Interview 2 // Anne Spalter

Hello and welcome to the second installment of the Expressionist Artist Interview Series. My name is Colin Goldberg and today is Wednesday, January 27th. I'm here today with Anne Morgan Spalter, an American New Media artist based in Brooklyn, New York and Providence, Rhode Island. Anne founded and taught the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1990s. She's the author of The Computer and the Visual Arts, published by Addison Wesley, and is co-curator of the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, one of the world's largest private collections of early computer art. The collection is loaned work to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.

Colin Goldberg

It is available as an online resource for curators and scholars at spalterdigital.com. Anne's own artworks reside in the permanent collection, collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. Her artwork is available for viewing online Anne Spalter.

Colin Goldberg

And with that, we'll get started. So welcome, Anne. Thanks for coming to the interview. And maybe you could just start by telling us a little bit about your background, like where you were born, where you live in practice now. And what you're doing. And maybe some cultural influences.

Sure. Thanks. And I'm excited to be here and be part of the Expressionism group. I was I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, which is right outside of Boston. And it was a great place to grow up, very multicultural. A lot of immigrants from different countries, but good public schools. And I lived there until I went to college at the Rhode Island School of Design. And I think that has to do with sort of part of another part of the question that you just asked, which is how I got interested in making art. I had a really great art instructor in high school who was very classically trained and trained us to really look at things and see them and draw them and paint them. And I became fascinated with that process of how you really see something differently when you draw it, when you make artwork with it, than when you just look at it or even for me just taking a photograph of it.

Anne Spalter

And that really captivated me. And I was also amazed by just the magic of how you could draw a few lines on a piece of paper and somehow in your mind and the mind of other people that became a person or an object or an animal or still life. So I didn't know it then, but the sort of cognitive psychology part of just how art is made and interpreted. Has always seemed very magical and fascinating to me. And also the fact that you could communicate things that you couldn't say with words. So language is amazing and very powerful, but I love that you could look at a single image and get so much out of it. And it seemed to transcend time and language in a way that, you know, remains very compelling to me. So if you look at a Rothko, it's not it doesn't translate into some sort of verbal explanation.

Anne Spalter

There's no explanation. There's no equivalent. So, I enjoyed making art and I really didn't like regular school. So the idea of going to some kind of college where I never had to write a paper ever again, seems just absolutely fantastic to me and that's how I ended up at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Anne Spalter

So I thought if I'm going to go to college but I could have fun because I'd be making artwork all day instead of writing essays and taking math classes. And I was very much to my surprise. Because I'd always hated math. In the summer between high school and college I took a summer course in calculus and bizarrely really liked it.

Anne Spalter

So when I got to RISD I took math courses at Brown because you can cross register between the two schools. And I was really enjoying that and I took math, the way most people would take art as a hobby. And I was really enjoying that and I took math the way most people would take art as a hobby. And I thought math was really fun and a fun thing to do on the side.

Anne Spalter

But I ran out of special studies credits at RISD. So at RISD you can take liberal arts courses in addition to studio art classes. And you have a number of requirements in art history and English but you're only allowed a certain number of classes in any other topic. So I had run out. And I went to the head of the Fine Arts Division and asked if he would okay adding another class or two. And he said, Absolutely not.

Anne Spalter

And I was flabbergasted because I always thought, you know, art school would be more open-minded, but it turned out that Brown was much more open-minded about curricular requirements. So I actually transferred to Brown, which doesn't have any general studies requirements and lets you take any number of classes in any subject that you want and actually graduated with a math major from Brown as well as visual art.

Oh, wow.

I don't know if that answered all the things that you asked, but I think some of the influences came from obviously traditional art-making tools and techniques plus a mathematical, you know, interest, and that I think is responsible for a lot of the patterning and trying to put a sense of order into the works that I create.

Interesting. So, you know, did you always know that you wanted to be an artist ever since you were young? Or I think you sort of touched on some of this, but, you know, when did you know sort of that this was what you wanted to do?

I started taking art classes in high school aside from the fact that some were required so that I could make drawings and etchings of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. So it was kind of like I was a fangirl. But that was part of the magic that you could like make this image and it looked like someone. So, but that was my entry point. And then obviously I became more and more involved. But I would say there wasn't sort of one reason why I became an artist or a certain moment. It's more the opposite that every time I've tried to do something else, I've realized that I have to be making art. So it sort of seems like my inescapable destiny. So now I've just accepted it.

Gotcha.

