When artists go the way of technology

Technology is making inroads into the world of digital art, writes Frank Rose

its “clients” — preserving their online presence and, through virtual reality, even the memory of their physical existence.

On its website, the institute greets visitors with such deadpan sales pitches as, “What will death mean when our digital souls outlive our physical bodies?”

In fact, sculpture and institute alike were the work of Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, a 35-year-old New York artist and teacher at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme.

Working with a grant from Lacma, Barcia-Colombo invented the institute as a way of exploring the rituals of death in the digital age.

At Goodman’s invitation, he curated the digital art exhibition at Sotheby’s. The young artists in the show — several ITP alumni among them — tend to share, despite their immersion in digital technology, a profound ambivalence about where it is taking us.

They also seem to share the “Black Mirror” sensibility behind the Hereafter Institute: The perception, endemic to the satirical British TV series, that technology has led us into a digital fun house where nothing is as it seems and everything is as we fear it might be.

The show at Sotheby’s, called Bunker, ran through Aug 10. It included Jeremy Bailey, a Toronto artist who merges Snapchat with art history, portraying individuals through an augmented reality lens in poses that recall famous portraits from the past.

A digital C-print of his wife as she stares at a tablet that appears to be coming to life recalls Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” gazing into a mirror.

“It’s the idea of looking at oneself through the technology of the day,” Bailey said.

An adjacent self-portrait shows him in the guise of the persona he has adopted — that of an obnoxiously ebullient naif who proclaims himself a famous new media artist.

Elsewhere in the show, you could don a virtual reality headset to navigate the childhood home of Sarah Rothberg, who reconstructed her experience growing up in Los Angeles from old photos and home movies. Or view lacy, metallic sculptures by Ashley Zelinskie — self-portraits whose surfaces are made up of the letters that spell out her genetic code.

One piece — in a series called “Android” had a cube embedded in the face; the cube’s surface is made up of the computer code that was used to generate it.

Zelinskie’s human-digital mash-ups were about “how we’re becoming one with our technology,” she explained in her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn — a small, crowded loft with NASA fliers and Star Trek posters taped to the walls.

Another Brooklyn artist in the show, Carla Gannis, seemed less intent on preserving human culture than on documenting its degradation. In “The Garden of Emoji Delights”, based on the early-16th-century triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, she reimagined one of the best-known paintings of the Northern Renaissance as a gleefully hacked computer file, its frolicsome figures and hellish beasts transmogrified into cartoonlike characters.

There were two versions — a 13-foot-by7-foot (3.96m-by-2.13m) C-print (roughly the same dimensions as the Bosch), and a smaller electronic variant that lights up like a video game.

The e-version presented a deliriously animated tableau that ends in catastrophe on all three panels — Eden wiped out by a plane crash, Earth overtaken by forests, hell freezing over. It’s mesmerising, in a twitchy sort of way — but in place of depth and enigma, we got candy-coloured titillation and a nagging sense that nothing exists beneath the surface.

The most haunting work in the show was Jamie Zigelbaum’s “Doorway to the Soul”, which consisted of a white pedestal surmounted by a 16-inch-high (40.6cmhigh) video monitor that stood at average human height.

On the screen is a face every 60 seconds. You might not realise the feed was live, or that the faces belonged to workers at Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s microemployment site, who were being paid 25 cents to stare into their computer’s webcam for one minute.

“That archetypal looking into someone’s eyes — it’s a very powerful moment,” Zigelbaum said.

Barcia-Colombo’s Lacma installation was indeed complicated. For two days last August, museumgoers were offered a free consultation on their digital afterlife. To ensure a fully customised experience, they were asked to sign up in advance and to share access to their Facebook profiles.

When they showed up at the museum, they were greeted by actors in white lab coats and given a 3D body scan that was used to generate a life-size digital avatar.

They were shown a memorial virtualreality film such as the one Barcia-Colombo made about his grandfather, a Spanish poet who fought against Franco and ended his days an emeritus professor of Spanish literature in Los Angeles.

Then they got to attend their own funeral, complete with a eulogy based on their social media posts. As the eulogy concluded, their avatar appeared onscreen, only to turn and walk off into the clouds.

As this suggests, Barcia-Colombo is actually less concerned with death than with memories of life — with what happens to people’s Facebook pages when they’re gone, for instance.

It’s a common concern — so much so that two years ago Facebook started allowing its users to appoint a “legacy contact” to manage their profiles after they die. But is that enough?

“I wanted to design a digital urn — some kind of object, some kind of memory machine you could step into,” he said at NYU, where he teaches animation and video sculpture. “What if Facebook goes down?”

An unlikely prospect at this point — but were it to ever happen, he pointed out, “there would be no record” of the many billions of lives and trillions of “likes” that have been so casually, trustingly, innocently recorded on it. “The whole point is to make that data physical,” he said, “so that a record exists of that person’s life.”

Gravestone makers and turntable manufacturers, please take note.