Salon 20 // Victor Acevedo & Christine Sciulli

Go. Thank you, AI voice. I very appreciate that. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to our 20th Tech Spiritsism Virtual Salon. Yes, 20. It has been that many times. That is a total of about 40 weeks. So we've been at this for a minute, and each one of those has been a great time. And I'm glad to see you all here. Glad to see a lot of new faces too, because I don't recognize quite a few of you.

Davonte Bradley

So glad you made it. Glad you're here. The date is June 22nd, and it is at 2.09 p.m., and it's summer, kind of. It's a little rainy, at least where I am. Not sure what the weather's like where all you are, but it's been hot because summer has started. And I hope all of you are still keeping up with the weather. I'm sure you're all doing great. Keeping up with your art, keeping up with the movement, all that good stuff.

Davonte Bradley

And today we have two presentations from Victor Acevedo. Close, Acevedo. Acevedo. Okay. Thank you for the correction. I promise I won't try to like mess it up a second time.

Okay, no problem.

Thank you. And then we also have Cynthia Shuley giving a presentation.

And we did decide that

Shuley. Did I not say that correctly? Did I say Christina?

Cynthia.

Oh, oh, wow. My bad. Names. Sorry. Yes, Christine Sciulli. Sorry. I don't know where Cynthia came from, I guess, because I was talking about Cynthia Beth Rubin a second ago.

Wait, I kind of love it because you got the last name right, which nobody on the planet gets right. So I applaud you, anyway.

See, I'm really hit or miss sometimes, like really simple stuff. It's like, oh, no, that can't be that. And then the complicated one, it's like, oh, no, that's easy. It's cool. All right. So a little bit of background about Christine and Victor. Christine is a visual artist whose primary medium is projected light.

Davonte Bradley

Paul Miller has this to say about her work. It consists of intersections of geometry and intuitive sense of how to use everyday materials to give a sense of spatialization. She plays with how we perceive the world around us in a way that leaves us, leaves you with a kind of eerie sense of timelessness.

Davonte Bradley

Christine holds an architectural engineering degree from Penn State University, graduated as a Bessal scholar, Bessel? Okay. As well as a BFA and MFA degrees in combined media from Hunter College, where she was awarded the British Perry Award, BFA Merit Award, and the Lutz-Rydal Travel Grant. Victor is, oops, sorry.

Davonte Bradley

Clicked something I wasn't supposed to. Victor is an artist best known for his digital work involving printmaking and photography. However, since 2007, his primary focus has been working with video and producing electronic visual musical works. As an ongoing practice, Acevedo, Acevedo? Acevedo? Acevedo? You had it? Acevedo. Okay, cool. Still issues signed limited edition prints, but now prints are from still MJ source from his video work.

Davonte Bradley

Acevedo is considered a desktop computer art pioneer as he was an early adopter of pre-Windows personal computer, IBM PC software, to create fine art in the early 1980s. He now works primarily in the Apple Macintosh platform. He has shown his work in over 130 group and solo art exhibitions. Acevedo's works are currently being exhibited at eight museums in the United States and internationally since 1982.

Davonte Bradley

If you would be so kind, please welcome both of them with a little round of applause. It's a little eerie just seeing people clap but not hearing it. This is the world we live in and the nature of our meetings. All right. How these salons work? We do have our two presentations first. Following each presentation, we will have a Q&A session. Acevedo will give us a I ask that you remain muted during the course of the presentations. Save your questions. You can drop your questions in the chat if you're familiar with how to use that.

Davonte Bradley

And then I ask that you kind of like self-moderate yourselves with the auditory questions. So you're not like necessarily talking over each other. In order to help facilitate that, please raise your hand if you have an audio question that you want to ask. And then I'll see that in order of who asks. So it'll be first come, first serve basis.

Davonte Bradley

And then after that Q&A session for the second presentation, then it's kind of like a free for all discussion where we'll either talk more about the presentations, the artists, go over whatever new stuff that's going on in you guys' lives or your craft or any events that you have going on. Just general discussion because that's what salons are for. Just talking to people, connecting with people. All right. Sound good to everybody?

Davonte Bradley

And Colin, who I also forgot to introduce, who coined the term tech specialism, do you have any words to say? Just that, you know, I'm psyched.

It's a really great turnout tonight and two really great presenters, you know. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. It's number 20, you know, it's pretty wild.

And yeah. I feel like we should have done something special for our 20th. But maybe we'll do like after the facts. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway, Victor, I think we can go ahead and get started with your presentation so you have the floor. Okay, great.

Thanks so much for this opportunity to speak to you all. It's really great. It's exciting for me and a great honor. So I'll jump right into sharing my screen. And well, actually, before I let's see. Yeah, I guess I could do that. Well, actually, before I do that, I would just want to say that I'm going to kind of do a PowerPoint based on a book that I'm producing, which is a career survey of 43 years going from analog to digital art.

Victor Acevedo

So I'm just going to kind of jump through the book. Okay. So I'm kind of starting maybe 20% into it for this particular chronology. So let me share screen and I'll show you the cover of the book. Hopefully it'll be out like at the end of the year, November or December. It'll be it's a self published print book and then later ebook.

Victor Acevedo

Okay, share my screen here. Okay. All right. So I'll show you the cover which is on my website. Okay, that was there a second ago. Okay, there we go. And so you get a sense of it. It's a 400 page book. It has four contributing authors. And it goes from it says traditional media and digital media, and to give you a more exact breakdown of my timeline from 77 to 87 is analog on the front page. And that's an affix to the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book.

Victor Acevedo

And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. And that's the process and you can see that in the design of the book. With Tony Longson, and that was a pre-PC, but that was in 84. So, but anyway, from 83 to 2007, I was primarily focused on digital prints, archival inkjet and photo prints. And then from 2007 to present, I've been getting into time-based works, focused mostly on what I call electronic visual music, which is an update for me of visual music, of that idiom. And that is expressed in digital video. And then I take still images, selected still images from some of the videos and issue those as digital prints now.

Victor Acevedo

So I'm plucking my still images from the time-based work at this point. Okay. So now I'm going to, there's always a little bit. Okay. So because the book starts with analog media, I just wanted to show a couple of few images from that time that represent where I was at right before I learned about computer graphics, as they called it in those days. So about 1980, I was assimilating my influences, which were Dali, you know, there's a sort of allegorical surrealism and there was MC Escher was a big influence. And this is, this is my student work, but I wanted, it was also the age of neo expressionism, late seventies and early eighties. And I love the color graphic work of Mark Toby and of course Jackson Pollock on a larger scale. So that's in here too. So it's kind of an amalgam of these different modalities of mark making or art making or drawing.

Victor Acevedo

So I liked the idea of art and geometry, you know, all MC Escher. So that kind of like had me presupposed that for some reason I wanted to use to tune into computer graphics. I'm assuming you can all hear me okay. Oh, you know what? I'm going to stop sharing. Could you all hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you. Yes, I can hear you fine.

Okay. I think what I did is I forgot to click those buttons. Share sound, optimize for video clip. I'll need that later. Okay, because I can't tell if I'm, you know, hearing. I can't really hear myself other than in the room. So anyway, so there are some versions of that image in color. And you get it. This is a color study for it. This is called slated breakfast visceral analytic. And it's a color study for a painting. And here's a 16 by 20 version. And I did a large version of it later.

Victor Acevedo

So while I was still at ArtCenter, Oops, jumped ahead. Always go smoother in rehearsal. Okay, so I was taking, I took this class by Gene Youngblood, who was teaching at ArtCenter. And it was based on his book called Expanded Cinema. And this was 19, I took it twice because I loved his class so much. It was 1980 and 19. And it was based on Expanded Cinema that he published in 1970, about 10 years earlier. But what he had in there was amazing, still very new to a lot of people. And he was adding to it. He was carrying on where Expanded Cinema left off.

Victor Acevedo

And so there I learned for the first time about computer graphics. And Gene would show a lot of different videos and some animations. And I would show a lot of different videos. And I saw Sunstone by Ed M. Schwiller. And that just blew my mind. I go, wow, this is the future. This is time-based painting.

Victor Acevedo

It's something beyond just video. It's this computer graphics, but it can be conveyed in video format. So those of you, many of you may know Sunstones from 1979. That really just changed my life. And, you know, I was in the middle of a movie. Let's see. I have it here that he also worked with Alvy Ray Smith, Lance Williams and Garland Stern to work that out at the Computer Graphics Laboratory at NYIT.