I worked banking for a while for one semester at Brown. I didn't do any art. And I literally almost died. I almost cracked up. I was in banking, which was fun. After I graduated, I went to New York. My parents stopped sending me checks and I panicked and took a job in investment banking. And then I thought, this is fine. I enjoyed it. There's a lot of smart, interesting people in banking. But one night I had a dream that I had left my purse in the drawer of my desk. And I often have dreams that seem relevant to my daily life. And if I lose my purse somewhere, I'm going to lose it. It's some sort of identity shift.

Anne Spalter

And I was in a taxi and I said, oh, I have to go back in the building and get my purse. And the taxi driver, this is before Uber. I'm old. The taxi driver said, if you go back into the building, you'll never get out. So I really interpreted that like I had to leave that banking identity behind and move forward. And I applied to get an MFA at RISD, which is what I ended up doing in painting.

Huh. Wow. That's interesting.

Yeah I'm into dreams I'm into Carl Jung and uh-huh

Yeah that makes a lot of sense you know definitely definitely so do you have any specific influences as far as you know where your work is at now or as it evolved you know maybe both in terms of aesthetic influences or stylistic influences and then also sort of more conceptual influences like the you know the ideas that you became interested in as an artist

Yeah I'd say aesthetically I've always been interested in medieval art I think because the perspective is so strange so when you use the computer or a 3D program or a camera you get this three-point perspective that's kind of the western perspective that we're used to and really like a lot of people are interested in the medievalism but I've always loved the way that medieval work looks sort of compressed and twisted and doesn't follow that perspective and therefore to me has sort of a more inner perspective so you're seeing a real landscape but it has this subjective quality as well so I think that's been a factor in my work switching from more photographic perspective to the kind of this patterning or things that transform the work and try to keep that balance between internal and external other art things that you know I enjoy color field painting I think that's more aspirational for me but just being able to you know put the right colors next to each other to get certain feelings has always intrigued me and as I mentioned Carl Jung I've read some and I'm very interested in his archetypal imagery throughout my work pretty much the same imagery has kept reoccurring for decades so these things like lighthouses and spheres and water and airplanes so they have this sort of symbolic personal iconography resonance for me

To work yeah I noticed that airplane piece was one of the ones that I reposted to the Techspressionism feed and I thought that was really interesting you know how you know you're bringing in photographs of the past and the present and the present and the future and you know I'm glad that people put those pieces together because there was also photographic imagery and sort of I guess those pieces were involved AI in some way

Yeah were they the colorful airplanes yeah

There was a set that had sort of like photographic content and there were these sort of meshes or grids that one of them was like an airplane sort of taking off but it was kind of contorted and there were almost like polygons kind of growing out of it and stuff I think it was Okay, yeah, that was an AI.

But I did some where I combined airplane images with Hans Hofmann paintings, speaking of color. And that came out really, so that's something I could screen share if you want.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's see, they were in a show on artsy. Hold on, let me bring up the page. I have some pages up already, but I didn't know. I'll just share my whole screen. I think that'll be easiest. So this is a show I did with the company Playform and through artsy called the dream within a dream with a bunch of other really great artists and the pieces I had in it were these airplane pieces. And they're based on photographs of airplanes from the web, and then it was an AI algorithm that does style transfer so the style was Hans Hofmann paintings.

Anne Spalter

And I thought it actually did a really great job, taking the colors from his paintings and repurposing. Them.

Wow, that's really interesting.

The images come out a little bit low res, which is one of the reasons they were grouped together like this, but I think it actually works better seeing more than one at a time.

Did you, how is that style determined? Was that something that was in the system or did it like analyze a whole bunch of Hoffman paintings and then.

Find it for you in my giant list of Playform pieces and then you can see exactly how it works. Planes to Hoffman style.

Yeah remember Patrick look he had mentioned that he was doing work with Playform as well.

Yeah so the inputs to it the inspiration set. It loads in here yet are a bunch of airplanes that I just grabbed from the web. And similarly, screen grabbed a bunch of Hans Hofmann paintings. And then you can see the process that it goes through. So it starts out kind

Of

Monochrome like, you know, and it keeps iterating and iterating. So each one of these things that you see down here, like we're on the 17th iteration. And it's using all of the images together in the AI algorithm to try to make things look like, you know, the way the final images look in terms of their colors and style attributes.

Wow, that's really interesting.

So you kind of cooking it and cooking it until you get something that you like. Some of the intermediate things are nice too, like with this weird pink mist in there.

Can you enlarge that a little bit in any way? Sadly, no.

