Marjan Moghaddam
Marjan Moghaddam is a pioneering and award-winning Digital Artist and Animator. One who is actively engaged in redefining form through Digital Painting. As a result, her work is distinguished by animated, interactive, avateered, and virtual reality compositions. Pieces that speak on disruptions found in art, culture, philosophy, and political circumstances. You will see her critique of ‘Late Stage Capitalism’ (a term that refers to the absurdities and injustices of modern Capitalism), recurring feminist themes, in ‘Revolutions' (her last collection that ran from 2009-2015)…As well as the 3 year old project, #ArtHacks which was created to observe and critique the commercialisation of the World of Modern Art.
Marjan has been creating ‘fantastic virtual worlds for decades. Since 2008 and she has been doing so through the use of 3D CG and motion capture of improvised videos. These virtual environments are easily identifiable by her signature ‘Digital Bodies.’ Representative of the transformation we are undergoing due to technological advancements. The artist and social commentator describes these bodies as ‘’machined, organic, disrupted, and discontiguous.’’ Emanating the appearance of cinematic paintings, with video game aesthetics, and special effects. A notable figure to be considered, her unique and original style is a signifier of the Post Digital Age. An age that in which there is a desire to subvert the very idea of curation, whilst introducing the idea of a democratised work space. An age that in itself, is symbolic of a new digital - artistic era.
What is your background?
I am a digital artist and animator. Originally, I was born and raised in Iran and immigrated to the US as a political refugee in 1979. I have been living and working in New York City since then. I work primarily with 3D CG and my first exhibited computer animation was on a Commodore 64 back in 1984, so I’ve been creating and exhibiting digital art for some time.
What does your work aim to say? Does your work comment on current social and political issues?
On many levels my work is always combining the personal with the global. I explore what I consider as our ‘Collective and aggregated technologically enhanced Imagination,’ on the net. The story of art is the story of human imagination. So the Net, AR/VR etc… are all the emergent technologies of our imagination. My work includes commentary on social and political issues: from critiques of Late Stage Capitalism and feminist themes in my previous Of Revolutions collection (2009-2015) to my #arthacks (2016-present) which have actively critiqued the the commercialization and financialization of the art world - alongside feminist themes. Despite this, for me it’s not just about merely working with these issues or themes. It is about digging deeper, underneath the surface in order to explore the psyche of our world. I think art can create a cultural space for a more nuanced and complex way of examining ourselves and the world, which is very different from our public discourse on social media, where everything is about who is the most aggressive and what is the better clickbait.
Who are your biggest influences? Have they changed during your long star studded career? Absolutely (they have changed), in the 1980s, I was totally enamored by the Beatnicks and Punks… Although today, I can’t say I’m that into punk anymore, although the Beatnicks continue to inspire me. But in terms of who I’ve kept, I’d say animators like Tex Avery who pioneered Squashing and Stretching, in a way that can only be considered as artistic genius. Stanley Kubrick who inspired me greatly at a young age and still blows me away, Dali whose work still remains very much an artistic singularity, and CG animator Ryan Landreth. Someone who became an inspiration for me in the 1990s till this day. I’ve also been inspired by different philosophers from Schopenhauer to Baudrillard, and most recently Peter Sloterdijk.
Louis Bourgoise was someone I didn’t get when I was younger, yet now I do. Both Anslem Kiefer & Gerhard Richter continue to inspire me because they’re intimately involved with their art and have a meaningfully active practice, they’re not ‘factory manager’ artists. Also Doug Aitken is someone who has been inspirational in terms of expanding the boundaries of what media in art can be, like his use of pop music, for instance. And most recently Greta Thunberg was an inspiration for my #GlitchedFae sculpture and AR animation, as the maiden or youngest state of the Triple #GlitchGoddess. Lastly, I would say Banksy has been the biggest influence on me in terms of the #arthacks.
You work through different art platforms: 3D Computer Graphics, Motion Capture of performance, and digital media. Doing so for: animation, net art, print, sculpture, installation, AR and VR. What is your favorite working platform for your art and why?
Whatever I am working on now is my favourite, and that changes every day. Materialising and physicalising digital art. Whether it be large format prints, sculpture, installation, AR on a mobile phone, or walk around VR - it is always exhilarating. Yet in recent years with the #arthacks (especially the ones that have become very popular online, like “Baisser at Mary Boone in Glassish and Waxish” (2 million views on Instagram post)), or the “#GlitchGoddess of Art Basel Miami with Picasso and Wood” (3.6 million views on Facebook) Net art is increasingly winning out over physical media as my favourite. Ten years ago, it was all about materialising the digital for physical shows. Now for me it’s more about the Net - which has greater cultural impact and relevance. But these things can also be cyclical for me, because I did a lot of early Net art in the mid ’90s too, but then went back and forth with festival and gallery periods.
