Salon 10 // Spalter, Gerbarg, Karver, Gellis, Bradley

You ready Davo? You got your I'm ready to go. All right, cool. All right. Hello everyone and welcome. Today is February 2nd, 2021, and this is our 10th salon. It doesn't feel like it's been that long, but it has. We are, we have had 10 meetings every two weeks the past couple of months now. My name is Davonte Bradley, otherwise known as Davo. I will be your moderator this salon. Our timekeeper is Colin Goldberg, the man that kind of kicked off this whole movement and the community.

Davonte Bradley

And recorded session will be two hours. We have already started recording so it will wrap up around 2pm Eastern time. So how this kicks off. So we will have a session. We have five artists were actually missing one this time around. So we have four artists are presenting already today. So if you want to present. Let me know in the chat. We have room for one more so first come first serve.

Davonte Bradley

We'll have our artists presents. They will be 10 minutes or so presentations. And then from there, we will be going on to a sort of a business planning, kind of session. Meeting. And just talking about what's going on. Oh, I forgot to add to edit the document but yeah why don't we do the interest in between. So that way like, you know, if anyone has to say a quick hello. Okay, get into the boring part. The boring part.

Davonte Bradley

Yeah. So after the presentations will do a little intro for anybody that wants to introduce themselves to the group. And then we'll go on to the more boring stuff. The boring stuff. Yeah, so like the status of what's going on and, you know, ideas for discussion that all that all that stuff sounds fun but you know it's fun it's enjoyable. I didn't mean it. No offense. It's all good.

Davonte Bradley

Alright, so without further ado, is and Spalter in the room. And here you are here. Okay. So, and will be our first presenter for this meeting. Please feel. Please mute yourself. While the presentation is going on and save your questions for the end. All right, sound good everyone. Oh, and one quick thing so anyone who's presenting, please make use of the chat window to paste in any links that you might find relevant, and then you know people can follow along by going to the site. I click here. And then you can see your Instagram, your website or whatever gallery that might have your work hosted the all those links you can post in the chat.

Davonte Bradley

If you have any questions about how to use zoom. You can also put that in the chat, and either I or Colin will get to that as soon as we can. Alright, so we good to go. Yes, yes. All right. All right, and you have the floor.

Alrighty. Thanks for having me explain my artwork briefly I've been using the computer in my art for a really long time so I'm just going to give a brief overview and then if anyone has more questions or anything asked me offline in the chat and up at my email in there as well. Basically I started out hating the computer and not believing it had any role in art making until I found myself using it. When I didn't have studio space in New York and I had a, an office job. I started using the computer to make artwork so I could just click on Excel when my boss came by and otherwise be doing what I really wanted to do instead of working at my office job. And when I returned to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design and Painting. I found I wasn't ready to give up all these powerful things that the computer had to offer terms of visual thinking.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And it's a long story but I ended up writing a book called The Computer in the Visual Arts to help me. And I taught the first ones at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. Back when some students I had to teach them how to use a mouse. So, a long time ago, and have been using it ever since but because my training was traditional and painting and drawing. I usually try. I go back and forth between the computer and analog media and I enjoy putting them together a lot. In the course of writing the book.

Anne Morgan Spalter

I'm going to. Share my screen. If I can just share Safari. In the course of writing the book, I wanted to meet the pioneers of the field and find out what their story was. And it turned out there were these amazing artists who had been working for decades, creating beautiful work and the traditional art world really hated them. And Michael Spalter who is a digital art history major at Brown said wow this is like every art movement in the world. I've ever studied the Academy hates these people they're doing amazing work no one understands what they're doing. And we began to collect digital art and we now have.

Anne Morgan Spalter

I think the largest private collection of early computer art, and because we come out of academia and want and are proselytize errs of computer art. We have put everything online, which I have since discovered is unusual for private collection. So it's that Spalter digital.com. And that in the chat as well. And that in the chat as well. I'll do it I'm not sharing my screen. But you could go on there and see all of the artwork and read about it and learn more about the different artists. Some of the people you may never have heard of others like David Hawk me you will have. But it's a great resource if you're interested in the early days of digital art.

Anne Morgan Spalter

For my own work after graduating. I lived in Rhode Island for a while but then I moved to Brooklyn, New York and began doing a lot of public works and installations. And I started working with digital art. So this one was about a year ago today in January and February. And in Brooklyn, and these are huge inflated spheres with digital printing on them in a tropical oasis for people to get away from the winter in Brooklyn. So you can see other installations on this page. And recently I've been using AI to do crypto art and to make images in general and I want to briefly show some of that process. This is a program called Playform, which anyone can use and it's a tool for artists to make AI work.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And I've been using it for a while as you can tell by how many projects I have to scroll through. But I want to show one of the first ones, which is called Circles to Planes if anyone sees it. Here we go. And just to show you how it works. You put in two sets of images. I put in images from my Instagram which were circular and photographs of airplanes from the web. And it matches them together in these I thought fascinating ways.

Anne Morgan Spalter

Making really cool compositions that I would not have come up with on my own. I got into an art fair where I wanted to show these but I couldn't print them because they were only 256 pixels across. So I ended up making oil paintings based on them. And that I think sums up a lot of things in my artwork because it's sort of cutting edge digital but also old school at the same time.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And I'm currently working on a series of prints with this company of AI gems. Ah, right. Which are these crazy looking gems just based on photos of gems. So it's really fun and I encourage people to explore that. I think that's the whirlwind overview. And if people have questions I can answer now, I will. And otherwise I will put my email in the chat. Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention is I've been doing crypto art, selling work on SuperRare.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And you can see some of that on my website and the rest of it on SuperRare or Viv3. V-I-V-3-D-R-A-R-E. And that's been really fun. And if anyone has questions about NFTs or crypto art, I'm happy to answer them. Okay. I think that's everything I wanted to say. Can you expand a little bit about what exactly crypto art is? Yes, absolutely. It is art images or videos or 3D models that are tokenized. Oh, you probably couldn't see what I was showing you because I stopped sharing my screen. I'll put in links. Just like a piece of cryptocurrency is a token that's on the web, the art pieces are actually tokens using usually the Ethereum blockchain. But they're not interchangeable with each other because obviously each artwork is unique, unlike one Bitcoin, which you can trade for any other Bitcoin.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And that's why they're called non-fungible tokens, basically non-interchangeable tokens or NFTs. And you put them up there. The nice thing about it is that everyone can see the art that you put up. It's not like a private thing, like a gallery where you need a VIP invite. Everyone can see the pricing of every transaction of the work. And it brings a lot of transparency to the art market that it has never had before, which I find personally exciting.

Anne Morgan Spalter

Absolutely. Thank you. And can you talk, could you expand a little bit about the, you know, how the AI works? So you bring two different categories of pools of photos in. Yeah. It's two different categories. It's different algorithms. But that one, essentially it starts with an image set, like I started with the circles. And then it runs through an iterative process where it's looking at the second image set and it's trying to create another member of that second image set that's a valid member of that set from the first images. So it looks at the second set, it analyzes them, it starts changing the first set. And then each iteration, it looks at members of that first set and says, in this case, you know, are these airplanes? Are these like the airplane photos? And if it's not really like them, then it iterates again.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And it keeps going until, ideally it would make something that looked exactly like a photo of an airplane that you've never seen. I actually found it interesting when it wasn't successful. But if you look online, you can see faces that are constructed that way. It looks like a portrait of a person, but that person never existed. It's amazing.

Anne Morgan Spalter

So it is actually learning through its generative repetition. Yep. It becomes better and better with every repetition. And it's a little bit creepy. It's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And I think I read about crypto banks. Is it the same? I think it was on OpenSea website. OpenSea is a website that you can see actually pretty much all the crypto art that anyone has made. Super rare. You have to be accepted to it. And then you can see it. And then you just see the artwork that's on super rare. So there's a lot of I would like to say like your work is amazing. Those installation and also online work. It's really, really good. And also the collecting you are doing. It's amazing job. Thank you.

Anne Morgan Spalter

Dava, were you raising hands or the old fashioned way or? Oh, Ross. Hi. Hey, hi, Ian. Good. I'm fascinated too, I have to say. And I'm such an old fogey in a way in terms of drawing and painting. But I do feel we're in this new visual universe of images of images of images. And there's something so honest and weird and true to me somehow when I see some of these pieces that are done in AI. And I wanted to ask you, Ian, when you're doing when you're like the circle set, are the circles yours or you got them from somewhere else? Or how did that or are they both sets things that you put in that are your work or? Yeah, the circles. I just took off my own Instagram. Gotcha. Okay. So I wonder where your how do you feel the process? Where do you find it interesting in terms of your control as an artist or uncontrolled?

Anne Morgan Spalter

But when you see the mixtures that happen, do you look at one, whether creepy or not, and find your artist's eye going, oh, I only want to use this one. And then I want to go out to a painting. Do you find there's a certain discernment of still using that artist's eye, even if you're not, you know? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let me go back for a second because a lot of them do not work out.

Anne Morgan Spalter

So Crystals and Gems was a home run, I thought. It made really cool things. I mixed gem and fire images, which I thought would make really fantastic stuff. And I got this. It's like nothing. Cool. It's just a lot of nothing. So there's a ton of experimentation. Absolutely. It's very, very fascinating work. Thank you. Thanks.