Like this is it only comes out. I think this algorithm is 512 pixels wide.

Oh, I see. Gotcha.

Yeah. You need to do some AI upscaling on it afterward usually to get it good enough to print.

Interesting. Yeah. So I guess this kind of blends into the next question, which is about your process. Is like, you know, could you tell us a little bit about how, you know, you got to this point of working with AI and maybe like how you initially started with using computers in your work? Like I know that you, you know, when you said you were doing these images of like Mick Jagger and stuff like that, were those like hand drawings? I was like 15

Then. Gotcha.

So at what point did the computer come into your work? And how long did it take you to get your, your artistic practice?

Not for quite a while after that. I actually at first was really opposed to the idea of artists using the computer in their work. I was traditionally trained. I felt like the artwork had to come through your hand to be legitimate. So I fought the idea until I ended up working in New York and the banking world was great because I made more money than I practically ever made since. But you worked a million hours a week. So I had money to get a studio, but no time to go to a studio. And I began using art programs on my computer. Then if my boss walked by, I could click and be in Excel. And then he left doing my artwork again. And when I went back to RISD for graduate school, I thought, oh, I'm done with that computer stuff. I only did that out of necessity.

Anne Spalter

But I really began to miss it. I missed the very powerful things that the computer can do, like change colors as much as it can. I really wanted to be able to do whatever it was you want without getting a bunch of green muddy paint as the result or erasing through a piece of paper. That flexibility, the ability to undo things and save different versions and scale things. So many things that now we take for granted using the computer, but were new to me as an artist. So I began then trying to incorporate the computer into my work and have a blend of traditional and digital in the work, which has continued to be a theme. And I think that's what I've been doing throughout my work. And that was also how I ended up. I really wanted to take a course that would teach me more about using the computer in my work.

Anne Spalter

And there weren't any to take. So the head of painting asked me if I would teach one. And it is a little bit like the one I'm reading, The Blind. But when you start teaching something, you really learn it better. And especially when I began also working with the computer science department at Brown and Andy Van Dam there, who has really helped found the field of computer graphics. And I think that's where I really started to learn about the technical side of it. So I really began to understand the craft of it and the technology behind it and ended up writing my book, The Computer and the Visual Arts.

Interesting. So when you say you were combining traditional and digital media, in what way, how did you actually execute the pieces? Or like, could you tell me a little bit more about, you know, how you combine those two sort of working styles or paradigms?

I don't have any pictures from grad school on my website, but I did. I used collage. So I would print things out and stick them on and draw around them. I did a lot of photo printing where I would make an image and print it in positive or negative, depending on the process, and then expose some kind of printing plate to light using the image. So you have a picture. You have a beautiful, you know, etching or lithograph afterward. But it had, you know, this digital quality to it.

Interesting. Yeah, it reminds me, like when I was in undergrad, I was taking, I was a studio art major and my concentration was in painting. But I also did a bunch of design courses and did a graphic design internship in one of the summers. And I remember it was really the, it was the sort of student TAs that knew. Photoshop and knew some of the early like versions of the Adobe tools, the actual instructors of the classes, you know, they, they didn't really have any idea how to use it at the time. This is early nineties. And I remember during that internship, that was the first time I encountered, you know, digital typography.

Colin Goldberg

There was a Mac at the place I was working at, and we would use it to do typesetting where we would print things out of this. I don't even know exactly what the piece of hardware was, but it would print out a strip of type. And then we'd use a waxing machine and actually paste it up onto boards and bring it into the dark room and shoot stats. But that I can relate to that idea of, you know, that transition period of when things started being done digitally. And so, you know, an interesting time to be working for sure.

Yeah. I mean, some people were encouraging and interested. But I also got a lot of pushback. I had visiting critics come from New York who literally refused to even look at my work. You know, not that they saw it and said, I'm not into this, but I will not look at it because you use the computer. So the situation has definitely improved for those.

Yeah. That was really one of the main reasons why that has driven me to move forward with this Techspressionism project is the sort of prejudice that I experienced. Working digitally. In many, in many cases. I remember when I was living in Boston, there were galleries all up and down Newbury street. And I brought in a bunch of my digital drawings to one of them. And the dealer was just like, you know, pretty much the same response. He wouldn't even look at them. And I remember setting up shop on a bench in front of the gallery, like that weekend and just laid my prints out, you know, sort of like the busking style and, and a bunch of people bought the prints. So I felt very, very, very. Vindicated, but.

