Salon 91 // Origins Part Two

Welcome to Techspressionism Salon number 91 on the origins of technology and art. My name is Michael Pierre Price. I'm signing in here from Phoenix, Arizona. And today is February 6, 2025, and we have a great lineup of artists who have been working from the early 80s and even before

And since then, and they have some great insights and stories to share. And first up is Roz Dimon. Welcome, Roz. Welcome. Hello, everybody. I'm usually reporting from Shelter Island outside of New York City, but I'm reporting from Tybee Island. My husband and I are working remote. Better get going. The clock is ticking. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Colin and everyone. Okay, here we go.

Roz Dimon

Let me just go into slideshow. Can everybody see my screen? Yeah. Okay, good. All right. I added to the origins of technology, I mean, of digital art, the origins of perspective. And I have the wrong date, excuse me, but we'll just go forward. But you're not showing your slideshow. We see the whole screen.

Roz Dimon

Okay. So, we're going to go to the next slide. Yeah, we see it in presenter mode, Roz, with the up the next screen on the side and captions. Okay, hold on a minute. We did test this. Look, can you see I'm just playing from start. I'm not in presenter mode. Can you see my screen now? No. You don't. I don't think you're sharing anymore. You're not sharing right now. Yeah. Okay.

Roz Dimon

It may be that you were sharing a different screen. You know, of all those different screens you can choose. Yeah, let me go share. Oh, I did. I shared the wrong screen. I'm sorry. I've got a new computer. I'm in a new place. That was it. Exactly. Thank you, folks. We did test this. Sorry about that. Okay.

Roz Dimon

Slide show. Are you seeing my screen now? Yes. Okay, great. All right. Make up for time here. I'm talking about origins of perspective as well as the early days of where I'm coming from in art and getting into using technology in my work. It's always been for me about connection. And I just want to talk from the point of view of training.

Roz Dimon

I think like most of us, I went to the University of Georgia, Lamar Dodd School of Art and was very interested in art history as well as just, of course, painting and drawing, which was my major. And it was that perspective of the vanishing point of us being out here looking really deep into a picture. It's after sort of the medieval period of flat iconography and we're coming back into humanism. And you're right. You're going deep inside a painting. And this continued through, in a way, through, you know, more contemporary movements. We got impressionism, de Chirico, even a more contemporary photograph where you're looking deep into the distance. We're out here and you're going deep inside a painting.

Roz Dimon

I would say like from the beginning that when I look back at my first show after I graduated and I was in Atlanta, Georgia, that I was really even then kind of going an opposite way. It was like, oh, I'm going to be a painter. I wanted the paintings to come out and really touch the people from the wall. So my first show of portraits, I was working at an investment.

Roz Dimon

And please turn off your someone's I'm hearing someone's voice. My first show was called Talking Heads and I recorded the portraits, the people while I painted them. And so in some kind of funny ways. You know, I'm. I never thought of myself as a technological person, but I had technology from the very beginning. So when you came into the gallery, all the paintings were speaking. Now, these are oil on canvas. We're in the late 70s. I'm getting to be an old bird here, but still pretty alive and kicking. So it was it was a different kind of perspective.

Roz Dimon

Wasn't long after that I drove my Volkswagen up to New York City to be famous with the other eight million people. A challenging situation. But the perspective changed because it was just the information was everywhere. And it's just I was like overwhelmed and loved the city from the very start. And not just the technology and the squares and pixels and electricity going on in the buildings. But I was interested in the space in between and how we connected one another. And space in between things has always been pregnant with energy for me, even in my drawings. So, again, I was still. I was thinking about this perspective. Well, I wasn't really consciously thinking about it. But here the perspective was coming from all different sides in a screen that, as we know now, can share.

Roz Dimon

I mean, infinite information, which is pretty fascinating. So my early pieces were filling up with squares and grids and the New York Times crossword puzzle. And this is called Kevin and Jane Take a Walk in New York. But I was very interested in kind of the immediacy and electricity. Even my drawings are very gestural and fast.

Roz Dimon

Early information paintings. This is what I call this series. Also, again, about people connecting. But you can see those squares. I'm kind of painting this electric pulse I'm feeling in the space between us. And I'm not really even sure what they are. You know, I didn't really know the word pixel at that point, but they were coming in everywhere. I was influenced by people like Nam June Paik.

Roz Dimon

Who really reached out with the heart in a way. And so does Lillian. Laurie Anderson. She was just fantastic. I went to see her perform. And she really connects. Ed Paschke was always a favorite of mine from Chicago. It's tech, but it's human. And it's got emotion and feeling. The cabs were going tech and turning into kind of electric squares.

Roz Dimon

I'm still in what we call, of course, now natural media oils and mixed media on paper. The bars were going pixelated. And I was like, I'm going to go to the pyramid club, an early club. It was turning into squares. Squares were just coming in there. And I realized my brush, even flowers, you know, there were these squares. And by now I was starting to like draw a grid on the canvas. I mean, there was some mathematical element I was obviously missing. And here's one. I reluctantly gave up that brush, but not really. I mean, I've kept doing other, you know, my natural media. But this is my one of my earliest digital pieces that I don't think I've ever shared here.

Roz Dimon

And I'm going to show you a picture of this. And I was just thrilled. I mean, these squares, I was painting with this like ugly block, you know, of a square and four colors on an IBM at the School of Visual Arts. And I was just, wow, this was fascinating to me. I think some of my patrons, collectors at the time were just, whoa, this is ugly stuff. You know, it's not ugly, but it's not, you know, it's when you're on an adventure, there's pain, you know, there's suffering. But I was thrilled because I knew I had this medium that was speaking to today. Through paint.

Roz Dimon

I really entered this, you know, post code where the first really the first paint programs were coming in. And just so elementary. Resurrection, my plant has died again. Getting more excited. Working on a Commodore Amiga. And sometimes filming off the screen. I mean, you know, some of you who are younger might not remember, but there was no Internet.

Roz Dimon

And there was no way to even get the painting off the screen. So I had to make it into fabricated into anything else until. So I had this Catch the Burglar camera that I would use RGB and somehow get it out to make it into a physical thing, which I think is another big topic we could talk about. This is History's Interloper Intruder commenting on the plug. One of eight pieces in AT&T's collection.

