up in the 70s huge influence culturally all those things I think you know play a role in my work and street art too you know I definitely I remember growing up going to visit my other grandma in the bronx and seeing the trains all covered in tags and stuff like that and you know I was of the generation where all of our schoolmates would be into you know break dancing and rap music you know kind of before it was even called hip-hop

Stuff

And so like that sort of culture I think has you know I think it's sort of like found a little bit of a revival in the crypto art community in the sense that a lot of crypto art artists you know they go by a handle or a tag or street art you know artists like banksy and stuff like that too I mean I don't really incorporate that into my own work or sort of artistic identity but I you know I think it's interesting can

You just expand for a minute on crypto art because people will be seeing this interview who don't know what crypto art is and if you just for a few minutes and

Yeah sure so I mean this is something that I actually learned about through Techspressionism through one of our artists that joined up a guy named andrea bonacito I think or I don't know if I'm butchering his name but he's a an italian artist that's in london right now but he kind of explained it to me and he kind of explained it to me and I think it's important to kind of understand what he's trying to say but also think about what he's trying to say so those are your show then but also think about what do you think about what do you think about any of the other names that are being used for well kind of colloquial terms like market share what do you think about them or what do you think to establish authenticity that they actually are the owner of that particular piece.

Colin Goldberg

So it's, you know, it could be a JPEG or an MP4 video file, a lot of them are animations. But the thing that makes them unique is the fact that they are unique, that they're actually one of a kind or they're also able to be minted by the artist as additions. So it's a whole, yeah, yeah, it's a whole sort of world in itself.

We can go down that rabbit hole. It is interesting.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating, though. I would definitely check out, there's a site called Super Rare. And there's another one called Rarible that are both, you know, really solid crypto art marketplaces.

Thanks. I think that's good for those of us who work in digital media to let audiences who are listening to this know, hey, this is the next. You know, it's happening. It's very interesting. Thanks. Before we look at your work, Colin, do you want to tell us a little bit more about your process before I share the screen or you share it?

Yeah, sure. And actually, you know what, I mean, I was gonna show something at the end of the interview about what I'm working on currently, but I think it's actually relevant to this question. So is it alright if I share my screen now? Yeah. So I was gonna show basically back here behind me. These are two paintings that are in progress. They're oil and inkjet on linen.

Colin Goldberg

And they're small, smaller pieces. Actually, I don't know if you do the Guildhall member show, but I've been doing it for a lot, I don't know, last number of years.

It's a way to support the museum and it's fun. And yeah.

Yeah. So like these are that was sort of a, you know, an impetus to get me get me going and making some small work. So I'm going to hopefully they'll be dry. But the submission deadline.

But these are pieces that is a museum, wonderful museum out here in East Hampton. Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let me share my screen really quick. And second. Okay, can you see my screen? Yeah.

Okay,

Awesome. So, so there, these are the first, these are images of those two pieces. The first layer is oil on linen. So just straight oil painting. And then what I do is I take a picture of it and bring it into the computer. And then I draw into it in Adobe Illustrator using my Wacom tablet to create an image of, for an overprint and then I take that image and actually run the painted canvas or in this case linen through my printer which is an Epson 9800 it's a large format printer and I use a special primer called ink aid which allows me to print onto the painted surfaces so

So

This is sort of I'll

Switch this one the one on the right is the beginning painting and then you're showing the layers in Photoshop yeah

Well these are actually two separate pieces there's number one and number two so this is the first layer of them which is just a painting straight-up painting and then this is the second layer of the two pieces and they're fairly similar there's actually some meaning behind the work too you know like I said I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure if you can see it but I'm not sure incorporated, it's abstracted into the forms a little bit.

