Presentation 7 // How Technology Changes Artist Interactions with Cultural Sources

Welcome, welcome to the artists of the American Maker Space in Qarshi in Uzbekistan. We are Techspressionist artists. I'll say what Techspressionism is in a moment. The topic of today's presentation is “How Technology changes artist interactions with cultural sources" My name is Stephen Paré and I am the moderator today. Let's say a few words about what Techspressionism is. "Techspressionism is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience."

Stephen Paré

And Techspressionism is also a global networked community of artists working with technology and all of us here today are Techspressionist artists. Techspressionism is a movement and it is open to other artists in the world. If you are interested in joining Techspressionism the web addresses are on the slide. What we offer is monthly meetings, monthly salons on Zoom and artists present and discussion. We also have smaller groups weekly working together once a week. The timing should be workable for evenings for artists in Uzbekistan.

Stephen Paré

Techspressionism is a global community, and we have artists from India, Iran, Europe, various European countries, lots of artists from the United States and Canada and I am leaving out other countries but we are aiming to be an international movement. So Uzbek artists are most welcome. The Techspressionist community has also been responsible for creating live exhibitions with pictures and videos hanging on walls and so on including in Uzbekistan and that's how we made this connection. Our exhibition in Uzbekistan took place at Urgench this past September, October and November and the show then moved to show in Samarkand. It took place at the contemporary art museum of Uzbekistan in Urgench. We thank Shirin Tashova, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Uzbekistan. My name is Stephen Paré.

Stephen Paré

I'm a digital artist and a mixed media artist and I will be moderating the panel of artists today. Our presenting artists today are Patrick Lichty, cha:), and Erin Ko. Hello, my name is Patrick Lichty

And I'm also presenting on behalf of my wife and partner Negin Ehtesabian. I want to thank everyone at the Qarshi American space for having us and also to Shirin Tashova for having us as part of her initiatives in Uzbekistan. My website is patlichty.com and neginete.com and we currently live in Winona, Minnesota in the United States after having been in Abu Dhabi then Cyprus and Istanbul, I \ wasn't in Tehran and Weimar Germany and then we're now in the United States since June of last year. One of our taglines as we say for our work is that art is a manifestation of life for us. So this is a little bit of information about us. I'm originally from Akron, Ohio. I lived in Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Austin, and Dubai. I do visual art, performance, music, and media, and I'm a co-founder of Techspressionism.

Patrick Lichty

I've been exhibiting visual art internationally since 1990. I've been part of the Venice, Whitney, Maribor, Performa and Yokohama biennials, and I'm also a Herb Alpert fellow. I'm also in a few museums. I'm part of the half of the NPT collective with my wife and partner Negin Ehtesabian, who studied at the University of Tehran and has over 40 illustrated books, has exhibited around the world and is also partner of was founder of Techspressionism Iran. She also is a medalist from the Sharjah book festival in the United Arab Emirates. Our work, House on the Water, it's in Hello Uzbekistan at the Contemporary Art Museum of Uzbekistan, Urgench, and also the Art Station Samarkand at Silk Road University. It's a metaphor for our journey as a family, as we've migrated from the United Emirates around the world on our way to finally being here in the United States, where we live, where we're waiting for, Negin's naturalization.

Patrick Lichty

We use cultural sources from our origins and where we lived. This could be the United States, Iran, Germany, where I picked up influences on German romanticism and Negin's metaphor for living on the water as being in uncertain times is an Iranian one and also research on the Persian water goddess Anahita. So this is the installation at CAMUZ or Urgench. It is work that tells the story in three stages. On one hand we have the central motif. The two sets of images to the sides showing the turbulent environment around us and then incorporating the two to as a metaphor for the house on the water that we live in now in the United States. So, if we're going to have a house on the water, we need a house. We used some artificial intelligence, but not all. We used Meshi.AI to create a 3D model of a house made of paper and origami and this is our favorite and we use this in visualization of our work.