Roz Dimon

And things were moving up. I was getting into Deluxe Paint. 88 colors. Really thrilling. Lost in a City of Dreams. The perspective is that information is just everywhere. You know, it's flat, but it's pregnant with it's flat with a million layers somehow. I mean, the miracle of it all is just has always fascinated me.

Roz Dimon

And going into the late 90s, even my husband had turned into pixels. James, who's such a compatriot and supporter of my work on a part of it. Well, here he became the subject matter. And he's looking out. And you've got the subject matter. And it's the I put the toolbox in the screen. And this actually became the buses that were on the tours in Soho would stop at our third floor apartment at 6th and Prince and Charlton. And it was not a scripted part of the tour, but they would look up and go, who's that? The naked man in the window piece up there. This is a big, big digital piece.

Roz Dimon

Yeah. And I've talked about this before. But during that period, I was working. Starting some of the new media departments at the World Trade Center where I worked for 10 years. And we lived within 14 blocks of. And I was have been working at the Wall Street Journal and certainly a plum position. When the towers came down in my world really came down. Trying to keep track of time here. And I was forced just by sheer.

Roz Dimon

Being in a very sad state. Trying to see how. How I could do art that might. You know, have some meaningfulness for people after such a. A time. And I took a course. This was just another strange part of this adventure, but fascinating in a way that I mean, I've never really cared about icons. I'm a very spiritual person. Interfaith minister.

Roz Dimon

Actually, as some of my friends know, and I don't separate my ministry from my art, which this talk kind of speaks to. But I went to see a show of iconography at the Metropolitan Museum where it said. Icons were sources. Of comfort besieged. And my heart was awakened. And I went and actually painted.

Roz Dimon

It's called you write an icon. And it's really doing a prayer for a week, but it's washes and washes and layers of flat, flat. Color that is every layer has symbolism and meaning. And it's not about you and it's totally Eastern perspective. I mean, we're kind of going back. Before. My first slide of Western teaching and I wasn't familiar with this language and my I remember my ribbon. I stopping my hand, which is kind of connected up to my shoulder in a way. And when I draw and he said, please, this diamond stop no expression. You're copying along with the other 20 people in the room. I think it was the only professional artists taking the course and it was all about copying, but it was all about love. Two minutes for us. Okay. I better go. All right. So I'm back to this place where I'm speaking out from the wall.

Roz Dimon

I am wrapping it up. This is one of my icons of Jesus, who I think is a total rad. And he's speaking out from the wall. This is. And I wanted to go immediately into the works that came out of that period. Where the speaking to people really came to the fore and with technology. This is my wall for my first one of my, well, my more recent diamond scape. This is my wall for my second one of my diamond scape of Haven's history of 800 years of 300 years of history. And if you can imagine mathematically you're going across 1234567 generations. You're going down on the left about events and in the middle is that third dimension of the Z that is where it's all happening for me and in the diamond scapes and I'm doing these pieces on the wall that become these multi layered.

Roz Dimon

Infinite information paintings. But they're still about a painting. And here's a young girl actually entering inside the painting. Yeah. What are you looking for? Pieces on the wall. Oh, yeah, the document. It's fabricated. Yes, exactly. In a light box with a. Yeah, you can. So it's still about a flat work of art that if the internet's off, it has to be beautiful, and it has to work as a white art in a seductive way, which I think is very different than sort of these immersive. I love repeating my dog. Oh, there's another flag on the other side. This is still a painting. The painting can go inside. And it also has audio. It's easier to find the American flag. I'm going to keep going.

Roz Dimon

I'm bringing up a recent drawing and just saying that it's all about what connects us is the heart. And this is a drawing of someone you might recognize, kind of a sad character. And for me, it's all about not just the lines, but those white spaces, which one of my earliest drawing teachers pointed out and said, you know, your drawing, it's the marks you don't show that are also filled with space. So this is not a digital piece. This is mixed media.

Roz Dimon

And a little close up there. If I get thrown in prison or anything, please come see me and bring me something good to eat and some wine. I love this group. What connects tech to expressionism? The human heart. Amen. Thanks. Wow. Thank you, Roz.

Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well, we're going to keep the show rolling here. Next up is Cynthia Beth Rubin. You got the floor, Cynthia. Okay. Is the share there? Oh, wait a minute. I got to do it again because I may have forgotten to check. I'm sorry. I forgot to share sound. I did forget to do it. I'm sorry. It is completely not intuitive to do that. So a reminder to everybody. So you are now seeing this, right? Yes. I just realized one thing, which is some of these are pulled from previous presentations.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I forgot to change the timing. So we might have a little. But anyway, this is my very first piece on an Artronics computer. It wasn't meant to be a finished piece. It was just playing. But it shows what we could do in those days, which is basically draw into the computer because there was no scanning. And we could repeat things and change the color and kind of chop them up.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And so here it is, like, bigger. But, you know, I just wanted to show you. I just talked about it. So I'm going to zip along. I don't know why I did that. What I was doing at the time, here's a watercolor. So this is from, I believe, 83. I'm not great with all of my dates. But I was doing a watercolor that had forms taken from nature and had borders and had a kind of geometric form going on in the border. So it fit. A lot of people later would say, oh, you're right. Your painting was really influenced by the computer. But it was actually that they fit exactly what I was working on at the time of kind of moving across the page, taking the forms from nature, abstracting them, and working in borders.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And eventually, this is the piece that I actually exhibited. So I was showing you the unexhibited pieces as I was feeling my way to this one. You will notice that it's still all in the middle. It's still all flat colors. So this was prior to Gradience working on our Tronics. So you'll notice there's compositional structure that's really important in these. So where did it come from? Way back in the, this is 1980. So it's not so far back. I was doing collages, mixed media collages. And prior to that, in the 70s, I had been looking at Persian ink. And I was really interested in the idea of changing my source material so that we weren't always looking at Western wall painting. This was kind of the politics and the aftermath of the Vietnam War. So when I was in grad school in the mid-70s, people were talking about that a lot.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