Colin Goldberg

And also, you know, other sort of like identity elements, you know, the, I guess the political climate had made me sort of like, think about what it means to be, you know, a minority within a minority, you know, and, and so that's kind of like where my head was at, you know, and it wasn't really like even intended. And in fact, when I started the work with the painting, that wasn't even an idea in my head. It wasn't until sort of like after what happened, you know, at the Capitol that like something was going on in my mind that, you know, like I used the abstract work to sort of like process things. So the next layer.

I like hearing that because I think it's great when, when artists are working on a, you know, raising the bar to work on multiple layers and sharing that a little bit with.

Yeah, I mean, you know, underneath the abstraction, there's always something there. A lot of times I don't even know what it is, and I'm not conscious of it. I mean, in this case, I sort of like identified an idea and kind of like worked with it. So this is the next layer, which basically I took these empty areas and masked them off, with tape and then painted back in, in sort of like a hard edge way, with more oils.

Oh, interesting.

Do these two different variations here. And then the final layer, which I actually just finished this morning or the most recent, it's not the final layer, but was another sort of jet, a layer of gestural mark making. And, there's probably going to be one more layer of, sort of wire frame. That's going to be the last layer of the final layer. So that's kind of like the power of that and that's going to be the last layer of the final layer. You know, we're going to get we're going to get this set of pieces on top and this is going to be the last layer of the so. So that's kind of like where these, these pieces are at, but, yeah, that's, that's what I'm working on currently. And my, my process kind of like all in one, you know, and, and, the printer that I have is actually, it's an older Epson, but, back in 2014, actually the day before my wife and I got married, I got a call from the Pollock-Krasner foundation, chairman.

Colin Goldberg

And he told me that I got awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant, which I had applied for almost a year prior to that. That was back in 2014. So I used some of that money to buy the printer, and I used that printer in almost all of my work.

And Colin, if I understand, I think you're saying you actually put the paint, do you put the painting through the printer? Did I get that wrong? Or...

Yeah, no, I actually run the painting directly through the printer.

And then your computer image goes on top. That's so fascinating. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, that was actually a technique that I learned in graduate school. I did my MFA in computer art out of Bowling Green in Ohio, and I studied under a couple instructors. Dina Eber was the professor that taught me those techniques about digital overriding. And I also studied under a guy named Greg Little, who was, he studied painting at Yale, really interesting artist, does VR work and stuff like that. And then my third graduate advisor is an art historian by the name of Andrew Hershberger. And those three people were definitely, you know, also big influences on sort of my formative time in grad school.

Great. I just switched back. So we're sort of sharing the screen. I'm just sort of making a little bit of a pause. Yeah, so I think this is a little more interesting for a Zoom interview, which is how we're doing this interview. Would you like to share any more of your work and just to show us a little bit about how your work may have evolved artistically and technically? Or did we just do that? Or would you like to go a little further into that?

Yeah, sure. You know, I kind of...

Just so we see a little bit.

Yeah, I'll take you, maybe I'll just take you through some stuff on my site that lets you see... Perfect. Kind of like how it evolved.

Yeah. That'd be great.

Can you see my screen now?

Yeah.

Okay, great. So down in the bottom of my site, I have my work kind of organized by series. And I'll start with the earlier stuff. So initially, you know, I was just a painter, you know, no digital work involved. These are all older oil paintings from college. This one was actually the first piece that I ever showed publicly and it was exhibited at the Parish Art Museum when it was back in Southampton for the East End student show back in 1989. Wow. That was a fairly large piece. Nice. 36 by 60 acrylic.

Colin Goldberg

And let's see. When I was... Yeah. When I was an undergrad, that's when I sort of started getting involved with computers. And I grew up, you know, my first computer was a Commodore 64. And I played a lot with like ASCII animation and I had a light pen and, you know, I always enjoyed seeing...

That's an Amiga, right? A Commodore Amiga.

