Surreal Digital Art

Digital art is an artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as an essential part of the creative or presentation process. Since the 1970s, various names have been used to describe the process including computer art and multimedia art, and digital art is itself placed under the larger umbrella term new media art.
- Wikipedia

Surrealistic digital art -- art that uses a computer as one of the defining methods of its creation-- is as varied as the vision of the artist itself.

Major genres within surreal digital art include photo manipulation, digital collage, digital painting, CGI/3D-rendering, Algorithm Art & Digital Animation.

Electric Sheep – Interview with Scott Draves

Last Modified January 4, 2019 Leave a Comment

Electric Sheep Introduction

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.
– Wikipedia

First created in 1999 by Scott Draves, the Electric Sheep is a form of artificial life, which is to say it is software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction through mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 450,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet.

This is a distributed system, with all participating computers working together to form a supercomputer that renders animations, called “sheep”, that everyone sees. The human participants guide the survival of the fittest by voting for their favorite animations in the flock. You can join this project by downloading the Electric Sheep Screensaver.

Clade 1 at Michael Berger Gallery, Pittsburgh 2010

The Clade 1 Blu Ray showing at Bryan Bilgore’s (sensoriumav.com) place with dynamic lighting by ambx.com (photo by Shannon Harvey).

Dreams in High Fidelity II by Scott Draves. 4 channel HD projection at Lexus Hybrid Art, Moscow 2010.04

On the 2nd largest LED wall in Europe, curated by the Streaming Museum. 2010.08.

Scott Draves speaking at TEDx in Hungary, 2010.06.

Dreams in High Fidelity by Scott Draves. 25 projectors and 5 channels of HD in Hungary 2010.06.

Dreams in High Fidelity by Scott Draves projected at LICHTSTROEME, on the banks of the Rhine in Germany. Photo Jennifer Braun 2012.05.

Karjaka Studios; 2013; Rubin Museum; Green Lama; Linus Roache; Paul Haas

Generation 244 immersive projection at 21c Museum Hotel grand opening, 2013.04.20.

Generation 244 by Scott Draves. Students immersed in projection at Emoção Art.ficial Bienial, in São Paulo 2012.05.

Generation 244 permanently installed in a corporate reception in Manhattan.

Electric Sheep iPad App exhibited in Beijing, curated by ZKM.

Generation 244 Triptych at Vida Retrospective in Madrid, 2012.05.

Generation 244 at LACMA, as curated by Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music. Showing on 3 screens at Renzo Piano–designed Stark Bar in the courtyard. The show ran July 2011 – February 2012.

Generation 244.1 at Microsoft Research Studio 99, 2014.01, Seattle.

In the atrium at MoMA, 2010.12.

Each participating computer follows mathematical instructions, Draves’ Flame algorithm, to render its own piece of the larger work, as seen in the table at left. The images are sent back to a central server which compresses them into animations which are sent back out to the viewers. The electricsheep.org website shows the family tree for each sheep, including its parents and offspring, and viewers can track family resemblance. The artist’s Clade series shows a selection of family members in high resolution.

Like Draves’ other software art, the Electric Sheep code is open source, which has allowed it to benefit from code contributions from many enthusiastic programmers. Now Draves serves as head Shepherd on a project with many participants.

The most popular sheep from the current flock can be viewed on the live server, or you can browse the archive.

– via scottdraves.com

Scott Draves Interview with Surrealism Today

Surrealism Today: You have designed this technology, company & ecosystem. Electric Sheep has taken on a life of its own. In a sense, from a systems perspective, you have developed your own game rules rather than just being another player in someone else’s game. What in your thinking has made that possible?

Scott Draves: That’s right, I definitely think of the Sheep as generative world design. My approach is based on languages and metaprogramming, as a way to cross from finite to infinite. It was made possible by exposure to books like Gödel, Escher, Bach and SICP and my friends and colleagues at Brown and CMU SCS who taught me so much about computers and programming.

