This chapter focuses on the idea of a “virtual camera.” Instead of using a real camera to capture the world, artists are creating images using 3D software. These images look like photographs, but they are actually completely generated by a computer. Artists like Tim B and Claudia Hart use these tools almost like filmmakers, but in a digital way. They build entire scenes that follow some visual rules, like perspective, but at the same time, they break the limits of reality. So even if the image looks real, it would be impossible to take that photo in real life.
Tim Berresheim (b.1975, Heinsberg, Germany) has been called a ‘pioneer of computer-based art’. The image-worlds at the heart of his practice combine digital and analogue methods, weaving together disparate references from art history, technology, science and nature in a process he has described as an ‘artistic contemporary archaeology.’
Claudia Hart is a trans-media artist. She was educated in art and architectural history in the late 1970s and early 1980s at NYU and Columbia University. This training remains formative to her digital art practice, one that emerged in the early 1990s after she had already exhibited intermedia work for a dozen years in the NY downtown art scene. Hart then transferred her analog practice into the digital space, and has bridged these two worlds ever since. Hart’s strategy is conceptual. She tends to make distinct bodies of work that track an art-historical research, setting herself up as both its subject and its object. Her work is profoundly reflexive and consistently so.
Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn based artist working in new media, performance and installation with an interest in spatial intervention and the altered experiences of the artwork as site. His current work explores the collage of the virtual and physical worlds in the recent medium of augmented reality (AR) and “mixed reality.” He is a pioneer of AR medium and a founding member of the AR collective, Manifest.AR, formed in 2011.