It was the 64 actually. Oh,

It was before. So it was before the Amiga. Oh, yeah. That's nice. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I was also in the BBS scene and had a... I was in the BBS scene and had a modem. So a lot of the cracking groups and freaking groups would have these really amazing digital art intros that were almost like sort of street art type stuff. So this work is I call my photo construct series. And this is definitely, you know, inspired in part by artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol where they integrated photographic content. Like these are silkscreen pieces that I did when I was in college. And I think that's... You know, it's really nice taking these a couple different photographs that I took. This one had a castle and like a kind of a water background. Then I photoshopped them together and then burned a screen in the dark room actually and screen printed it. That was during an independent study that I did where I where I had sort of access to a dark room.

Colin Goldberg

And then this piece here is called Pollock's Studio. And it's based on a couple images that I took at Jackson Pollock's Studio. You could see his barn. This is his actual studio. Was kind of like a barn or a shed where he made his drip paintings. And this is really kind of obscured, but it's a big boulder in his backyard.

Colin Goldberg

But that piece actually was taken into the permanent collection of the Pollock-Krausner House and Study Center back in 2005.

Yeah, wow, that's great.

So in 99 is when I really started doing straight digital work. That's when I moved to that smaller apartment. And this series, which I call Metagraphs, are vector-based digital drawings that are just basically drawn on my Wacom tablet. So they started in 99. Most of them were made from 99.

Adobe Illustrator kind of vector?

Yeah, they were all drawn in Illustrator. Yeah. So yeah, most of this body of work was done between 99 and 2005. And this piece in particular was kind of like a bridge piece. It's called Suggesture. And this is the first piece that incorporated these sort of wireframe forms that then I kind of, this was the start of a whole new body of work, which, you know, I call my wireframe series that I'm still, I would consider the work behind me, you know, the wireframes aren't actually incorporated into them yet, but they're going to be wireframe paintings.

Colin Goldberg

And they, they incorporate these wireframe forms which really are, you know, based on the idea of a gesture that is, I'll make a gestural mark mark on the tablet and then rotate it in 3D space or extrude it in 3D space to create these wire frame forms which I consider almost to be like volumetric gestures in a sense. So this one here let's see where is it yeah this one here was acquired by Stony Brook Hospital back in 2019 for their ward.

Colin Goldberg

Nice. And it's called Dynamic Dispatch. The ones on top are the most recent ones from that series. And these were all done in 2020, those pieces.

They're wonderful. I can almost feel your, I don't know, your science parents and the art and the calligraphy, you know, all of your influences, it's there.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I think everything kind of like, you know, melts together. And then just the output is the images, you know, and these ones are directly influenced by the Japanese calligraphy. And when I was in grad school, actually, there was an artist who actually, me you know did you ever work with sumi ink and I hadn't so he's like oh I have some you know he gave me a jar of sumi ink so I started doing these ink paintings and then composing drawings that I then printed on top of the ink paintings and this is just sort of like a smaller set of works on paper they're quite iconic as well oh thank you thank you and then this series is probably the most recently started series the biomorphic series and they're also based on gestural marks but instead of rendering them out as wireframes I've been rendering them out as sort of like plastic objects so to speak so they have shading and then I convert those objects to outline so they're almost like contour drawings and flatten them and then kind of like contort and twist those forms so you know I end up with some pretty unexpected and weird you know compositions and a lot of you know what I do is experimentation so this one actually was created in 2019 and I called it shinzo because and that's the japanese word for heart because it reminded me of a heart yes and then later in that year I actually found out that I needed to get open heart surgery which I had that year but it was strange because it was almost like something was telling me that was you know that was that was going to happen yeah so that's pretty much you know you know the spectrum of the different bodies of work and my latest addition to my site is this online viewing room which I created using kunst matrix and that's the platform that we're going to use for Techspressionism to do our jury show.

Colin Goldberg

But this lets you see some of the pieces that I did over the course of 2020 in kind of like a 3D space.

Beautiful. So nice. Wow. Love seeing that whole progression. Thank you so much. Sure thing. I'm sure we could talk about it more, but I think we're going to, I do want to get in a few questions about Techspressionism. And tell us a little about your thoughts about Techspressionism.