You'll notice that I had access to a color photocopier because before the general public did. I was originally from Rochester, and that's where Xerox was based. They still, their research was based there. But the whole company was based there then. And so using various connections, I got in to use color copier. And you'll see, like, here it is. I was hand drawing. I was using color copier.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Some of what looks like hand drawing was actually drawn on a stone. So it was a lithograph that I printed out. And was able to repeat. So and then I cut up. I cut up old, old drawings. And I drew around it. And I broke the borders. And in some ways, you know, if people know my current work, I'm doing the same piece. At some point, I got interested in Hebrew manuscripts. It actually just World Trade Center reference. I was meeting my father in New York on a Monday in the days that all the museums were closed except for the Jewish museums. So that's how I found the Hebrew manuscripts. I kind of stumbled in. But he had a meeting at the Trade Center. And he wanted to have lunch there on the top of the whatever it was called, Windows on the World. And I was like, no. And I insisted we go off and go to some hippie place somewhere else.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So I never got to eat there. But I always associate the discovery of the Hebrew manuscripts with that day. So it turns out when I was planning this talk, I didn't realize I would be sitting in my living room where that painting is behind me. And this is an interview that I had early on. And I was scanning all these things. I thought what was really interesting was that I said that it was stimulating and that it will do the stuff you couldn't do any other way. It's like any other medium, really. But it has less damage. It has less grammatical problems than other media. So other people, they misquoted me. I don't make grammatical errors. Other media.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

What's interesting is that people focused on how challenging the computer was. But for me, it was a natural. I had a more awkward relationship with paint than with the computer. And it also brings up this whole idea of materiality. So these are the books that I read over and over again. I wish I could say I was reading women and people from more diverse backgrounds. But no, I was reading these people with German backgrounds, men.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And Hegel's phenomenology of mind, of when something becomes an object, and how we look at the collection of characteristics in order to understand what the object is, was very influential. And of course, Hans Hofmann, Push-Pull. Also, when I was an undergrad, I studied with Paul Sherrits, who was obsessed with the idea that film was the image, but he scratched into it. Like in this piece, this is a still from his work, Section Stream, which I talked about quite a bit with Paul when he first saw it, screened it on the large screen. And just the way that he had wanted to bring out the image. And he had to bring out the fact that it was a material, that film was actually a material. And then there was the image.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So I think one of the ideas that I wanted to bring up is this difference between material and working with the computer, which to me almost has no material. And it's one of the things that I think is a reason why art historians and critics may be more drawn to the idea of material. And I think it's one of the reasons why I think it's more of the algorithmic art, because I think it has more of the evidence of the material. I'm just going to skip over this because I've been talking about these pieces. But I feel that one of the great things that we have about in digital art is that it erases the material. The image stands on its own. It's kind of a pure image. So this is also in the AT&T corporate collection. Interesting. They collected some of our work from those days. But do they ever show it?

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Not that I know of. It was a big deal when gradients came in. Yes, we had to photograph the screen. And the only way we would know what was on our big floppy disks was by keeping a notebook like this, because there were no icons. There was no hard drive. It took forever for the image to load. And so here's my notebook. I wanted to show a little bit of this video.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And that's probably enough of that video. Just to come back for a second. I did this with David Smalley, who was a colleague at Connecticut College. And because the palette was held separately from the image in those days, what you could do was create a video by simply having color cycling. The fading in and out of the one photograph we used of trees, I hand-drew trees into the computer. We had a scan that cost about $50 in 1986 dollars, so you didn't scan very often. And we did traditional AB rolls in a regular video suite in order to get that effect. But the color changes came from simply changing the palette, and it looked like things were moving.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

You have a couple minutes, Cynthia. Okay. So I'm just going to jump through into what I was doing later in Avignon. Going backwards and using a basic G2 computer where I hand-drew things in. And then this shows the palette. And yes, because you could change the colors, it was possible for the palette to disappear. So you had to be careful. But that piece went on to become a mural that was commissioned by the Connecticut Commission. It was commissioned by the Commission on the Arts. I think it was, as far as I know, this is where I got stuck. Sorry, I didn't check this.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So this is, was probably the first mural design on a computer. So you can see how pixely it is. And I think I'm just going to have to do this from now on. Because I forgot to check what I was doing. Anyway, that's pretty much, I went on more reading. People were talking about where their ideas came from. And one of the things I was really drawn to with the Hebrew manuscripts was the idea that more than one thing was happening at once. So there's like little writing in there, which was what everybody was talking about in those ideas those days. More than one thing at once. So I went for a long time using the structures of the works. The Hebrew manuscripts. Not necessarily the text that was there. And I think that's pretty much where I wanted to stop. I'm just trying to jump ahead here a little bit to show you early scanning, which was only black and white.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

That organizations were super important to me. Going to CISEA, which was a big organization. I was in CISEA in 1991. Creating community. Some of the questions people were raising about the art at the time. I learned Photoshop from Apple France. That brought a few of us into a workshop in 1991. So I had to learn it in French. Sainte-Rocopier gave me an artist residency. So before you could print out easily and you certainly weren't going to cut something up. I was able to do color photocopying. I was able to print out copies and cut those up.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And that just gave rise through the years to different ways. I'm not going to show the video. I'm going to end here because the video I think is a little long and people can find it online. So here I am. This is my ending slide. Up at the top is a very recent work. At the bottom is an artronics work. And you can see that I've been doing the same piece for 35 years. Or whatever.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But still that interest in things moving along and extracting from nature. And that's it. Thank you. Fascinating presentation. Wonderful work. Thanks, Cynthia.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. Next artist up is Carter Hodgkin. Hey. Hey, Carter. Welcome. Hi. Where am I sharing from? I forget. Can you see the screen? No. Probably not. Not yet. Okay. Where is the share button? Oh, got it. Okay. Sorry. Okay. I'm going to zip through this as quickly as possible. My thinking about images and painting was influenced by living in San Francisco in the late 70s. I was exposed to computer programming and digital imaging emerging from Silicon Valley. But I had no special interest in computers and was focused on painting.

Carter Hodgkin

Hold on. Sorry. Do you want to turn on the presentation? Yeah. Can you see anything? Yes. I can see your screen. I can see a slide. Okay. You in front of work. Hit the play button. Thank you. Okay. Good deal. I'm just not used to doing this. It's been a while. Okay. All right. But encoding images into bits and bytes impressed me as an important extension of artists I was interested in like Sol LeWitt and Dorothea Rockburn. So in my studio I engaged in a procedural drawing process generating abstract sequences of colored squares which replicated and extended indefinitely. These works resemble a genetic sequencing or computer code anticipating the future direction of my work. Each square was painted with oil pastel on rice paper.

Carter Hodgkin

I created wall size installations using the rice paper panels. Each rice paper sheet was about three by four feet high. And the overall size was about three by four feet. The order of these sequences challenges the viewer engaging them in a process of pattern recognition. So my aim was to make people more aware of the process of observing or seeing.