You know, Watched and notice. Have an example of combining the two things. Go back to screen share for a second. That's more recent. So I used in the same program play form. This is another algorithm that kind of morphs one set to another. And I started out with images of my own work. Just captured from my Instagram feed. And then my set of images of airplanes from the web. And it tries to take those circular things. And by iterating and iterating and learning as it goes, make them valid members of that second set of images, those airplanes. So it's kind of trying to change them into what it decided the airplanes were. And in the process, it made these really, I thought super cool, wild things that looked like UFOs. And I was reading. There's a small book by Carl Jung called flying saucers, the myth of things seen in the sky.

Anne Spalter

And he talks about how people see UFOs in troubled times. Out of a desire for someone just to come from outer space and save us from ourselves. So that has seemed relevant. To conditions in the U S for several years now. Yeah. And I loved all the images that it made and it made literally thousands of images.

Anne Spalter

But there were just 256 pixels across. So I wanted to do something with them, but there wasn't really a way to print them or make videos from them directly in the digital world. And that year, which was last year, the spring break art show in New York. Which has a theme every year had the theme of excess. And I thought, well, I have this excess of images through the process because it's generated so many little pieces of art. So I wanted to make something like this and then use it as a reference for other artists to come up with new pieces of art. So I created these little compositions and I wanted to do a proposal based on that. But I really struggled with how to bring them out into the real world in a way that other people could see them. And at the same time I got a residency at mass MoCA.

Anne Spalter

So I had access to a real galleries studio space where I could use traditional media if I wanted. Unlike my apartment or I didn't really want to be painting.

And I mean, so you actually executed them by hand then based on the images that the computer generated. That's really that's really interesting. Yeah.

It was sort of super high tech. And the most low tech traditional solution came together in a way that.

That's really cool. Like I know that Frank Stella, a lot of his work, I think even, you know, maybe in the 80s was the computer was used in some ways in the compositional. Can you hear me now?

Hello.

Can you hear me now? Testing testing.

I hear you now. So maybe something. Oh, OK. OK, go ahead. I'm going to.

Yeah. So that painting.

Yeah.

That reminded me of, I believe, Frank Stella's work from, like maybe the 80s or 90s, you know, involved computers in terms of the way that they were composed, but not necessarily in terms of the execution. And that's really interesting. Yeah. I have a bunch of work that I did actually when I did a residency down in Key West.

Colin Goldberg

There weren't any large format printers or tools like that. So I did some work where I drew the pieces digitally and then projected them. And then sort of executed them by hand as like pen and ink drawings, gouache and stuff like that. So I can relate to that idea. And there's something that, you know, I think people, if they see that it's oil on canvas, it adds like an instant level of legitimacy to the piece. You know that something that's digitally executed, you know, we're still waiting for that day where it's kind of, you know, considered to be at the same level of legitimacy, I think.

But it's absolutely true. And I've been doing this art fair for I think this is my fifth year that I was in it. And usually I might sell like one or two pieces. And this year when I made all oil paintings, I basically sold out my whole room.

Nice.

It's much easier for people, I think, to understand it, to read it as fine art, to make a decision to buy it. And yeah. Interesting. We're still fighting.

Yeah. So that sort of answer is I was going to ask you, you know, so how do you actually execute them or execute these images or manifest them as physical objects? So that's really interesting to hear. Like, I know that, you know, there are a lot of artists out there that send their work out to be painted like in China or they get turned into rugs by like artisans and stuff. But it's nice to see, you know, somebody who's actually, you know, executing the painting themselves by hand, you know.

Yeah.

I've done drawings based on them as well or trying to combine the different things.

Huh. That's really interesting.

To me it's harder to do the computer part. So I don't know.

And I know that you've been getting into the NFT world too, right? With crypto art and stuff like that. Could you share a little bit about that? Like how you got involved in it or, you know, and maybe for the people who don't know what it is, maybe a little bit of an explanation on it.

Yeah, sure. I mean, this is kind of similar to how I ended up teaching it. I was asked to be on a panel that was going to be hosted on SuperRare, which is one of the sites that sells crypto art and discuss collecting NFTs. And I had never made one or collected one. So it inspired me to learn about them. And at first, maybe also similarly to the crypto art. I was very skeptical. So the idea is you make an image and you tokenize it, which is essentially making it like an item of cryptocurrency. But instead of being exchangeable the way one Bitcoin is exchangeable for another Bitcoin, it's a unique token. And that's why they're called non fungible tokens or NFTs as well. So they're kept track of on the blockchain and anyone can see it. But there's only one owner at a time. And when I first looked at it, I said, this is preposterous.

