Circuit, 1999-2024. Augmented reality digital monoprint on vinyl. Edition 1/1. 75×100 inches.

Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art

In his 1912 ground-breaking publication Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Wassily Kandinsky stated that “every work of art is the child of its time.”   I was born in the early 1970s, around the same time as the birth of the personal computer, and I thought it would be irresponsible of me as an artist not to embrace the tools of our time, namely, the computer.

At some point around the turn of the millennium, I decided that if I were to make my mark as an artist someday, it would reflect my work involving computers, and I hauled the remaining paintings and drawings I had made during my undergraduate art studies to the Southampton Town dump.

A few years earlier, in 1994, I landed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, following my college graduation. My intention was to move to New York to become a painter.  This also happened to be the year the web became widely available with the release of the Netscape browser. My first job in the city was at a small shop called NOMAD Multimedia on 11th Street in the East Village. I created logos and other graphics, as well as being involved in CD-ROM development.  The owner of the shop came in one day and said, “There’s a new way to distribute multimedia globally; it’s called the World Wide Web…. we’ve got to get in on it!”

During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, I had the good fortune of launching brands such as Popular Science and Snapple onto the web through my work as a freelancer at various ad agencies in New York. Over the course of the last 30 years, web development and computer graphics have lived alongside drawing and painting as integral facets of my studio practice.

My undergraduate painting professor at SUNY Binghamton, Angelo Ippolito, was a New York School Abstract Expressionist painter. He opened my eyes to abstraction, a modality I only started to explore in my experimental digital works, such as Circuit, the work in this exhibition.

Shortly before Circuit was drawn, a friend who was doing his graduate work in Computer Science at NYU had explained vector graphics to me. In contrast to bitmap graphics, such as JPGs, which describe an image as a grid of pixels, vector graphics use code to describe the shapes and colors comprising an image.

This distinction allows vector images to be scaled to any size with no loss of resolution.  For this reason, corporate logos are often created as vector art, allowing them to live comfortably on both company letterhead and a giant billboard.  I imagined that one day, large-format digital printing would become available to artists, and I decided to create a series of abstract vector-based digital drawings called Metagraphs.  The name of this series was born from the idea that the actual piece of art was the code itself, not its physical manifestation, a meta-representation of the image.

An additional bonus of vector art, besides its resolution-independence, is that the file sizes are very small compared to bitmap graphics. In fact, the 6×8 foot piece in this exhibition fit on a 3.5-inch floppy disc in 1999 with plenty of room to spare.

The piece was drawn on a PowerMac 8600 with a Wacom tablet in Adobe Illustrator.  The development of the drawing into an animated audiovisual piece, its minting on the blockchain, and the augmented reality integration of the drawing and the NFT came about 25 years after the creation of the original drawing. The piece has truly been thirty years in the making.  Through the evolution of technology, the piece has evolved from a digital drawing into a completely different medium – augmented reality art.

Colin Goldberg
North Bennington, Vermont
August 2024.

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