Carter Hodgkin

And again, there's tons of work I did but no time to see it all now. So when I moved to New York in 1980, there was an ongoing discourse about photography, painting, and the nature of representation. Which I felt was not looking at the present. So at the same time, new technologies were digitizing the body through MRIs, SEMs, PET scans, and other techniques. I saw the interpolation of the body by these imaging techniques as an intersection between representation and abstraction. And I looked for ways to place this digital visual language within painting. So I started to think about the future of photography. And I looked at the future of photography. So I'm going really fast through my whole body of work. So these are just one image for the whole ten years. During the 80s to 90s, I used a range of materials and methods.

Carter Hodgkin

Hand painting digitized forms. Photo silk screening fragments of DNA. Helixes, computer chips, and molecular structures. I was embedding high tech images in a deliberately low tech way. My whole body of work has since grappled with this conflict between painting and technology while exposing a new visual universe.

Carter Hodgkin

In 1978, I was invited to see a friend's research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto with bubble chamber images. On the left is a bubble chamber, an image of a particle collision from a bubble chamber. And the eccentric linear trajectories created by the colliding particles fascinated me for their random yet precise depictions of force. I drew parallels between physics and the speed of information, rapid change, and complexity in our world.

Carter Hodgkin

For many years, I combined fractal forces and quantum mechanics. And I created a new form with photo silk screens of particle collisions. And now we're jumping way forward to 2004. I discovered processing, a coding program created by two MIT grads. Instead of using other people's bubble chamber photographs, I could use processing to create my own particle collisions. I can simulate collisions and alter particle behaviors to enact forces such as speed, curvature, and momentum. I do this by altering code, which creates behaviors for the particles. And in this process, I feel like I'm drawing with code.

Carter Hodgkin

So the collisions unfold randomly in frames, which I then capture to create compositions. I layer several frames into a composition, which is imprinted onto handmade rice paper or canvas. I paint the collusion. I paint over the imprint with gouache and watercolor, teasing out an image. On paper, I exploit the properties of watercolor to interact with the ground, emphasizing touch and violating the perfection of the imprint.

Carter Hodgkin

Whoops. I've been working with processing since 2004 to create forms. And I've translated these forms into many paintings, works on paper, and other media. This particular work on paper from my electromagnetic watercolor series became a huge mosaic for Queens College in 2010. For Queens College Science Building, I created a three-story mosaic, which simulates a particle collision occurring at the top floor and causing particles to dramatically fall to the bottom. It's a little hard to see. This is an exhibition of a three-story mosaic.

Carter Hodgkin

I used 20 millimeter blend tile sheets as the ground and 10 millimeter glass tiles for the image. I also employed silver, chromium, and gold tiles to reflect light and convey a sense of motion. I united the interior space by creating mosaics for the building's nine columns, which you can also be seeing from outside the building.

Carter Hodgkin

And in 2017, I created a glass tile mosaic 12 by 45 feet for Capital One's event space at their headquarters in McLean, Virginia. And this is a close-up. I've also created large-scale mosaics for the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. I haven't included them because I didn't think I had enough time. But I have.

Carter Hodgkin

So the code that I have and use can generate multiple frames, allowing me to make animations. This is from the LED Lab in New York in 2016. They have these amazing ways of presenting LEDs. And they were very gracious in allowing me to present my work through these configurations. Like what you see here.

Carter Hodgkin

And last year, I received a commission from the MTA Arts. Let me see if I can get this to run. At the Fulton Center in downtown Manhattan. And it consists of 15 animations on 50 LED screens. Varying a lot of different sizes throughout the Fulton Street Transportation. This is the biggest wall of LEDs they have really.

Carter Hodgkin

And then currently I'm working on a series of circular forms which are translated into paintings. These works are printed and printed collage on wood panels. So that's, I think that's the last one. I think I made it within the 10 minutes. And that's my website. Okay. Wow. That's just beautiful work.

Carter Hodgkin

With my physics background, I'm naturally drawn to what you have done. So kudos to you. Brilliant. And your use of different materials is really, really fascinating. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So. But. I don't know how to get back. Okay. Back on soon. All right. So what do I. It Stop share. Let's stop. Thank you. Feo. I always had a problem with that too. Yeah.

Carter Hodgkin

It's up at the very. Carter's work. It's the closest I've seen to what Udis and Tony Longston and myself did back in the 60s and 70s. We were dots and dashes. Hers is much more beautiful, much more complete and professional looking. We were doing things that were very crude on that cheap paper I showed you. But that's the kind of images that we were able to get out of those early computers.

Carter Hodgkin

Swirl circles,

Dots, dashes. All right. Thanks again, Carter. And on to our next presenter, Victor Acevedo. Welcome, Victor. Yes. Thank you. Welcome. And thank you, Michael, for organizing this. And it's a great honor to be here with everybody. Thanks for the opportunity. Let me share screen. Let me share screen here.

Victor Acevedo

Okay. All right. Let me just move some stuff around a little bit. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm just moving stuff. Oh. Okay. So. So, you know, they're not obscuring my vision. You might be. I think you can see this. Okay. Right. Yes. Yes. Okay. Anyway, I love the sort of the directive or for the for this presentation, which was to kind of focus on the early days. So I thought I'd focus on the 1980s and primarily in Los Angeles and how the scene was there and how I kind of. And then I started to think about that. And then I started to think about the early days of the late 1980s and how I kind of interfaced with it and how my work sort of developed in that period. And but starting for where I left off in analog media.

Victor Acevedo

You know, I went to art school, Art Center College of Design, and I studied analog media. It was a fine illustrator and then a fine art major. And okay, let me. So this just shows this is a piece. Called Ectoplasmic Kitchen and later in 1988, it was selected for to be in the show that was in Spokane, Eastern Washington University in Spokane. So that was kind of a nice validation to be entered into this show. So that was kind of in that decade of full circle. Well, actually, yeah, it was full circle, but the piece was originally from 87. But I want to go back in time. This is the wrong caption, but this is a model I made. This is where. I was in 1983, and that's where I first got introduced or actually got hands on in computer graphics, working with computers to make images kind of started.

Victor Acevedo

It started did start in 83 and kind of gradually I became kind of a full fledged digital artist by about I'd say 87, 86, something like that. So but in 83, I was very interested in Buckminster Fuller and synergetic. So I made this model of Octet Trust, which. Was a space frame made up of octahedra and tetrahedra. So that kind of set the scene for drawings that I was doing at that time. This is actually from 84. But I could trace the vectors of that a photograph of that sculpture and sort of interface it with a figuration.