ST: In previous interviews, you mention Pollock, Gysin, and Burroughs as artists who inspire you. (Related: Cut-up Technique) Art has changed more in the past hundred years than it ever has, and likely will even more in the next hundred years, where would you like to see it go? Rather than create the content of art, will next-gen artists create algorithms that allows for infinite works of art? If that’s the future, you’ve actually been doing it for some time…

SD: I am loving the Cambrian explosion of software art going on. What are my wishes for art? The more the merrier. Algorithms and coding and infinite art are definitely growing and that’s great. But are they growing popularity in the art world? Maybe? I can’t imagine 100 years in the future. I will admit I’ve been doing this forever, I am old, and got an early start, releasing the first open source art in 1992.

Surrealism Today: Many of the Electric Sheep are reminiscent of mandalas in various religious traditions in both East and West as well as psychedelic and visionary art. These movements seem to have goals in common. Do you have an affinity with any spiritual traditions or movements?

Scott Draves: The Sheep have a meditative aspect for me and a spiritual aspect. Yes, there are goals in common, and affinities. Yoga. Zen. Negentropy. Positivism. Science.

ST: You’ve created this ecosystem of beautiful living mandalas that change over time and breed and evolve and die. Each sheep had DNA (code), its form, not to mention the memetic (conceptual) & cultural level. In what senses are the sheep alive?

SD: Thank you. They are alive because they have emergent complexity, at both the breeding, DNA, evolution level and also in the Flame algorithm, where the image emerges from the DNA. The memetic level kicks in with the open source and allowing others to create their own flames and sheep.

Surrealism Today: What non-intuitive things do you do, think or avoid that may have helped contribute to what you have created?

Scott Draves: When I started doing Open Source it was considered unamerican and anti-capitalist, and literally compared to “cancer”. It turns out sharing code has merit. Actually, that was always intuitive to me but most people just didn’t get it. These days it seems open source has taken over in some domains and is thriving.

On the other hand sharing everything may not be advisable. That was not obvious to me. It took me a long time to learn.

ST: William Gibson mentioned in one of his sci-fi books that instead of writing music, musicians wrote algorithms and the code would generate infinite, unique songs that never repeated themselves. Recently the iPhone app “H__r” got me excited… it loops sounds from the environment into a surreal listening experience. What being created today (that I can perhaps link to) has gotten you excited recently?

SD: Joshue Ott has a bunch of amazing av apps: https://intervalstudios.com/. A bit further afield: Alpha Go, https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/. This is an enormous breakthrough that promises so much to come.

Surrealism Today: I’m super excited about this recent high-resolution release of the sheep, and the subscription. What’s next?

Scott Draves: Thank you.

Dots! The real-time audio interactive version, which premiered last year at Creative Tech Week and is going to be in it again this year: http://creativetechweek.nyc/. The mixed reality party was on the 17th of April, 2017.

ST: Where can we find you on the internet?

https://gold.electricsheep.org/
http://scottdraves.com/
https://twitter.com/scott_draves
https://twitter.com/ElectricSHE3P
https://www.facebook.com/groups/82690628019

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Nikolina Petolas – Surreal Art

Last Modified February 5, 2017 4 Comments

Biography

Nikolina Petolas is a Croatian based photographer and digital artist.

Petolas is fascinated by industrial and fantasy environments, and these form the backdrop of the mysterious worlds in her work. She creates her images using photography and digital techniques.
With over 10 years experience in photography with experience in portrait, still lifes, landscapes, and macro photography, Petolas is now intensely involved in creating complex, surrealistic photomontages.

Petolas feels a profound fascination with human behavior: with her work she attempts to highlight the psychological and social aspects of human identity. Petolas explores multiple personalities, dream-like landscapes and strange, surrealist dark creatures and environments. Her observations of inner conflict and what must be so for it to occur, inform her deeply psychological work. She is interested in the complexity of human emotion and this drives the narratives in her figurative, surrealist artwork.

Her work has been featured in numerous publications has participated in multiple group exhibitions across Europe.

Artist Statement

Flying fish, women that rise inside an insect lair, giants pears, monstrous creatures, the world after an apocalypse… these are the images that flicker in my mind. Although these worlds may seem strange and unreachable, they contain my hopes and dreams, of people around me, their urges and desires, of new revelations and repeating disappointments, of life with its twists and turns.

My motives are sometimes dark and gloomy and often present dreamlike ambients and strange beings.
I am inspired by my surroundings and I see potential in various everyday things and relations, people, nature, architecture, even food. I see them sometimes as fragments of my work. Most of the time they remain fragments, and sometimes they become unified into a whole and therefore start to exist as a part of my sceneries.