Anne Spalter

Why would anyone buy a blockchain? Why would anyone buy a file to look at it online? They could go to my website and look at it all they want. I could just download this. I didn't really understand it at all. And Jason Bailey, who's an art critic and writer and artist also himself, has written some good pieces on this and helped in my education about it. And the concept really grew on me. And I thought, you know what? This is this is this sort of native world for these things. They're made on the computer. They live on the blockchain. And you can buy and sell them and everyone can see the whole provenance, you know, every owner of the piece and how much they bought it for. So it brings a level of transparency to the art world that I think is sorely lacking.

Anne Spalter

And because of, you know, the way the ledger is verified all over, the chance of fraud or misattribution is pretty much zero, which is also extremely different from the regular art world where apparently something between 20% and 30% of the people who buy 20% and 60% of all artwork is either fake or misattributed.

Anne Spalter

Wow. Yeah. So now I'm really obsessed with the whole concept of crypto art and NFTs. And I started out making one. I can bring up my super rare site with the screen share. Are you seeing it?

Yep.

I started out making. Actually, I guess I started with videos. So I did this little video of a spaceship over New York City. Based on footage I had shot in the 3D model that was actually based on an AI piece. And I did a series with day and sunset and night. But then made a bunch of still images. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it really should have video. Or maybe 3D. Maybe also sound things that you can't experience through a printer. You know, traditional art making.

That makes sense.

So it's not so.

These words fly back and forth. Learning how to play the piano during a concert. During the pandemic. So. Here's another one of the space. Kind of floats around in space and then has this interaction with an asteroid.

And they lose their. And they lose their. And they lose their.

And they loop around. And I've had good luck selling them. And they've also really been fun to make. And these are from a project I'm working on right now. Also in. Play form with. Gems. So it's sort of creating.

I think I saw some of those. I get, I get the mailings from super rare. And then I saw. Wow. New artwork from Anne Spalter, you know, so I went in and checked it out. And I'm starting to get my feet wet in NFTs as well. Just, you know, and I had the same.

Reaction.

That you described in terms of like, you know, who would really. Pay all this money for a JPEG or a little MP4 file. But then when I saw that there's a true secondary market. You know, it's almost as if. You know, like with cryptocurrency itself. You know, like with cryptocurrency itself. Like as long as there's a consensus that there's value attributed to it. Like as long as there's a consensus that there's value attributed to it. That's what. What makes it true, you know? And, and I, you know, I definitely had spent time making things.

Colin Goldberg

Like experimental videos and stuff like that when I was in grad school and just never knew. What to do with them really other than post them on YouTube or what am I going to ever do with this? You know? And it seems like. And if he's really provide. You know, a context for a lot of the work that is being done. There's no such thing as the digital art world that is purely digital that never really had. A means of consumption before. So it's, it's really interesting. It's an interesting phenomenon for sure.

And then you can share your collection with friends. Very easily. They don't have to come to your. House especially great during the pandemic.

Right.

Secondary market. There is a thriving secondary market and artists get a percentage of each sale. Yeah.

I saw that. I actually. Actually, you know, I had been waiting, I guess, SuperRare sort of closed off there. You know, they're not adding any new artists. So I set up an account on Rarible, which is more of like a community owned, you know, NFT marketplace just to experiment. And, you know, I saw that, you know, it's just it's really it's you know, the subculture with NFTs reminds me a lot of street art in a way that it's a lot of artists, you know, working under a handle in the same way that street artists a lot of times do. And there's sort of a level of anonymity and just the language in terms of like artists have drops and stuff like that. You know, it's kind of different lingo from kind of the traditional. Fine art world way of talking about art. And I think it's you know, it's interesting and it's refreshing and definitely, you know, the blockchain itself.

Colin Goldberg

I learned about it at first from another expressionist artist, a guy, Andrea Bonaceto, who joined the group a couple of months ago. But he's you know, he's a blockchain, I guess, entrepreneur in London. But he also does portrait art and really interesting work. And he kind of explained the concept to me. And turned me on to the idea. So then I started dabbling around with it. And it's really just a whole a whole other world, like another art world.

Yeah, it's completely separate. Yeah. I've had one sort of traditional art collector buy an NFT. I think the getting set up with cryptocurrency is challenging for people. And that's been a barrier. You know, there's a number of steps required, as you know. Yeah.