Victor Acevedo

And that was a big part of what I was interested in. Here's some details. I'm going to go fast on some things because I probably have more slides than I have for 10 minutes. But you can come back and look at these. This is another piece called Void Matrixes, graphite on paper. And it was just kind of thinking about perception and the notion of sort of the energetic matrix, the unified energy field that could co-mingle with our sort of standard perception of the world. There was a bit of surrealism going on, of course. But here's that space frame. Here's you know, this is a distilled cube octahedron which emerges from that octet trust structuring.

Victor Acevedo

And then I know I've showed this slide before, but this is so important to me. And like, how did I find out about computer graphics was through Gene Youngblood's expanded cinema class at Art Center College Design, which was purely a survey course. And I saw it in Ed Emshuler's piece from 1979. And I saw it in Ed Emshuler's piece from 1979. And I got introduced to the work of Woody and Steina Vasulka.

Victor Acevedo

So in 1983, there was this exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art called The Artist and the Computer. And a lot of the work was work that was done in the 70s, maybe early 80s as well. And here's a better slide of the artist in the show. And, you know, we have Darcy on the left here, Darcy Gerbarg. We have Nina Sobell in the right column.

Victor Acevedo

So there's a few people that we know, part of our group that are pioneers from this era. So it was a very much of a historic show and that had Frank Dietrich, David M., had a great impact on me. And I watched, went to see a lecture that had James Blinn and David M. And I saw, I came across, it's not in the slideshow. I came across another lecture with Nina Sobell. And she was talking about her brainwave drawings in 83 as part of the show. So I took a workshop in 83, kind of algorithmic work with Frank Dietrich, who is a computer art pioneer from the 70s, originally from Germany, but he had moved to the U.S.

Victor Acevedo

And in 83, he was based in Long Beach and he was teaching a workshop. So that was in 83. And then in 84, I took this class at a private. College called West Coast University. And it was taught by, I have these highlights here. Tony Longson, who is from the U.K. Many of you know Tony. And the class was called Art 222, Introduction to Computers in the Art. And, you know, down here on the left, you can see the equipment they used. It was a VAX 11730 and Evans Sutherland PS 300 workstation and an AED 767 frame buffer. And this was the sort of the.

Victor Acevedo

The tail end of the pre personal computer era. It's still 84 personal computers are already disseminating widely in the early 80s. You know, in fact, this is the same year that the Macintosh came out. But it wasn't I couldn't find it in universities such I had left school by then. But. I wanted to get hands on. So it was one of the things I did to do that. And Frank Dietrich is here as well.

Victor Acevedo

So then in 85, then sort of getting into personal computers, I got into this access to a paint system. And these are examples just sort of croppings of tests I was doing in 85 on the true image paint system. This was PC. And then also this was also running on the same computer that had the cubicomp, which was a 3D modeling system. So. I was kind of dabbling in that. And because I was into polyhedra, I kind of gravitated towards that.

Victor Acevedo

So I'll kind of go through some pieces. This is the source photograph for ectoplasmic kitchen. And here's some early variants before I overlaid the sort of geometrical matrix. But I'm working with color shapes. This was a 2D program. So, you know, I got access to the cubicomp that had 3D modeling, but I got a gig with a company. That made speaker support slides is what they called them. This was before PowerPoint software. You hired a company to make computer slides for you. So it was a 2D program or two and a half D called artwork. So I after hours, I would make work on it. There's M.C. Escher influence. And there's kind of a that's another way of kind of thinking about this energetic field is using tessellations, zoomorphic tessellation influenced by M.C. Escher. So here's another you could see my workflow starting with photographs.

Victor Acevedo

That I've pulled from the world. It's just kind of at a friend's backyard at a children's birthday party. 83 and then five years later with the cubicomp and paint system interface basing it on that photograph. I made this piece called Semiotic Outback. And I used the term semiotic, the signing, just kind of the play of a hexagon and how that can work as a face of a poly polyhedron or it can be a floor, a tile floor going into space. So that was that. So many of you remember this, the floppy disk. This is how we saved work in the early days, early 80s. This is from actually 1989. This is another series called that Wired Couple.

Victor Acevedo

Just working with it didn't really. The series was called Wired Couple, you know, the name of the piece and the name of the series emerges later, but I had this notion of the Wired Couple. And, you know, I have these like. Temporary names, Jumbo 4, Jumbo 7. I'm not sure exactly why that was, but here's the finished piece.

Victor Acevedo

From that is once again, the cubicomp polyhedra overlay of geometrical form. Here's another one a little more developed. These are from 1989. I believe most of what I'm going to show you is from 89. So this is I was an artist in residence. This is the wrong caption. A place called the video image in Torrance, California. And this was this cubicomp system. This is a still from a video that was shot and working on another iteration of the Wired Couple. So some readings I thought was cool that some of the presentations included some of the conceptual readings. So this is from my analog media phase, which actually conceptually informed my digital work. So. Still does really. I was this was influential book Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher and this book on Polyhedra Polyhedra Visual Approach by Anthony Pugh is a brilliant book.

Victor Acevedo

He's part he was part of the Buckminster Fuller community. These are two other books that perception perception and mysticism separate reality. The Carl's Castaneda books. This goes back to the middle seventies. The Tao of Physics I've talked about before was very influential. This was ideas and integrities. But Mr. Fuller was the first book that I really actively as an art student delved into. I had heard of Bucky since 69 and I had heard of operating manual for Spaceship Earth. But this is the first book that I really sort of like got in there and saw the relevance for making visual art. And then the Holographic Paradigm edited and other paradoxes edited by Ken Wilber was a very influential book, a collection of essays. Science. Metaphysics.

Victor Acevedo

Hello. Holographic Paradigm. This is a one page from an essay by William A. Tiller and bring your I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but this I still remember this to this day. And there's these postulates. There's five postulates and these jumped off the page to me when I first read this book in about 1980.

Victor Acevedo

Number one space is embedded in the. Domain of spirit to this is a six dimensional Euclidean space rather than just the three dimensional Euclidean space that one perceives at the purely physical level of consciousness. Space is a hexagonal close packed lattice of active nodal points rather than a continuum. So this was like complete.