#arthacks and #digitalbodies are conceptual Instagram-based collections that you started three years ago and that are still expanding. How did you come up with the concepts around #arthacks and #digitalbodies?
I had a long standing practice with 3d CG figures in my original and distinct style going back to the 1980s with my PMS animation on the Amiga. Then my 3d CG avatar GIF animations which I showed as the featured digital artist for the launch of Dotcom Gallery and International Forum for the Digital Arts on the internet in 1996. Followed by my Adorations series, with CG figures covered in fractal dermal pigmentation in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2008 I started working with Mocap and did Scab (2009, Siggraph CAF), with digital bodies driven by Mocap, simulations, FX, and pose-to-pose animation. Then they expanded into my figures for the Of Revolutions collection (2009-2016), and finally the #arthacks. These #digitalbodies were exploring how the technology was transforming us through the inherent aesthetics of the digital in a unique and original style. A style which I was developing into my own figural and conceptual vocabulary.
The #arthacks started in 2016, when I realized that most of the art I looked at was online, even though I live in NYC, the art gallery center in the US. My original concept was to expand the possibilities for exhibiting digital art beyond the physical - through digital interventions. While also radicalizing curation and democratizing the exhibition space at the same time. I had so much work rejected from physical shows because it was digital, political, feminist, or even because of its sexual content that I finally decided: “Why don’t I hack my own art into found and shot exhibition footage online?” So I took this street art approach, with only 2-3 days to do the art-fair hacks, as they’re happening in an improvisational manner. Originally, I wanted to have this dialog about what was happening in our world as a netizen and an artist, but with the work growing online and all the comments and posts from people all over the world, it’s increasingly becoming more aggregated for me. For instance, I’m using the comments from people on the #arthacks in the exhibited #GlitchGoddess prints and sculptures as audio voiceovers in the AR. Each hack is also informed by everything that is happening at the time, such as memes, political events, news cycles, events or talks at the art fairs, art market commentary etc…So the hacks are fully derived from the collective imagination of the net.
Meanwhile talking about them you also said “to hack is merely transgressive, to do so with a critical dialog is transformational.” Could you explain to us this statement further?
I think that all my favorite avant-garde and disruptive art has always been transformational. It wasn’t just rebellion for the sake of rebellion, weird for the sake of weird, or disruption for the sake of disruption. Although there are a lot of artworks like that - in my opinion. But there has to be a higher goal and/or purpose, that is also evident in the work. My hacks don’t come with an artist statement, yet the concepts that inform them are evident to the viewer online. When I first started the hacks on Instagram (2016), there weren’t a lot of Mixed Reality pieces on social media. Now there are tons.
Although, most are not engaged in a critical or thoughtful discourse, nor talking about transformation. Most are about getting eyeballs. There’s nothing wrong with that, I think a lot of innovation happens that way, and I’m respectful of the artistic effort that goes into CG works that are about eyeballs…But for me that’s not enough. If you look at the comments on many of these #arthacks, you will see that the impact is real, globally, that the critical dialog is understood, appreciated, and participated in. And that is the transformational part I am talking about.
Since you have started a lot has changed. Especially in the technological world that has been ever-evolving at an exponential pace. How over the years has such fast, technological development impacted your art?
I think I have been able to make more and more of what I see in my imagination. So, as an artist that is really important for me, while it also has a high value in my practice. For instance, a lot of my early figures were all polygon based, and there was a lot of organic articulation I just couldn’t do. But then, when NURBS came out, followed by Sub Patch modeling, my process changed. The way I animate today, seamlessly blending Mocap, with IK/FK rigs, and pose-to-pose and simulations at the same time. At one point that was not conceivable. Now it is a pipeline that supports my original style. I remember working with Mocap in 2008 and it was a nightmare pipeline back then. It took a lot for me to do Scab, a year later. So, a lot of these new abilities are a result of advances in technology.
I see novices deliver very sophisticated simulations in quite an easy way nowadays. I remember a time when simulations took a lot longer and where a lot less user friendly. My Yellow Whirl Number two was a particle and simulation heavy animation that I started in 2009, then rendered for a year, and showed in 2011 - where it won various awards. But that was a 3-year cycle! Today that animation would probably take me about a month. Even AR has changed in the last 3 years that I have been making apps, I was recently the AR Artist-In-Resident for Adobe Project Aero and I couldn’t believe how easy it was for me to drag and drop my 3D CG animations into AR on an iPhone with Aero. In comparison to what I usually had to do before with Unity, my creativity and experimentation literally exploded.