Victor Acevedo

Also, he talked about, he shared the work among many others of Woody and Steina Vasulka. And their work was really mind-blowing. Because I was, you know, I was a traditional media, analog media, fine art major doing painting and drawing and a little bit of film, Super 8 film. But to be able to do that, you know, it was really important. To get exposed to what they were doing, Woody and Steina, like, it was amazing to me. And it was like, really the future. And seeing this toggling of on and off imagery that was like Escher's tessellations, but in electronic form. And it was video, abstract video generated with, by noise or other sounds, quasi musical sounds and things like that, but composed and very, very elegant. So their work was really important. So that planted a seed, I didn't get right into digital immediately, because at Art Center at the time, they had no classes.

Victor Acevedo

This is right before classes in digital practice were being offered at most colleges and universities. So after I left, school, I was seeking it out. And by well, 1983, I started taking workshops. 83, I don't really have, I took a workshop with Frank Dietrich. Many of you know him from the history of computer art, or computer graphics. Anyway, Anyway, this is about the most earliest image I have accessible to me. In 1985, it's this paint system work.

Victor Acevedo

It's a freehand drawing using the true color paint system off the target card on a PC. That's from 1985, just a crop. There's me in 85 working on the Cubicomp system on a PC clone. Here's some other croppings of that. It was quite sophisticated at the time because it was animation and modeling software, and it allowed you to offload to videotape one frame at a time to make animations.

Victor Acevedo

And so you could do 3D modeling. So here's an example of early, this is a collaboration with a friend of mine, Stuart McSherry. And it's kind of a virtual sculpture of these pentagonal dodecahedra that are kind of fused face to face in an array. Okay. Maybe just try to speed up a little. So this frame kind of shows you that bridge for me, my personal bridge going from analog media into digital. So in analog, I had a relationship with photography, you know, as a source image, and I would translate it, you know, into a drawing just to kind of distill it down to a, a linear rendering of the photographic scene. And that went into a, went into a painting. I, it's been so long ago, I may have projected the drawing onto the, onto the canvas first, you know, trace that, and then started painting and filling in.

Victor Acevedo

And this is a piece called Ectoplasmic Kitchen. And I was experimenting at the time with an overlay of a space frame. And this comes from my interest in R. Buckminster Fuller. And he talks about the, the isotropic vector matrix, which is an all space filling network of tetrahedra and octahedra. And this is actually an unfinished piece because by 83, I was getting, I was basically dipping into computer graphics. So it became less interesting to me. And by 84, I had dropped, virtually dropped analog media completely, except for a couple of other things, maybe in 87 was the last time I actually painted something in a, in a digital art practice. So I started, so the digital art practice started coming up. And this is what I kind of started doing at first was revisiting subjects that I had done in analog media.

Victor Acevedo

And this is an example of that. This is that same scene rendered in an illustrator-like application called Artworks, which ran on the PC. And it was a two and a half D vector-based system. This is an early version of that. So you've got your space frame stuff happening, but kind of in a loose expressive way. And this is my favorite version of this image from this series, which was called the Ectoplasmic Kitchen series. And it's a distillation of variations of the image. And it has a spherical domain coming from Buckminster Fuller, the great circles. And it has these umorphic tessellations influenced by Escher. And, and, and, and, so they're, they're in there. And of course, you know, figuration and what that may convey.

Victor Acevedo

Here's the one without the tessellations. Here's another variation. So I would just kind of spontaneously do a lot of variants because I was just really learning the new tool set. I had this experience of like almost starting from scratch, building on the, what I had done in analog, but I really was, had to learn, learn this new tool set, but I was excited because I knew the potentialities having taken Jean Youngblood's class.

Victor Acevedo

Okay, so let's see, I have my notes here. And I'm gonna jump ahead to another work. So this is a piece, I wanted to kind of share this, my working method at the time. And I would just kind of jam on an image, you know, I have this photograph that I liked as a starting point. And I would just kind of add to it. So, it was kind of a hybrid from the, of photography and computer graphic elements.

Victor Acevedo

And it was kind of just finding my way and it turned out, you know, it becomes very sort of an expressionist approach to things. And then the geometry was really important to me in terms of, based on my influences of Fuller and Escher. And then I went from polygons to polyhedra. Polygons, morphic tessellation of Escher and the polygon, polyhedra of all space filling phenomena as talked about through Fuller's writings, you know, synergetics, it's important. So I went through different iterations, not always successful for me at the time. Then I arrived at this, this is what at the last minute, I combined this figure here at the right from the original starting photograph with this other completely different photograph. And then added this thing, it's called a triacontahedron that I built in the Cubicomp.

Victor Acevedo

And then I had these kind of like painterly digital brushstrokes, but the whole, being a painter, it was natural for me, the notion of brushstrokes and digital mark making to kind of add some intensity to the image, graphical intensity as I saw it, you know, make it a little, add more interest to it.

Victor Acevedo

Okay. So then, well, this just leads right onto early 89, 91. So this is another piece of soon after that I got access to a geodesic modeler still on the Cubicomp. And this stuff is pretty low res. I really didn't understand resolution to be honest back in these days. But, you know, I just, I did what I could, but it's fun. These are still fun for me to look at. And then after that, I went on to the next project. And that's this two by two three and it's this little sort ofiend I'm gonna call it. And that's cacortopit. And that's the most Come to my mind.

Victor Acevedo

And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape.

Victor Acevedo

And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And that's the kind of thing you're gonna get in the case of the oldtape. And most of the work has been, for a long time, the work was really figuration and abstraction combined. Later, you'll see that I got into pure abstraction.

Victor Acevedo

This is a hybrid workflow. You know, here's an example of, you know, ink on paper, making a zoomorphic tessellation. And I used OpenPact. Unlike Escher, I wanted to do something different than him. So I allowed the interstitial non-objective shapes to remain and allow that also to be periodic. So from there, I could add those in to build that same 2D image and insert it into the photographic space. And that's what these were about. There's another one using... So I would kind of mix and match with the different assets, components of the graphical, either 3D models or photographs, etc., to build compositions.

Victor Acevedo

Let's jump ahead to another one. So you get a sense of the development of my work over time. This also shows a sequence of development from the original photo and how I'm at it, intervened with the photographic... So here's a piece. It's one of my favorites still. It's called February 29th, 1993. Sort of a psychedelic piece. And I was honored at the time that it was put on the cover of this Japanese magazine called Pixel. Some of you may remember this from the 90s. It was very, very big magazine at the time. So that was cool. That was a great honor. It was fun.

Victor Acevedo

Here's an earlier version of this. Okay. Some of these I can just go right up to. And this is a fun piece called NYC 8385. And before I moved to New York in 1995, and I was there until early 2009, so almost 14 years. On my visits prior to then, 93, 94, you know, I was kind of gradually getting into the scene there. And this is from actually 1993. It was based on a party. Okay. In New York. Kind of an art party with a surrealist interpretation, of course.

Victor Acevedo

These are some others. Now, jumping to... This is a piece called Skull. And this is a little different approach. This is using 3D models like found objects of a human skull and a deer's head and some other designs. And this is from 1994. So we're into the 90s now. Okay. Now this also...let me jump ahead for a moment...

Victor Acevedo

Was picked up as the cover of...or used for the cover of Leonardo in September of 2001, Volume 34, Number Four. So that was a great honor at the time. So I kind of...it was kind of like riffing on this skull model. Which was really interesting. I really liked, right? So this is a piece called X-Hour and just kind of playing with some bilateral symmetry and composing this image and using the, you know, surrealism is always, always present in most of these works. So there's a variation of that. This is called Tavern Mirror and referring to the mirror reflection.

Victor Acevedo

So Davo, let me know if when I have just five minutes left, because I'll immediately jump to the videos, which are all very short, but I don't I don't want to, you know, miss out on showing some of those.

Oh, no, you're fine. Don't even worry about that.

Okay, cool. Cool. Thanks. So when I moved to New York in 95, after getting my bearings, you know, I first became an artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts because I had some contacts there. And I got access to these. Lab. And I had, even in LA, by 93, I had migrated from Cubicomp into Softimage, which was then again, was more powerful and more refined as a software.

Victor Acevedo

So carrying on with my workflow of building geometrical models and structures that kind of articulate, they weren't just models in there for their own sake, but they were part of this structural field, or aggregates, or subsets of a potential structural field. And they could be like objects, large metal objects in their own right. And then later, I'd insert them into compositions, like this is a piece many of you may know, it was shown at the SIGGRAPH art show in 1998. It's called the Lace Maker. And it was based, influenced by Johannes Vermeer's same title painting, The Lace Maker. And, but it wasn't intentionally posed or anything, you know, it's purely spontaneous. I was a new, at a New Year's Eve party. And this woman had, was trying to reassemble a little necklace that had come undone.