Anne Morgan Spalter

Okay. So we're just about 10 minutes. Yeah. Oh, is that you remember? That worked out good. Yeah. No, I've been timing it, even though, you know, we're sort of playing it loose here. But cool. Yeah. I mean, I could talk forever. So it seemed better to do something fast and then people can ask me more.

Anne Morgan Spalter

Could you paste in? I don't know if you did. You paste in links to SuperRare or any of the other NFT platforms? Yeah. Let me see. Yeah. And do. And that one that did that you showed me on the interview that was generative NFTs on demand. That was really interesting, too. Absolutely. Artblocks. Artblocks actually runs code and you buy an iteration of a piece from that generative code. You don't know what it's going to look like before you buy it. And it connects to me very closely to early digital artwork. So I'm very excited about it. And I'll put a link in the chat.

Anne Morgan Spalter

And I'll put SuperRare in there as well. Thank you, Anne. All right. And these sites, I'm actually probably going to add them to our resources in our Discord. Just so that in case people miss them here. They still have access to them afterwards. So just making a note of that. All right. So is there anything further?

Anne Morgan Spalter

I think we're good to go on moving on to our next presenter.

Darcy, are you ready to present? Yes, I am. All right. You have the floor. Thank you. Thank you. So it was interesting to hear Anne speak. I had known about her for a little while. And we just actually met last week. She came to visit me in one of my virtual worlds. In virtual reality. Yeah, in one of my virtual worlds. So it's interesting to me that in your search for artists who were pioneers and working early in the field that we didn't cross paths sooner. Yeah, there were some people that I did not find. No, it's bizarre. I was in the lab starting in 79 when they first invented computer paint systems. And I got involved because I come across Alvin Ray Smith's paper on the Color Cube. I was just going to ask you if you know him. He helped advise me on my book and he's an amazing person.

Darcy Gerbarg

Yes, actually he has a picture of mine in his new book that's out, just out now. And he's coming out with a book called The Pixel something. Yes, that's the one we're talking about. Yeah, that's the one we're talking about. Called The Pixel or something like that. He lectured me on what a pixel was endlessly. So everyone should read that book who uses the computer to do art. He and Ed Caton were still at NYIT when I was there. So that's how I met them originally. And also at the SIGGRAPH in Chicago in 79.

Darcy Gerbarg

So I've been active for a very long time. I started the SIGGRAPH art shows for SIGGRAPH. And I started the first, I started the first MFA program in Chicago. And I started the first program in computer art anywhere at the School of Visual Arts in the mid 80s. And I wish I'd had your book, but you're quite right. There was nothing until Photoshop came out with Classroom in a Book, which was actually very helpful.

Darcy Gerbarg

So I was also the first artist in residence at NYU Courant. Ken Perlin was a PhD student there at the time. And of course, I already knew him because we'd been at Magi Synthavision together where I had been invited to do a project way back when. So let me show you a little bit of recent work. I've kind of been using technologies as they've come available.

Darcy Gerbarg

I don't want this. I want screen, share screen. Share. No, that's not coming up for some reason. Hold on a minute. Hold on a minute. I'm not seeing screen share on here right now for some reason. We can see your screen. Yeah, your screen is being shared. They see your screen. Oh, okay. I don't see it. I see it, but I don't see it the way you see it. Anyway, I have for all of my time, I come out of the art world in New York. Actually, I was an abstract expressionist painter. The members of the group that I was part of are not alive anymore so much.

Darcy Gerbarg

Clement Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. The only one that's sort of still around who's a dear friend is Larry Poonz and his wife Paula. So you can see in these pictures, this was a show last year, a virtual show. In the Hamptons. And why is this doing this? I don't know. It wasn't doing this way before. It was working, behaving much better before, but now it's doing this. I don't know why. Okay.

Darcy Gerbarg

There we go. So as you can see, or maybe not, I have been using Toadbrush since it came out. Actually, we bought it and put it in Ken Perlin's future reality lab so that I could use it there. And I found it very interesting. And what you see here are literally brushstrokes. So it's the same. I really do similar kind of painting that I was doing in acrylic on very large scale paintings. By the way, these all exist at these scales on canvas. And they're all painted in Toadbrush.

Darcy Gerbarg

So it's, I use a similar process in terms of my approach to painting, which is formalist. And instead of painting on a 2D picture plane, I'm painting on a 3D picture plane. And I'm painting in a 3D space all around myself. And I'm able to then take this 3D model that's created in Toadbrush, which turns out to be, as you may already know, a Unity model. And I can take that model as an AR object and actually take the whole model as if it were a paintbrush and paint it into the real world. So I can put this model in my environment. And that's what these are. This is why they're called the inside-outside paintings. Okay. Because I've actually taken that model into my environment, into my home in these two cases and painted it. So put it in my environment and taken snapshots of it in that environment, which I can then take into Photoshop or into other environments, as you can see from these.

Darcy Gerbarg

Okay. So I can take that model and paint it. And once in Photoshop, I have to say my first version of Photoshop came in a loose-leaf binder. So I find that a pretty versatile tool. Is this a good speed for you to see these at? Does anyone need them slower? They're okay, right? Can we get any closer to them, Darcy? I'm sorry.

Darcy Gerbarg

Thank you. And if you could paste a link to that into the chat, that would be great as well. These are all on my website. And I did put my website on the chat. But I'm not seeing somehow. Wait a minute. I'm not seeing this. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the chat. We see it bigger now. Yeah. Well, I'm not seeing the chat is what I'm saying. But I will put that. I will put my website in the chat.

Darcy Gerbarg

This picture was actually. Is not one of the inside outside pictures. This is strictly painted in tilt brush. Okay. Whereas the one next to it. This I'm, I'm sure you're aware of this, but. There's a lot of confusion about virtual art and virtual galleries. This gallery I'm showing you first is actually. A 3d gallery. That was shown as part of what they called a virtual art exhibition in the Hamptons. It was really just an online exhibition with this. 3d model of an art gallery capability. But the art world doesn't seem to have figured out the difference yet between this. And what I'm going to show you next. Okay.

Darcy Gerbarg

This is also, this is. So one of the things I found interesting was the actual brushstrokes and it's almost like a pop. A pop art brushstroke. And I just love them. And so I have a bunch of these paintings that are literally. One brushstroke just because I like it as a whole painting on its own. This one next to it, which I keep trying to get to, which I'm not doing a good job at. I'm sorry to say.

Darcy Gerbarg

I'm not doing a good job at it. Do you produce these as objects? These all exist. On canvas and the works I sell are actually. Works on canvas. These included. And these are to scale. So as you see what size they are on the wall, you can see what size they are. I print them myself. At a very high end photography center. Called light work up at Syracuse university. I ship up a bolt of canvas and I go up there and I work for days to print them. So you'll notice this is a 3d. This is one of my 3d models. Put in a room. And this was actually a. Digital party that.

Darcy Gerbarg

I attended in New York in someplace where it was dark. You can see a monitor in the bottom corner. Eventually when you. So what I like about these is that they work. Compositionally as abstract artworks and, but they incorporate real things in them. So it's a combination of abstract painting. And realistic painting. And it kind of new kind of. Still life or.

Darcy Gerbarg

Landscape. So let me go to my next one that I want to show you, which is. This one. Hold on a minute. Not that one. Well, I can get out of this now so I can go back here. I did have these set up, but that didn't stay for some reason. So. This is my website. These are. Some paintings. And this is a, this is now this, as opposed to the last thing I showed you. This is actually a virtual world. That we created. And you'll see the paintings in the background or billboard size. And the structures in the foreground, these freestanding. 3d light sculptures are actually the paintings that I paint. In tilt brush. And they have the advantage because they are 3d. In a virtual world. Of allowing people to go inside of them and fly around in them. And play in them.

Darcy Gerbarg

So these are the brush strokes that I painted. And I'm going to show you. The 3d light sculptures. To create these sculptures. And they are not physical. Obviously they can't be put in a physical world. Because they don't. They don't have gravity. They don't adhere to the laws of gravity. They just float here.

Darcy Gerbarg

So. Any of you that would like to visit this world. Email me and we'll set up a time and I'll invite you and give you a tour. There are seven or so of these light sculptures in this world. And I know a little more than a dozen big billboard paintings, things like that. Do you. To, to experience it. Do you experience it within tilt brush or like, you know, is it another.

Darcy Gerbarg

You don't have to be into. No, you don't want to experience. Until first, you don't have to be into it. Way to do this is with Oculus quest. VR goggles. Okay. But you can also experience it. And you'll notice in here, there was an avatar. She's just a fake avatar to give scale. So she doesn't really move around. Okay. But when you come visit this, you can do it with your. Laptop.

Darcy Gerbarg

And you will have your own avatar. And your avatar will be able to walk around and fly around in this space. And talk to anybody else who's there. And we can do, I do events there occasionally. We can do an event there. If the group wanted to. And everybody could come there using their laptop or their goggles. Their choice. We're doing.

Darcy Gerbarg

To visit it. Within. You need to join all space VR. And it's free. And once you join that. Then you can visit any worlds in old space. VR. With your laptop. Or your goggles. But my world, even though it's public, you won't be able to find it. If you are not a friend of mine in that world. So. Unless we, I mean, we could set up in a bit. We could have 35 people or 30 people come to an event here. And it's fun to have a lot of people wandering around. The last group we had here.