Patrick Lichty

Negin also has been researching the goddess Anahita The Zoroastrian goddess of water and wisdom. I found this description of her that I really loved. The life-giving deity of the damp, the strong and the untainted. And this is one representation of her. So in this, we have the water that our house floats above and the goddess above us giving us life giving protection and you know being with us on the water, and to the sides are a couple research images on the goddess Anahita. So you know the image is based on research of the of Iranian legends of the water goddess influences on the next stage surrounding in 24-25 Negin was living in Weimar, Germany where she was studying there and I was there as much as I could. This was the home of German romanticism and here is the monument to the great cultural icons of German romanticism, Goethe and Schiller.

Patrick Lichty

There I rediscovered the work of Caspar Friedrich who was a great friend of Goethe’s and this is his famous piece The Wanderer Across the Sea of Fog which was is one of the iconic works of German romanticism. So I was studying this, and I realized that he was a great student of nature, of clouds, of fog, of water. And from this Goethe asked that he do an atlas of clouds for him being that Goethe was a subjective researcher of many things in nature being an early natural scientist.

Patrick Lichty

So, from this, Friedrich actually refused and from that I decided to take my interest and actually create two atlases of my own. I create other works, I created an atlas of clouds and an atlas of seas. From this we I took two pieces from these works as a representation of how I kind of feel romanticism reasserts itself within the contemporary age in terms of an anxiety about technology like artificial intelligence and also anxiety about things like climate change, global warming. And this is represented through the awe that the romantics felt about nature and its great power and how that power is intensifying.

Patrick Lichty

So House on the Water, it's a Persian metaphor. It means living in uncertain circumstances, which is primary in my life. It's also like the metaphor of living on shifting sand. So, it's a metaphor for our migration path from the UAE to Germany through all these other countries to Minnesota where we live on the Mississippi River, the nation's longest waterway. So, here we have actually a picture of the Mississippi River from near our home.

Patrick Lichty

And one of the two framing images from House on the Water, which has you know the t turbulent skies the river the goddess and then the house in which we live. So in many ways House on the Water as the installation is a depiction of our journey from throughout our time in migrating around the world.

Patrick Lichty

So our work is deeply informed by our culture of course from an individual and a collective and a mutual sense. It's a source from which we tell our stories who we are, and where we've been, and we tell a story of uncertain times, but one also of hope family and togetherness. We want to thank you. That's Negin and I. And actually during a trip to Germany in Berlin you can find me on Instagram at Patlichty_art and you can find Negin at neginete_art.

Patrick Lichty

That's us Patrick Lichty and Negin Ehtesabian. I'm at patlichty.com and she's at neginete.com we are from Winona, Minnesota. Thank you so much. Thank you,

Patrick. We will turn next to cha:). Hello everyone. I'm cha:), an intermedia artist and sculptor, currently working in the spatial internet at Loop Art Critique which you can find at loop.Onland.io. I'm in a couple of museum collections, the Gallery of Art and Architecture in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Rhizome Artbase for Nasty Nets, the new museum in New York City, New York.

cha :)

What are cultural sources? The images contained in and or utilized to build a model, an AI model for generative artificial intelligence. Text image generation, for example, imageet_16384. All the media found at the internet archive. Now, this is a selfie 00112. It's a generative AI text-to-image generation using the prompt artificial intelligence. This case asking VGAN VQ GAN plus clip plus imageet_16 384 model to simulate its understanding of what artificial intelligence is and/or looks like. When I took that image and put it into an image to 3D AI to generate a 3D model. And here we see the 3D model, which was a video.

cha :)

And here we are in the spatial internet. We see both 2D file, a PNG or JPG and then a GB of the 3D version. And this in this space we can walk around and through them. Thank you. Thank you, cha:). Thank you, Stephen. We will turn next to Erin Ko. She's a futurist and

She's a veteran game developer. She's an early pioneer in web development. Ah, here we go. Take it away, Erin. Okay. Can you hear me? You can. Yeah. Yeah, I can hear. Okay. So, hi everyone. My name is Erin. I'm an interdisciplinary artist. I work in many different mediums. Please check out my work when the bandwidth is better because I think a lot of this stuff plays better on video. I wanted to talk about technology and culture and art as always existing together. I work with, I work with augmented reality quite frequently. I work with images of myth and ritual and the esoteric.