Victor Acevedo

And she was just there concentrating on that. And I just thought in the instant, she, looks like the Lace Maker, you know, and I had a camera in hand. So I snapped the picture. And that's how that came to be. And kind of in that same period, this gray geometry period, as I call it informally, another piece called The Violist.

Victor Acevedo

And this guy is Keith Berry. Look at the text to prompt me on the names. This is Keith Berry. And he's, he's a violist that he played with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And he was a good friends of school friends of all the guys in that band. They came up together, but he also had his side projects. And this is him. At a moment, I went to a gig he was playing at. And I've since met him again, many, many years later, and I gave him a copy of this. He was happy to see it.

Victor Acevedo

Okay, so let me jump ahead. These are collaborations with photographer and here's, you know, the space frame concept that I've kind of talked about here and there. And here's that network again, of octahedra and tetrahedra. This is mostly just the octahedron. So it's kind of an expressive use of this field geometry and the way it interfaces with, with figures.

Victor Acevedo

So in New York about, I think it was 1995, I first met Billy name, Billy named Linick, who many of you know, from the Andy Warhol scene. He was the factory manager and photographer for Andy from 1968 to maybe 70. I'm sorry, 63, 1963 to about 1970. So anyway, I met him informally. And when he started showing again, I went to his one of his shows. And we hit it off. And he liked what I was doing. He liked this silver geometry. So we just, I asked him, Hey, would you be interested in collaborating? You know, and much to my surprise, he said, Sure. You know, so he allowed me to, he lent me some of his negatives, if you can believe that to, to scan. So and this is Bob Dylan from one of from one of Andy's Warhol screen tests, Edie Sedgwick, kind of a production still from a movie, I believe it was called vinyl.

Victor Acevedo

And this is three, three superstars. Forgetting their names right offhand. Viva, international velvet and ultraviolet, left to right there. And this was actually Billy names favorite of the ones I did. And then later, you know, I hadn't, I found this image. And I just recently sort of brought this forward, and completed it, you know, maybe a month or so ago, but I hadn't really finished it. And this was a fun photo for me to work with. I like the idea of Warhol actually working the camera and you know, right on the front lines of making art. And this is from this is out on the East Hampton.

Victor Acevedo

He's making a film there. 05. Einweiser 05. Einweiser the exact title but so anyway yeah and then here's another piece that I that I still like from a long time ago 1998 this is called sunburst couple and for me it has a nice balance between the geometry the field of geometry and the figures they're kind of turned down in the mix but somehow it works well for me I have some others this is kind of a little bit of an outside move but fun this is called millennium epicenter from 1999.

Victor Acevedo

Let's see I guess we can jump ahead this was also in the back of leonardo this is called 4d memory cluster I go a little fast and then just interest of time so forgive me if I'm going too fast on some of these page turns this is one called a glass of wine with harry one of my old friends and this is from about 2000.

Victor Acevedo

So you could see my metaphor was pretty much in place very early on decades before but I just kept kind of refining it and wanting to make it articulate it further and have more of a sense of what's going on in the picture so I'm going to go ahead and read some more about this okay I'll read one more piece from this book which is called the void presentations of the metaphor which is kind of human moments genre scenes that are taking place in what one could call the void matrix or the void plenum which is a concept that I got from reading in the late 70s fritzov copras the Tao of physics some of you may know that book and that's one of the metaphors that comes forward in that book from eastern mysticism but also from the also the descriptions of reality by some atomic Western physicists.

Victor Acevedo

Slinger on this one a little bit more. So this is a variation. Still doing variations at times. This, this one on the left got more play, if you will, you know, more people saw it at the time. And then this one was put off to the side, but then I rediscovered, I go, yeah, that's not so bad. Let's bring that forward.

Victor Acevedo

This Eric and our rents portrait of my brother. And I'm going to zoom in here, which is something I can do with easily with InDesign. Get an idea of that. Oops. Okay. There we go. All right. So we're still in the digital print. Fate phase. Some other images. These were shown at the SIGGRAPH art show in 2003. And you can find these whenever they're in the SIGGRAPH art show, you can find them in the SIGGRAPH archive, which has been published online.

Victor Acevedo

This is called what's so different about today's inner child. And it was kind of a play on that famous. Richard Hamilton, seminal, 1956 pop master pop art masterpiece. That was entitled just what, just what was it that made yesterday's homes are today's home. So different. So appealing. It might be a typo there.

Victor Acevedo

So what's so different about today's inner child. A few more portraits, friend of mine. You can kind of see in hard copy. You know, the book will be, you could kind of view it as a, you know, a two up display. That so, so this starts 2007 and what I have in the book are stills from time-based pieces. This is a visual music at this time, when I first started in what I call visual music or, you know, it's an, a known unknown form form idiom. It has its own history. A lot of amazing work's been done. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm really happy to be part of that rubric.

Victor Acevedo

I thought of it as visual music as well. And I was happy to be under that. In that category. In my time, this works, I thought, you know, it's, it's kind of like the. Outgrowth of my still imagery. It combines geometry and figuration and, but the geometry is animated now. So these are a dance study.

Victor Acevedo

Okay. So I'm going to kind of speed through some of. These. Many of these are from actual short video pieces, but I like the notion that they, the still images, certain particular stills from the time-based works could stand on their own as single image compositions. So this is from the teens now, this is 2013.

Victor Acevedo

So everything here has a life, life in two domains in the animated moving domain and also still images. Slow down a little bit so you can kind of see these. So another thing about this period is it's kind of a new body of work emerged for me which was pure abstraction. They all have titles as well.

Victor Acevedo

So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer.

Victor Acevedo

So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. So you can see that in the art of question and answer. That. It's a fun form to work with. And this piece here, which was called Fourfold Access, brings imagery from my traditional media period into the digital domain and video domain, as well as some earlier pieces, still digital art pieces. So that was kind of fun. So this is pretty recent, 2019.

Victor Acevedo

And these are stills from a piece called Proxima Nova. And this is from 2020, Red Shadow. So sort of surreal. So these are some of the last two. Let's take a look at these again. So these are, you know, models built primarily in soft image. I'm getting into Cinema 4D now, slowly. But working on the book has kind of stopped my forward-moving progress. I've been working on the book for about three years, maybe four.

Victor Acevedo

But I thought it was important to put this all together. I'm going to close this out, just the InDesign part of it. And I'd like to show you some videos. How are we doing? We have a little bit more time?

Yeah, we have more time.

Okay, cool. Great. I have to ask because I don't want to, you know, I lose track of time being in the flow.

Oh, no, you're fine.

Okay, cool. Oh, that's right here. Okay. So I have two versions of this video. And these are kind of shortened versions of them. And this is, the original name is called Anonymous Realtime. And this first one is called the Ambient Anonymous Realtime. And this is actually, a version very close to the one I'm going to show you is up on OpenSea now, OpenSea as an NFT. So I have these two videos up on OpenSea.

Victor Acevedo

And I have still images. So I'm kind of testing the waters in the NFT world with this kind of work. This is kind of an ambient piece.

Okay. So let's see if this works. Okay. So let's see if this works. Okay. So let's see if this works.

Yeah, so I've collaborated a lot with a guy called Chris Holland, who is an electronic musician, primarily focused on circuit bending and other modalities for generating sort of like hybrids of the part of music that goes into the noise spectrum, but kind of musical noise, if you will, and all that whole library of potentiality that comes out of that end of the spectrum. And this next piece, he's playing the soundtrack live. It's the same imagery, and it's the original version of this piece called Anonymous Real Time. He likes to wear a mask when he performs live. So I had this, I go, well, yeah, he's having fun, and he's being anonymous here. So Anonymous Real Time.

Victor Acevedo

Oh. I'm going to turn this down a little. This is a little noisier. Yeah, so these are kind of excerpted versions of the piece. The actual piece goes a little bit longer, but I cropped it for... For the NFT marketplace. Here's a piece that I'm working on now. It's just about done. It's kind of a work in progress, but it's virtually done. And this was also a collaboration with Chris Holland, Igor Amokian, which is his stage name.

Victor Acevedo

And it's called Orbital Remix.

So you can see that's it. So you're going to have to make the design in the same way. So you're going to have to make the design in the same way. So you're going to have to make the design in the same way. So you're going to have to make the design in the same way. So you're going to have to make the design in the same way.