Darcy Gerbarg

People congregated in like threes and fours and fives and sixes to have conversations and then floating above the ground. Nobody was on the ground. Everyone was up in the air. Having conversations inside the sculptures or outside. Look at, you know, it's just another. Another way to experience art, Billy.

Darcy Gerbarg

So. I might be able to show you one more thing. If I got here. Let me see if I have it. Okay. I'll put it in the chat. Would you be able to paste in the link to the old space site? Darcy. Into the chat. I'll paste the information in there. Yeah. Let me see if I can find, I have. A video. The first one of these that I did. First. 3d animation of a world. The reason I did them in the first place. Was because I was exhibiting my work in. In regular exhibitions, my paintings and regular exhibitions. And people kept saying they wanted to. Go. I'm not going to do this.

Darcy Gerbarg

And people kept saying that they wanted to. Go inside my paintings. So. We created. For cat. Which is a. It's an organization of computer artists, basically. For an exhibition. They had a Miami Basel in 2019. It was a virtual. Exhibition. We produced a. A. Video. Of a tour through another world that I did, which was. Much more like a gallery. You built it as a gallery. You, when you visited it, when you came to my booth. A cat. We had goggles for you to put on. And when you did that, you found yourself in what looked like a regular art gallery surrounded by art. And you could then.

Darcy Gerbarg

Walk around in it. If you want it to, we had some music. Gave you a tour. Of the artwork in that environment. Which is. Sort of a step from the traditional art gallery way of looking at art to this. This way of looking at art is. Is really a new way of looking. At art. Still sharing this, but let me see if I can find the chat.

Darcy Gerbarg

Not really. Okay. I think that. Maybe people have questions. I'd be happy to answer questions. And if you have questions, please do use the functionality and zoom to raise your hand so we can get to everybody in order that's, you know, they want to ask their questions. If you are unfamiliar with using.

Darcy Gerbarg

Zoom's functions for that. If you look at the bottom of your screen, that little wind. That little bar at the very bottom of that says chat, share screen, record. Reactions. Click the reaction. Little button. And there's a button right above that. That says raise hand. And if you do that, we'll be able to see.

Darcy Gerbarg

Who has questions and what priority we. Can get to them. So. Yeah, I'm not seeing the chat here. No, I tried to bring it up. All right. Looks like we have Roz who wants to ask question first. Yeah. So. Is she still muted? Hold on. She is still muted. Hold on. There we go. Oh, thank you. Hi Darcy. Hi. Nice to see you. It's been around a long time. Haven't really met.

Darcy Gerbarg

Yes. Thank you. You too. But it's a, you know what, speaking of going back in time. The virtual gallery you're talking about when you say virtual gallery. I'm thinking of some really old game design where I first heard of avatars called, I think it was the palace or something. And I wondered if. You can talk to each other. Like when we come in, is there kind of an audio? If people came to visit it, do they talk to each other while they're looking at your paintings or you just kind of.

Darcy Gerbarg

It has all the functionality of zoom, but it's much better. Cause you're in 3d world. Oh, You could, but we'd have to. We could have to set that up separately. If we were doing an event and we wanted to be able to have video in there or something we could, but that's a separate thing. But yeah, when you're in that environment.

Darcy Gerbarg

There's some, there's a term called presence. That is used in this kind of stuff where. When you are in one of these worlds that you are an avatar in one of these worlds. Your brain and your eyes believe that you are actually there. You feel that you have an actual, that your presence is really there. You look around, you turn around. You can see things you physically can turn around and see things. Now, when you're on a laptop, you do that with. The keys on your keyboard, the way that you might do in one of these online 3d galleries, but instead of being stuck.

Darcy Gerbarg

In the 3d gallery. Environment. You actually can fly around in the space. And talk to other people who are also there and see their avatars. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. And it's really interesting. It's really the next generation. I think. Of online art experiences. Presence. I like that. That's very, a different kind of presence. And thank you for showing your work. It's really interesting. I especially love the latest one. The.

Darcy Gerbarg

It looks 3d, but it lives in another dimension. It is 3d. Okay. It's three dimensions, but it's digital. It's a digital 3d. It doesn't. It's not made out of a bricks and mortar out in the real world. But however, I can take these 3d models as a, our objects in the world. And when we're in the world, we can see them with our phones. So we can any AR object. Yeah. It's another world. It's becoming more real every minute. Thank you.

Darcy Gerbarg

All right. And the next question goes to. Francine. Yeah. So I'm going to ask you about your work. Yeah. The work is phenomenal. And very interested to know what's the process of translating it from TV to 3d. How much control do you have? You're not converting it from 2d to 3d. You're working in 3d. From the get go. Well, how much control do you have over the stroke? I have tools. Just they're similar to tools that you have in Photoshop.

Darcy Gerbarg

So you've ever been scuba diving? No. Well, if you've ever been scuba diving. You're in another world that is all it's you're in the water. You're floating. You have there's some gravity, but you're not much. And everything is all around you. And so you can look. Turn your body and look around and you can. Everything is three dimensional. Okay. And it's like that when you are in.

Darcy Gerbarg

You notice over here on the screen, there's somebody sitting in a chair. The paintings I've got are in the background on canvas. There's someone sitting in this chair with goggles on. She actually, when she puts these goggles on. She is transported. Into a three dimensional world. The only thing she see is the three dimensional world that. That well, it's somewhat similar to the one I showed you, but it isn't that one. It's an actual big 3d gallery. Okay. And she can actually, she could actually get up. From that chair and walk around. We found that it was easier for people to sit in the chair and just turn the chair around to see everything.

Darcy Gerbarg

I'm still confused about how. How the. You as the artist. Controlling your strokes. Oh, okay. When I'm in this three dimensional world, I have those goggles on. Okay. Yeah. And when I have the goggles on, I have. Two different goggles. I have two controllers. I have two controllers. Just like the kids have with their video game controllers on their TVs. Right. I have two controllers. One controller.

Darcy Gerbarg

Let's me select things. For instance, I have a bunch of, I can pick brushes of any size, different kinds of brushes. All kinds of things like that. And in my other hand, I have a pallet. Complete palette of it of color okay and I can pick any hue any shade you don't have so much control of the value because it's projected light it is not yeah pigment I mean I don't know about you but I mix color and pigment and I mix color and light I mean I painted with acrylic for years and I used to at one stage before there were color printers which are pretty recent I used to take on in Photoshop on the computer, project them on the wall, mix the acrylic to match it and paint them to scale wall size in acrylic. So it's so the process when you have these goggles on, you select the brush, and you've got okay, can you see?

Darcy Gerbarg

Hands or it's you're not really seeing that no you just see this screen okay so basically you have a brush in one hand and then you start making brush strokes around yourself now you could paint something figurative you could paint something abstract I'm an abstract painter so instead of starting with one color at one location on a flat 2d plane I start with one color in one value one pigment one hue and a certain brush which has certain the brush has I selected a brush that would make it sort of like oil paint or could be like some other kind of it could be like a marker or it could be like watercolor whatever kind of paintbrush. I selected and then with my whole body and my arm I make a stroke in space around myself instead of on a flat 2d plane and that's how we make I make those brush strokes.

Darcy Gerbarg

Can you model that like a sculpture? I paint it like a painter does. Once you have the mark can you move the pixels around at all? No you can erase them but you can't move them but you can walk around and as you walk around you see them from different directions because they're three-dimensional and they cast shadows on each other and on the floor and when I'm in that space I can also take snapshots of different pieces of it which is how I make the paintings okay it's sort of like Larry Poon's does his paintings throws all this paint at the wall drips down then he crops out the piece he wants for a painting that's actually I learned that now at Larry's studio you know with the you know that crowd creating work and looking at pictures. I'm not sure if I'm doing that right now. I'm just you know in the interest of time I just want to you know kind of move on to the next person I really appreciate your presentation I just want to make sure it's fair for everyone but you know certainly we also have been doing this interview series that Roz has started Darcy so definitely like you know with your long career in this area I think that you would definitely be a good person you know if you wanted to participate in that to you know to do an interview and it's kind of in the spirit of Interview Magazine where one artist interviews another artist so but I think you know the topic of VR is a giant topic in and of itself and you know I definitely I've been getting my feet wet I have my headset and it's a lot of fun but yeah and also I think that your suggestion of creating an event around participation and a meetup.

Darcy Gerbarg

In VR space would be really cool that would be a great initiative and maybe we can talk about that as one of the topics once the presenters are finished. I just want to make sure everyone has a time to you know has some time to speak so. So as a collaboration I'd be interested if somebody some other artist had a 3D sculpture or some 2D or something that they wanted to maybe put in my world I could think about that or you know.

Darcy Gerbarg

I'd be happy to work with you. Who said that? Brandon hi. Well then maybe you should be my collaborator. All right Damo. Well there we go I'll make it done for you. Yeah I'll make a note of that right here that's why I have this paper out. Okay I'm gonna turn on screen share not that I know how to do it.

Darcy Gerbarg

Oh I can take care of that. Oh stop sharing. Oh well there you go you got it yourself. Here's my website and my email I'm not gonna print it there but it's my name it's Darcy at gariborg.com so if you want to come visit me email me and we'll set up a time. Awesome thanks so much Darcy I really appreciate you coming and presenting.

