Niio World Premiere

Curated by Steven Sacks

Niio is the premium discovery and display platform for curated video and new media art, experienced across private and public spaces. Niio’s Curatorial Program features limited-edition media art collections from leading archives, galleries and artists. For Niio commissions No. 2, Steven Sacks (founder, bitforms gallery, NY) 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.

“The screen is ubiquitous today’s society. It’s used for almost everything we do. It’s in our homes. Our hands. Our streets. And our place 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.”

- Steven Sacks

Claudia Hart
StillLife - 1.1

StillLife - 1.1 was inspired by the Henri Matisse Red Interior, Still-life on Blue Table from 1947. It uses a mathematical simulation for generation to grow the flowers based on fractal geometry. The flowers were set to grow half way through the 5 minute animation. There is no “death” function in simulations softwares, so instead, I inverted the growth function which caused the flowers in the still life to glitch, break up, and ultimately disappear, a digital version of “death.” Instead of painting decorative patterns on the elements like Matisse did, I chose colors, and programmed a procedural pattern that would randomly evolve over the five minutes of the work.

Claudia Hart
StillLife - 1.2

StillLife - 1.2 was inspired by the canonical Henri Matisse Painting, The Blue Window from 1913. Like all of the work in this still-life series, it uses a mathematical simulation to generate a representational image, somewhere between a painting, a photo and a sculpture. In this work, I tried to navigate the problem of interpreting the 19th century concept of a painting as reflecting the “flatness” of a canvas and the flat but fluid paint that sits upon it, but interpreted in a 21st-century 3D space. In the 21st-century simulations softwares, space is “x,y,z,” a Cartesian mathematical construction used by computers to generate the illusion of depth. The 21st century metaphor of a gridded “matrix” is a powerful one, and The Matrix, the 1999 film by the the Wachowskis Brothers is a symbol of our time. In my still-life work, I am trying to express that perceptual change from the point of view of artist living in the now but feeling herself to be part of a continuity - the great tradition of 21st century painting.

Claudia Hart
StillLife - 1.3

StillLife - 1.3 was inspired by the Vincent Van Gogh sunflower still lives and his fields of wheat, all painted from 1888-1889. Like all of the works in my still life series, it also uses a mathematical simulation for generation to grow the flowers based on fractal geometry. The flowers were set to grow half way through a 5-minute animation that I later slowed to 10, because it “felt” wrong. My approach to mathematics is as intuitive and expressive as the School of the Paris painters. I use algorithms and rules to set up structures, then break all of my rules until it has an emotional expressiveness that mirrors my own inner life.

Clement Valla
Glazing Rock I

In this series of Valla is engaging with forces at work that shape natural forms, and forces at work that shape digital images — and humans have their part in both.

Clement Valla
Glazing Rock II

In this series of Valla is engaging with forces at work that shape natural forms, and forces at work that shape digital images — and humans have their part in both.

Refik Anadol
Melting Memories - Engram - B

Refik Anadol’s latest project on the materiality of remembering. Melting Memories offered new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. By showcasing several interdisciplinary projects that translate the elusive process of memory retrieval into data collections, the exhibition immersed visitors in Anadol’s creative vision of “recollection.” “Science states meanings; art expresses them,” writes American philosopher John Dewey and draws a curious distinction between what he sees as the principal modes of communication in both disciplines. In Melting Memories, Refik Anadol’s expressive statements provide the viewer with revealing and contemplative artworks that will generate responses to Dewey’s thesis. Comprising data paintings, augmented data sculptures and light projections, the project as a whole debuts new advances in technology that enable visitors to experience aesthetic interpretations of motor movements inside a human brain. Each work grows out of the artist’s impressive experiments with the advanced technology tools provided by the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. Neuroscape is a neuroscience center focusing on technology creation and scientific research on brain function of both healthy and impaired individuals.

Refik Anadol
Melting Memories - Engram - A

Refik Anadol’s latest project on the materiality of remembering. Melting Memories offered new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. By showcasing several interdisciplinary projects that translate the elusive process of memory retrieval into data collections, the exhibition immersed visitors in Anadol’s creative vision of “recollection.” “Science states meanings; art expresses them,” writes American philosopher John Dewey and draws a curious distinction between what he sees as the principal modes of communication in both disciplines. In Melting Memories, Refik Anadol’s expressive statements provide the viewer with revealing and contemplative artworks that will generate responses to Dewey’s thesis. Comprising data paintings, augmented data sculptures and light projections, the project as a whole debuts new advances in technology that enable visitors to experience aesthetic interpretations of motor movements inside a human brain. Each work grows out of the artist’s impressive experiments with the advanced technology tools provided by the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. Neuroscape is a neuroscience center focusing on technology creation and scientific research on brain function of both healthy and impaired individuals.

Alex McLeod
Walking Seasons

A viewer navigates a forested space through spring to winter. The trees transform from illustrative to a representative while a forward-moving entity directs our passage.

Alex McLeod
The Same Place

A landscape is viewed from a birds eye, as the animation plays similarities begin to appear suggesting a loop, but something is different.

Jonathan Monaghan
Starship Baroque I

Starship Baroque is a series of portraits of strange spacecraft-like creatures. The forms operate on a liminal space between the organic and artificial as baroque architecture flows gracefully though the sky like a piece of fabric. Combined with surveillance equipment and ambiguous technological contraptions, the forms defy classification.

Jonathan Monaghan
Starship Baroque II

Starship Baroque is a series of portraits of strange spacecraft-like creatures. The forms operate on a liminal space between the organic and artificial as baroque architecture flows gracefully though the sky like a piece of fabric. Combined with surveillance equipment and ambiguous technological contraptions, the forms defy classification.

Siebren Versteeg
Surround (A-F)

Siebren Versteeg’s work series exemplify a continued exploration of the intersections between code (Langue) and abstraction. In these works, algorithms are set loose to paint continuous yet indeterminate compositions in real time. The meditative results confront their viewer with a kind of digital sublime where process supersedes resolution, and all is subject to the winds of change. Despite their embrace of continuous flux however, the meticulous rendering of the painterly that is at the heart of these algorithms imbue them with a reverent nod to the complex and often debated history of the viscous medium, asking us again to consider the notion of what a painting might and might not even be. 

In homage to the classic Atari video game, Surround depicts a series of compositions created by two simultaneously painting algorithms, each represented by complimentary colors. As various interplays between the brushes unfold, palettes blend and interact; expressing the notion of a dialectical relationship that is evolutionary yet seemingly unresolveable.

Siebren Versteeg
After Indifference

Siebren Versteeg’s work series exemplify a continued exploration of the intersections between code (Langue) and abstraction. In these works, algorithms are set loose to paint continuous yet indeterminate compositions in real time. The meditative results confront their viewer with a kind of digital sublime where process supersedes resolution, and all is subject to the winds of change. Despite their embrace of continuous flux however, the meticulous rendering of the painterly that is at the heart of these algorithms imbue them with a reverent nod to the complex and often debated history of the viscous medium, asking us again to consider the notion of what a painting might and might not even be. 

After Indifference renders a continuous abstraction made with small brushes of varying personality and intention. In this work, the additive process of mark making builds ad infinitum, resolving only at the point when the video loops.