Unattributed

So you're going to have to make the design in the same way.

Okay and I'll play one more and this is another short little piece also a collaboration with chris and this one's called space matrix okay so I'm gonna stop sharing screen let's fast forward retrospective encapsulation thank

You for listening and watching appreciate it thank you so much victor that presentation was amazing and it's always amazing to me just realizing just how far back the kind of work that you know we all do actually goes because you know for me I was unaware of artists like yourself like it was just completely unaware that artists like you and you know roz and you know lee all of you guys have been doing work for a really long time and I hadn't heard of any of you yeah and it's amazing just you know just my artistic world has been expanded just by being a part of this movement so it's always amazing just learning more about you know the history of what you guys have been doing and you know how my own work fits into all of this too

Well that's cool that's very cool thanks for saying that and acknowledging that it's and it's to your credit it, that you're tuning into it. And you're part of this male you that's living history, you know, as personified by a lot of the group. And, and that's so important. I remember as an art student, it was very important for me to learn the history of art, to see where I fit in, because I wanted to know what was done before. And I also wanted to do something different and build on that.

Victor Acevedo

So yeah, and that's, and it's symptomatic of where we're at this moment, where the history of digital art is sort of underreported. We need more and more books, we need more and more documentation, the story needs to be disseminated. But I think now that the appetite for it, and the knowledge base is there to receive it.

Victor Acevedo

We're right on that cusp, with an NFTs are part of that. But just the natural development of, you know, technology, you know, and the web, and people born digital, you know, it just gets ever more natural to be in a mediated cyber reality, hybrid, right, right, social space.

Anyway. Well, thank you again, thank you very much for your presentation. I'm sure we've actually all given you a round of applause. We'll give you another one, you know, just for good measure. All right. So that being said, does anyone have any questions or comments for Oh, okay, nevermind. Beat me to it. I think we have, let's see who was actually first.

Davonte Bradley

So Michael Price, I believe was first with his hand. So give him the floor.

Hey, Victor, that brilliant presentation. I appreciate it. Thank you. Your work is stunning. So, so here's, here's a question that I have that I think those of us who've been working digitally for a while can probably relate to but it's, it's, I think it's also a unique and interesting thing to talk about. And maybe this is something we can talk more about in the future. But looking at the history of your work and the evolution of it.

Michael Pierre Price

The limit. See it's like it's like if paint was evolving over time you know earlier painters would have looked a lot different I mean our concepts of what art has changed over time but the technology and traditional media not as much and for those of us who have been sort of been involved near Near the beginnings of these things, the limitations...

Michael Pierre Price

The ingenuity that you needed to create art around that is very different than today in many respects in terms of the tools, in terms of what we can do. So as an artist who's been doing this for a while now, how do you see that for yourself? And just how that has influenced you? Because there's a lot of thematic things, like you said, that you've carried forward, but you can see the image making has changed over time because you've got more pixels to play with. Just what can be done is so much more than before. So I was just kind of curious of that unique aspect that digital brings to the art world, especially historically.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying. And I agree. It's an important component of any digital artist's development, their evolution, because you're kind of writing along as the tool set evolves, which is kind of exciting. Like, you know, oil paints or acrylics are pretty much set, you know. But with... With digital tools, they keep evolving. And I'm feeling excited. Like, what I consider my act for is to continue on with these concepts, but express them, you know, in VR, in AR, you know, in the metaverse to be able to walk into the environment. So those tool sets are there. I'm just, you know, I hope to venture into that soon.

Victor Acevedo

I've dabbled in it, but I see that as my future. And that's the tool set, right? That's available. Unprecedented capability that's way beyond anything that I personally have worked with. So that is exciting. And, you know, and in some ways, I feel like I'm moving towards, if I could master that those new tools, I'll have a more exact rendering of these ideas.

Okay, so here's my, I don't want to take too much time. But do you feel like your older work stands on its own. In other words, if you wanted to update your... Older pieces and bring them up to today's technology, that's one thing. But they have an integrity in and of themselves because of, I just see there's this level of ingenuity that those of us who had to work in the digital medium needed to bring to bear that I'm not saying doesn't exist today, but the type of ingenuity is very different at times. And that's what I'm curious about in terms of how you see your historical work in today's light.

I see. Well, I'd like to think that it stands up and it's of its time. Thank you. And in some ways, today's audience can understand it more, could see what it is and have an experience of it. Like in the old, say 30, 40 years ago. An art critic. Could maybe speak or write very eloquently or articulately about a painter's work because you know, they took painting. Yeah. And you know, there was this kind of like no man's land for a while. Yes. Where they, people couldn't write about it. They didn't understand it. They didn't know how it was made. So they said, well, let's put that aside. It's not art yet. Let's just talk about painting and sculpture and drawing, you know, so what we know about what we have a visceral experience. Yeah. And I think that's a very, very important piece of, but yeah.

Victor Acevedo

So the work I think does stand on its own and the fact that it was done at a certain time in the past and adds to its value and the understanding of it. So it has a historical function and it also has a relevance in a retrospective way. But you know, we're all collectively fleshing out the story. We're all co-writing and co-inventing this and co-writing this big story. Yeah. And that's, what's exciting.

Victor Acevedo

You know, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's what comes to mind.

No, you did. No, I thank you. And one last thing, I want to buy your book when it comes out.

Okay. Well, thank you.

So you got a sale here. Okay.

Thank you so much. I'll keep you posted. It's going to be actually available as a print book on my website first and I'll have signed editions. You can buy it directly from me, but eventually it'll go on Amazon and I'll have a print book and it'll be an ebook, but I, that's kind of how I'm going to roll it out, how I see it. So I'll keep everybody posted. Thank you.

All right. We, we do have four hands up, but unfortunately it's like three o'clock, but I'd like two of you that have your hands up. I know you probably actually haven't had a chance to speak before, or at least I haven't seen you speak before. So sorry, Roz and sorry, Patrick. I know that you would like to, but I'm going to give them the chance to speak. So if you have a little bit of time, a little bit of space, and then we can get on to Christine's presentation, because I know she's very eager to go ahead. So let's go with Michael first.

Davonte Bradley

Michael, are you there?

Yes, I'm here. I was chattering in the comments about various things, but Victor, I was struck by the casualness of your photography. It mixed comments. I was struck by the contrasting with the precision of the rendering in many cases. And then you have digital imprecision added on top of it. Was that, has that always been a conscious choice to be working with the snapshot aesthetic, random pictures practically, or is that just what I'm seeing in it right now?

Yeah. It kind of comes out of what, what, of, of, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the idea of everyday life. Just genre scenes and not being trained as a photographer and not having a lot of technical chops in that area. But just as a natural you know just somebody taking photographs but with an artist's eye. So there's that looseness that not you know that casualness of a snapshot that's there but it's towards the goal of really having an everyday scene.

Victor Acevedo

Sort of moment that actually is a cosmic happening you know every every second is it is we're in the inside this you know amazing eternal unfolding of whatever it is so and then locally you know there's energetic fields energetic waves so that's the metaphor so the photography yeah is that's how it is and there are some collaborations with professional photographers here and there thank

You sure sure all right thank you for your question michael and then lastly we have vernita

Yes thank you so much victor I enjoyed your work and I noticed that there's a recurrent motif of filling space with interconnection geometric figures and some geometric fragmentation of the human form I think this presages the internet of things and the filling of our time in space with non-ionized radiation from our ever-present digital devices is there a central philosophy of yours from which this artistic choice emanates

Well I think yeah it kind of comes from myself sort of adopting the graphical metaphor to try to express that what I was saying a moment ago is you know things happening in an energy field you know the void plenum the void matrix from the dao of physics so it kind of comes the metaphor comes out of there and to express that graphically I adopted the isotropic vector matrix from buckminster fuller but at the time I was thinking about the!