Darcy Gerbarg

Well thanks it was fun. Okay. And

Next up we have. Sherry Karver. Are you still around? Okay you ready to go? Okay hold on let me it looks like you're still unmuted are you're muted? There you go. All right yep. Hi I'm Sherry Karver I am in Oakland California but born and raised in Chicago so I'm sure you'll hear my Chicago accent coming through and I come from a little different background. My MFA is in Surrey. I'm a professor of ceramics and I've taught college level ceramics for the past 30 years but in my own work, I really switched to painting photography and Photoshop. About 20 years ago. And I really thought we're going to keep this to five minutes so I'm only going to show you one series, but I did want to mention my other series called identity and perception, because that is where I really use Photoshop and many layers and I hand paint with oil glazes for all the colors.

Sherry Karver

And I write narrative text and some of the images. The photos are all actually from public places that I take photos at Grand Central Station in New York, my favorite spot, and the Metropolitan Museum, and places like that and it's all about identity and perception and so on. The reason I'm mentioning all this, I'm not going to be showing you that series this time, is because those pieces, take me about a month to make from beginning to end. They're very labor intensive. And time consuming. So when I hit upon this other series that I'm going to be showing you today. It was really freeing and liberating, I work on both simultaneously.

Sherry Karver

So the series that I wanted to show you today is called movement interrupted. And I actually titled this about two years ago. But now it has taken on an entirely different meaning, because our movement has literally been interrupted. Due to coven. But wanted to share the screen and I will talk much more about that as I am sharing my screen. So, let me go to this.

Sherry Karver

Okay, can you all see this. Yes. Yep, we can see it. Okay, good. Yes. So, great. So basically, what I'm working on here is I'm using the breakdown of technology to create these pieces rather than the good parts of technology. This series started a couple years ago I was in London, I was staying at kind of a junky little hotel, and they had a junky little television and it was raining. And all of a sudden the images started to pixelate and break up. And I was fascinated by this somehow it just caught my attention. And then the image which is vanished like in a second. And I had my camera there since we were traveling so I started to photograph the TV screen. And I probably took a few hundred photos but only one or two came out really good as, as one of the other artists I think, and was saying earlier.

Sherry Karver

Not all of them work so I actually ended up with you know maybe only one or two that worked well. And I didn't really want to deal with that because I felt if I'm going to do a series I like to have a lot of information a lot of imagery to work with. So I came home and soon after my own television at home started to do the exact same thing and pixelate and break up. So I started photographing with my Canon camera digital setup a tripod. And you have to be very quick because these images will appear for just a split second. And then it started to fall apart. And then they vanish. And I don't really do anything other than minor cropping because this is just how they come out all by themselves. So I'm really harnessing the visual effects of data corruption glitches for aesthetic purposes and for fine art purposes.

Sherry Karver

So I can go through each one of these and I title all of them. This one is called Inner Reflection. This one is called Modern Times. And then I started thinking like, why am I so interested in these images? What is it about them? And I realized that for the past few years, I have been feeling, and maybe some of you have also, that things are sort of falling apart and disintegrating socially, economically, politically, environmentally.

Sherry Karver

And that's really what these images represent to me. But yet within that confusion and chaos, I try to find beauty. I'm always still looking for a good image. Keep going to the next one. This one is called Competing Against Oneself. So again, this is all spontaneous. It happens within like a split second and then these images vanish. So in juxtaposition to my other series, which is called Countdown to the it takes you a month to make one piece. This has been almost like magic for me. It's like my television is literally channeling these images to me and I am there to capture that moment in a photograph.

Sherry Karver

This one is called Push Pull and the colors are all just the way they were on the TV screen. I really, as I said, do nothing other than maybe crop them a little bit. I don't think I could create these images using any other method. Yes, I could try to paint them, but I don't think it would come out this fluid and this authentic. This one's called Thinking Too Much.

Sherry Karver

This piece actually actually was part of a collaboration that I've been doing with musicians who have been coming up with music inspired by my work. It's a group called Mosaics of the Bay case any of you are interested in showing them your images, Mosaics of the Bay. This is a brand new one. It's called I can't remember what this one is called.

Sherry Karver

Brand new. I think I just got this one yesterday. I try to photograph every few days. As I said, I may photograph 100, 200 images, but only maybe one or two really come out the way that I would want them to. I don't know if you've heard of them. I don't know if you've heard of them. So I really have to pick and choose.

Sherry Karver

This one is called Questioning Too Much, I think. Dancing with Abandon. This was actually from an ad on TV, I think from Cirque du Soleil. And it just totally pixelated like this. So I mean, I really like the spontaneity and using these glitches for the aesthetic purposes and not having to plan so much like I do with my other series.

Sherry Karver

This one is called The Conversation. So I have these printed as dye sublimation on metal. I started off printing them on paper, but it didn't look as good. Somehow the metal substrate shines through the surface and adds another layer of visual interest that I really like. And also the metal and the industrial feel of metal works really well with these kind of contemporary technological glitches that occur. And all these little squares that just happen arbitrarily kind of represent to me how our technological world breaks down and how it interacts and affects our environment and ourselves.

Sherry Karver

Almost done here. This one is called Believe in Magic. And these are all in editions of 12 in varying sizes. Most commonly I print around 20 by 30 inches, but they could be huge or they could be little. This one is called After Midnight. And I think this is the last one. Let me just make sure. Oh no, one more. The committee. It's called The Committee. It was actually from watching a dog show on TV where they were judging dogs.

Sherry Karver

These were some of the judges. So we're almost done. And I think that's it. So I will try to unshare my screen here. I can figure out how to stop share. Okay, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask. You can see about two to 300 more images from this series, Movement Interrupted. I have them all on Instagram. And if you want to see my other series where I use all the layers in Photoshop, that's called Identity and Perception. And that's on my website.

Sherry Karver

And I'll put all that info on the computer. And it was nice meeting all of you. I'm new to this group and I hope to be added to your list. Yeah, Sherry, I was going to ask you, where are you located? I'm in Oakland, California. Oh, okay. San Francisco Bay Area. Gotcha. Yeah, you know, you're on the list of people I'm going to be adding. It's just I have a backup of people to add onto the index. But definitely you will be added on there. And I pasted your links in the chat so people can check the work out. But very cool. So thank you so much for presenting. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, all of you. I'm enjoying seeing all of your work. Thank you.

Sherry Karver

Thank you for sharing. Okay. And we are right at 2.53. And we have one more artist that did want to present today. We normally would do five. But in the interest of time, I think we'll wrap this up at four for now. Unless there's any objections. Yes, no, maybe so. Davo, if we run over or I can go next time, it doesn't matter to me.

Sherry Karver

Colin, what do you think? Yeah, I think Brandon should go. I mean, you know, there's no real rule that why we should, you know, start the other part of the meeting at any specific time. And, you know, I kind of feel like maybe that part of it at some point just ends up happening, you know, on Discord or, you know, offline. Because honestly, I mean, it's of importance to all of us here in the Zoom, but the rest of the world doesn't necessarily need to know all of our sort of internal initiatives necessarily, you know, or I don't know how interesting it would be. So I would, I would opt to focus more on the artist presentations.

Sherry Karver

Fair. Okay. All right. That's fair. So go ahead. You have the

Floor, Brandon. Okay. Thank you, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and get started. I am also newer-ish to this group. My name is Brandon Gellis. I consider myself to be a new media artist, educator, and maker, and I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming. I teach design and technology, specifically emergent technologies and new forms. I have my MFA from Emergent Digital Practices Program at the University of Denver, and it was basically a way for me to go from being a graphic designer and brand strategist for a whole organization and stop that and do something completely new because I was really tired. So I learned a lot about digital interactivity and working with microelectronics and robotics and hardware and some computer engineering aesthetics. So I just thought I would briefly walk through some work of mine on my website.

Brandon Gellis

Again, my website is BrandonGellis.com. I'll put that in the chat. I have some new work. I'm actually going to go through examples. I think it'll be easier. So these are the six exhibitions, seven exhibitions that I've developed in the last six years, basically about one a year. More recently, I have started working with augmented reality. So I created an application that users go into this fairytale environment. And it's a...

Brandon Gellis

I'm a new father. My daughter just turned two yesterday. So I'm going to show you some examples. But it's... This body of work is the first of multiple pieces that are based on romantic ideas of fairy tales and the morals and lessons that we as children learn about how to treat each other and given current political environment the last number of years or well, less 35 years, but let's say the last three or four years.

Brandon Gellis

How we develop our sense of morality and how we ultimately treat each other. And so... And then look through a separate lens. And so this story, Resonant Blue, the first one is The Prince and the Knight, which is a fairy tale that my husband and I read to our daughter. It's a love story about a prince and a knight, and they challenge a dragon and they fall in love and the whole community falls in love. And it's very picturesque. But for me, it's a discussion about what lessons do we learn as adults? And so I'm immersing people into an AR environment that I've 3D modeled and constructed and created. The particle systems and the lighting and the motion graphics and asking people just to think about this idealized romantic view.

Brandon Gellis

And then I'm trying to get back to another image of this because ultimately when you're in a gallery, what... And I think the link is not working. What you're in the gallery, you have a tablet in front of you. You have some vinyl graphics and details, reflective materials on the wall that picture that are what I as an adult... As an activist and think of, and this is a gay marriage between my husband and I or Prince and I and the dragon.

Brandon Gellis

And on the right side, you have the villagers that are... Let's say they wear red hats and they storm government buildings and they are the torch wielding villagers. And then the left side, you have the royal family. And so you have this juxtaposition. And so you can actually look through the application on the tablet and see the environment as you're walking around the entire mountain scape that I've modeled and the dragon inside there. So she loves dragons and moons. And so that's kind of the focus.