So do you do you create work that's unique? Like, you know, are all of your NFTs uniquely created as for that purpose? Or do you ever make NFTs from work that's already been created before or, you know, additioned? Or is it all basically created for the platform?

It's been both, but I'd say mostly created for the platform. And actually doing that has influenced. My videos, which all used to be about three minutes long. And now in the show I have up in Boston at Boston Cyber Arts Gallery, I have videos that are like 30 seconds.

Gotcha.

Which were bizarre to me before. But now it's sort of like evolution of the GIF, maybe. But having a looping thing, if it's done right, I think can be very effective.

Yeah, it does remind me of that. Like I got involved in web work right at the beginning of the web, you know, and was doing director based. CD-ROM development prior to that. So I remember the first time that I saw a GIF, you know, within I think it was Netscape browser, you know, and it just blew my mind. And then developers and designers started using these tiled GIF backgrounds that were like insane, you know, that's kind of gone away. But, you know, but this is really interesting because, you know, I struggled with so what do I what do I release if I'm trying to make an NFT? And. And. And I was thinking, well, I could take some digital drawings that I haven't released before or some video, you know, experimental videos that. But then, you know, I started thinking more and it does make sense that and what I've been seeing is more of these short form videos.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, and in some of the other marketplaces, too, it's like not all art either. It's these weird like trading cards, you know, almost like, yeah, it's very strange. You know, it's kind of like Pokémon type type collecting, but like evolved into some strange crypto hybrid.

But yeah, that's one of the things I think is great about this Techspressionism group that you started is trying to have, you know, art isolated from the digital design, the scientific experimentation that really follows more in the theory of, you know, the regular fine art work. And I think that's a really good example of the world of expressing something, you know, from within you personally.

Absolutely. You know.

Yeah.

And I think that also, you know, part of it, too, was like when I was a graduate student, I noticed that like I was I went to grad school with Patrick, who, you know, also when we were in Bowling Green and did our MFAs together for computer art. And I remember, you know, most of the undergraduate students really were only concerned in getting. Involved in industry in terms of, you know, being placed in a Pixar or electronic arts type studio.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, it was, you know, Patrick and I as graduate students, we were more concerned with the fine art context and looking at what the computer could be used for within that context. But very few of the younger students, even, you know, if you said the term digital art to them, that wasn't even a component. Of what that meant, you know, and in terms of the curriculum to generally speaking, you know, is more about the tools and learning the specific usages of the tools, but not necessarily talking about using them for a personal expression.

Colin Goldberg

And I think that's, you know, when I would see the students creating their own work for that purpose, though, it was always amazing, you know, and really interesting to see. So, yeah, that's really.

Yeah, I'm on Super Rare and then another site called Viv3, viv3.com.

Is that another crypto, another NFT?

Yeah, they have a different technology that they're working with called Flow that enables you to do smarter contracts. So I don't understand all the technical details of it, but I think you could do things like if I did a collaborative piece on Super Rare, but there was no way to automatically share.

Anne Spalter

You know, money when it's sold. So I would send money to someone else. So things like that where you can send money to different creators and just have more information and terms in the contract.

Interesting.

Currently can have just with the technology that Super Rare is using. And then there's another website that is very cool that I will share. And this kind of ties into the art collection. So our art collection is early digital artwork. And a lot of it is generative. And now, obviously, there's generative artwork that artists are doing. But combining that with the NFT world, it's not open. See, it's artblocks.io.

Anne Spalter

It's generative work that's minted on demand.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

So. This is a set of images created. So some of these are still other ones are still available. They go online and they sell out in like five minutes. But so the founder of the site wrote this program that makes this beautiful rainbowy squiggle. And when you buy a piece, you don't know exactly what it will look like.

Interesting. It's almost.

Like the collector is commissioning the AI to.

Yeah, it's not AI. It's I think a lot of the artists are using processing.

Oh, OK.

Or another language like that. So it's making generative artwork that is similar to. That's spelling my name wrong. Similar to early artwork. That was, you know, programmed. Yeah. And created. By artists. Like. Manfred Mohr. Who did all these investigations of the cube. So, you know, his algorithms would spit out many, many things and then he would select ones to make into final prints. So each one is a unique drawing that's printed.

Can you tell us a little bit about the collection site that you're showing? Yeah.

When I was working on my book. Now I've been collecting these. You can see they're on the site. When I was working on my book, I began trying to find out, you know, who were the artists who pioneered this field and where are they now and what did they have to say about it? And because there was so much hostility about computer art, they all knew each other. They had been working sometimes for decades making this beautiful work. But it was not really welcomed by galleries or museums or the art world in general.