Victor Acevedo

Of structural energy and also the ocean that's way bigger on the universal level so that's kind of yeah in whatever I'm doing is kind of like just a little bit of a almost like a haiku or a poem as a subset of that you know understanding yes and a foreshadowing because

At the time that you created the earlier works this dense filling of our space with ionized non-ionized radiation did not exist I'm most of us didn't know about it yeah so it's like you are peering into the future in a way cool

Thank you that's an example of you know a contemporary audience can see things in the work could understand the work bring references to it that someone in the 90s couldn't do or you know in the late 80s there wasn't that the description of reality was nowhere near what it is now for any of us

So thank you for that thank you for that observation thank you for your question and yeah definitely thank you for your observation vina okay all right I think we are kind of out of time for additional questions at this time and so that being said christine would you like to start your presentation

Absolutely that was amazing like I honestly never thought about how work that's done before has new tools to describe it they can almost recontextualize the work and yeah that's a little mind-blowing I'm still absorbing that right now okay

I'll share my screen I need

To move my controls here I'm going to let you know that this is this is the most beautiful part of the show we're going to do is we're going to have a new co-host that's going to be like the new co-host of the show we're going to have s team that's going to be like the co-host of the show it's going to be me and jim not all of us are going to be or are going to be all of us are going to be at the same time so we're going to have s team that's going to be me and jim that's going to be jim and jim and we're going to have the co-host of the show that's going to be jim and jim and way before that I was just working with light. This is an, I love that Victor showed student work because this is an undergraduate piece they did when I was in engineering. And I switched all my classes to art and I called my parents and I said, I just changed to an art major.

Christine Sciulli

Like you can come home and go to community college. So I sort of dumped all of that and went the very next day back to my engineering classes. But this was a piece of plywood. My dad was a wood shop teacher and industrial arts teacher. He was always psyched that he could give kids like an actual skill that they can go on and make a living from, which probably part of his, you know, disinterest in my doing art. But this was plywood that was cut into eighth increments. And it was like pretty regimented. I was working with a bandsaw for the first time and it was kind of intense, but these are just 12 by 12. And I just, there's only one of them. And I changed the way the light landed on it and photographed it. But my inspiration is kind of from everywhere. Definitely light driven, light in shape.

Christine Sciulli

I spent a ton of time doing figure drawing work and then interested in natural phenomenon. Like these little worms that live on the beach that create like crazier patterns than humans sometimes or paper towels. Shout out to the Penrose guy for bounty in those patterns. And also the way that nature carves into space.

Christine Sciulli

So I'm jumped through time. And this is actually, I'm gonna show you a piece based on these carvings through time by water. A piece about reflection that I did at Shirley Feiderman that I had great aspirations for this piece. But I think it was challenging to see for most people but I got what I wanted, which was taking the water shapes that I had photographed and redrawn, transferring them onto the wall and then cutting what I saw as human interventions in the shape of roads through them with tape or just plastic tape.

Christine Sciulli

And then you would see the way the light changed or you would sense yourself in the reflection which is the abstract of the reverse of the water. These drawings I did when I was pregnant with my first child. I have three kids in 2001, 2002. And then two and they kind of constantly come back from my work in a way that I wasn't really thinking of.

Christine Sciulli

This was much later, like several, like three or four years later, but their animations in space using simple Christmas lights and all kinds of bric-a-brac behind the translucent projection surface. It was a real projection surface. This piece changed my life entirely. So I don't know if any of you guys know Mabou Mines, Ruth Malachek, but she walked, can you hear that audio? Probably not.

Christine Sciulli

There's audio with it, but she walked into a show that I did. And she said to me, Christine, I want you to do a video installation for my next show. And I said, Ruth, what's the projection surface? This is such a great opportunity. And she said, oh, there isn't one, it's a scaffold. So I quickly started thinking about projection surfaces as the absence of a surface and working with kind of what remains of a surface.

Christine Sciulli

So from there, I went on to work, working with lines of light. We did this piece at White Oak in Florida. It was a two week residency. And I got a lot of chances to experiment. And so experimenting with lines of light, which become planes through space and how they would intersect that scaffold. So here in Frederica Taylor Gallery, I don't know if any of you guys remember her. She passed away a few years ago. I constructed the network of string and then projected lines of light through the string.

Christine Sciulli

I think this one. I think this is the video. Yeah. So this is at Islip Art Museum. And this is what happens when you project rotating lines of light through a network of string. I worked with this for a pretty long time as a concept. And let's see, fast forwarding through. The lines can only, the points of light can only be where they are, but because you're in the dark, you don't really understand where it's coming from until your eyes dark adapt. So dark adapting for me is something that I like to play with when people experience my work. It takes about 45 minutes to dark adapt. Some people actually do sit down, lay down on the floor and let it all happen, which I love.

I'm gonna pause this.

Sorry, I don't know how to pause it. I do wanna share audio for this, but I don't know if you, can you give me a thumbs up if you hear audio when I play this? Probably not. So these kids are actually, screaming and space and jumping and a silas is, let me see, let's take, let me get that back. Well, maybe it's not time to mess with it, but I did want you guys to be able to hear this.

You know, Christine, if maybe if you go out and reshare the screen, but make sure you hit those, check those two boxes for,

Oh, which boxes are they?

Share audio. When you, if you, if you stop sharing screen for a moment and then share screen again.

Okay, stop share.

And before you tap on something, look for those boxes to check at the bottom.

Okay, share screen and then, no, I can't, it's okay. Okay. What if I do a new share? I don't wanna stop the flow here. Oh, share sound. All right, let's see. Is that better? Yeah.

Yep.

It's coming through now. Okay, good. So I was saying, you know, there were people who'd come in and do a saxophone sound and there was someone who was, Hello. All right, they're talking. And anyway, all kinds of sounds would come through the space. This is another riff. I found the line piece, but I, you know, looked at it again, not so long ago, like maybe two years ago or a year ago, just before COVID. This is in a space called Vsauce Projects in Greenport, where I took over like kind of a tiny space in the gallery. And Colin actually saw this piece, which I think is how he found me.

Christine Sciulli

This is from a while back after I was stopped working with straight pieces of string, I was working with like, network, like, works of brambles and bushes and going out and harvesting and bringing things back and inhabiting spaces, galleries. And this is the Edward Hopper House Museum up in Nyack. And then Carol Crane, if she's still on, invited me to do a residency at South Fork Natural History Museum after we accidentally ended up talking when a reservation I made for a Warhol walkthrough was, I was too late. I was like three days too late to reserve, but she said, hey, I looked at your website. Would you want to do something with us? So I started working with fabric during that residency with lines and inters through like a mesh of fabric. And this is my friend and collaborator, Janneke Pirna, who's an Estonian artist who works a lot with lines.

Christine Sciulli

And she also does amazing work with, you know, like with these big Prismacolors. And we're going to do a little bit of the old looking for the old two and you can see that it's like a great line of light. And it's like a kind of like a nice same light it's like a kind of like a light in the space of the inside of the house. And it's like, you know, it's like a kind of like a whole new side of the house. And it's like, you know, it's like a kind of like a big light and you can really see that in the space. And it's like, you know, it's like a kind of like a real light and you can really see that in the space. For a fundraiser. This was for Children's Museum of Art in the city. It was just a really simple, you know, set up white background, white platforms, and they could adjust them however they wanted and they could pick a background.

Christine Sciulli

But there was a lot of bonding. It was a really sweet, sweet project. This was for art in general. Frederica Taylor brought me in to do a piece for their gala. They were honoring Phuong Bui and Lisa Dennison. It was 2016. And then this is, this was at Spring Break Art Show. I don't know if any of you got to Moynihan Station before, you know, when it was the old post office in disarray and Spring Break Art Show did a piece a couple of years there.

Christine Sciulli

I traveled to a couple of three actually light festivals. This is an old, old church in Hildesheim, Germany. They were really worried about the lift going over the wooden floors. So we had to move plywood every time we had to move the lift. It was a complete nightmare. This piece went up really high into the, into the ceiling. I think it was, it ended up being like 30 feet high because we were also working from an upper balcony.

Christine Sciulli

Here's the church. So it was freezing cold, but it was a light festival and it was really fun, actually. And you can see the upper balcony up there, probably more like 25 feet by the time you got up there. And these are, I probably should have said, you know, I went from working with lines of lines to working with circles. This was at Smack Melon Gallery in 2016. The curator there had seen the piece at Spring Break Art Show and invited me. Suzanne Camp was now up in Rhode Island to come and, and work in this space, which became this space when I got through with it like three very cold weeks later. Actually, it was more like a month and a half, but they, they let me work in this space. They had an extra slot between shows. And so I just went in every day with literally seven wool sweaters and put the piece together with string and broke my fear of heights by going way into that pocket on the upper balcony.

Christine Sciulli

And then I went into the space and I had to work in the space. And I think that was the most exciting part of all of this. And I think that was the most exciting part of all of this. Which is terrifying for me who didn't like heights, but I had no other option. I wanted to do the work. It was built on a structure of string. I've since just started pinning the work, like only pins, which makes a lot lighter piece.