By using real life photographs and textures I give my work a feel of realism, although the themes are far from being realistic…

Insects, animals, skeletons, strange creatures, and self-portraits guide us through these imaginary worlds.
Mostly these are leftovers of something that once lived and had its purpose. By implementing them in my environments, those odd, and often dead things and creatures tell their own story. They start to live as part of something new and in some other form.

I create surreal worlds from real life situations. These strange worlds are the flickering imagery and symbols encoded in my experiences of life, emotions, sexuality and relationships, human behavior.

Through my art I attempt to develop my personal mythology and archetypes, to make real my visions and dreams.

nikolinapetolas.com

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Zeitguised’s abstract, surrealistic, strange, video art

Last Modified November 7, 2016 Leave a Comment

Holy strange eye-candy Batman, what is that? NFW! WTF? It’s Zeitguised again, making magic. Pure, magical, computer generated abstract art. Delicious candy for your eyes. (We originally covered Zeitguised here in 2013.) And wow. It doesn’t get weirder than this.

Watch Zeitguised’s mind-altering videos with sound on. It multiplies the effect.

Geist.xyz

Animated Gif Stills:

AN EXPLORATION OF HANDCRAFTED ALGORITHMIC TEXTILES AND SURFACES
A Ghost in the shell,
>dancing the procedural revolution<.
Algo vs rhythm =
0% organic /
100% processed *
(*Olive, Rose, Mauve and Electric Blue).
Serving suggestions:
Grid wrangling like a pharmacist /
Authentic apparition sequence;
Fake hacks realism,
Small wonders:
Sympathy demons / Uncertainty artefacts
: Synthetic ecstatic aesthetic means
Extended PLAY
Station NSFW.
Incrementally yours,
ZEITGUISED.

– via Geist.xyz

Neural Groove

Synthetic constructions of shapes and structures that have a similar level of complexity as natural occurrences, yet follow rules that are manmade and artificial, and modelled by and according to human thought processes. Some are engineered from physical growth and distribution processes but altered towards a common design goal. The outcome was open in the beginning, so we would not produce something that we would know beforehand, to leave space to explore unknown territory. In the end the topic that crystallised from the results was the juxtaposition of simulated organic topologies and hard mechanic artefacts as they are known from technology production techniques. We produced synthetic spaces in which we invented rules and parameters that let those two formal worlds collide and interact and inform each other.

– via Neural Groove

Void Season

“Void Season” is a simulated fashion project.
Part dreamlike theatre, part lateral cargo cult hustle, a quick succession of bold garment designs acts as an ersatz runway show. In a minimal set of solid backdrops, radiant colors and oblique choreography second the exquisite design of costumes that have been entirely artificially generated.
A wealth of custom procedural surface detail emphasizes the uncanny rift between the realistic presence of the guises and the abstract vacancy of the digitized human movements.

– via Void Season

Void is the fashion of the future.

Comme Dec Organismes

The motion triptych shows an interpretation of what the initial concepts would have looked liked if they were not realised as a line of runway clothes but spontaneously realized themselves as autonomous life forms.
The concept was a result of a collaboration between Antonio Trecel-Diaz, Erik Madigan Heck and Zeitguised.

— via Comme des Organismes/

Mind Games: The Cerebral Art of Don Bergland

Last Modified January 4, 2019 Leave a Comment

Editors note:

Don Bergland is an artist creating surreal work using computer graphics as his paintbrush. The “uncanny valley” effect is in full view in Bergland’s work, making the work even more surreal.

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers. The “valley” refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of beings as subjects move toward a healthy, natural likeness described in a function of a subject’s aesthetic acceptability. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics and 3D computer animation, among others. (Wikipedia)

Uncanny means “strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.” We feel Bergland’s work is in dialogue with much surrealism & theater, but also video, video games and popular media. The work is surreal, strange, and unsettling.