Anne Spalter

Try to show some while I'm talking. And Michael Spalter was an art history major. And he said, wow, this is like every art history movement in the contemporary world, you know, that I've ever heard of. There are these people doing this new innovative thing. And the Academy hates them. But the artwork's really beautiful. And they're doing this. And maybe we should try to, you know, be supporting these people and collecting some of these. And we began to slowly get some pieces.

Anne Spalter

And then it just grew and grew. And because other people weren't interested, they were, at least when we started, much more affordable. I think compared with a lot of contemporary art, they're still quite affordable. This is one by one of my favorite artists, Vera Molnar. Who just turned 96. And she began doing really computer-based things. She had a computer, imaginary computer where, you know, it was a systems-based artwork where she wrote down rules and made things based on it. And then when she discovered the computer, she, you know, was like, this is it. I'm definitely going to use this. But it's hard to have access to one. She actually went in during the student riots in 1968. Her husband worked at Comfort. She had a company with a computer. And everyone had left to escape the rioting.

Anne Spalter

And she went into the building and had all this time to work.

Wow.

And she's just created an amazing body of work that has been shown at MoMA and many different museums. The Center of Pompidou, she had a retrospective. So I think it's just beautiful, constructivist work. And she goes back and forth. Also, she makes acrylic paintings. And sometimes collages or other media-based work.

Anne Spalter

And then she also works on the computer. And it all really makes sense together.

Wow.

This is Desmond Paul Henry who repurposed bomb-sighting machines.

Yeah, Helen Harrison, actually. She told me about his work a few years back. And actually, I wrote a blog post about it a few years ago. It just really was amazing. It's striking. Yeah.

It's beautiful work. We also have work by some more recognizable people like David Hockney, who's really experimented with technology constantly from the Xerox machine, the Polaroid, and now also the computer. Going back to the beginning of the whole conversation on perspective, this is an enormous work. And it's this weird, weird perspective that incorporates all these different things. And on the easels are all different paintings. But the whole thing is digital, super high-res digital work.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So, it's amazing. He just continues to be creative and experimental. And he says he likes the iPad because he can draw and make art in bed. So, that's... I don't know if you have any more.

Nice.

Thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your particular collection.

Let's see. Let me... I think we covered a bunch of the questions across those screen shares. So, I guess one question is what interests you about Expressionism and sort of how did you come to get involved with it and, you know, like to hear your thoughts on the topic?

I think you wrote to me on Instagram.

I think, yeah, I think, well, Patrick actually mentioned that he knew you, and then your name came up also when I was putting this proposal together for an exhibition. And then I Googled you and then got the textbook, and then Patrick mentioned that he had known you, I guess, I think maybe in the context of Playform and some other things. And then, yeah, that's right, I reached out to you. And so, I mean, in terms of the ideas behind it, or, you know, like, I mean, basically Helen Harrison helped me kind of like come up with the working definition, which is, you know, an artistic approach that utilizes technology to, in the expression of emotional experience, you know, which is really just sort of building off of the conceptual framework of expressionism. And so, I mean, I think, yeah,

I think that's a really good point. And hold on, my dog's gotten hold of some crackers.

I don't think you should be eating those. All right. I think

Those crackers are gone. Let him puzzle that out. I don't think that'll hurt him. Where you'd go to a show and maybe some of the things were really art, fine art that would stand on their own, and then other things were obviously more technical experimentation. And I think it's all valid. But it. It's one of the reasons that the regular art world was less than welcoming.

Anne Spalter

Because someone would go and be, what is this? This isn't this is an artwork. So trying to have a group that's really focused on the artwork aspect of it, I think, is important.

Okay. And so the last question, I guess, is how do you see the future of art?

I think we might have covered that with some of the NFT. I'm hoping that continues to be popular. I think it might come down a little bit. There's been some sales for a really extreme amounts of money that don't completely make sense to me. But I think that it has a lot of potential. And even if artists don't all end up making crypto based artwork, that it could influence the regular art world and encourage more transparency.

Anne Spalter

And sort of ease of interface and use for people. And I think the pandemic has done that some as well with all the art shows that have been online. And you can see art. You can often even see prices. You don't have to go into a gallery in Chelsea and have someone sort of look at you condescendingly and have to ask for the price list. And then you don't know if it's the real price list. And you have to negotiate. If they don't think you're an important enough collector, they may not sell to you anyway. You know, it's a very bizarre world.

