WORKS AVAILABLE

MENINA

Archival Inkjet Print of a Virtual Model, 40″ x 30″ (size variable), 2015. Edition 6 +1AP

‘Menina’ exists within a new series of work from Hart, drawn from the scion of a fallen empire: the gowns of Margaret Theresa of Spain, among the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. This child princess was also the central figure in the famous painting Las Meninas, a canonical masterpiece by the great 17th-century court painter, Diego Velázquez, and the subject of many of his paintings. Hart models the Velázquez princess dresses in 3D as part of her ‘expanded cinema’ series ‘The Dolls’. This series continues its evolution as a solo exhibition opening at TRANSFER in 2016.

 

AFTER THE PARTY

3D Print Sculpture, custom-built PC with Oculus Rift VR installation, 2015. Edition of 3 + 2AP

‘After The Party’ is a real-time 3D installation created for DiMoDA, a virtual reality institution from Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robertson. Hart presents an Op art palazzo inhabited by her 3D modeled flowers which algorithmically grow and decay. This artwork is contained in the inaugural instance of the DiMoDA which includes works from Claudia Hart (NY/CHI), Tim Berresheim (DE) Jacolby Satterwhite (NY) and a project by Aquanet 2001 (Salvador Loza and Gibran Morgado) from Mexico City.

 

THE CURRENT

‘The Current’- Adhesive Wallpaper with Augmented Reality Moving Image, 2013-2017. Editon of 5 + 1AP

‘The Current’ is part of ‘The Flower Matrix’, a hybrid environment created by Hart, using a custom augmented-reality application made for a physical installation in the real world. This real-world environment is meant to be a viewing lounge for a virtual-reality, software world created on both the HTC Vive and Samsung Gear platforms.

 

PRINCESS DRESS: BLACK

Princess Dress: Black- 3D Printed Sculpture, ABS Plastic, 8” x 5” x 4.5”, 2016. Unique

‘Princess Dress: Black’ exists within ‘The Dolls House’, a series of video, drawing and sculptural work from Claudia Hart. Inspired by her media ballet ‘The Dolls’ which is based in the philosophical idea of the “eternal return” – the notion that history endlessly renews itself through a process of decadence, decay and rebirth. To embody this, Hart has molded mathematical cycles into visual form, a figurative flicker film defined by rhythmic animations of pulsing patterns that are mesmerizing and intentionally hypnotic as a result of their algorithmic qualities.

 

CLAUDIA HART has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. Claudia Hart is an artist working with digital trompe l’oeil as a medium. She directs theater and makes media objects of all kinds, creating virtual representations that take the form of 3d imagery integrated into photography, multi-channel animation installations, performances and sculptures using advanced production techniques such as Rapid Prototyping, CNC routing and augmented-reality custom apps.

Her works deal with issues of representation, the role of the computer in shifting contemporary values about identity and about what might be “natural.” Her project is to de-masculinize the culture of corporate technology by inserting the irrational and the personal into the slick, overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design.

She is widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14.

In the mid-nineties, she began to produce illustrated books that resulted in my publishing A Child’s Machiavelli and Dr. Faustie’s Guide to Real Estate Development. You can view her latest critical works here.

Statement from the Artist

My work adapts the forms and software normally used to create 3d shooter games. It transposes discussions about digital technology and a critique of the media through a feminist lens. In the context of ideas about a technology that has replaced nature by threatening to eclipse and permanently alter it, I argue that contemporary ideas about technology are not a rupture but a reflection of very conventional ways of thinking.

Technological culture is still functionally an all-male engineering culture – what the historian of technology David Noble has identified as “a world without woman.” He describes the high-tech ethos as actually emerging from medieval Christian monasteries and describes it as still being driven by an unconscious millennial desire to recreate the world afresh, without women and outside of nature. I have experienced something similar on a personal level in the vocational schools where I taught 3D animation for eight years before coming to Chicago and the School of the Art Institute.

In the absence of women, the masculine culture of technology, colored by what Noble has connected to Christian Millennialism, defines the impulse behind much of technological development, from atomic weaponry and space exploration to cybernetics and robotics. This impulse is one of both annihilation and of purification. Equally religious values pervade the technological research of the military/entertainment complex and influences its visual manifestations, particularly in relation to the body. An example of this is the typically hyper-erotic femme fatale populating mass-culture representations.

By creating virtual images that are sensual but not pornographic within mechanized, clockwork depictions of the natural, I try to subvert earlier dichotomies of woman and nature pitted against a civilized, “scientific” and masculine world of technology. In my own way, I am staging a romantic rebellion against technocratic and bureaucratic culture.”.

Right now I am interested in considering alternative ways for performative lecturing. By combining both my practical as well as academic background, I intend to merge my practice into a grand theory artifacts (a study of glitch ecologies) as a case study of my resolution studies.

EXHIBITIONS

June 2017 –‘Empire’ presented at the HAUS DER ELEKTRONISCHEN KÜNSTE BASEL in Basel
February 2017-‘The Flower Matrix’ presented at MOVING IMAGE ART FAIR in New York
November 2016 –‘Empire’ presented as part of the CURRENT MUSEUM OF ART inaugural exhibition.
July 2016 –‘Empire’ presented as part of an installation inside the media gallery at the Minnesota Street Project
April 2016 –‘The Dolls House’ a solo exhibition at TRANSFER
November 2015 –‘The Digital Museum of Digital Art’ in conjunction with The Wrong New Media Biennale and the Satellite Projects Artfair in Miami.