Victor Acevedo

Affirmation of that sort of visual metaphor, that graphical metaphor for interpreting. How perception and consciousness operate spontaneously as we perceive the world. So that was that was very influential. You need to wrap up. Oh, okay. So I'm going to go fast. This is an important book. Digital Visions.

Victor Acevedo

There's a piece by Darcy Gerbarg. This tile piece. This further affirmation that the M.C. Escher tessellation was alive and well in the digital domain. These are this is a piece called Two Philosophers. Let's go through it later was put on the cover. It's 1991, but the pieces from 89. These are newsletters.

Victor Acevedo

The community was important. LAC graph was quite active. These are the newsletters piece in there. A lot of information that was dispersed and then culminating. This is the last slide. All of that decade of 1980 is my personal development. My. My personal development and my interface with the community.

Victor Acevedo

Sort of culminated to this moment in 1990. Art 1990. A collaboration with LA Seagraph and Easy TV in West Hollywood. And so I was in that show and we had V. B. B. S. Sorenson. We had David and we had Rebecca Allen. So that was an exciting moment. And it just began the 1990s. They kept going from there. So anyway, thanks so much. Thank you.

Victor Acevedo

Victor. Beautiful work again. Thank you. Just really, really interesting. The perspectives there. So I appreciate your presentation today.

Thank you. Okay. Next artist is Annette Weintraub. Annette, welcome. Hi. Let me share my screen. I'm going to go to the next one. Okay. So I don't want that. Okay. Can you see that? Yes. Okay. Great. So like many of my generation, I was trained in traditional media first. I was a painter. And I'm going to focus on work from the mid to late 1980s.

Annette Weintraub

And in the 1980s, as I'd been like since grad school, I worked with ornament and architectural imagery. And the series of paintings that I'm going to show first as a way of introducing my digital work. So I used to travel around the world and explore the visual language of ornament that came out of architecture and then extended to other environments. And I was making a series of small paintings that were hung in grids of nine, six, nine, or 16.

Annette Weintraub

I don't have any slides of the installation. These were in a show in 1987 at the Leonard Pearlson Gallery. But for some reason, I only had a series of slides with black background. So in the PowerPoint, they look very flat, but they actually were not. So this is, let me go back. This is a set of four. And it occurred to me very much later that they have a lot in common with my recent virtual still life work. I've been working with 3D models and doing panoramas, which is something I keep coming back to, and also virtual still lives since about 2018.

Annette Weintraub

So I've kind of come a little bit full circle. So these are some of the early paintings. I also worked with different kinds of multi-panel pieces. So unfortunately, the slide doesn't show that they were three-dimensional paintings. They look very flat because I cropped them out of the black background.

Annette Weintraub

And that's the last painting. And I was aware, let me go back. I was aware of. I was aware of computer technology, primarily in relationship to typography, because I was doing graphic design at the time. And I was a big fan of this magazine called Upper and Lowercase, which was the magazine of the International Typographic Corporation.

Annette Weintraub

And they were very advanced in writing about becoming digital revolution. I didn't really know any other source. And I appreciated Victor's presentation because it showed that so much more was going on the West Coast than in New York, I think, because I certainly was very active in the art world, but I really wasn't aware of that volume of activity in New York City. But in Upper and Lowercase, they were highlighting how the computer could be used not only for graphic design, and typography, but also for art and animation.

Annette Weintraub

And their articles probably went back to the 1970s. Then in 1983, I started teaching graphic design at City College and City University. And I was encouraged by the dean to put together some courses in computer media. When I came into the college, the existing program was, charmingly called commercial art, and it was kind of my job to update it. And we started talking about how to integrate computers.

Annette Weintraub

So the first system that we got was a proprietary system. But then in 1984, we moved to the first, I think it was a Mac 128K, and then an early Microtech scanner and some dot matrix, and dot matrix. And then laser printers. And for me, that really changed everything. So I started to think about how to adapt, how to use the computer in my own practice.

Annette Weintraub

And by 1989, I had the first Mac 2, which was a color Mac. I don't think it was 32. I'm not sure if I remember whether it's 32. But I had my own access to the computer and I started applying what I'd learned in my design courses in my own work. So my first step was to do some really rough crayon drawings. I wanted to make a series of computer images that were based on the paintings that I've been doing. And these were the.

Annette Weintraub

Basis. For a series of color images. The I was working in Studio 8, which was an 8-bit program. So that means only 256 simultaneous colors. And there was a lot of jittering. And I developed this way of working that kind of adapted or interpreted the way I'd been painting into the computer medium. So that's another one. It was there. I didn't have a tablet or a stylus.

Annette Weintraub

People have described drawing with the mouse like drawing with a bar of soap, which I think is really accurate. But I tried to incorporate the crudity of these tools into the kinds of images. But the thing that really attracted me to the computer was the luminosity of color. The color was very beautiful. And just the kind of brilliance of the color space. So I developed a method of overlaying different colored strokes on a kind of gray-green background, which was a bit analogous to how I did my paintings. And the forms, again, were derived from various kinds of architectural ornament. As someone else said, maybe Cynthia said this, there was no way of outputting these images. So I shot slides off the screen. And then later on, when I had access to better printers, I did some prints for archival purposes.

Annette Weintraub

So these are from 1989. Then... In... I guess it was also 1989, I had a residency at Yaddo. And I'd been thinking about trying to make work that more directly engaged the computer. Instead of drawing upon my previous paintings. And I was also thinking about using photographic source material. So I brought a portfolio of scanned images to the residency. And I was also interested in just exploring black and white. I was very interested in noir film and the kind of dramatic effects of black and white as it applies to urban space.

Annette Weintraub

And this was the first image that I made using scanned photographs. It's very primitive. I kind of forced... Studio 8 into a kind of transparency. But the program was really limited. I was... The other advantage of working black and white was that I could print on red paper to the laser printer. Which gave me a fairly archival kind of print. And I was really concerned with output.

Annette Weintraub

The next series... In the next series that was also architecturally based. I began to use the patterns that were built into the early programs. And these were like lines and grids and bricks. And they were essentially dithered patterns that could be used to create an analogy to levels of gray. I used them not only for their...

Annette Weintraub

Gradations, but also as texture. And they also have a feeling of reflecting the kind of pixelation of the images. A couple minutes to go. Okay. I'll speed up. The next series... By the time I started the next series, I was using Photoshop. Which had more capability. In terms of layering images. And I started a series called Disintegration Reconstruction.

