Paradise
Paradise, 2023
Video (color, sound), AI 3840 × 2160
00:33
Edition of 3
333 TZ
Link to mint the work
„Paradise, “ is the work that we are releasing here at NODE. Can you share more about the process behind creating this particular work?
Sara: Paradise, another AI generated video, embodies more of an advertisement energy, a commercial for something like a perfume or vacation ad, but it’s unclear. The video was created from an image I made by blending multiple images together, which was then paired alongside a camera zooming out. I generated many clips until this one emerged. I found it amusing that it created a black box and a transition wipe at the end of the zoom, a sort of simulated self-awareness. I slowed down the clip to make it more dramatic, processed the video to enhance the digital patina and noise, and added an AI generated “romantic ambient” music track. It’s about revealing an energy in material, something that just feels right and makes sense. I largely work through feeling and instinct. Our unconscious mind processes around 11 million bits of information a second, whereas our conscious mind processes around 40 bits a second. I enjoy accessing that massive unconscious database, and getting out of the logical mind from time to time. That’s why I also enjoy making paintings.
You have been working in the digital world for years, how do you navigate it and keep discovering new dimensions of material for yourself?
Sara: I often think of ways I can extend material through space and time; both static and moving. Additionally, I often think of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Cuttings”, and the idea of pushing through material to reveal something beyond it. My process embodies this, I want to push through and process material to discover something new. I predominantly work with digital material, as it brings me closer to the language of the immaterial, like thoughts and dreams, and ideas about consciousness. I like contemplating and thinking through these things with computers.
AI is one of the dimensions you are currently exploring for yourself, what are you interested in in relation to your way of working?
Sara: Since working with AI over the last couple of years, I have found myself embracing its absurdity. It’s absurd how the hype of its promise outshines what we are already capable of, especially in a creative sense. We can’t help but prompt and fill the world with more mundanity, but I see it less being about the outputs, and more about engaging with another form or representation of intelligence. We want to feel seen, and we don’t help each other with that much anymore, so now we’re defaulting to simulation and AI chat bots. Beneath all of this is still us; we are still present in this technology and its outputs. I suppose I’m trying to find that energy somewhere in there, beyond the coldness, seeking a reflection of ourselves.
How do you then interpret this into your own work?
Sara: The AI works I've been making, such as Metamimics, are very much about seeking a reflection. Metamimics (2023) is a series of AI-generated video works that explore the material nature of AI while seeking to unveil aspects of ourselves. Each scene was created using an AI-generated image of a stage performance, combined with text prompts depicting everyday places such as beaches, dinners, and pools. In certain scenes, the stage performance seems to bleed into these places, such as a stage light shining through a blue sky. This spatial bleed unveils its own cosmology — a black box stage through which AI performs. The music, also AI-generated, features upbeat tempos and off-pitch melodies, creating a slight dissonance that oddly humanizes the simulated experience of self.
About Sara Ludy
2024
Health & Wellness, Night Lights Denver; Denver, CO
Close Reading, Office Impart; Berlin, DE
SMALL V0ICE, Honor Fraser; Los Angeles, CA
2023
Sandbox Mode, Office Impart; Berlin, DE
Chain Reaction, Feral File, Online
Code Chronicles, bitforms gallery, New York, NY
2022
Swimmer’s Canyon, Art Mur, Montréal, QC (s)
/home, Sara Ludy & Niko Princen, Panke Gallery, Berlin, DE (s)
Weather, Mirror Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Screen Strokes, Pequod Co., Mexico City, MEX
Freedom of the Form, Sevil Dolmacı Art Gallery; Istanbul, TR
Digital Baroque: History Meets Algorithm, 4ART, online
Digital Comines, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2021
Future Fair, via bitforms gallery, New York, NY (s)
Fragments of a Hologram Rose, Feral File, Online
Parfum Liquide, Galerie Galerie, Online
Pieces of Me, Transfer Gallery, Online
Abstract Art in the Age of New Media, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, Online
2020
Starmesh, 150 Media Stream, Chicago, IL (s)
The Tree of Life, bitforms.art/thetreeoflife, Online
Well Now WTF?, wellnow.wtf, Online
Psychic Plumbing, Canary, Los Angeles, CA
*(s) solo exhibition
Additional works
Untitled 5, 2020 – 2021
Untitled 5, 2020 – 2021
Archival digital pigment print on Belgian linen
54 × 44 × 2 in
When I reflect back on my digital painting series “Untitled”, it uncannily resembles the forms of AI that I work with now. It’s as if the multidimensional and shapeshifting qualities the forms have in the paintings were pointing towards something to come just a few years later.
