Caress

source: claudiahart

My films are organized by systems that employ patterns using algorithmic decays. 3d virtual-imaging is made with commercial software, in my case Maya by Autodesk. Creating 3D animation is very elaborate and painstaking, and is closely related to the process of computer programming. It requires knowledge of Geometry, Trigonometry and Calculus. My films use these systems to create patterned visual structures that are nevertheless erotic and emotional.

Caress is organized around five poses of the figure and five camera positions. The figure was first created lying on a Madam-Recamier style divan and then the couch was removed. She moves from pose to pose in 500 frames and camera position to camera position, with 500 frames of pure breathing in between. The film consists of every possible permutation between these master poses/master camera positions.

In Caress, the camera slides from shot to shot over the figure, which morphs from pose to pose. Camera and figure offset from one another. The 3-channel frame acts as a box, functioning like a prison or a coffin, with the figure straining against its confines. As a result, the camera seems to caress the figure. They are both, figure and camera, locked in an embrace: camera-to-figure sex.

The poses are: a, b, c, d, and e.

The sequences are: ab, ac, ad, ae, bc, bd be, cd, ce, de, then backwards.
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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.