Annette Weintraub

That was about the urban environment. And the constant process of renewal and destruction that you see in the city. And these images I output at 31 by 47 inches. They were tiled. Which means that they were printed on probably 12 or 16 separate pieces of paper. With an overlap and crop marks. And then I assembled them and laminated them onto museum board. To create a large image.

Annette Weintraub

And it was... The tiling was a very tricky process. I don't know if anyone remembers doing this at the time, but you had to be, like, incredibly precise, or the paper would stretch because of the slight bit of moisture in the glue stick, and the images would become unaligned. But I got very good at it, and on my tile prints, you really can't see any seams. So that enabled me to work much larger and have an output that was fairly archival.

Annette Weintraub

And these were shown at Isaiah, which was maybe the second or third Isaiah. They were shown at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, and they were reproduced a lot in various Photoshop books. The next series came from a trip that I took to Las Vegas, where I became totally blown away by neon light and artificial light. So this series is called Night Light, and they're also tiled and laminated. And I used a lot of the same things that I did in the initial prints, but I used a phaser print, which was a kind of wax-based print, again, on rag paper. And they...

Annette Weintraub

Annette, can you wrap up? Thank you. Yeah. I'm just going to kind of quickly go through these. These were shown in an exhibition that was organized by Aperture, that traveled for years. And I just wanted to end with my switch to making web-based art, which I started to do in 1994 after I'd seen an image come. It was actually Hiroshige's The Great Wave come in on a fast connection in one of my colleagues' labs. And that sorted me on a series of web-based pieces that incorporated writing, sound, animation.

Annette Weintraub

This one was shown in a show that Ross organized called Code. The one that I did in 1999 was in the first biennial that showed Internet art. And it was based on a book called The Great Wave. And it was basically a quick-time panorama using audio GIF animations and on-screen text. So am I out of time? Yes.

Annette Weintraub

Okay. Well, thank you. Let me stop sharing. Sorry to cut you short. Appreciate you. Beautiful work. Again, it's just stunning to see the progression of going from, you know, analog to digital and what was capable. So thank you so much, Annette.

Well, thank you. Well, I'm going to bring up the rear here. And unlike all of my predecessors here, I did not start as an artist working with technology. And... I'm sorry. I'm going to show you what I want to show here. There we go. This is a recent piece I did just this past week. So this is where I am today. And just over 40 years ago or so, I was a game designer. I had left the traditional role-playing game working on Dungeons & Dragons. And I went into working in the video game market working for Coleco. And we had 16 colors to play with. Actually 15 because one of the blacks was for transparency. And we had a wonderful 256 by 192 pixels worth to be able to display things.

Michael Pierre Price

One of the games I worked on was Spy Hunter. And this is what it looked like on a traditional television set back in the day. And that's the actual size. And so you can see the limitation on color. And we were working directly on hardware. And so there was no programming language. The programmers had to actually talk to the hardware.

Michael Pierre Price

We got to do game manuals that went with the game. And the artists had some fun. And they did a caricature of me as Dr. Torpedo. So that was kind of a fun thing. And during the early mid-'80s, the arcade games were the fascination all across the country. Putting down your quarter to play a game. We did Donkey Kong and other arcade systems for the ColecoVision. Here's a screen of Zaxxon.

Michael Pierre Price

And then in 83, there was a groundbreaking game called Dragon's Lair that used laser discs in order to play traditional animations, beautiful animations. Don Bluth and Rick's. And so we didn't get to do the beautiful animations. But we got to do the gameplay part of it. And we also had the license for 2010, the movie, after 2001's Space Odyssey. So we did a couple of games that I got to work on for that.

Michael Pierre Price

But then the video game industry collapsed mid-1985 or so. And all of the folks that were working at Coleco got laid off. And I decided I never wanted to work for a big game company anymore. So I created my own small one-man operation. And during that time from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, I was working on emerging technologies to create not games for the consumer market, but games and entertainment for amusement parks like Disney World and such. Did a lot of prototyping. The only product that I managed to actually get on the market was the Game of Thrones. And that was the first game that I ever got to work on. And so I got hired by Coleco as an independent designer. And I got to do the AI for the Talking Cabbage Patch doll. The doll had a bunch of sensors internally.

Michael Pierre Price

And so what I had to do was create a finite state machine that said, okay, if the doll is lying down, if you get it upright, what's it going to say? If you squeeze it, is it going to cry or laugh? It also had an IR sensor in there. And it was really, really fascinating to tell whether or not other dolls were nearby so dolls could talk to each other. It was really, really fascinating.

Michael Pierre Price

After that, I got to work on some laser technology and also early virtual reality. And I did a number of VR games back in that back in that 90 in 94. In 95, myself, a couple of VR programmers, and one of the business guys, they were working on a game called Indigo Moon Productions. We started our small game development company called Indigo Moon Productions. We got a number of programming contracts through Interplay.

Michael Pierre Price

We did a couple of different games there, licensed for the United States Chess Federation of Chess Game. During this time, I was working on a very interesting game. I saw that the rise of the Internet was going to be something big. We had 3D technology based in our company. And I knew that the merging of 3D with the Internet was going to be something really, really profound. So I worked on this game. There was a combination of 2D, 3D. It was a ritualized sword fighting game. So it wasn't a button masher like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. You actually got to create a warrior and you strategized your fighter by creating various different kinds of sword technique moves. We had gone out to California, did motion capture with a bunch of martial arts swords fighters. And we used that as the basis for the game.

Michael Pierre Price

And so we did this game. It got published. It was really, really cool. It was really quite successful. You have to remember back in 99 when this came out, a 28K modem was the standard. AOL was still the mode that most people were getting on the Internet by. And so it was really groundbreaking. And it's probably the most proud game I ever worked on. I'm the happiest with this game of all the things that I ever worked on in my career. But then the dot com collapse happened. And since we were located in small Louisville, Kentucky and not in California, all of our contracts basically dried up and we had to shut the company down.

Michael Pierre Price

Myself, a couple of the other guys, since we knew we knew that 3D and the Internet was going to be something groundbreaking and everything was heading that way. That's what we focused on. And so we ended up coming out with a prototype product where we actually loaded 3D program onto a music CD. And if you put the CD and you had a computer, what we did was we created this 3D environment for the band that you could go online. And it was a way for you to interact with the band members online. As far as I am aware, no one has ever replicated this ever since then.

