The screen is ubiquitous in today’s society. It’s used for almost everything we do. It’s in our homes. Our hands. Our streets. And our places of work. Over the past 16 years I have been working with a group of artists that have embraced the screen as an artistic medium. I have placed artworks on screens in hundreds of locations around the world. With the advancements of technology and computational power artists are further embracing these new media art forms and delivering stunning, thought-provoking moving image works. These dynamic artworks can represent almost all categories of existing art. For the debut NIIO commissions I selected a group of artists to create new video works specifically for the NIIO platform. The artists present a range of conceptual directions with new modes of movement using the latest technologies merged with traditional art-making sensibilities.

 - Steven Sacks

Jonathan Monaghan 
No Longer Dead

Referencing the iconic medieval imagery of a unicorn in captivity, No Longer Dead follows a psychedelic unicorn walking within an empty gray space resembling a photo studio. This ambiguous backdrop is populated with vignettes depicting security checkpoints, consumer electronics and baroque palaces. The work is a critical reflection of contemporary life, suggesting a type of captivity within modern consumer culture and the security state.

Quayola
Camouflage #A1

Camouflage a series of algorithmic paintings by Quayola. Camouflage investigates the ways in which nature is observed and synthesized by machines. Employing custom computer software, natural landscapes are analysed and manipulated to become new abstract formations.

Jonathan Monaghan 
The Phoenix and the Medusa

The mythological Phoenix is rendered as a golden chimera, its head replaced with an ominous surveillance camera. The bird meets its inevitable demise above a consumer-electronics store, perched above a jellyfish-like creature composed of intricate Beuax-Arts architecture, hovering gracefully among the clouds. Trapped in a contentiously looping cycle, the work alludes to the cycles of destruction and creation of modern capitalism.

Quayola
Camouflage #A1 

Camouflage a series of algorithmic paintings by Quayola. Camouflage investigates the ways in which nature is observed and synthesized by machines. Employing custom computer software, natural landscapes are analysed and manipulated to become new abstract formations.

Joe Hamilton
Close to Infinite

Close to Infinite, is a meandering journey through landscapes suspended in various states of decomposition. Architectural ruins are draped in withering flowers, leaves and foliage. The cycle of desolate scenes is a reflection on our mortality and the impermanence of structure and material.

Casey REAS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliography is a video about information archives, specifically the transfer of information from printed formats to software formats. It scans through the set of books from my collection that have been fundamental to shaping my understanding of the history and theory of information and how culture and technology intersect. 

Joe Hamilton
Cézanne Unfixed

In Cézanne Unfixed, the relationship between the painting and the museum in the installation photograph is blurred. In his time, Cézanne was influenced by developments in science to challenge the ways of modelling space and volume, and this artwork continues that work. The brushstrokes of Cézanne break from their canvases to inhabit the spatial dimensions of the museum while the architecture flattens into the surface of the image plane. While old barriers are fractured, new barriers are created in the medium of this artwork, the digital video file.

Sara Ludy
Fire Mountain

Fire Mountain is a digital animation from Ludy’s ongoing series, Clouds (2011 - present). This series employs computer imaging programs to generate animated paintings. Dozens of painterly compositions are layered to create tangible textures, referencing the desire for virtuality to manifest physically.

Casey REAS
Transference

The Transference video is about personal identity and the mutability of iden-
tity. The raw material for this video are all of the frames with faces in

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, imperfectly extracted by a computer-vision
system. Each frame is distorted through the loss of information to obscure the
distinct identity of each face. This flattens the identity of each individual
while maintaining distance through a different filter.

Sara Ludy
Sky Ruby

Sara Ludy’s practice investigates the confluence of the physical and virtual. Her works include websites, animation, video, sculpture, and audio-visual performance. Traversing the online virtual world Second Life, Ludy photographs domestic interiors, landscapes, and other scenes that are iconographically familiar, yet feel otherworldly.