Dream

source: claudiahart

Dream is a fluid environment evoking x-rays and the style of medical imaging as well as biological elements. Semi abstract, the animation suggests cells, blood vessels and a range of the visceral emissions that come from bodies.

Dream is also a way of imagining a digital body, on the edge of the abstract or the graphic, yet with the slow time and space of a painting or a dream or a dream of painting.

Dream consists of two parts. In the first, a fish-eye super wide-angle virtual camera has been rotated 90 degrees to be vertically oriented in the horizontal space. In the second, the camera’s view point is similarly rotated from frontal to upwards. Both camera moves are unfamiliar because impossible with analog cameras, and so were deployed to create a sense of spatial ambiguity.

The sound track, by composer Edmund Campion, also functions on an edge between representation and avant-garde composition, integrating sounds emitted by bodies and fluids with classical compositional strategies.
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source: claudiahart

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.
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source: eyebeamorg

Claudia Hart is an artist working with post photographic simulations technology to create media installations, objects and images. For the past fifteen years, she has used virtual imaging and 3D animation to create hyper-feminine, often erotic installations, sculptures and photo integrations that deal with issues of representation, the role of the computer in shifting values about identity and the real and what might be considered “natural.” Her works are polemical and meant to interject an emotional subjectivity into what is typically the aggressive, hardcore iconography adopted by the computer graphics industry.

Claudia Hart is represented by bitforms gallery, NY. She is a former IDMagazine as well as an Artforum editor and is an Associate Professor in the department of Film Video New Media and Animation at the School of theArt Institute of Chicago, where she developed a special program,“experimental 3D,” in which she developed new pedagogical structures for teaching computer animation in the context of the avant-garde and experimental film.