OK, yeah. Well, so I came up with this term Techspressionism back in 2011. And it was really just the title of a solo show. I had basically bartered a website job with somebody who had a space in Southampton, kind of like a rental gallery. And I did a self-produced show that my wife Donna helped me hang. And I was like, oh, I'm going to do this. And I had to come up with a title for it. And that's where Techspressionism came from as a word. It was just the title that I thought was a clever combination of technology and expressionism.

Colin Goldberg

And I kind of kept it around. I used it for a couple of different shows. Helen Harrison, who's our group advisor now, she actually wrote the essay for that exhibition catalog. And her essay, that expanded on the idea.

New York Times. She's awesome.

Yeah. She's been a critic for The Times and also was a curator at both the Parish Art Museum and Guildhall prior to being at the Pollock House. And she's got a huge amount of knowledge about the expressionist artists and just sort of art history in general. So she was able to take that idea and relate it to some of the expressionist painters of the past. And last summer, I was able to go to a gallery and I did a Google News search just randomly for Techspressionism. And I saw that there was an artist named Oz Van Rosen, who was in Southampton, who had used the term in a magazine article. And I thought, wow, that's interesting that other artists are actually starting to use this term. So I reached out to her to see if she had any interest in trying to put a group together of other artists using technology based around this word or term.

Colin Goldberg

And she liked the idea. So I reached out to Steve Miller, who also incorporates technology into his work. He does a lot of it's a lot of silkscreen work, but the imagery is scientific imagery that incorporates things like MRIs, X-rays. He's worked with scientists at CERN in Switzerland to develop different types of imagery. So a lot of his work really, yeah, it incorporates technology both in its execution, and in the content. And he thought it was a good idea. He encouraged me to move forward with it. And he actually helped me formulate the initial content for the site and the plan of using the hashtag Techspressionism on Instagram as a way to try to locate artists who related to the idea. So I ran that by Helen Harrison. And she thought it was a good idea. And she thought that maybe it'd be a good thing to organize a show to locate other artists who were interested in this kind of as an incentive to get involved.

Colin Goldberg

And she, at that time, agreed to be the group's advisor. So that, to me, was like an instant green light of like, OK, so there's a legitimate art historian involved now. And that sort of lit a fire under me to invest some energy into the project. So at that point, I reached out to my friend Patrick Lichty, who I went to grad school with at Bowling Green. And we did our MFA studies together in computer art there. And he was teaching in Abu Dhabi at the time. He actually just moved back to the States. He's going to be a professor at Wynonna University.

Colin Goldberg

And then the five of us, myself, Steve, Oz, Patrick, and Helen met on Zoom. And that was sort of like our first salon where we talked about the definition of Techspressionism. And sort of hashed out the current working definition, which is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. So it really is based on the definition of expressionism. But it incorporates expressionism that incorporates technology, basically, or uses technology to express this emotional experience or subjective experience.

Colin Goldberg

And then since then, currently, we have about 200 artists in our index at Techspressionism.com from over 30 countries. So it's pretty amazing. Since August, it's grown pretty rapidly. And I think a big part of it has been these salons, which you've been a part of on Zoom, which we just started recording and publishing on our YouTube channel.

Colin Goldberg

And that was actually Devante's idea. There's another artist who's been pretty heavily involved, Devante. Davonte Bradley, who's been helping moderate the sessions. And it was his suggestion that we record and publish them. So it's been really interesting and also kind of based on this idea of social sculpture, which was an idea that a German artist came up with, a guy by the name of Joseph Beuys, who is a Fluxus artist.

Yeah, it's kind of a textbook name. Yeah. Yeah.