Your #GlitchGoddess has recently blessed JLO in Milan, during the Versace runway show. Who is #GlitchGoddess and what made her chose that specific moment? How was the world before Google Images and were these connections relevant for her?
#GlitchGoddess evolved out of my #GlitchedOdalisque (2017 Whitney Hack), and her first appearance was in the Armory Show 2018 #Arthack, in which she walked down the runway at Armory going from fat to skinny. I then did a more glitched version of her for my Kavanaugh Haunted my Frieze London ArtFair hack in 2018. Her glitches became more exaggerated, as I further developed my #ChronometricSculpture technique for her. I had already employed a similar technique for my #Non-BinaryNude which I did as a digital intervention of the Gagosian Nude show (2016), because that comprehensive 100 year survey of the nude didn’t have either a digital one or a non-binary. I then used that #digitalbody in several hacks and also The Wrong Digital Art Biennial 2017.
The main concept for the #GlitchGoddess is that she is a post digital body with fluid contours and volumes. She glitches existing ideas of the female nude, as a singular form, because women’s bodies change. Further, in the case of biological females they are designed to, because of pregnancy. Glitch for me is conceptual, aesthetic, and also technical at the same time, and the digital in this case becomes a corrective intervention art historically.
I then showed her stepping out of a Fractal Niche as AR for Enamored Armor. Around the same time I did another version for Art Basel 2018 Miami as a hack. With voices of women artists discussing inequality in the art world, because that is another dimension of glitch. That video went viral with over 3 million views and 64,000 shares on social media. After which I created two print versions of her with AR activations, one for the 836m gallery show in San Francisco, one for the #GlitchedFae, the maiden state of the triple Glitched Goddess, and another one that I recently showed at Contemporary Istanbul. Both the #GlitchGoddess prints and the new #GlitchedOdalisque print, will be in Snap Orlando AR show opening this October, alongside a 10” print AR activation of my Autonomous. A piece which I created under commission as AR art for the Smithsonian. The AR audio features voiceovers, based on comments left under #GlitchGoddess posts. Mixing body issues with comments about inequality. So, at this point she’s become her own phenomenon, and when I saw the clip of JLo walking the runway with a body that is not the one of traditional model, I decided to have #GlitchGoddess virtually bless her.
Your art is spread through different worlds: physical, with museums and galleries and virtual through social media. Which one you think is better for you or for the type of art you make? Can they co-exist or one is deemed to be replaced by the other?
As an artist that is not just engaged in innovation but also participating in the greater dialog of our world, I think there is no substitute for net art. Although I’m also a big fan of high fidelity digital art - whether it is a 16,000 pixel render I output as a large format print, an 8k animation on an OLED screen, large immersive projection, or an exquisitely finished high resolution resin SLA 3d print. I need both of them, so for me they coexist. But the worlds that host physical exhibitions and the net don’t always co-exist. There’s still tension between 20th century thinking and art curation, versus 21st century realities, making it hard to show the most revolutionary and compelling digital art of our world.
The majority of digital art that is shown in galleries and museums doesn’t really have much appeal for me, whereas the work I see on the net does. The art world sometimes has an adversarial relationship with technology. As a result, much of the work that is shown is a critique of technology. While I agree that these critiques are necessary, not all digital art can be exclusively about technology bashing. Photography didn’t evolve because it was always critiquing itself as evil. I think the art world itself needs more of a critique, like everything else, so maybe it’s a bit of a deflection on the part of the art market that wants to appear as if it’s politically pure, through a critique of technology. Instead of looking at its own out-of-touch, nepotistic, late stage capitalist, crony, and corrupt practices. Maybe we’re a lot like 1919, the early era of Modernism; there’s a lot of exciting radical new art and thinking in the digital and on the net. Although the bulk of the art world is not aware of it or embracing it. They are still attached to the previous century’s sensibilities and their capitalistic systems.
You have been a pioneer of digital art, being heavily present since the earliest days of our virtual universe. Have you ever had to deal with being a female in such a world, that to these days is still dealing with sexism and toxic masculinity?
I think if I had done one tenth of what I’ve done, as a man, I would have had a lot more success. That’s not just my opinion; a lot of people are saying that privately, as well as publicly on social media. So, my gender does mean that my work is not received and appreciated the same way as that of a man’s. Usually, when men come along and rip me off, (which they do frequently) it becomes a thing. But as long as I’m originating it as a woman, nobody knows what to do with it. We have cultural attitudes that assume only men create and innovate.