Brandon Gellis

This is a piece of work blending in. This is work that I did about two years... About a year ago. And it's a live... It's generative code. So it's creative coding using open processing P5JS language. And so it's incorporating a variety of different images and video stills that I have that's speak to me as a person and my identity as a gay Jew from Los Angeles who lives in Laramie, Wyoming now, of all places. And it's interactive. And so it's a discussion of giving the... It's giving the audience the opportunity to make me the other. It uses a web camera and the audience participant that's picked up in the web camera, you can see my hand moving, actually controls how the pixels form and how the video... Which video... And stills trigger at what time based on proximity of the camera.

Brandon Gellis

On the opposite side of that, in the same body of work is this body of work, which I don't have a good video of, which is called heated signature... Heat sync. And this is a three channel video of 44 elements that are speak to my Jewish identity. And I led a trip a few years ago last summer to... I don't know. I think it was in Germany. I took students to England and Germany of students and I took students to Sachenhausen, which was a German Nazi work camp in outside of Berlin, which is in the suburb now. And it's as a memorial. And so there's images in here and video in here of stained glass window in the...

Brandon Gellis

In a church building basically there. And then in the center is a video camera feed that informs the generative... The generative... The generative content that develops. And on the left side, you've got 44 different cubes basically of different images and content for my youth. And so this is me basically other rising or making the audience be the other because I'm controlling the purview.

Brandon Gellis

Let's see. Translocation is a series that I created with a student. I took a student with a botany colleague to Costa Rica a few years ago, and we flew drones in the rainforest to see if we could get high resolution imagery in the rainforest at high elevations, as opposed to having to get permits and affect the animals and the different plant species. And so these are actually drone video that I've brought in and used P5.js, again, a creative coding language, Processing 3, to augment the videos as data moshes and then took them into After Effects and further distorted them. And so these are still images printed on clear, translucent mylar. And so you actually, when the light hits it and they're raised off the wall, you can see the pixel patterns on the wall behind them as shadows, as ghost remnants of what the forest looked like before we were there.

Brandon Gellis

And so for me, this is a discussion about human impact and how every time we digitize or take a picture of something we see or lose ourselves in the camera and don't experience it in real time and enjoy the nature of things or the forest, we are one step more diluting it or taking it from its original voice. We're also stripping this level of autonomy out of it. We're dictating what the forest is, what the natural protected species are in the rainforest, for example. And then this is actually the data pixel depth seen.

Brandon Gellis

Let me see if I can blow this up a little bit. But this is the pixel depth from the color saturation and hue that is seen in the actual color imagery. And what I did is from here, I made, again, on translucent material, I made images and stills. And then I took this into VR space and I created a point cloud data mesh. And so people actually go inside the cloud. And when you're in VR space, you're standing there and there's point data all around you. But it's very clearly... Well, it's not a point. It is specifically a data visualization of the color depth of the forest foliage.

Brandon Gellis

So it's very abstracted. And people don't necessarily know what their experience is. Opposite of that is this piece, Velocity, which is an interactive work that I created in VR space in Unity. And it is using a web... It is using a web camera and the IR sensors from the headset towers to watch people, to pick up the people. And so if you... If I am in the headset, I am actually watching the people that are around me in the headset as pixels. And so they...

Brandon Gellis

People viewing it don't understand that I have control over them because I am the one surveilling them. And so this, again, for me... Is this idea... You can see a person's head shape in there. This idea for me is, again, the idea of regaining power from the, let's say, heteronormative community or mainstream community that I have felt oppressed by as a gay man living in rural Wyoming.

Brandon Gellis

So that's a variety of different pieces. This, to me, is actually a really significant piece. This is a piece called Stumbling Back. And this came... And out of the trip I took... I don't know what happened. Thanks. Okay. Sorry? Oh, I'm... Okay. So this, for me, is a piece called Stumbling Back. And this was the first time I put something visibly emotional and historic in a gallery. I put it alongside the motion graphics work because when I was in Europe... I lived in Germany for a short while. With my... My husband on sabbatical and all these different things. And we took students back to Berlin. And my students noticed that there are these beautiful brass round placards on the ground outside of homes all around the city. And what they were is they were notating the locations that Jews and different people were taken out of their homes and sent off to death camps, concentration camps, during Hitler's reign.

Brandon Gellis

And so it's a historically accurate... It's a historically accurate data visualization of the actual grid of the city of Berlin. And where all the paper, the vellum is missing, I've laser cut the little squares. And so as the paper or vellum got weaker, those whole communities fell out and created these shadow gaps on the wall. And those shadow gaps, those open parts, are representational of where the significant proportions of communities, whole city blocks were liquidated. And so these rips and tears that you see are actually entire boroughs within the city of Berlin of people that were taken to their death in Nazi concentration camps. And so this was really significant for me growing up as a Jew in Los Angeles, going up, really practicing. We always learned, never forget. And this year, a month ago, was the memorial of remembering of Auschwitz closing.

Brandon Gellis

And the last few remaining survivors were not able to go to Europe, to Germany, excuse me, specifically, because of COVID. And so they did a virtual event, and it may possibly be the last event ever done with survivors of Auschwitz. Because the last two people, I think, are 95 and 98. And they don't know if they'll be able to have a live event again next year. So this, for me, was not to be... I'm not trying to be dark. I apologize. This, for me, was a discussion of my identity. And so all of this work is a transition in my creative portfolio where I'm going back to, from bottom right to top left, where I'm going back to embracing and celebrating my identity in purposes of being an advocate for my family and my daughter.

Brandon Gellis

Yeah. Okay. With that said, I don't want to take up too much time. But thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you for presenting. Your work is amazing. Well, thank you. And I really enjoy the message behind all of it, actually. Did anyone have any questions? Did they want to ask Brandon? Okay, if not.

Brandon Gellis

Anybody? Anybody else? All right. Now, in... We would typically do five artists today, but we only had four. I could potentially fill that gap in if there are nobody wants to go. I don't really have necessarily anything prepared, but I can definitely share what I've been working on and past works that I've worked on. Do it up, man. Go.

Brandon Gellis

No objections? Show us your stuff. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Give me a minute. So give me actually one second. As I pull up a few things. Okay.

Guess I'll share screen one. Which is apparently screen two. Okay. Okay. So I work... Well, first of all, I'm Davonte Bradley. I've actually... I've actually been here in these meetings probably since like the first couple. Full digital artist. Like I don't do anything physical anymore. Like all of my work is done on my drawing tablet.

Davonte Bradley

And I work with a software called Krita. I'm not going to show you this full thing. But Krita is very similar to Photoshop or Paint Tool Sai or any other... A piece of digital painting software. But I use Krita specifically because of its ability to, you know, simulate actual brush strokes and that sort of thing. So this is actually a piece from a series that I did late last year. Probably around, I think, December.

Davonte Bradley

December is apparently when I did December 2nd. What you're going to see is a lot of different things. What you're not seeing is over on this side of the screen. That's where my brushes, the paint, color picker and all that is. I'm not going to like go through the whole process. But what you're also seeing here is the avatar that I created, a 3D model. It's two pieces of software. So there's the one... This piece of software that actually created the model and then the other piece of software that kind of creates this virtual studio environment. So there's the one... This piece of software that actually created the model and then the other piece of software that kind of creates this virtual studio environment. This piece of software that actually created the model and then the other piece of software that kind of creates this virtual studio environment.

Davonte Bradley

So that you can kind of see my key presses and brushstrokes in real time. And I do all of my drawing and painting pretty much like this. If I want to record it anyway. Because apparently recording your screen by itself is not exciting enough for some people. So I got the idea to do something similar to this.

Davonte Bradley

Which apparently a lot of people think it's interesting. Here recently I've kind of been doing time lapses of some of my work, just showing different angles of how everything goes on. I've been incorporating more words and more direct messages into the artwork itself. The thing is, is that at the end product you don't necessarily see all of these so the only way you're actually going to see everything that's written in one of these pieces is if you watch one of these are actually like watch a making of. So that kind of creates another layer of meaning and experience to the work that you wouldn't otherwise get just looking at the finished product.

Davonte Bradley

So, there's a couple of these. This one was called they call for unity was made rights, right before, or no I'm sorry. Think it was the day after are pretty close to the, the storming of the capital that happened. And this again also made around the same time. So I've been exploring a lot more. And I'm going to pull up. And I will actually I'm going to pull up. Because a lot of this stuff isn't actually on my website, or.

Davonte Bradley

So my website, or Instagram yet. So this was made on Martin Luther King Day. Of course, I'm not going to be doing that. Of course, I did attribute to that. This is an interesting piece I think because this is actually. I found a transcript of Biden's inaugural speech. And through that I kind of. I highlighted certain phrases and stuff from that speech superimposed it layered it highlighted certain pieces and created this. I'm.

Davonte Bradley

I'm going to zoom in so you can kind of see some of the pieces here, but it's also layered on top of my art. This little thing over here is a symbol that I use quite a bit. I've kind of called it my own personal all seeing eye, because I'm always watching. Always observing. But that's actually one piece. Of it. One piece of another piece. So this is the same kind of idea but with Trump's last speech as President of the United States. And I did the same thing.