Michael Pierre Price

Unfortunately, timing is everything. And I think we were too far ahead of the curve. We tried meeting with record companies, and at that time they were all worried about streaming media. And if you remember, there was a whole lot of controversy going on about who owned the rights to, you know, the artists and all of that. So unfortunately, even though we did this cool stuff, it never materialized.

Michael Pierre Price

And then I ended up started getting burned out. And so I was teaching at a local university, game design. And around 2010, I just gave up and said, I want to become an artist. I want to use my creativity, the things that I learned during my 30-year career to create artwork. And I started doing that based on photographic images that I was taking. And then here I am today as part of the Techspressionist community. So that was my whirlwind introduction to seeing technology advance over the years and how it related to what I was doing. So thanks to all the artists today. I'm really, really grateful for all of the work that was presented.

Michael Pierre Price

And hopefully we're doing okay on time, Colin. Yeah, we're all good. Yeah, I know that probably each person who presented last time and this time could have spent the whole hour going through all of their work. And their careers. So, you know, take this as a little snippet, looking at this across a dozen or so artists who presented and realize the wealth of experience that's in this group and how much technology has transformed our lives during this timeframe.

Michael Pierre Price

Absolutely. This was a really great salon. I'd encourage anyone watching on the recording on YouTube to check out the previous one as well, which was part one of this two-part series, Origins, both of which were moderated by Michael Price. So thanks so much, Michael, for, you know, taking the initiative to put this series together and selecting the artists. All that kind of great stuff. And thanks again also to all the presenters. Really amazing, you know, look back into the origins of where we're at today. You know, the term and a bunch of people, you know, it's been said to me many times that the term expressionism puts a name to something that's been happening for a long time now, way before the community was formulated or before the term existed. So it's kind of cool to have a, you know, a platform that can bring, you know, all of these things together.

Michael Pierre Price

And I think that's what's really allowed us to be able to bring all sorts of different types of artists together from all different working periods, styles, you know, feel like we have a lot to credit Helen Harrison for really stressing the idea of, you know, defining Techspressionism as an approach versus a style. I think that's what's really allowed it to encompass so many different types of artists and different methods. We've seen some work from her for example in this series called methodologies figurative and abstract work, you know, and really the approach is that we're all using technology in an expressive way.

Michael Pierre Price

So, there are a number of interviews of the people in this series on the site already that were conducted earlier in the group's existence. And they're online at expressionism.com slash interviews. So you could see some full depth conversations with her. Conversations of a bunch of the artists in this particular salon and the previous one there.

Michael Pierre Price

I also would encourage any of the artists here or watching the recording on YouTube to propose interviews where they would interview another artist or they could team up with another artist and be interviewed by them. But this is kind of a format that we've been doing for a while now. I want to give props to Roz Dimon for coming up with the interview format. And that's kind of a set of questions that we use as a starting point to do the interviews. And the idea really came from Interview Magazine, which Warhol started.

Michael Pierre Price

And that was kind of the idea of artists interviewing artists. So instead of having a journalist approach an artist, it was one artist interviewing. And I think that's a really interesting perspective. And I think I really enjoy these salons. It's incredible that the salons have been going this long and to see both new faces coming in all the time, but also to see a lot of the people here who were in the first handful of salons, really. I know Michael was here.

Michael Pierre Price

Yeah. So it's been a really interesting conversation from the get go really with these salons. And there's kind of a core group of members that I think really keep this community going and active. And it was said that in the beginning that we've definitely become more organized in that we have the next couple of salons planned out already.

Michael Pierre Price

There's going to be a great salon coming up on AI. That Renata Janiszewska is going to be moderating. And we have a number of salons coming up that focus on exhibitions that artists in the group are going to be putting together. There's a salon coming up for a show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, which is up, I believe, that closes this weekend, Renata.

Michael Pierre Price

It's a two person show with Renata Janiszewska and Karen LaFleur. Which is an incredible piece of video art. And then we have a large scale upcoming show that's curated by Tommy Mintz called Techspressionism 2025. It's Hello Chelsea, actually. Techspressionism 2025, which is going to be our first group exhibition in Manhattan. It's going to be at the Hudson Guild Gallery, which I believe is on 26th Street, which is a very exciting development for the group.

Michael Pierre Price

And also a salon coming up for a four person show that I'm a part of in Chicago called Four Techspressionist Artists with myself, Renata Janiszewska, Karen LaFleur and Jan Swinburne. That's going to be a really exciting project, large scale video installation. So there's a lot of good stuff happening. And we're also going to be resuming our open mic or slash open studios format.

Michael Pierre Price

You know, this summer, at least for a few salons where artists are encouraged to come on and share on whatever they're doing, or they might be it might be based on a topic, but where I'll be more open and kind of like a freeform format. So again, I'm going to close the recording out. But anyone who wants to stick around for the after party, that's basically a time that's off the record. People could hang out on Zoom. And a lot of times that's when topics for upcoming salons get decided upon. And or, you know, other group initiatives. We do have another activity called virtual co working. And that's headed up by Cynthia Beth Rubin and Cynthia DiDonato. And that happens every week. There's details on the on the Techspressionism.com homepage about that. And also, a way to register a link to register for that zoom that's also open to the public.

Michael Pierre Price

And you know, for anyone watching on YouTube, who isn't familiar with Techspressionism, these meetups are completely open to the public, they're free. We're an artist run organization, everything everything that happens here is volunteer based. So yeah, that's kind of what it's all about. And I'd encourage anyone that wants to, to use the hashtag Techspressionism when posting on Instagram and our internet, actually our Instagram curator, Ranani Anishefska, will see those posts.

Michael Pierre Price

With hashtag Techspressionism for consideration on reposting and also addition to our artist index. So that's how we've kind of grown as a community is largely through the use of the hashtag on social media. So yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, that's a great idea. And I think that's a great way to kind of demystify how this all works, you know, so not really, you know, a situation where there's gatekeepers in the same way that much of the art world functions. So it's based on self identification, which is, I think, a very important aspect of the group. And also, we are a community that embraces diversity, inclusivity, and all of those good things that are exceptionally important to acknowledge at this current point, point of time in history. So yeah, we're going to keep on keeping on with that, as well.

Michael Pierre Price

So I am going to close this out. And anyone who wants to stick around, please do so. We will stop the recording in five, four, three, two, one, and cut.