And he kind of defined it so that it was a social sculpture as human activity that strives to structure and shape society or the environment. And that the central idea of a social sculptor is an artist who creates structures in society using language, thoughts, actions, and objects. So this is actually an idea that was introduced to me by another artist member of ours, Joseph Nechvatal, who is really a pioneer in digital art and new media art. Good artist. And he related this idea of social sculpture to me when we were living near each other down in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And it always kind of stuck with me in the sense of how artists can be activists.

Yes, they sure can. Just like poets, we can be outlawed. But beauty can be dangerous.

Absolutely.

Colin, this has been wonderful to talk to you. And I guess the final thing we just want to talk about, which I think you've already gotten into, but before I sign us off here, do you have anything you want to say about the future of art and where you see Techspressionism or what we're doing as part of that or not?

Yeah, sure. So I really think that since digital tools have become widely available, it's really changed the definition of what an artist is. And also, it's made the idea of being an artist much more accessible to more people. People probably who never would have considered themselves an artist are playing with apps. They're doing all sorts of things, making videos, and creating stuff, which is pretty cool.

Colin Goldberg

Mass media, like animated movies, like Pixar movies and stuff, and video games, those have really created a viable career path for people who want to be artists, which didn't really exist as much before. And digital art now is a whole new field of study for artists. And I think that's a really important part of the future of art within academia.

Colin Goldberg

Absolutely. That being said, that is a big reason why I wanted to develop Techspressionism as something where it's an artistic movement versus a means of production. So to me, a lot of what's called digital art, it encompasses both individual artists' creations, but also Pixar movies and video games. So to me, Techspressionism much more closely refers to the art of an individual artist.

Colin Goldberg

And I think that there's a huge crossover for all artists working with technology between their commercial and personal practices. And I think that artists today need to have their kind of feed in both worlds as far as artists working with technology in order to stay current. Definitely like the commercial work I've done through the years has allowed my drawings and paintings to move into the direction they never would have without technology.

Yeah, the Renaissance, one of the highest points in art. Hey, they didn't have a separation of, you know, good commercial and fine, really. But the cream always rises to the top in a way. So that's always an interesting concept, too. But I love your approach with this and what you're saying, because I think technology always gets messy sometimes because it does promote more democracy.

It's true.

And you know, when it comes to art, you know, I think it's important to say that art is not just about the art. You know, it's funny because when I was in grad school, the undergrad students major was called digital art. And the grad students, it was called computer art because the faculty didn't make the transition yet in terms of the nomenclature. You know, we were still computer art and the undergrad students were digital art. And most of them didn't care at all about hanging something on a wall. They just want to get a job at Pixar or make the next Grand Theft Auto.

Wow.

You know. It's true. And you know, like I think it's interesting, but like, you know, there's also something to be said about, you know, the idea of the medium being the message. You know, like people like Cindy Sherman, for instance, she, you know, she creates her work photographically. But she always defined herself primarily as an artist. And her work is about identity. It's not about the fact that she's a photographer. Yes. Or uses a camera. You know, and that distinction really helped move photography out of these segregated photography galleries. And I mean, she had a major solo retrospective at MoMA. You know, completely legitimized photographic work. And not, you know, artists, including her, not her alone. But I mean, certainly that mentality that, you know, it doesn't. It's just.

Colin Goldberg

An aside that it happened to be a camera that was involved in the creation of these pictures. The important thing is that the pictures, you know, so I think that digital is a few decades behind. Photography. Certainly, you know, it's development, but it's, it's part of that same continuum. So, you know, I'm hoping that down the road, you know, it's really going to be the content of the work that artists like you and I create that gets looked at. Not necessarily. The tools we use.

I really like that. You're saying that it really makes it a whole, a more exciting thing and to tether it to the history of art. And yet it speaks so uniquely to our time. It's been so wonderful to interview you and your work is so exciting. And I'm, I'm pleased to be part of this. Expressionism wherever it's going. It's really been interesting. I'm pleased to be a part of it. It's been an honor to interview you today. And. I'll see you soon. Probably right here on the screen.

Absolutely. Sounds good. Thank you.