Oh, and one other thing that I've just thought of.

You have work up now at Boston Cyber Arts, right? Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and what's there?

I'm trying to move the dog in his lap. I don't think I'm going to be able to. Yes. So this is a really cool show called In the Future Everything Will Be Perfect that I conceptualized during what I thought was the heart of the pandemic. I don't know. It continues to go on. So who knows where we are in it. But it just seemed like things were so. Dark. And often my work is sort of dark. So I really wanted to make something that was just incredibly hopeful and positive. And.

Anne Spalter

So I made all these videos. And it's an interactive work. You see it through the window of the gallery. So it's completely COVID safe. And. So you could walk up and see something that has things in it. You would see. And these aren't big screens. So they're actually. You know, tall. They're 19 six. But these are prepped for Instagram. You'd see a video and you see the sort of magical ball. But nothing's in it. And then when the little camera that's associated with the screen recognizes that a face is out there. Things magically appear in the crystal ball. So it's like you're looking in and seeing.

Anne Spalter

All these cool futures.

Oh, wow. So the, so the pieces it's truly interactive. Yeah.

It is interactive.

And it's interacting through the window.

It's interacting through the window. Which, thank goodness it's working because I wasn't able to travel there because of the pandemic. So the whole thing was remote. Everything was shipped and installed by the gallery director and staff at the gallery. So, so they were really. Amazing, you know, working with an artist remotely to install it. So it's really, really challenging. And it's really, really challenging to have an artist come in and show up with a piece of technology that hasn't been tested in places. Is challenging.

Very cool. Yeah.

It's gotten some good press. And there are. There's a bunch of other videos in it as well. Some of which are also on super rare as NFTs and sort of a different format. And they're, they're more, a little bit darker.

Gotcha. Really interesting.

That's the show. And it is up until February 21st.

Awesome. Amazing. Well, I'd like to thank you again for coming in and doing the interview and also just for, you know, being involved with the Techspressionist community. I think, you know, that's really, that's really where I see it now. You know, people have asked me sort of, well, what is, what is it, you know, what is Techspressionism? And it seems a little, you know, I mean, I just don't feel completely comfortable calling it a movement. It just sounds pompous to me, but it's, it's also not just a group either, or a list of artists because I feel like, like when we're meeting up on zoom in those salons or on our discord, it really is like kind of like a community where the different artists get to know each other. They get to know each other's bodies. They get to know each other's work.

Colin Goldberg

And then when, and we've been working on this collab project now that Devante's come up with, which is really fun. You know, and I think it's just something, you know, that it, it just encourages the development of ideas, you know, this, this kind of discourse that I really, I missed since, you know, finishing my MFA, there really hasn't been a whole lot of the crits or things like that, you know, where it's artists talking with other artists about ideas. And, you know, it, it kind of like. Satisfies that for me. So I'm really glad to have you as part of the conversation and, you know, I appreciate your, your input on some of the language on the site, like on the movement page, because you're definitely a much more, you know, much more capable author than me or you're, you're an actual author.

Colin Goldberg

I have your book here, which is a little product placement. So, Anne's book. And yeah. Yeah. You know, and then I'm excited, you know, at the prospect of maybe you and I working together to, to put together a physical exhibition. I think that could be really cool. And, you know, especially with the component of your collection, which really contextualizes, I think what's going on now, you know, because really I think that's, that's a missing piece. And like right as I was getting started with this, I bought one of the books actually that was referenced in your book by Jay Z.

Colin Goldberg

So I'm really excited to have you on the show. It's beit in the book. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. And I'm really excited to have you on the show.

Colin Goldberg

And I'm really excited to have you on the show. Determine what our reality is yeah you know in terms of gibson

All the time with AI because you know at the end of count zero where there's the machine making the little like joseph cornell artworks totally

Totally and then and also like stevenson there was a book the diamond age where he's talking about nanotech and you know that the idea of like some you know in the future people have this box where there's a feed tube and it's feeding raw you know molecular material into it and just making things in their homes you know and then I see like there's a 3d printer now like we have a six-year-old there's a 3d printer called a toy box where it's basically they're just making toys you know and you download and there's an app and it's like wow this was like this was fiction you know and now here it is and I'm getting an ad for it on Instagram so it's pretty cool you know just seeing it's exciting how the future is now so all right well you know I really appreciate your time and you know there'll be links to your sites and stuff when this gets posted up on our YouTube channel and on Techspressionism.com so people can check out your work and I look forward to you know continuing to work with you thanks thank you so much okay

You