Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:
Canadian painter Vickie Vainionpää defines painting as a joint effort of “intellectual collaborators across time and space.” These collaborators might be human and they might be algorithms. Across the generations and across technologies, says Vainionpää, the conversation is one in which the gap between experience and perception is never bridged—or is it? Using technologies such as 3D software, virtual reality, eye-tracking, and generative algorithms, Vainionpää proposes to close the gap between the experience of seeing and the practice of translating that experience into one expressed by canvas and paint. She is asking us, in short, to consider the future of art.
One way Vainionpää’s work changes the experience of art is by experiencing it first hand, which I did recently at the new exhibition Soft Logic at the Gainesboro Modern Museum of Contemporary Art. The works in the Soft Body Dynamics series are exuberant and kinetic, tight balls of wiggles, some in flat color, delicately modeled, some painted like reflective glass or chrome. The surfaces of the paintings are smooth, strangely uninflected—any sign of the hand of the artist has been removed. For works in the Gaze series, the artist wore an eye-tracking device and recorded how her eye traveled over works such as Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way and Jacques Blanchard’s Mars and the Vestal Virgin. The idea is to transform the physical pathways of the eye into abstract compositions, “shifting attention toward the act of looking itself.” The wiggles, which Vainionpää calls “random curves,” were “based on a plug-in that generates random curves in 3D software.”
More here.
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