So, yes, I’ve faced a lot of sexism. But I’ve also been able to break some glass ceilings especially in tech, where I worked for many years. Ultimately, there are more doors open based on merit in tech, than the art world. Whilst for instance you have so many immigrants in tech from non-European countries and backgrounds. I also don’t always see the issues of sexism as just toxic masculinity. This is because, often it is the women in the art world who value male artists more. So that doesn’t come out of toxic masculinity. It comes from patriarchal programming. It is so pervasive that most women aren’t even conscious of it.
For example, there are a lot of women collectors who buy art from male artists only. This is the same with women art critics, art dealers, and museum curators. Ironically, some of my biggest champions and collectors over the years have been men, not women. And you still can’t sell the work of a women for as much as of a man. However, now there is a generation of younger women in both the art and tech worlds, who are very “woke” to sexism. And I’m getting a lot of support from them…so perhaps it is also generational. I am very hopeful that this generation’s impact will make a huge difference. Maybe not in my life time - but definitely down the line.
What do we have to expect from the future? Could you give us a glimpse of what your next venture will be?
There are some new tools that I’m evaluating and may possibly integrate into my pipeline in the upcoming months, with more Deep Learning components. Not to generate art, necessarily, but more as something to assist what I do. I still believe in a dyadic approach between Human, Artist, and Machine - in which the creative agency is fully active on all sides. I’m also currently working on more print & sculpture AR activations, in addition to further evolving the #arthacks. Another new venture I have undertaken is creating and selling AR experiences for Android and iOS on the ARize platform. This came to be, also through social media, with people asking for it so much that I posted about it on my Public Page on Facebook and the public in turn offered a feedback, in terms of pricing and other suggestions. A kind of ‘crowdsourced direction,’ of how to sell AR art on mobile. There will be a selection of AR art experiences, with pricing that will range from low-end to high-end. I’m also working on more VR and more direct interventions.
In the near future I will have several new works in several different pavilions of the upcoming, The Wrong 2019 Digital Art Biennial, including: Web GL, AR, animation (#GlitchGoddess and #GlitchedOdalisque), and at least one surprise direct intervention for the Biennial, at a physical location. Lastly, as many people ask for prints to buy online at more affordable prices, I’m working on the best ways to facilitate that (as they will be revealed next year). I’m a firm believer in taking feedback from online comments, because on some levels, all of this is new, there’s no real playbook or template to follow. It is all evolving rapidly in a crowdsourced, aggregated and organic manner. Ultimately, that’s the flow that I find interesting: the inherent tendency of the digital in terms of immateriality, connectivity, aggregation, and interactivity.
What do we have to expect from the future?
I’m not a huge techno utopian anymore. I used to be, during the Internet 1.0, I worked in the Silicon Alley in Downtown Manhattan back then, while also doing a lot of the early influential physical and internet computer art shows. My VR head-immersive fractal animation installation went straight from an early computer art show in a Soho gallery, back then, to Internet pioneer Josh Harris’ Executive CEO office at Jupiter Communications which was like the ground zero of Silicon Alley during the 90s. But, today I’m more of a cynic and I think that the realities of Climate Change go beyond weather catastrophes and food insecurity, because once the ocean’s die they will release toxins that will kill all life forms, even plants. Basically, we’re staring at total annihilation. The same thing happened in the 70s and 80s as we stared mutually at pure destruction due to the nuclear war, so it’s very similar to that era, but the world, although, is still flirting with annihilation through Climate Change.
And I don’t know whether tech can save us, as our modern science facilitated by our latest technology has failed to rally our world around this urgent common mission to save humanity. So, I think it’s more in the hands of culture at this point. Look at the Renaissance and how it blossomed so much after the Dark Ages leading eventually to the Enlightenment and the Golden era of Liberal Humanism in subsequent centuries, shattering the birth of our whole modern world and many of its secular humanist achievements and progress.
So, we need a new Renaissance, a new dream, we need a new spark for our collective imagination, and that’s where the creators comes in, whether they are visual artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, videogame designers, architects etc. Artists have perhaps the greatest mandate in history and of their story right now, and they need to be more idealistic, avant-garde, bold, unapologetic, committed, creative, imaginative, badass and greater than they’ve ever had to be in the past, because our world needs a new dream to save itself. So whether it's AR or VR, a video game, a Netflix series, a cool CG animation, a love song, an installation, a performance, a sculpture, or a painting, they have to decide if they are going to accept this mandate, or merely create for likes, fame and money. So, ultimately, my hope is for a technological facilitated cultural revolution as significant as the Renaissance that could push us past our current Dark Ages. And that, will finally determine if the future will have humans in it or not, because oneway or another the planet will continue and have a future, but we may not.
courtesy MARJAN MOGHADDAM
interview BRANDO COLEMAN
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