lecture6digitalpainting

Samia Halaby's kinetic paintings

-> Halaby is a Palestinian-American artist who has been creating abstract painting and Computer art simultaneously since the 1980s.

-> She began writing short programs that ran abstract images in constant motion, which she referred to as her “kinetic paintings.” She describes her coding process as intuitive.

-> Through the 1990s, Halaby began experimenting with live performance, working with the Kinetic Painting Group to present improvisational audio-visual works. At this point Halaby had switched to a PC computer to play their coded visuals live alongside a multi-percussive group led by Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr. They would often perform at artist-run centres and small DIY galleries in New York, or as complimentary programming during Computer Art and net.art conferences.

“I code algorithms to mimic life’s processes: trees branching or flowers scattering. In Hawaii, I saw yellow blossoms everywhere, on grass, cars, and sidewalks, like an impressionist painting. That’s what I code: the principle, not the image. Land holds my homeland’s spirit, not its map. It’s reality abstracted, not dreamed up in my head.”
(Halaby interviewed by Abby Hermosillo, 2025)

Harold Cohen AARON

->British painter born in 1928, interested in a cybernetic approach to painting and the language of abstraction as a feedback network.

-> AARON was a series of computer programs that autonomously created images, which were then drawn onto a mechanical plotting engine that Cohen had built himself, and later coloured the images by hand with a fabric dye.
In AARON, Cohen attempted to replicate human-like markmaking, in order to question to what point a series of marks will constitute an image. The program is referred to as an early example of an Artificial Intelligence program, and the first used in the creation of visual images.

-> At different points in Cohen’s career, he referred to AARON as a studio assistant, but near the end of his career admitted to how AARON became a collaborator.

-> In 2021 the Whitney Museum exhibited works by AARON created after Cohen's death; this was the first posthumous exhibition of new artworks.

Samia Halaby, still from Land, 1988. Image from MoMA.

Harold Cohen, Stephanie and Friend, 1991. Image from MoMA.

Albert Oehlen bionic paintings

->Oehlen was born in West Germany in 1954. He was a painter who combined abstraction and figurative components, as a response to Neo-Expressionism, describing his work as “post-non-representational” and resisted assigning meaning.

-> In 1992, Oehlen began using Texas Instruments drawing software to create analog paintings through the use of digitally rendered low-resolution gestures, to create what he called “bionic paintings.” These were gestural experiments in digital markmaking, where Oehlen would generate different graphical motifs that were then enlarged and transferred to canvas, and then further resolved with details added in paint.

-> His works are particularly interesting in that they realized a physical iteration of digital imaging tropes like drop shadows, rendered with texture in a physical form, but that embody a shallowness on the painting’s surface.

Albert Oehlen, Bad Artist, 1997. Image from guggenheim-bilbao.en.

"Normally the computer helps you to do something that you otherwise couldn’t do. Computers open a window onto the future. Here things are reversed. The painter corrects the pixels, and ultimately the computer image gives rise to a hand-painted picture.”
(Oehlen)

John F. Simon Jr., Every Icon (1997) and aLife (2003)

-> Simons is a new media artist who works in software code and pixels, and also designs bespoke LCD screens to display his different computer artworks, which he describes as “art appliances.”

-> His first major piece was a contribution to the net.art movement, and was inspired by German expressionist artist Paul Klee’s drawing process of combining different patterns by filling in the squares of a grid with colour variations.

-> In 1998, Simon developed Every Icon into the first of his ongoing series of software driven animations he calls “Art appliances.”

Paul Klee, May Picture, 1925. Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

John F. Simon Jr., Every Icon, 1997. Image from HEK collection.

John F. Simon Jr, still image from aLife, 2003. Image from the artist's website numeral.art.

Web 2.0 and digital portraiture

Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM(2007)

-> Cortright is an American Internet artist working in video, painting and new media. She was born in 1986 in Santa Barbara, California, and studied at the California College of Arts in San Francisco.

-> While completing her degree, she created one of the first major Internet artworks that utilized Youtube-as-medium.

->The piece seeks to juxtapose Cortright’s malaise to the performance of being online and content generation, of exaggerated reaction as a way of attracting viewership online.

-> The use of scrapped keywords could also be attributed to the influence of Nasty Nets and the surf club movement of incorporating found

-> The commenters on her videos would respond with offensive comments, and Cortright would argue back with them in a further performative aspect of the work

->The term Post-Internet art, was coined by artist/curator Marisa Olson in 1999 to describe her process.

-> Post-Internet follows a wave of Internet art following the year 2000, as well as the accelerated development of digital technologies. By the mid 2000s, the Internet was impacting broader culture, politics, economies and daily life, to the degree that digital systems had become embedded within daily experience.

-> It is a new cross-disciplinary movement of artists, mainly working in new media in various capacities, that draw from a digital malaise. Artists within Post-Internet no longer conceive the Web and computers as novel tools but are making work from the position of a web-fueled culture that permeates lived experience both on and offline.

Post-Internet Painting, Textile, Sculpture

Petra Cortright, digital paintings 2015-present

-> Cortright’s later works take on a painterly technique, using Photoshop to create intricately layered images, displayed as unfolding videoworks uploaded to Youtube.

-Cortright paints with the medium of the Internet, gathering low resolution images from the Internet and creating hundreds of layers in a single composition often gathering visual information from Google Images, Bing and Pinterest. Her process is described as mining the spam of the Internet, drawing together data in a celebration of the poor image.

Laura Owens, Untitled(2015)

-> Laura Owens is originally from suburban Ohio, but pursued graduate school in Los Angeles and still resides there.

-> Her works include sampled imagery from many wide ranging sources, gathering and juxtaposing medieval tapestries, emojis, archival documents and early Internet graphics translating to the canvas through brushstrokes, digital rendering, needlework and screen printing.

-> Owen’s practice is a primary example of the post-digital or post-internet approach. It is a painterly technique involving layering effects that mimic the visual qualities of a digitally rendered image.

Shaheer Zazai, digital paintings(2015-present)

-> Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian contemporary artist currently residing in Toronto. He works across the mediums of painting and digital media.

-> Since 2015, Zazai has been working with the program Microsoft Word to foster a digital weaving process, by methodically inputting data across a digital file one pixel at a time.

->His works draw from the imagery of traditional Afghan carpets.

-> His digital patterns have been translated into prints and Jacquard-woven tapestries

Examples of digital storytelling_net.art Cosplay Assignment

Olia Lialina, Anna Karenin Goes to Paradise, 2002.

Juliette Lizotte aka jujulove, Sisters of the Wind, 2022.

"In most games, narrative and time are equated with movement through 3-D space, progression through rooms, levels or words. In contrast to modern literature, theatre and cinema, which are built around psychological tensions between characters and movement in psychological space, these computer games return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero, travelling through distant lands to save the princess, to find the treasure, to defeat the dragon, and so on."
(Lev Manovich)