“Untitled 5” is from the Untitled painting series. This painting is experienced as a temporal object, where its materiality expands through time and space as a physical work and digital file. Each manifestation is not a separate version of the painting, but the painting itself, appearing in many forms and contexts. The painting consists of dozens of layers that build upon each other by cycling the painting through various 2D and 3D processes, where it acquires a patina of artifacts that reveal the natural tendencies and limitations of its materiality. Collectively, these artifacts build a multidimensional composition that reflects its own temporality and the conditions in which it was made.
Metamimics, 2023
Metamimics (series), 2023
Edition of 6 + 1AP |
Each edition is a collection of all 6 works + 1 exhibition copy (11:45), for 7 videos in total. SSD.
Metamimics (2023) is a series of AI-generated video works that explore the ways in which AI reveals its nature and, by extension, our own. Each scene was created using an AI-generated image of a stage performance, combined with text prompts depicting everyday places such as beaches, dinners, and pools. In certain scenes, the stage performance seems to bleed into these places, such as a stage light shining through a blue sky. This spatial bleed unveils its own cosmology — a black box stage through which AI performs. The music, also AI-generated, features upbeat tempos and off-pitch melodies, creating a slight dissonance that oddly humanizes the simulated experience of self.
The series includes 6 works; Bayrbex 790, Magic House, Beach Bender, Summertime, Ballroom Loop, and Dinner Party Loop.
Tumbleweeds, 2022
Tumbleweeds, 2022
Tumbleweeds, found glass, garden twine, animated gifs
From the Sunrise/Sunset series for the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Christiane Paul
(Screenshot courtesy of Katherine Frazer)
“Tumbleweeds is part of a series called Sunrise/Sunset at the Whitney Museum, which invites artists to make web interventions. The limitations given are that the piece will only be visible for 30 seconds, two times a day, at sunrise and sunset, New York time. I started thinking about ways to expand that 30 second integer of time and decided to expand the media beyond the browser through a sculpture and ended up with a piece about light through space and time.
The sculpture is a land sculpture made of tumbleweeds, found glass, and biodegradable garden twine. I started tying pieces of found glass to the center of tumbleweeds so that when they are carried by wind, they generate light patterns and when there’s several spread out anywhere from 10 feet to 10 miles, it creates this expansive, yet lightweight and temporary structure that light can reflect from across an expansive space. The garden twine degrades after a few months and all the materials fall back to the desert where they came from. No one ever really sees this sculpture and I don’t even get to see this sculpture in all its forms, its timeline and history is generated by wind.
The only part of the sculpture that is visible is through an animated star map that contains captured reflections of the found pieces of glass. As more tumbleweeds are fitted with glass, the star map grows and changes, representing the ephemeral nature of the unseen land sculpture.
At the time I was working on this piece I was burned out from being online so much during the pandemic that I started making sculptures in my garden and painting again. I wanted to find a way to make a piece that wasn’t so heavy in tech and animated GIFs seemed perfect, they represent something essential and universal and a part of internet cosmology. I didn’t want to entertain anything about Web 3.0 or Blockchain, even though that’s what was in the general sphere at the time. I wanted the work to slow down, honor the time we were in and point towards the space between hyper-connection and hyper-isolation we had been existing in.
When I decided to expand the browser work as a land sculpture, I wanted the material parts to be as lightweight as the animated GIFs and I ended up choosing tumbleweeds, found glass, and biodegradable twine. They became lightweight frameworks through which the lightest material could be explored: light itself.” (Excerpt from Fiction Magazine)