Davonte Bradley

So you'll see different phrases all throughout that I thought were significant. So there's actually a couple of different phrases that I'm going to be using. And I actually in some cases I actually try to do like a little phrases in between so have a good life soon. Just leaving. Goodbye. Things like that, and then those were put together as a juxtaposition. But this piece. Ah.

Davonte Bradley

So on the left side you have. Trump speech on the right you have Biden's inaugural speech and layered on top of that is this phrase. I just want to believe in hope again. And. That's, that's kind of the overarching idea that I've had for a long time, because kind of becoming disillusioned with the political process is this kind of what's happened in this country as far as discourse goes. There's a lot of things. A lot of bad. That's happening and. The idea that I just want. To hope that things are going to get better.

Davonte Bradley

So, then, that's kind of where my work is right now. I've done a couple of pieces in relation to, you know, the Black History Month starting. So this is actually a poem on the left side here. Another phrase. I wonder, and I have no answers. Just speaking to the experience that I have as a black person in this country.

Davonte Bradley

And not just that, but my status as being a light skinned black person that didn't necessarily conform to a lot of the stereotypes I guess of what black people should be like. Because I kind of was ostracized quite a few times. In my own community, no less. So I had identity issues and still kind of searching for meaning and purpose in that.

Davonte Bradley

And so I've done three pieces. Kind of speaking to the colors of the pan African flag that's where that's the background of this actually the colors of the pan African red, black and green. And here. The red. From the pan African. You know, the pan African red is supposed to symbolize you know the blood of the ancestors, which is what this is titled blood of the ancestors so you have a lot of red. Kind of cascading down the canvas.

Davonte Bradley

Here, the green the green the pan African flag is supposed to represent the bountiful land and giving nature of Africa itself. And then you have black that's supposed to represent the unified structure of the family. And then you have white that's supposed to represent the flag itself and what that's supposed to mean. So that's why there's a lot of circles and connectivity here like this one, this shape is actually linked to that one.

Davonte Bradley

Actually, I'm going to try to zoom in a little bit. You also notice like there's pixelation going on, that is done on purpose by me, I actually have a brush that's capable of doing this I discovered. I discovered. That's technique I've experimented with. There's a lot of small details that you wouldn't also otherwise get just looking at it zoomed out.

Davonte Bradley

And, yeah, I'd say, as far as my art goes it's come wide ways since I first started. Like I was normally I was actually originally like aspiring to be a character artist for video game design. And, yeah. But then what ended up happening was I became. I guess disillusioned with that and. Well, I went through a whole learning phase. Last year, during pandemic where I was experimenting with a lot of styles and just rediscovering my artistic roots and so I created a lot of stuff. This is actually my, the first piece I made that actually made into a gallery.

Davonte Bradley

This is a Krampus. And my style. But it started, I think literally it started. This is the first piece I made. Last year. And compared to what I've been making now but it's, it's all different all. Just. I like I like to experiment. And I'll never stop experimenting. So, there is an overarching style, but, you know, it's just.

Davonte Bradley

I paint, or I create what I feel. And I create what's, you know, I, what messages that I feel that I need to have said. And. Many cases those messages aren't necessarily clear. And. I'm trying to make them clear. And that's where, you know, these works came from where I'm trying to actually speak. Through words and convey messages. And there's the all seeing eye again. And some of that actually came from studying Bosnia. If you guys are familiar with that.

Davonte Bradley

So, yeah. That's, that's, that's that for me, pretty much. That's a lot of one more. That I made this is actually a collage of my work that I did. Digital collage, where I kind of merged quite a few recent works of mine or once I liked all together. Just put them as a like a hodgepodge. Yeah, that's a that's that.

Davonte Bradley

And I think that's a. That's a good one. That's it for my presentation. Anyway, it wasn't all that organized, but I guess you guys probably got the. Do you produce these as singular objects? I know you said you told me that you do some as additions and some is singular objects like you have a favorite substrate that you like to print on. I know metal. Right.

Davonte Bradley

Yeah, I've actually been outsourcing. Some of my work is metal like this one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was a test print that I did on metal. And I found that. This is. I found that. How my work looks on my computer. The, the kind of effect is actually amplified when I put it on metal. So the reflective nature because there's all sorts of different colors, more often than not in my work. And when the light hits it. Just right in reality. That creates a totally different experience than what you would be able to see just off of the computer screen. So as much as I'd like to say that my art is an of itself, wholly digital. You do get a completely different experience based off of how you're experiencing it. So the experience that you get from looking at a computer versus experience you get from experiencing as a print.

Davonte Bradley

It's completely different. Right. So, but. If I had to choose a favorite way to experience it. I would say probably the. As a metal metallic prints. It's probably my favorite. Is it one last question. Is there anything that like any specific reason why you would produce one piece as singular unique. Object versus an addition or is it like just your favorite ones you do is as a one off. When I decide to pick one as just like a single edition.

Davonte Bradley

More often than not, like I don't have like a rubric for how I decide this but the ones that I do decide to just say okay this there's only going to be one. Usually those pieces have more meaning to me, like at personally like subjectively, it has more meaning to me than the other pieces. Yeah. So I would say that it's more like a singular than most of the other ones.

Davonte Bradley

Like aspire. Actually I'll share my screen again. Might see a little bit of screen section going on, maybe for a second. But there is a piece called aspire, which is from the second series. If I can find it. There it is. It is right here. Aspire beauty. There's only going to be one. One of these made. And the reason for that is because this piece, how it started is what got me on to my current style. It started off as a black and white, where I was just experimenting.

Davonte Bradley

The original aspire. And it did something where, you know, when I posted this one. I got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of people that I knew I was like, really, people spoke to people like there's, there's like people are enjoying this. And I actually had somebody say hey, can I can I buy this I want to print this out myself and I put it on my wall was like, oh, okay.

Davonte Bradley

And then when I was like, I felt like I was like, well maybe I have something here. And then when I was like, well maybe I have something here. And so I started to explore that style more and that's where all of these other ones kind of came from. And aspire aspire beauty was kind of that, that like that point where I can point out and say, this is where my style as an abstracts artists started to, like, solidify.

Davonte Bradley

It's like this is this is where this is where I like. This is my starting point, essentially. This is my starting point, essentially. So this one has a whole lot of meaning for me. What else. This one, have you got into an FTS at all because I know it's like you know work like this that's purely digital it almost seems like it's a natural fit for that type of distribution. Yeah, I've started playing around with that a little bit. I was unaware of how much it would actually cost. And so I was like, I'm going to buy this. But like in some cases like on variable there is a cost for actually minting a work to be sold on the platform. I wasn't aware of that, but I'm getting getting a little bit into that. So some there will be some works that won't probably make it on my Instagram, because I want to limit the exposure of it.

Davonte Bradley

But that is definitely an avenue I'm going to be exploring more thoroughly later on. Or in the very, very near future, at least. Cool. Nice. Thanks for sharing the work, Devante. And definitely, you know, I'm going to take you up on the interview. I know that, I think Roz and I are fighting over who's going to interview you for debating back and forth. But I know I asked you first. You did, you did. Because I was sort of overloaded, but now I'm reconsidering.

Davonte Bradley

And you've been definitely like, you know, really instrumental as far as keeping this whole operation going, you know, doing an awesome job moderating and everything. So really appreciate it. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. You know. Actually, I feel privileged to be here among you guys because I feel like I'm a little guy. I'll be honest with you. Like I'm very new to the art world, the art community at large. I am small. I haven't been here for years like some of you guys. Like. Some of you guys have actually had whole careers in the time that I've been alive and then went into artwork. Like that is crazy to me.

Davonte Bradley

And to be here among you talking with you, like that's amazing to me. So I feel honored to be able to speak with you guys. So I think, you know, the my vision for this is like, you know, that it's basically everyone's everyone's an artist in here and, you know, everyone's just as important as anyone else.

Davonte Bradley

And yeah, definitely. I see it in the chat. You know, being young doesn't make you small. Being young is like probably one of the best assets you could have as somebody who's turning 50 this year. I could say, you know, and the work is interesting. It's cool to see, you know, work with words in it. You know, I don't know if you've seen any look at any of the work that you've done. I mean, you know, it's like you've seen like Ed Ruscha, but like, you know, it's stylistically very different, you know. But the idea of incorporating words into paintings, I think is it's interesting. You know, it's sort of like reflective of sort of the, you know, the media culture that we live in, you know, in a lot of ways. I don't know what makes the most sense if we should go into like intros for people who are here for the first time.

Davonte Bradley

Business stuff first, because I feel like if we do the intros, we might run out of time. I just want everyone to know about the what's going on with the collab, especially because, you know, the first round was supposed to have closed today, but my partner didn't send in his stuff. But that's okay. You know, it's all good. We're getting there. I did want to let the group know, you know, so I did. Have some correspondence with the folks over at Kunstmatrix, which is the platform that we're going to be using for our VR shows.

Davonte Bradley

And, you know, like I was thinking that maybe they might be interested in partnering up in some way, seeing this like there's a pretty heavy crossover with our, you know, group members and their platform. So they're our first technology partner is the long and short of it. And I sort of pitched them. You know, an offer to include their branding in the site footer of expressionism. And in exchange, they're giving us sort of like a premium plus plus plus package would like, you know, so that'll allow us to have our shows hosted and have a pretty good database of images on their platform, you know, and we're partnered with a German technology firm now, which is pretty sweet. So much room for activity. Yeah. And so like in the way that they explained to Davos, just to let you know, I'll just be sharing a set of credentials with you and probably Patrick as far as probably the three of us are going to be the ones actually executing the, you know, the VR shows installation.