Christine Sciulli

These were by photographer Paul Warchall. He's an architectural photographer. Sorry, my dog. He was just laughing on my chair. That music was from Bodan Kilish who put together a score. The piece was called Royal at Smack Mellon and he put together a score with his band called The Royal Noise. Hold on, I'm gonna let my dog out because he's very excited.

Christine Sciulli

And he had musicians. There was a band called The Royal Noise. There was a band called The Royal Noise. There was Chris Nappy on percussion and Shazad Ismaili on like a tiny little guitar off in a corner. Everyone, all the musicians inhabited the space in different ways. That's Bodan. He had a bass clarinet.

It was amazing.

This was, I was invited to Indianapolis to do a piece at the Heron Art Gallery. There's an art school there. And they gave me a couple of thick moving walls. So I put this sculpture, a soft sculpture over those walls. And this piece is called Subsume. You can see like kind of a corner poking out on the far left side. Space was incredible. It was over 100 feet long. And my family came for the night to visit, which was very sweet.

Christine Sciulli

Indianapolis is a lonely place. There we go. This is at the Mac Museum in Cologne. They never actually turned off the lights for me, which was a bit of torture. But it was another art festival, light festival. And here is when you were walking up those sort of grand stairs of you up into one of the pieces coming down the column.

Christine Sciulli

And then, you know, I'd like to not be snobby about the work. So I did a piece in this very small, pretty fun gallery in Williamsburg by Piro Gunduz. And there's a long, narrow hallway. And I said, well, this is the site that I want to inhabit. So I inhabited a space for this piece. And then I was asked to do by actually Paul Miller, CJ Spooky, who spoke, I think, last week.

Christine Sciulli

Connected me. This is Pablo Molina, who's an amazing video guy, engineer, special effects person. He edge blended. I think it was 10 projectors for me to project onto the crowd at the first Global Citizen Festival. The idea was that it was about the power of one person to change their circle and change the world around them. And it fit in with their mission for their very first festival in Central Park.

Christine Sciulli

The audience is a canvas. And I got Sigur Rós to do the music for the day. At the end, you can see the people there. I also like to use projections of imagery. So I went to Denmark to the Kattegat coast and interviewed a bunch of people who were all related basically to the owner of this ice house where they used to store ice and fish.

Christine Sciulli

And collected their photographs and did a, like, not a performance, but a light performance of sorts. And then the kids, I invited the kids, that was my mobile projection unit. And I invited the kids to do some graffiti on their ancestors, which didn't go over that well with some of the people there in the town. But the kids had a great time. So these drawings come kind of back to me over and over again. I did a collaboration with my friend, Bastien Schmidt, at the Southampton Art Museum.

Christine Sciulli

And my piece was to install the this wasn't that long ago, it was about three years ago, to install a series of string drawings, rope drawings. And then Bastien installed a grid. And then the other artists started to inhabit those spaces and the string and the walls around us. And I get a lot of joy out of working with other people. And I know being an artist is usually a solo enterprise.

Christine Sciulli

Yeah, so old obsessions never leave. So then I... Went back to that piece again this year, except I did my own corner installation. But I wanted people to interact with it. So the idea is there were seven pulleys on the wall and you could manipulate this piece into your own drawing. But then again, those details just kept going back to those drawings I did when I was pregnant with my first son. He was now 19.

Christine Sciulli

There. I have a piece up right now in Tribeca. And it's a small installation, but I had the opportunity to have a talk there with Paul Zuzbuki and physicist Stefan Alexander, who's putting a book out called Fear of a Black Universe and Outsiders Guide to the Future of Physics. Stefan Alexander is his name. And Stephanie Keith, who did the... The infamous, famous photographs of the Capitol invasion. And my friend Nicole and Hartnett, who did these photographs of black objects on a dark black background and gray background. It kind of obscures the idea that it's photography and the nature of light. And then Martin Schoeller, who is a famous photographer, celebrity photographer. So it was nice that we could all kind of meet in this space and have a talk about a lot of different things. Physics, dark matter.

Christine Sciulli

I mean, I was... And politics. But that's what I like about art, that it can kind of give you a place to talk about things. I do projection interventions as well. This... I did it in East Hampton on a windmill the night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. I put together a projection series to get out the vote. This was a piece that I projected for... I was... Project your vote through Center for Artistic Activism. And then I put together 60 artists who had projections from St. Anne's Warehouse through the East End, trying to get people to get out to vote. So this was my contribution to those videos. And today we're voting out where I live in New York and I think in a lot of other places in the country.

Christine Sciulli

Let me get to the punchline. There we go. Oh. Oh, yeah. And yeah. These are... This was a Guild Hall out in East Hampton and my kid was in second grade at the time. This is class. Having fun. And that's that.

Well, thank you very much, Christine. Your presentation was wonderful. And, you know, there's one thing about, you know, that kind of artwork or the artwork that you're doing that it kind of reminds me of... Like I'm not sure if a lot of you have seen this before. But like if you've ever gotten like a piece of cotton and set it on fire, that's the kind of effect that it kind of reminds me of.

I've never done that.

Yeah. It's cool. It's cool. That might be an art form of itself. Some people might use. But that's... It really reminded me of that. It always fascinated me. And your work definitely reminds me of that. It's very beautiful. Cool. So. That being said... I think that's enough about what I think. Let's see what everyone else thinks. Anybody else have any questions or comments? Feel free to leave them in the chat or, you know, raise your hand and we'll get to you in order.

Davonte Bradley

Anybody? I'm going to fill in this awkward silence with me just rambling a bit.

. I just want to say that today's artists, I'm totally blown away by both of you and just seeing how you've used the tech and adapted the tech to your visions. And so, Victor, I've known Pharrell and now I feel like, wow, you know, we'll have to talk outside of this. Would love to talk more. And, Christine, I love how you're creating these experiences.

Unattributed

Especially since recently I've had the good fortune to be able to do this. And I've been really fortunate to project onto a building and so interested in this interactive sensibility. So thank you for sharing. And really exciting to see.

All right. At my invitation, looks like we have a long line of comments now. We have one question in the chat. From Cynthia. Cynthia, how do you create the lines of light in the soft sculptures?

So the ones that are done with fabric were, these are circles. They're cones of light projected through space. So wherever you are in space, you see them from a different point of view. If you were in line with all the projectors, you would just see circles.

Neat. All right. Vernita. Go ahead. Thank you for sharing.

I'm pronouncing your name correctly, right? It's Vernita.

Vernita. I'm sorry. Yeah, right.

Vernita. That's all right. Got you. Well, I enjoyed the presentation today very much. And I just wanted to offer my comment that it reminds me of continuous line drawings. But the action is not sequential as it would be. When you're watching someone do a continuous line drawing, but rather it's presenting all possibilities of the line when viewed from different perspectives.

Exactly. Vernita, you hit that nail on the head. Thank you.

You're welcome. I appreciated that. It just made me smile thinking about it.

That's really cool. Like no one's ever kind of just summed it up that way. Like to be able to see the line from different perspectives.

Yep. And that's what these spaces are for.

Yes.

I have to share a little bit more. People can't say my name. I actually say Shuli like prosciutto because they can't spell it. So I also appreciate the Vernita like Vernita. I get it.

All right. Oh, okay. So we have kind of two questions that kind of overlap from Michael and Patrick. Patrick wants to know what's your approach to scaling your work and what power is your projection? And Michael also wants to know if you're using a video projector or lasers or what?

I've tried laser projectors and I don't really like the color of light. But as far as lasers go, I haven't used lasers because I don't

Know. I definitely like people to feel comfortable in the space.

And I've always been reluctant to do a laser. For those reasons. And I also have projectors from different angles. A lot of the time. It's hard to avoid the line of sight into them. As far as scalability. I like people to be able to inhabit the space and a lot of people have advised me to make a tabletop version or to make, you know, something that you could put on a wall. And I've. I've tried it. And it's never been satisfying enough to me. So I think while you could scale it way down.

Christine Sciulli

Almost to like a nano level. If you had the right, you know, if you had little threads on the right video projector. It's only interesting to me when it's in relationship to human scale.

And how and the projectors.

How strong. So when I work outside. It depends on how dark it is outside. The video projectors that I use. They are 2000. Almost 3000 lumens. But the thing about them is it's not very strong, except that they have like a million to one black ratio. So the contrast ratio, the video black is really, really, really absent of light. As opposed to some projectors that are a lot stronger, but have. A ratio that's more about projection. And they're not really projecting data. You know, where they just care about.

