Halfway Between Real and Unreal:Claudia Hart Interviewed by Sean Capone

The art of animation and automatons.

Claudia Hart, Flower Matrix Augmented Lounge, 2018–19. Installation view. Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University. Courtesy of theartist.

I first encountered the work of Claudia Hart in 2009 at the now-defunct (but much beloved) Jack thePelican gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That work, a video piece titled Ophelia, was a single staticshot of an inert 3D-animated female figure suspended underwater; it seemed to connect the dotsbetween digital art, painting, and sculpture in one simple and direct composition, and it made me aninstant fan. Since then, Hart’s work has expanded in scope and technological complexity. We didn’tactually meet until several years later, on the occasion of her projection-installation The Dolls House atBrooklyn-based Transfer gallery; shortly thereafter she invited me to participate in her collaborative

online/exhibition project The Real-Fake. Even though Hart resists being called an “animation artist,” thecomplex flux and interchange between material and virtual “objects” across her bodies of work are forme perfectly exemplary of an expanded digital moving-image art practice.

—Sean Capone

 

Sean CaponeI’d like to start by discussing the new version of the installation The Flower Matrix (2017) as part of thegroup exhibition Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI at Carnegie Mellon University. Can you give a quickbreakdown of what this is?

Claudia HartThe idea of The Flower Matrix is to create a lounge for viewing virtual reality. What this means is thatyou experience the immersive experience of VR in which you walk into a simulated environment andfeel, phenomenally, that you’re in it. I wanted to bring that a step closer to the real world. What’sinteresting about the simulation technologies that I use as opposed to traditional “flipbook” animation—because I don’t think what I do is animation but more like simulation—is that the experience of 3Denvironments is a phenomenal experience, a trompe l’oeil experience. When you build both a physicalenvironment for viewing it and a virtual environment, you feel like you’re in a realm halfway betweenreal and unreal. You’ve entered this “gateway zone,” which is a kind of fantasy, imaginative, or Heaven-like dream space, and in that space you build things, and you set physical processes and allow them totake on physical properties as real objects do in the real world, and then live their own lives. This is atotally different relationship in terms of hand-drawn animation, which is more of a subject-objectrelationship.

SCBut in 3D animation, you’re not drawing things either. You use automated processes to give theappearance of space and movement. Isn’t that already a rupture from traditional animation?

CHI think it’s something else entirely depending on what you emphasize. I don’t consider myself a“character animator,” but I do work with digital bodies. I work with physics. I’m not actually interested—Ireject out of hand, actually—the old-fashioned animation strategies of tweening and creating “good”animation. What’s amazing to me is creating automatons—giving them life to go and do things on theirown. Instead, I set up physics environments in which the bodies are acted upon by forces. There’s verylittle traditional animation involved. I mix simulations technologies with motion capture. I capturemotion data with sensors attached to real bodies and submit those to physical simulations. It’s closer tomaking robots than to making a flipbook.

SCIn a way you’re still an “animator” but one who skips the history of cinematic animation in order to goback to the original sense, the alchemical concept of animating or simulating life: Frankenstein, thegolem, the homunculus, that kind of thing.

CHExactly. And I think you could trace the history back to eighteenth-century automatons and earlyrobotics. All of these things I was fascinated by before I did 3D.

Claudia Hart, Ophelia, 2008. 3D animated loop. Image still. Courtesy of the artist.

SCFairytales and mythology informed a lot of your early work. The first piece I saw of yours was Ophelia(2008), which is a single shot of a 3D-rendered nude woman, suspended lifeless, floating underwater.

CHWell, I started working about thirty years ago, so I was an “intermedia artist.” I started as an objectmaker. I would do these performative environments where I would appear in images as a character. Iwas involved with tropes from Romanticism and the nineteenth century. Ophelia was done with 3D andsimulation, but I’m talking about work that I did with Pat Hearn Gallery when I was in my twenties. I wasa kid whose mother was a left-wing intellectual, so I wasn’t allowed to watch television. Cartoons weretotally forbidden. I never looked at anything like that, and I still find them sort of horrifying. I went fromreading texts inspired by Rousseau, Lord Byron, and Frankenstein in my early shows, directly intosimulations. So I don’t feel any connection to the traditions of animation.

SCYou’re coming from more of a theatrical and performance approach, not just screen-based work.

CHFirst I’d like to explain what I mean by simulations, or “Simulism.” In one of my classes we had the samediscussion. I’m not part of the animation thing. I don’t want to teach cartoon walk cycles, and thestudents I have don’t want to do that either. In my class we came up with the word “Simulism,” whichsort of nails it, because it sounds like Impressionism or Futurism.