Davonte Bradley

And, you know, maybe Roz, too, if you're interested in jumping in, you know, just people with experience with the platform certainly can, you know, because I envision, you know, and I liked what was spoken about a couple of salons ago, the idea of just always having the show up, you know, and we sort of rotate it just so stuff doesn't get stale, you know, and it might take us a little while. Like there's no hard date set for the jury show. And I've been sort of holding off on that because I've been going back and forth with a space in Southampton for a physical exhibition in 2022, you know, and it looks pretty close to being solidified.

Davonte Bradley

And I'd like to see that. I'd like to, you know, leverage any sort of PR that we do for the virtual show by being able to say, you know, a year out, we're going to have a physical show in essentially a museum space, you know. So if that ends up happening, you know, it's going to be it's going to be pretty cool. And it's actually, you know, agreed and offered to help co-curate the proposed physical show, which would be amazing because then you know, we could incorporate some historical work from her and Michael's collection, which would really contextualize, you know, some contemporary work that, you know, we can pull together. So, you know, that's kind of my report.

Davonte Bradley

Been going through a bunch of personal stuff. My father, unfortunately, is, you know, very ill. He's going into hospice today, so I might be sort of like, you know, in and out of contact, depending on what goes on. But, you know, this project has really helped buffer some of that, you know, that's going on in my life. So I appreciate it. And seeing the energy that comes in, you know, from all you guys is really positive. So, you know, that being said, I'm going to pass the mic over to Davo if you want to just let people know about what's going on with the collab. Yeah. Like the second one. Second round and how you envision that all rolling out. Okay. All right. So for those of you who don't know, there is actually an ongoing collaboration project among us, Techspressionism's artists.

Davonte Bradley

The first one kicked off actually somewhere around like two months ago, I think. But the initial vision that I had for it was something along the lines of if you guys are familiar with the collab that, you know, Warhol and Basquiat did all those years ago. Where, you know, it was two artists kind of having a conversation with each other with their artwork. So I was envisioning something like that, but virtually and digitally.

Davonte Bradley

Since most of us use computers or technology in some fashion with our work, I figured that there wouldn't be too much of a friction with trying to create something together with another artist or multiple artists if that's what people wanted. So the initial process was. I think it was. Several was five pairs, five pairs of ours, myself and Colin included.

Davonte Bradley

And we had artwork that either we had like a theme that we were going off of and the first artist would create something and then the second artist would create something as a response to that piece. It's like what spoke to them in that piece and then having a response back. So either like whatever you were feeling, it's like, okay, though, this, this piece. Maybe feel happy. So, you know, maybe I'll speak to that in my artwork. So I'll respond with something happy back or something, something along those lines, like communicating visually as best you can with, you know, what, whatever your, whatever it is that you're internalizing.

Davonte Bradley

And so that whole process is facilitated with email. So you're emailing your partner or your person you're clapping with back and forth submitting work to each other. And by the end of it, you would send them all to me and then we'll go in. We're going to display. Have a curated virtual exhibition using Coons matrix of all the artwork from that particular collab event.

Davonte Bradley

So the second round that is now starting. We've got several artists already, but still open. We have, I think. Last I checked. It was. Bear with me for one second. We have 1212 artists that want to participate so at this moment we feasibly have enough for six pairs at this time. If you would like to.

Davonte Bradley

Yes, if you would like to participate in the second collaboration event. Please do email your name I'm going to drop this in the chats. Please send your name, full name and email address. Or email that you want to be contacted at. To this with either collab in the title or want to participate, what something something to let me know that you want to participate in the collaboration event.

Davonte Bradley

Oh, why did I do that. Also technology does not. Like people sometimes and as somebody that regularly uses technology it just it just happens like that. Also, also forgot to remember. We. We do have a discord server. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with discord. But it is a software kind of along the lines of what we're currently using now, but it's kind of like an always open. Chat room. With, you know, different chat rooms within it. And, you know, if you want to participate in that I'll also drop a link to that as well.

Davonte Bradley

So give me what you can get there. It's always through the site footer, there's a social media icons. And it's the one that you probably won't recognize out of all the social media. We're looks like a little game robot roller. Yeah, something. Yeah, something like that. All right. There's the discord link.

Davonte Bradley

And the. Email. And there we are. If. I will probably at the end of this week because that's when I'm closing off the. Participants for the second round or second collaboration this week. Since we already have. Quite a few participants. And I know there were people that were interested and were confused about how to sign up or join.

Davonte Bradley

But hoping that all gets taken care of either now or very, very soon. But yeah. So. Anybody have one. Yeah. I have one thing to. To ask the group and you, Doug. Also about the. Collab and just this is about presentation within Kunst Matrix in general. So with Kunst Matrix you have the ability to upload an image. Generally it's I think 5000 by 5000 pixels is like the maximum. But you also can specify a physical size which is sort of how the image is presented within the virtual space.

Davonte Bradley

Proportionally to the physical size that you specify. So you could say it's upload an image of any pixel dimensions. You could say it's 12 by 18. It'll present as if it's 12 by 18 on the wall. If you say it's three by four feet, it'll present as if it's three by four feet on the wall. And I know that some of the work that's been submitted as well as reposted on our Instagram feed is fully digital, where the dimensions are variable. So what I wanted to find out is, should there be sort of like a default size of presentation in terms of like, you walk into a virtual room and if some artists say, well, this piece is intended to be 11 by 17. And then another artist says, well, this piece is 60 by 40. It's going to dwarf the other piece. So like I've been in shows where like a photographer gave, like I was in this one show where I was like, there was a photographer that took portraits of artists and he gave each artist like a 60 by 40 print of the portrait that he did of them to take and paint into and manipulate and or give them a file.

Davonte Bradley

So the work in the show, well, the short end of this is that the work in the show is all consistently sized, which made for a very nice looking exhibition. And I'm wondering what you guys think as far as presentation within Kunstmatrix. You know, obviously my first inclination is to say, ask the artist, well, how, like if it's a physical piece, obviously there are actual physical dimensions. And if this is, you know, going to have any value to us as artists, the work should be something that a collector can purchase if they like it. So it should be presented as to scale if it's a physical object, I would think. But if it's not a physical object, should we have a default size? Should that be up to the artist as far as how it is presented? Or should it be presented within the virtual space, say for dimensions variable work?

Davonte Bradley

What do you guys think? Does anyone have any particular feeling on that topic? It's like an artist always has an ideal size, even if something, you know, is flexible in that regard. And I would say ask the artist and then in the room group, group them similarly. Yeah. Cause I think that's, like for the collab, for instance, that should be something that each pairing needs to be asked too is, what would like, you know, if this object is going to be produced as a physical, you know, if the piece is going to be produced as a physical object or hypothetically or ideally, what would the size be? You know, and that would be something that the pairing, the two artists would decide upon, you know, I mean, when Patrick and I started working together, we just decided, well, let's just make it for the next piece.

Davonte Bradley

I would just like to have it be like a 5,000 by 5,000 pixels since that's the max dimensions. And then, you know, I would opt to just present it at a decent scale in the space, you know, but it is dimensions variable. It could be, you know, whatever, whatever we would decide upon. But I think, you know, there should probably be a maximum virtual size just to prevent, you know, one piece taking up half of the wall. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think if we could just have Davo as a curator, that would be something to think about. Wait, wait, wait.

Davonte Bradley

I'm not understanding what you're talking about a virtual space. Is it like the first gallery I showed where it's actually a 3D model with walls? Are you dealing with walls here? Are you talking about a physical exhibition where things actually are in a physical size? Or are you talking about a virtual gallery of some sort? I don't understand what the context is here.

Davonte Bradley

So let me, can you guys see my screen? Yep. It's very small. It's hard to read. Too much stuff. Can you see a browser? Am I sharing the right screen? Yeah, I can see. You can choose side by side gallery or switch just for the speaker. So that can make bigger. All right. Let's see. Yeah. The problem with a virtual gallery, because I do have experience, because as we know, all the artwork, they all have different sizes. So what happens is when you put on those virtual gallery, that may not fit your expectations.

Davonte Bradley

Because some environment, they already have these sizes. Well, I don't know. Is that something? Do I explain that well or I make even more confused? So this is Kunst Matrix. This is the platform that we're going to be using. And these pieces are to scale. They're three by four foot paintings. This one here is three by four. The ones on this wall are slightly larger.

Davonte Bradley

This gallery only has eight foot wall heights? That's pretty low. It's 36 by 60. Well, the Kunst Matrix does offer a bunch of different rooms, you know, and there's also the ability to develop your own spaces, I believe using maybe Blender. Is that Blender or Unity? One of the two. Yeah. Yeah, it might be Unity actually. But that's beyond my pay grade. There's any 3D artists out there that know how to do that. Also, I know in their contact us stuff, Kunst Matrix, they say if you want to have them create a custom sized space, that they can actually do that for you. Yeah, but they charge like five grand to do it. Right. Yeah. From my knowledge, that's at least five grand. Five grand is actually already cheap.