Uncanny Valley Illustration

Artist Statement

I have spent over 50 years working in the studio and have moved through many visual styles in my art. For half that time, I worked as a traditional painter creating works on large canvases. I now find myself working with digital tools and techniques, constructing a neo-surrealistic language that integrates the viewer in a participatory dialogue in unpacking meaning from visual imagery. For me, the enclosed space of the visual image is a dramatic cerebral theater populated by realistic sets, objects, and figures which when combined with intention, offer challenging mental puzzles. Walking a thin tightrope between the obvious and the absurd, I construct sets which host small dynamic dramas based on the mind’s ability to build meaningful narratives from enigmatic sources. The resulting images are to be seen for what they are, and then for what they may not be. Although I arrange my objects in specific ways to express my own ideas, I am fully aware that the way the imagery is designed will lead to a multitude of different interpretations. For the careful observer, directional maps are suggested in each image. These maps are woven into the location, pictorial relationships, and surface appearances of the actors in each composition. I intend that the viewer will engage with the work, note surfaces, relationships, symbols, and metaphors, and will then construct personal meaning from the engagement. Like all studio-based languages of imaginative possibility, I have merely begun the journey of building and refining my own visual syntax and grammar of cerebral imagination. Each of my works is a record of that journey.

Biography

Don Bergland is an Associate Professor of Visual & Performing Arts at the University of Victoria and has been an active exhibiting artist for over 50 years. He describes his current work as a version of Neosurrealism with the objective of eliciting questioning attitudes in the mind of viewers. He creates his work using both traditional and digital tools, focusing on an integration of 3D modeling software and various graphic processing programs. Each of his artworks features a theatrical set defined by a stage with actors, props, and a backdrop. The actors in the set consist of everyday objects brought into combinations and interactions that attempt to elicit inquiry. The content of the artwork focuses on themes such as time, aging, nostalgia, the footless pursuit of Utopia, and the conditions of ideology which disable our rational minds. Each image is constructed using conventions of visual realism, but with alterations that offer dreamlike possibilities. Themes and objects appear and re-appear from image to image. Each artwork becomes a framed snapshot of a moment in theatrical space, noticed briefly, and then forgotten once more, a fraction of time when reality is breached and a frozen glimpse into the mental theatre of Eternity is experienced, an opening when the viewer can catch the faint hint of cotton candy breezing in from the sideshow midway, the pastel moment of a lost memory, a slight reminder that the past is never absent, and that the future is always in front of us. Don maintains an active international exhibiting career and has featured his artwork in over 150 major exhibitions throughout the world. He has won over 60 creative & professional awards for his work. His work is represented in major corporate and private collections such as the Gulf Oil Corporate Collection (Alberta), the Madrona Centre Permanent Collection (B.C.), the Canadian Utilities Corporate Collection (Alberta), the Timothy Eaton Foundation Collection (Canada), the Chevron Standard Corporate Collection (Alberta), as well as in private collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe. His current focus is in using 3D modeling environments to create surrealistic imagery for international exhibitions. He currently lives and teaches in Victoria, BC, Canada.

donbergland.com
Don Bergland on Facebook

Surreal Collage Art by Marcel Lisboa

Last Modified September 19, 2016 Leave a Comment

Marcel Lisboa is a Sao Paulo (Brazilian) based digital artist. He creates psychedelic digital collages sourced from what seem to be Victorian paintings and illustration. But by juxtaposing numerous images in each work, and altering the color pallets he creates something completely new. Gorgeous, strange, surreal art that feels more painterly than digital.

Year Zero

Posthuman

Waking Light

A Heart On A Famous Hill

Born to Live

Golden Ritual

What You See Is What You Get

Eyes Behind The Wall

Born To Be Queen

Birds Of Blame

In Absentia

Between The Line

Between The Lines

Having A Blast

Wanted

The Connector

Across The Universe

Symmetry

Dreamer

A Matter Of Time

Dance! Dance!

You can find some of Marcel Lisboa’s prints here.

Lisboa cites Richard Hamilton as a source of inspiration.

Surreal Collage Art Predecessors

Collage art was developed by the Dadaists after and during WWI. (The Dadaists are considered the predecessors to the Surrealists.) Digital tools such as photoshop have created a resurgence of collage art, and particularly surreal collage art. Lisboa’s work feels like it is in dialogue with some of these artists such as Hannah Höch, Eileen Agar, Raoul Hausmann, and Man Ray.

Yet Lisboa’s surreal collages seems to invent a style all his own. The work seems both Victorian, but also contemporary, psychedelic and visionary.

Via The Creators Project