SC(laughter) Art history needs some new “-isms”!

CHI know! The idea of simulations technology is that you’re dealing with an interface, which is a liminalenvironment. When you use it you feel like the interface is an actual gateway for the XYZ-coordinate,theatrical space that you can look into. You become a cinematographer for this simulated theater; youshoot it, then you “render” all these frames—another alchemical process, like rendering fat—and thatbecomes a movie. The whole process is alchemy, and the relationship to “drawing” and “flatness” isnull.

Claudia Hart, Inside the Flower Matrix, 2017. 2-minute, 45-second excerpt from a 10-minute, 3-channel installation re-purposing the Flower Matrix VR environment.

Inside The Flower Matrixfrom Claudia Hart

02:45

SCSo you break through the fourth wall, the proscenium, which describes the experience of the work, butwhat of its real-world affect once you zoom out again?

CHWe should talk about the psychological and perceptual effects in culture that have been made possibleby these scientific visualization tools, which were themselves originally used for flight simulation, for

simulating illness, weather models, or architecture, and so on, and are now being used to make gamesand movies. We have this stuff that looks like real photography but is almost totally fake—it’s simulated.This creates another idea about what might be real or what is not-real. These are profound questionsthat have come up totally with our current president, with the last election, and all the crises happeningon the internet—questions enabled by digital filmmaking technologies concerning what is truth andwhat is not-truth.

SCYou’re proposing that these visualization technologies have contributed to the crisis of truth and“consensual reality?” I remember this was a serious discussion in new media theory: that seamlessdigital fakery would be used as false evidence, as propaganda.

CHRight, but I think it’s not just about image culture; it’s about institutions. What we are experiencing isfascinating, with traditional institutions breaking down. So from my point of view as a woman—or yourpoint of view as a gay man—it’s like, Hallelujah! We’re happy about that, right?

SCThere is the liberatory aspect of it, right? We wanted to demolish the idea of a dominant culture. Buthow? These tools are in our hands too, as artists, and we’re really good at using them.

CHYes. We’re experiencing a moment of technological explosion, of advancement due to digital technologyin which we can simulate for futures. Experimental, quantum physics says, “What you imagine is real.”These are scientific, theoretical ideas about the shifting of the “real,” and at the same time we’reexperiencing the breakdown of institutions. So, people are anxious about the crisis of what’s real, andwhat we’ve experienced with Trump and how he took the election by manipulating truth and the news.

Claudia Hart, 3D Animated Rose, 2017. For custom AR App, IRL installation with porcelain tiles (handthrown by KimiKim), and VR world.

3d Animated Rosefrom Claudia Hart

00:16

SCI want to talk about the visual evolution in your work over the last decade. You’ve moved away fromverisimilitude and more into a flat, videogame visual space, with flat lighting and strobing patterns.

Sean Capone is a Brooklyn-based video artist working primarily in digital animation, projection installation, andmoving-image based public art.

virtual reality digital media installation art animation

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CHThe Flower Matrix, for instance, is a metaphor for the interweb, but it’s also about “casino capitalism.”It’s like going into a casino. I lived a chunk of my life when I was a kid in Reno and Lake Tahoe.

SCI had no idea. This is so important to understanding the look of your work. A casino is also a weird kindof liminal, over-sensorial environment you enter into and disconnect from the outside world.

CHI lived in a lot of places like that when I was a kid. For The Flower Matrix I took the icons, emojis, andcomputer symbols for power, money, and addiction, as many as I could find. And I made these strobing,flickering algorithmic patterns and created a virtual labyrinth out of Greek mythology, the labyrinth ofthe Minotaur. I made five species of flowers, and I covered them with the strobing patterns for powerand addiction. It’s sort of a nightmare of consumption, but also of Heaven. It’s a topsy-turvy “Alice”world; and, actually, if you do make it out you get enveloped in a deep fog and popped back to thebeginning. You can never get out.

SCCome to think of it, in your work, there’s a recurring theme of imprisonment: the labyrinth, thestatuesque female bodies that seem petrified or are dissolving into nature. And a casino is quite acaptive environment.

CHI think it has something to do with dying, or transcending the constraints of the body. It also has to dowith the fact that I have parathyroid disease. My body doesn’t produce calcium, potassium, magnesium… I have glass bones. As I’ve aged, I’m getting twisted. I have arthritis, and I am in pain a lot. I do a lot ofbody practice. So I think that much of this work is about the prison of the body, how you transcend thelimits of the body.

Claudia Hart’s The Flower Matrix can be seen in Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI at Carnegie MellonUniversity in Pittsburgh until February 3.