Erin Ko

These things are the most useful tools we have to explore stories about ourselves. I am not really sure. I feel like I skipped some slides. That's okay. We'll just keep going. I got interested in working with technology around the 90s as part of a practice that incorporates many analog mediums, painting, sculpture, installation, moving image. And because technology is such a key part of our lives and our culture, I feel that it's also a very important tool to be aware of, at least for myself, but honestly for many artists, I think it's good for them to have a seat at the Table. You can see with these images on the left, this is the canvas as it is. On the right, this is the augmented layer. A lot of this stuff starts off as street art and becomes canvases in the studio. New York is a mythical place and a source of a lot of cultural influence for me.

Erin Ko

So, you'll see a lot of that woven through my images. This is an image of Icarus, actually which I wanted to talk a little bit about in terms of culture, art, and technology. Icarus, the ancient Greek myth about the son of a great artist and inventor who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings and was destroyed by his ego and perhaps his hubris around the use of technology.

Erin Ko

These are stories we've been telling ourselves for a long time. And it's a central dilemma, no matter what the technology is how to use technology responsibly. I often use fire as the most basic example, even when talking about digital media, because if you think about what you can do with fire, you can make someone a meal or you can burn their house down. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This particular piece is also about the idea of rising to success, whatever this means. Where I have the profile of the city. Here I have meditating astronauts which I'm very fond of. Here we seek transcendence through technology. So and I have my niece as a stand in but a childlike version of Icarus. This is really where we're at.

Erin Ko

I'm also into shared experiences and collective consciousness. Especially in the west we suffer from the cult of individual where of hyper-individualism. I'm really interested in making connections between people through art and through experiences and offering opportunities for people to collaborate and build artwork together. So this is a piece called flow. It is layers of flowing fabric. I didn't put any videos in the interest of streaming, but you can see a video online somewhere. This piece, people use their phones, they text messages to the art, it populates, it fills the room, and it becomes kind of a collective collaborative magnetic poetry, where your words get mixed with other people's. And this is akin to society. It's akin to prayer. It's akin to a philosophy closer to Ubuntu philosophy, which says, I am a person through other people.

Erin Ko

You are a different person to your parents than you are to your children than you are to your teachers than you are to the person in the cafe. But they are all you. So we have this central conflict especially in 2026 in a hyper capitalist world. This conflict between the individual and the collective. And I like to explore that. Of course, AI is one of the most controversial game-changing tools on the horizon right now. This is a series of works that I've done over the years. The first earliest in 2019 and the latest was just last year under different circumstances, I think that we might consider AI a miracle and the expression of the collective because it is a collaborative effort. It is all the things that everyone has put online combined. And without the hyper-individualism of capitalism, We might consider this a step towards divinity or a step towards self-reflection that we didn't have before.

Erin Ko

I think it's very interesting that you can tap into this huge collective of thought and creativity. I'm very into merging and building worlds. So, I have a project going right now which uses all of my techniques. It combines real world with augmented reality, with performance, with AI, and with music. And it's an interactive musical.

Erin Ko

And lastly, I want to say in terms of technology, culture and art, the history of these things is a conversation that humanity is having with itself forever that we will always have. So, on the left we have this illustration that was done in 1851. It was very directly copied in 1970 to make a very famous album cover. And we have a 2026 rendition by myself with the help of our great collective, the AI. These things will continue on. This is who we are. And this is how we understand who we are. And, that's it. Thank you very much. All right. Well,

I hope we've at least stimulated your imagination. Do you, I would like to find out about you as artists. What do you do as artists? Are you using technology? Are you using your computers? Yes. Mostly 3D models. What are you doing? We are basically building 3D models and we are printing using the I'm not sure whether it's visible or not. Yes, it's visible.

Discussion

Yeah. Yeah. This is a 3D model. The second thing is this one. It's like a llama maybe. Yeah. Then the brain itself it's like Yeah. Okay. Well, I hope that some of the presentations have inspired people to experiment and do something really wild. That's one of the things that were interesting. What I wanted to do was the presentations.

Discussion

So most of the students who are in art school I just wanted to reach out to them and most of them they do not know English well. So using your slides, I want to explain what you said earlier and then explaining the ways in Uzbek, not in English, so I can better understand and think out of the box so they can further do something big.