Image via Complex Original
We have entered a new era in art-making and viewing, one that might be post-Internet, or of the New Aesthetic, or something else yet to be named. The one thing we know for sure is that it’s very computer-driven, and it often spreads like wildfire over the Internet. New media artists are making work that is uniquely of our time, often pinpointing a collective feeling or subverting a technology to open up new ways of viewing contemporary culture. Technology-savvy artists inhabit a unique space, creating work that is often as technically proficient as it is insightful, and, as a bonus, it can often be accessed by anyone with a computer from anywhere, at any time.
There are still many questions about the future of new media art. How will we preserve it? Is there a market for digital art? What and who are the defining forces that will carve out its historical significance? The future is bright, and the work coming out of the new media community is only getting better.
The following is a list of artists whose work is not only formally interesting (it's often stunning), but technically adept and innovative. As new media artists carve out their place in art history, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for work by the following artists and follow them as they keep pushing forward with new ways of seeing contemporary digital culture.
Look at Jack Addis’ work, and you’ll be transported into a psychedelic dreamscape where sophisticated 3D forms blend seamlessly with rainbow glitch. While firmly anchored in the digital realm, Addis’ work still feels painterly, as color and form are just as important to his renderings as the subject matter he has chosen lately—weird humanoid figures wearing colorful, pulsing, and iridescent garments. Through animated GIFs and videos, Addis’ characters come to life in ways that are eerily familiar and yet wholly alien. As he writes on his website, his work “reflects how the virtual worlds we create, inhabit, and participate in affect our real life identities and relationships.” Jack is co-founder of the artist collaborative Madescapes^ and a member of NEON Contemporary.
La Turbo Avedon is an avatar/“digitally-based person” who lives and works on the Internet. Without an IRL body, Avedon’s work is uniquely anchored within the digital realm—the artist’s identity is one hundred percent created by her work as she presents it online, and nothing can be obscured by having it take place “off line.” Avedon’s work is created using imagery from the Internet and has recently taken on the form of jagged sculptures that feel like they were pulled straight from one of speculative architect Lebbeus Woods’ drawings, then re-rendered for the digital realm. La Turbo Avedon is the curatorial force behind the new project Panther Modern, in which artists can create their own 3D web-based rooms to “promote the versatility of digital installation via the construction of new architectural spaces for artists.”
Andrew Benson is a glitch artist, live-visuals performer, and software creator, plus a teacher and a curator. His works allow website visitors to interact; in his web-based work Bouncy Gradient, you can add as many jagged, rainbow-tinted shapes as you want, and watch as they twist and ricochet off of each other and against your browser’s edges. In Radical Paintings, your cursor contributes to a rapidly-evolving digital painting, and in Hills, you can soar through a misty digital landscape where colorful mountainous forms undulate and swell. Benson is an innovator within the live visuals community, and he has been teaching electronic media courses at the San Francisco Art Institute since 2008. Benson also curated a pavilion for The Wrong, a new Digital Art biennale called Plastic Yet Still In-Between, in which visitors can navigate between digital artworks through 3D space.
Manuel Fernández’s work is concerned with the ways that we perceive and experience reality in the age of the Internet. In his recent series, “Brush Stock Paintings,” Fernández investigates web-based art via the history of oil-on-canvas painting, creating physical works composed of digitally generated brushstrokes that mimic analog art-making forms. In his video Provisional Landscape, Fernández creates a composite journey through breathtaking scenic vistas, all composed from audiovisual stock material. Set against the recognizable grey and white-checkered Photoshop background and accompanied by an eery soundtrack, the video conjures a place that is as familiar as it is foreign—a fabricated utopia that is empty of human life, yet exists only because of us. Fernández is the founder and curator of Domain Gallery, an online gallery focused on digital and Internet-based works.
Don’t click over to Emilie Gervais’ website if you have a history of seizures or flashing lights-induced migraines. Gervais’ web-based artwork, while often difficult to navigate through and challenging to observe, flickers with maturity. In A Letter to Young Internet Artists, published on Animal New York, Gervais writes, “A post-Internet object doesn’t trigger space. Post-Internet artists do not consider art. Post-Internet artists do not consider objects. Post-Internet artists are not really artists. It’s about something else, something larger than life.” And, as she said in an interview with The Creators Project, “Thinking of net art as a movement is like thinking of phone art as a movement. It's kinda irrelevant.” This general “net art isn’t a thing” attitude helps explain why so many of Gervais’ sites feel fragmented and partially broken. Her works function like Greek statues with shattered noses; they are artifacts that present possible stories more than they are fully formed masterpieces. Gervais is exploring the cultural implications of the web, looking into the present from a future where most everything might already be “over.”
Alexandra Gorczynski’s work probes an area that lies between all that is possible in the digital realm and the visual allure of more traditional art forms. With a very adept digital painting style, Gorczynski’s recent works on the multimedia-publishing platform NewHive take collage-making to exciting new places with movement and layered transparency. Her great eye for color and her ability to create beautiful yet complex compositions make it look too easy to make gorgeous digital artwork. Since she was featured in a past Complex Magazine article, her work has evolved to feel more mature and self-aware of its place within art history. A notable recent work is the NewHive page History Repeating, in which Gorczynski brings a classical nude statue in a museum into dialogue with her own reclining form, pictured in her bedroom as she gazes in the direction of a blank screen.