Using DLP or.

I know I have LCD.

LCD.

But I do like the LP. If I do a big outdoor present project, then I like, like a 10,000 K DLP. 10,000.

Thank you. And we have a question from Michael. Another question. Like add one in the chat, but. Yeah. I'll say something to say.

I guess my question. Is that I see the complication in the, in the photograph that you have up and those are the cones of light going through. Your. Scans. Surfaces. To make a very complicated image. If you hadn't told me they were projected cones, I would be thinking. And that was one of my earlier questions about the lasers is that there might be some sort of generative component, making these crazy.

Unattributed

Shapes move around. And, and so I'm wondering, not, not without a criticism involved in there. How technical is most of your process. From on, on the. The electronic side. Not because I, I saw. Yeah. In the, the art museum. And you could actually see that it was Photoshop projected up there. And I was like, I would go. I would go bananas trying to get rid of that stuff and trying to figure out the.

Unattributed

Pristine way to do it. And that would be ignoring the fact of. Of every one of those images you showed was just such a delight for the, the people, the kids involved there and the output and. It wasn't. The perfect technology.

It seems to me it is the perfect technology because. I like type of control. So when I, when I thought about doing generative work with this. I am less excited about it because then I lose control over what it would be. Right. But it is really important for me for people to understand that these are circles. So in this space, there's always a way for you to see them head on. Because it's about the transmission of light and how it gets caught through space.

Christine Sciulli

You know, I'm not at, I'm not interested in. Making squiggles in space. That would be like a different kind of work.

Yeah. But perfect, I guess I didn't. I'm not trying to imply. Correct. But. Like trying to get. Total and precise control for an exact end. And, and what I saw in the kids museum photos was not total control. That was. Perfect for everything that needed to be there. And it here that their cones of light going through creating such.

Unattributed

Amazing work. There.

So you're talking about the messiness of this. And how it was just about fun.

Yes. Without.

Deletion. This is just like a big messy sloppy workshop where. Just playing.

And, and yeah, but that's. You're saying that those were just cones of light that there wasn't. You are. You said you're using control. And, and I'm not trying. I think I'm. Trying to defend myself. My own question here. If there wasn't a criticism. Thank you.

It was amazing. Thank you.

All right. We have actually three questions slash comments. Following that. One from the chats. What resolution are your projectors 4k 8k.

And my predictors are like simulated 4k. But I, you know, I upgrade them every so often. And it depends on where I'm showing and what projectors they bring to the table. By now, if somebody gives me a. Projector that's not HD. I just say, no, thank you. I can't use it. You know, but in the beginning, of course I used projectors that were like seven 68 by 10 24.

Christine Sciulli

Cause that's all someone was giving you.

Now you have standards. Yeah.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That's always nice.

Right. Right. Right. You have a question from Negin.

Yes. Hi. Such amazing project. Thank you so much. I have two questions. Once I did something like that for a project that trying to write. With light. And it was so difficult. So I had to do it like, I don't know, like 50 times until we could make it very nice. So I have this question that if you think of a drawing of a special image or composition and try to make it right or just express some movements.

Unattributed

And if you express the movement, do you think of your body movement as an expression of like choreography of your body expression or you only think of the lines?

Well, it's interesting. It's a good question or comment, because I think that the reason why I ended up putting the figure drawings into the slideshow was literally because there is a relationship that I don't think I've ever had. I was thinking of. But I think it's, again, one of those things that draws you to work that you don't quite realize through your life.

Christine Sciulli

Like there's a direct relation, but it's subconscious. But I think part of what pulls me towards continuing to work with fabric and the circles is something about getting this feeling.

So you forgot about your movement and your body and just create what was happening.

Yeah. I mean, I play with the speed of the projections of the expansion and contraction circles, which can manipulate how much it feels like, like an austere machine versus like a more lively physical body.

And do you think of a subject when you do that and playing or playing?

No. Well, when I make the pieces, honestly, all I listen to is The National or Philip Glass. I think it's really weird. Thank you. It's all so amazing. So inspiring. Thank you. You definitely reach out if you have any questions, you know, that are partially written in space and you want something, you know. Thank you.

All right. Next up, we have Colin, who wants to share or ask a question or make a comment.

Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, thank you, Christine, for coming. And sharing your work with us. You know, definitely very excited about, you know, having you participate in the Southampton Arts Center show too. You definitely talked me into that one space that I thought maybe like would be used for like a place to show a reel. And then you're like, how about that space to do an installation? I was like, you know what, that would probably be a much more compelling use of the space. And plus they have a theater in the back that we could show a reel on. So.

That's great.

That's great.

Wait, I just want to say thank you. You guys can all see my screen. To Michael for this comment, because I literally was just writing a proposal for a grant about redistricting in Pennsylvania. And one of my images was Harold and the Purple Crown. So now I feel like that's a good moment. Nice.

Sorry, I interrupted. That was cool. Yeah. And, you know, definitely appreciate,

You know, Christine was the artist that introduced me to Paul and Paul Miller to the show. And I think that's really important for the group, you know, so that definitely debt of gratitude for that. And also I just wanted to share a link to the chat of a piece that is by Christine's son, Tor Burwell, who is 17. And she sent me this link. And I mean, it was like, you know, Christine and I had shown together this little gallery on the North Fork of Long Island called VSOP. And it was the string projections. And I totally thought, you know, when I first saw the piece just walking up the stairs that it was some sort of high tech laser, you know, installation. And my daughter was with me, too. And she was, I think, five at the time. And she was just mesmerized by it. And then I saw what it was, that it was string with light projected on it.

Colin Goldberg

Wow. You know, and then when it came time to start putting artists together for this Southampton show, I saw that Christine had a piece that wrote. Yeah. You know, the rope piece, the interactive piece hanging in that space in Southampton Arts Centre. And it just sort of clicked. But yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, thanks again. And, you know, hope you keep coming back to visit us, you know, and see what we have going on. But I definitely think that the work speaks to me in terms of having, you know, what I think of as Techspressionism. It sort of embodies that, especially, you know, the site-specific installations. I think it really feels like something very, very different from other work that I've seen before. So that's it.

Thanks. Thanks. Okay. And then we have two more questions. Thank you, Colin, for your question in the comments, by the way. We have two more questions. One from Patrick. He wants to know. How do you feel about using fog machines in some of this?

Never. Nope.

No fog machines. Actually, I had the same kind of thought, too. Yeah. But definitely lends itself to that appearance, though. You know what?

I think part of that is that I use nylon, and the nylon is very translucent. So it glows. And it disappears like a scrim disappears, you know, especially when you first walk into a space. So you really see where the light is. You see where the light is hitting it. It passes through the weave and goes to the next layer. And it's all hand pinned, you know, pretty randomly. I'm the only one who can pin the work for some reason. I've tried to get people, especially in those giant installations. But no one can do it.

Nice. And Greg Little wants to know. Are your animations looping?

They're looping they're like eight minutes generally like eight to twelve minutes but they're staggered so the space doesn't really repeat they're all different lengths and they don't start in sync and so if you do the math it's a really tough repetition thing

All right that's cool okay does anyone else have any questions or comments that they want to leave with oh Roz and go ahead and lower your hand oh you're still muted Roz

Yes it takes me a little while yes coming from the old school still at it Christine thank you so much I mean both the presentations were wonderful today and I'm so grateful to have you on the show and I'm so grateful to have you on the show and the salons have been so great and I like the warmth of the atmosphere but Christine I just want to say it's not so much a question but I just want to say how much I appreciate that you know that your political voice and what's going on in the world comes is that you play you do you merge that with your work I think that is art I mean I never those concepts of fine art and commercial to me were always kind of like I don't know I get kind of what it is you should go to the heights that you can but I also think we are in the world and of the world and I think it's more powerful that we are so I just want to salute you for that and of course there's a mystery that comes with someone making something very original and creative that isn't up on a billboard or something you know where people encounter it in a way that is much more seminal I think and thank you for your beautiful work I saw your work at Guildhall I think it was with Tony Ousler's work in another room maybe but or I don't know maybe I'm I don't know I like

This oh no Tony had his show right after my show that's what you're thinking maybe

I was

The spring show and he was the summer show I

Tried

To get him to get the projectors I wanted but he wanted projectors that had a different brightness ratio so yeah

He's pretty great too but I know your work's very different it is I certainly know the difference but really beautiful work and just thank you so much thank you thanks and

Thank you Roz for chiming in I'm not sure from the looks of it I think everyone's questions and comments have pretty much been asked I'm not oh we got one from Tommy have you seen Tomas Saraceno