Davonte Bradley

Because the last year I spent a lot of money just building even just a custom gallery. Yeah, it is. And the other thing is the problem with Unity. Unity only can see from the web version, not a mobile version. And when people they want to see through the mobile phone, that's horrible. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely, we're definitely using Kunst Matrix as the VR platform. I believe they have those more. So, you know, and I think that ultimately, like Patrick and I are co-curating the virtual show. And, you know, with regards to that, I think there's really just going to have to be a maximum size that is like any physical exhibition.

Davonte Bradley

A work of, say, 10 feet tall wouldn't be accepted. Because it wouldn't fit in the room. Yeah. I had an experience before COVID where I was in an exhibition with a ceramist who does wall work, wall pieces, and a photographer. And my digital pieces were actually the largest pieces in the exhibition by a fair amount. Nonetheless, because of how it was hung, it all worked out. And so we ended up doing a series of works that ended up working really well together. And actually we did, I don't have this online, but we did a seriously big catalog of the work. And it turns out to be pretty interesting to have a variety of sizes. And the big pieces didn't dominate. Nothing was smaller than like, you know, maybe three by four feet.

Davonte Bradley

I think it's important for works to be relative in size to what they really are when they're physical. When they're digital, they could be any size if you maintain the aspect ratio, sort of. On the other hand, when you're doing an exhibition and everything is digital and nothing is framed, it's just boring. I mean, it's like, doesn't, there's something about it that doesn't feel like a real exhibition. If you're just doing an imitation exhibition in a 3D gallery. Even the first one I showed you, I don't love because my work's always framed when I show it. But that particular platform had no option that frames on the pictures. So I think you have to be careful or at least decide what you're going for in something like this. It's actually last year I just got a designer. He done really good at it.

Davonte Bradley

He did a really good job. And I think that's the reason why I think it's important to have a design for all the customer gallery. Include the, like what you said about the frame. The thing is, we want to find a developer and say, oh, this is a lot of work. You have a friend. I believe right now the VR gallery system, probably, what is the, the Kong's Magic? Kong's Magic. Kong's Magic. Kong's Magic. Kong's Magic. Kong's Magic. Probably the best is it. Because I'm not even want to touch VR or AR project myself because that's a whole lot of money.

Davonte Bradley

Unless, of course, you have a lot of a bunch of U.I. Designer, programmer, all the people that can make that happen, which I believe are Kong's Magic. Kong's Magic. Sorry can make that happen but don't as an artist and also as the I run civil tech business I my suggestion is all the artists don't put too much expectation because this is the kind of a pioneer really advances of course we like to see everything perfect that in the virtual gallery but I don't think the technology still is just a little bit distant from that yeah the kunz matrix platform does allow for both a mat and a frame to be added to the pieces I could actually show you what that looks like too you guys seen seen a screen yes yeah okay so let me just yeah okay leave us under like edit details or yeah you can specify you can specify that stuff spin around here so yeah so these are smaller works on paper that are about 12 by 18 you know the physical objects themselves and these are all physical works that incorporate gouache oil multiple media yeah they're not digital images they're reproductions of physical works on paper and on linen so you know you do have the ability to add a frame to add a mat I would I would be inclined to ask the artist you know the present what is the actual physical size of the work you know is it to be shown with a frame is it to be shown with a mat so on and so forth if it's not a physical work what is the ideal physical size for it to be presented at you know those sort of things for the purposes of a virtual show you know down the road obviously ideally we'd be looking at you know exhibiting in physical spaces but I think the virtual exhibitions are definitely going to be an ongoing component and I think a lot of the collaborative work also is going to be work that's dimensions variable where it's created digitally to begin with it might in most cases is not going to be you know physicalized so to speak or manifested as an object because these are collaborations across you know good distances where the artists might not ever even come into contact with each other right so you know part of it is going to be what how do the artists envision the work being presented you know and another option that's interesting is there's a new nft platform launching just for collab I forget the name of it but they like messaged me over Instagram about it that might be an interesting way for the pairings to like put their work out there you know and commodify it in some way so I would like to suggest that maybe instead of limiting the size of an artwork maybe once you figure out how many artists you have you can figure out how many square feet each artist can have and they can kind of select work at their discretion that they would like to be adding up to that amount of volume.

Davonte Bradley

That said, it was really nice mixed not having each artist's work might not want to all be together in one spot. You have to decide you want to put an artist as all their stuff in one place or mix them. Sometimes very interesting visual associations happen when you mix everybody's art on the walls instead of putting each one in an isolated context.

Davonte Bradley

So I think as long as it's fair that each artist gets a certain amount of space more or less like whatever it is, you pick an amount, a height and a width, and then artists could say I have 10 by 20 feet. I'm going to put X number of pictures in there. Now, they may not be in that space, but they would have that amount of work that would fit that space. They would have that space somehow in a nice way, not like packed in a normal exhibition where you have space between things. That doesn't mean it has to be exhibited that way. It means it gives everybody a fair amount of space, the same amount of space. It could be distributed through the whole exhibit. Might be interesting.

Davonte Bradley

Just a thought. Right. I mean, I think definitely for the juried exhibition, it's going to be a good number of artists with one piece. One piece per artist. For the pairings, the collabs, it's going to be multiple pieces per artist. But I think in either case, it's really going to be up to the discretion of the curator when they're doing the virtual installation to produce something that looks good. And it's got to be true to the artist's intentions. That is, if the piece is actually 12 by 24, it should be presented as 12 by 24. And for pieces that are not actually objective.

Davonte Bradley

If it's not objectified, then the artist would need to provide their sort of intended dimensions. Right. I mean, you know, and I guess the idea of consistency across the work in the room, you know, that's less important. The work shouldn't be sort of manipulated just to make everything consistent. And I agree. I think that having a mixture of work of different sizes will make it interesting. And the way I was envisioning the virtual show. And this is something that was suggested early on by another artist was to divide up the show into rooms based on, you know, whether the work is primarily figurative, whether it's primarily abstract, perhaps like segmenting photographic based work into one area and so on and so forth. Yeah, I don't like that idea. That's exactly what I'm saying is not necessary.

Davonte Bradley

And turned out not to be necessary in this exhibition. But I think that's a good point. I mean, I've seen a few artists where some was figurative, some was abstract. It's interesting to see the way that things relate to you. The curator should be able to put together an exhibition in a way that the work looks good. It shouldn't. I would not define it and put it together that way. Absolutely not. Well, I disagree.

Davonte Bradley

Well, it's your organization, right? Well, it's I'm curating the show. So it's my exhibition. And the co curator is in London. So I'm in alignment with that, as well as Helen Harrison, who's our advisor. There are a million ways to do exhibitions. There are a million ways to do exhibitions, and they each have their strengths and some of you know, I'm sure it'll be fine. Right? Yeah, I mean, I find very few exhibitions that are curated arbitrarily to be interesting.

Davonte Bradley

I didn't say it was arbitrary. You already have the context of membership in this organization. And the context there's really, I mean, to me, membership is sort of not really. The way I see it. I mean, if you want to refer to yourself as a Techspressionism is you are more than welcome to. If you don't, then you don't. But we certainly don't charge any fees. And I don't consider it an organization.

Davonte Bradley

Okay. I actually consider it a community. I'm just finding out I have no idea what this is about. Well, I would I would, I would vote for it. It to be done. It's defined as an online community more so than an organization and organization implies user fees as far as I could see it. It's definitely not the case. No, no community is the current way of describing groups, I guess.

Davonte Bradley

I really say that this community everything's about community and building communities in this and that today. Right but an organization has other implications. Maybe. I'm actually I'm sure we could probably go back and forth on the subject for a minute. I'll see you next time guys. All right. Thanks Darcy. Have a good one.

Davonte Bradley

Bye. All right. Certainly, certainly interesting note to leave off. I think that's probably as serious as it has, if it's at, sorry, English. That's probably as serious as it's been in this in the zoom meeting since the beginning. I think that's, I think that's part of the growing pains, to be honest. Right. The, you know, people coming in. Sorry. I think that's sort of a little with a little with less history.

Davonte Bradley

Are you know, and I think personality wise. Some people tend to sort of lurk till they kind of feel comfortable and other people are naturally. You know, more assertive. And, you know, I. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we're going to run into things like that from time to time. Right. But I wanted, I wanted to add one more thing to, to the discussion that's been going on, if you don't mind. Yeah. With regards to, like, the, the blockchain stuff and all of that. I've also noticed that there are.

Davonte Bradley

Art. Card. Collecting groups out there. Yeah. I saw that too. A number of other places. And I was thinking that perhaps. As part of either ending. Some of our online. Shows and stuff. That maybe we could, we could create something. Like some. Collector cards. That we could. Oh, that's a good thing. We're going to have to have a big swanky to do that. Blockchain thing if you want to get your toes sort of into the water of this thing. So it was just an idea.

Davonte Bradley

Right on. Yeah, I know that Rarible, you know, does it's, you know, basically like a, an NFT marketplace where it has like other types of collectible items that are tokenized, you know, other than stuff that's defined as art, like trading cards or other sorts of things that are still digital assets, you know, that are created, you know, by individuals. So that's definitely a site to check out, though, if you're interested in getting, you know, your feet wet with NFTs. But we're just about at time, I think. Yeah.

Davonte Bradley

Right there at 4 o'clock. But I will stop my recording now. And, you know, you guys are welcome to hang out if you want to. So thanks, everyone, for attending and being part of the community. Whatever you call it, I don't think it doesn't matter. Actually, I think I'm not sure if I.