Oh wait are they in Manhattan are they built in Manhattan like for playground structures

Tommy Tommy that's you we're asking you Tom I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm having microphone clicking this actually I think Victor if you haven't seen Star Cena's work also you would really enjoy he uses these sort of structures that are geometric and have this kind of interlocking quality but actually he did also is he somehow had spiders build webs in structures that were in the gallery with a light that I think slightly moved there's a slight movement right to it and so yeah I mean it's really the sort of interweb and I also was thinking like neurons and neural networks coming

As

I stare like at you and your background it's sort of like very sort of mind extent I was I was talking to a material scientist I was

I was trying to like understand how I could build something that wasn't actually nylon and you know like silkworms like how could you get silkworms to kind of spin in a space so I love that you bring that up check

Out check it out thanks yeah

Lee did you have a question or comment yeah first of all my comment is a wonderful presentation I was wondering about the funding you obviously are not selling something that people are walking out so how

Do you find if I could only make a tabletop just basically from Grant to Grant based on the institution you know they give a budget if I need new projectors you know sometimes they'll get the projectors but they're not selling anything they're not selling anything but they're not selling anything but they're not selling anything projectors at cost for me and then you know I'll make a deal but usually it's just Grant based and the museum or the gallery pays for the flights and everything and for the installation time and a flat fee and then it goes away into a little ball yeah it's really bad impermanence not necessarily intentionally but I just don't have any interest in working differently so all right

Thank you thank you for your question lee ross did you have another question or no it's your she accidentally put your hand up

No I didn't I yes I did have a question it's not really a question you know it's not a question people listen to go does she know what she's doing yes it's just that a lot's going on in the mind at all times I just wanted to say yeah thanks again to both of you but I had to put a shout out to victor I'm sort of loving that the exciting times that yes I was a part of and other people here like cynthia and there are other people here ruben were part of in the 90s I love how that's coming back together and the response that you guys see what was going on and there is something so exciting about seeing the constraints of the machine at that time where the pixels that people like what is last time you name I can't think of it but she's doing these large pixel things and it used to be you couldn't avoid those things and

I

Was painting them in my paintings and they were coming out and all of us it was a different kind of approach and it's just fun to see history being built because it's more powerful for all of us that this story and this lineage goes through digital and yes even back to vermeer and I'm getting to one more point about the lace maker my husband and I purchased a print of the lace maker from victor it's a show that he was having in soho somewhere and I love that it is you know that it's related to vermeer and it's also got the technology and I had actually texted my husband in the middle of this and can you come bring the piece out and just it's somewhere with other work and a lot hanging but he wasn't able to do it but I just I just wanted to add that and I look forward to seeing the book and thank you thank

You ross thank you ross I appreciate that you're that you I always feel very grateful that you got that and I'm very happy that you have it in your collection it's a small print from back in the day that was probably 1999 2000 that you acquired it so yes voice yeah

Grateful beautifully framed we're taking care of it right

On

Okay we are we are down to the last 10 minutes of our wonderful meeting that being said if there's any additional comments or questions for victor or christine please feel free to share them it's like it's open space now like so you can go ahead and start a conversation or you know I could keep rambling for 10 minutes I can totally do that like I have a lot of practice with that oh

You know I've got a quick I've got a question for victor and actually the thing is this is great seeing your work through time because I've been familiar with your work for you know since since early 90s and that sort of thing so it's really great to see this trajectory and I'm with michael as I you know what you're gonna have you're gonna sell books you're gonna be fine oh thank you so what happens is that the thing is that what you know in regards to some of the writing I'm doing haven't been showing yet about what's going on here is that I'm kind of looking at the ie right now I'm doing a lot of study of the you know the neo-expressionist movement you know like what you were involved in and I'm blanking on this but I'm going to do a little bit more on you know the other folks I see them from my head but the thing is that what do you see like the through lines in the notion of you know expressionism as it's going through time or the idea of like looking at you know trying to depict the interior state and that sort of thing and how as it keeps kind of like bouncing from expressionism in germany to abex to neo to this community and that sort of thing how do you how do you think you know things are resonating and you know how what are the things that you see what do you think what do you see staying the same what do you see the things that are changing

In terms of the expressionist vector that's going through yeah exactly yeah you know I think my personal experience of it is that it's always been there but say maybe in the 80s and 90s it was less than that so for me it's there's just it's not an amazing work of art the imprint of the imagery was computer graphic in a way, you know, and as people were just learning these, you know, the work looked like digital art. We didn't even call it digital art. Right. In those days it was computer art then.

Victor Acevedo

But I think as people, as the, as the software becomes more facile and you have a generation of artists that have mastered it. Point where they can really express, you know, their subjective, their unique voice, it just keeps, it just keeps, if anything, turning up the uniqueness factor that's embedded in each person's digital practice. So it's always there, I think. And even for me, I feel like surrealism is always there.

You know, especially in the digital, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if I'm answering your question. But I think I mean, the Techspressionists is, that's why I think it's a very powerful term. Because it, it's a term that really kind of encompasses, maybe art actions that respond in analog media. But that impulse for mark making or expressing is just, you know, in the computer, if you will, to use an old term or phrase.

Victor Acevedo

They're brought out of the computer through the human expression.

Sure, sure. It's, I think, in many ways, to me, I, you know, and sorry, I don't know if I'm saying this, but I think it's a term that really kind of encompasses I don't want to go on for, but I think the thing is, I'm thinking about this idea, you know, the internal emotional landscape of the Germans versus the action of the AbEx. And then the idea of, you know, just, you know, basically going back to more of the representational practice, you know, with the with the Neos in the in the 80s and 90s, and that sort of thing. And then seeing how that goes, you know, with our ability to represent reality or not, or, you know, the flexibility of the of the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the technology of the digital platform. I think this is what's very interesting to me.

Yeah, I agree.

Thanks, Ross.

Thanks, Ross. Cool. She found it. That's a vintage piece there.

Connecting the 90s. Us old geezers, we're still going here, folks. Yeah.

Hopefully for many, many more years.

Yes, absolutely. Life is long.

Yes. Cool. Michael, did you have Michael Price? I'm sorry, we have a couple of Michaels now. Michael Price, did you have something that you want to share?

Yeah, actually. Christine, thank you for sharing today. I love the organic quality of your work. I love the light against black. I like the black and white kind of vibe because it's pure. There's no distractions. It's in a lot of ways. And for me, they a lot of the imagery feels like you're expressing like what clouds are especially like in storms when lightning lights up the edges of clouds and goes through the clouds. That has a really strong vibe there. And also, when I look at projections or I look at imagery from subatomic cloud chambers, there's a real sense of that organic. That's something purposeful is there. But it's very enveloping. And I just I, I like that a lot. And I like the ephemeral quality of the work as well. So it's very intriguing.

Michael Pierre Price

And I think as human beings. There's that real world sense of the organic that comes through in your artwork. That I find very satisfying. So thank you. Thank you.

I think one of the things that I find like really paradoxical paradoxical about it is it's literally just circles. It's like the most devoid of any content and the most austere shape. Right. And it's just going through space and doing what it doing, but we get an emotional response to what's happening. And it's just so strange to me.

Christine Sciulli

But yeah, I'm happy that it happened. I just lost my earphone. Sorry.

You're fine. It happens. Okay, we have like two ish minutes left before we hit our time. So that being said, I think we can go ahead and start closing it out. I will say you don't necessarily have to leave. A lot of us will... Well, not maybe a lot of us, but some of us will still be here after the, you know, official lot of time.

Davonte Bradley

But just want to say again, it's just an amazing work. Again, thank you for joining us on our 20th virtual salon. Just that's an amazing feat for me, I think. And I think we should celebrate that a little bit. So give yourselves a round of applause or if you want. And thank you. Thank you very much for joining us here today. Thank you very much, Christine and Victor, for your presentations. They were wonderful. And thank all of you in our audience for your questions and comments and just general input and keeping things interesting. Because I mean, presentations are one thing, but I think feedback and being able to talk about the presentation is just as important. So without your great questions and comments, the presentations would just be what they are.

Davonte Bradley

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I tried.

Right on.

Right on.

So we

Will now.

Yeah, well, now we'll wrap up our recording. If the feeling strikes you, Colin, or do you want me to go ahead and wrap it up? All right, we'll close out. Thank you very much.

Thanks for moderating.

Yeah.

Thanks to Victor

And Christine for presenting. Thanks so much. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.