Michael Guidetti’s work blends 3D graphics with more traditional art-making techniques to create hybrid spaces where art history and computer renderings are forced to engage each other. Interiorized Observer displays the ultimate multitude of perspectives, from the observed to the observer to the art viewer. This work will make your head spin, as it is difficult to decide which identity the artist has assigned to you, the person behind the web browser. Guidetti has the ability to manipulate 3D renderings, video, and still images into web experiences that are equally stand-alone pieces and portals that invite you into another realm—perhaps somewhere that doesn’t yet exist. Trying to decipher exactly what is happening in his work will only make you anxious; instead, just try to enjoy the strangeness of his creations.
Yung Jake’s work swims adeptly between the realms of social media, hip-hop culture, and net art; he even attempts to pop into the physical realm, digitally, through an augmented reality app (which you can download for free, just search for “Yung Jake” in the app store, then open it and point your phone at this rock). His comments on our meta-obsessed, networked culture come alive through his smart multimedia creations, notably Datamosh,, in which Jake raps about net art speak and memes as his image melds in and out of glitch-infused focus. Also of note is the video he released on MOCA TV, Unfollow, which poignantly pokes fun at social media “follower” culture. “She don’t do sht, that btch just a follower.” Preach!
Sara Ludy’s work deals with the “virtual spillover into reality,” where the digital realm seems to exist as a pixelated black hole that has sucked real life into a glowing, vacuous new dimension. In her series “Spheres,” the artist has created complex forms that float in the center of computer-generated landscapes. Ludy sources her imagery from wanderings within the real world as well as Second Life, which explains the tense push and pull between textures that feel both rooted in the familiar and entirely ethereal. In Rooms, Ludy uses the 3D rendering tool Google Sketchup to create a disorienting architectural experience that is illustrative of our desire to use technology to create perfect worlds, as well as our inability to reconcile these constructed realities with what we experience as we move through the physical world. As digital technologies continue to take over our lives, Ludy’s work reminds us to revel in the beautiful mysteries that take shape in the blurry crevices between real and unreal.
With great talent, David Marinos captures fragility and beauty in his painterly digital manipulations of the human form. As mentioned in an interview with The Creators Project,, he sees the role of the human form within digital art as “infinite.” He adds, “The body can be interpreted in many styles, and that is what I’m always trying to find with my work. Imagery and digital mediums are powerful tools, and when they are combined with the human body, beautiful things happen.” As digital technologies change the definition of what it means to be human, Marinos’ work brings visual form to a beautiful yet chilling world in which human beings and technology distort each other. A recent artwork of note is Marinos’ page for the NewHive-curated mixtape MAJORTENDONS, for which he designed a gorgeous and endlessly scrolling web-based experience. Marinos is also the founder of the young digital artist collective Lucent Kids.
Claudia Maté is an artist and web developer who is as fluent in code as she is in the language of the fine art world. Her website, which is quite nicely organized in the style of an early operating system, features a myriad of web-based works, from websites to animated GIFs to curatorial projects (such as cloaque.org, of which she is co-founder). In her video work Mountain Mazes,, the viewer is transported through a 3D-rendered interior which is inspired by the Maze screensaver from Windows 95—a mindless yet specific tour of nowhere in particular. Within the digital space, we encounter a strange assemblage of scenery, from images of flattened-out human anatomy hanging on the wall, to a black cat lurking around a corner, to a scantily-clad woman on a waiting room couch, to a crackling fireplace. In the end, we arrive at a desktop computer that then morphs into a frame hanging on the wall. What does it all mean? Maté leaves that up to you to decide.
Vince McKelvie fuses his bubbling, warping 3D shapes with weirdly mundane, real world-based contexts, such as stuck between two panels of cement in the street or attached to the side of a wall. In these hybrid GIF images, forms that look like they were born from the Internet enter the dirty realm of urban architecture—as computer-generated imagery attaches itself like a parasite to the physical world—growing and mutating in a rainbow-infused frenzy. McKelvie’s work is an embodiment of the Internet as it attaches itself to our world in layer after semi-transparent layer, becoming more and more inseparable from the grey background of reality that will inevitably be completely covered with digital detritus.
Eva Papamargariti’s work is the visual love song of the possibilities created for artists through CGI and 3D rendering. In her film New Nosthetics, trickling water sounds tickle your ears while a computer-generated voice reads out rendering specifics that seem to describe how the movie’s 3D landscape was coded. The video is weird and often surreal—at one point leopard-printed bananas and pineapples tumble over a jagged marble structure, and then the film abruptly ends. As Papamargariti explained in a recent interview with The Creators Project, “Everything can fit into the never ending fragmented landscape as long as it is reflective, refractive, and shiny. The most complex texture activates the perception of a twisted materiality in which the organic element is re-embedded to the artificial language while the overwhelming production of these objects creates an instant immersion to a new 'virtuality,' composed from distorted abstract morphological schemes.” Indeed, this is the mind-bending language of new media, where anything can make sense as long as it is rendered in a compelling way.
Jon Rafman’s work explores the crazier, darker corners of digital culture (watch: Still Life (Betamale). Rafman’s new video Mainsqueeze is a window into a profoundly fucked-up world that may or may not be 100% based in reality, depending on your vantage point. In the video, a lot of very weird and provocative source material is collaged with footage of a green, frog-like character, who is tied up and writhing on the floor, clearly in a helpless position. Released on DIS Magazine, Rafman commented on his work, “Mainsqueeze expresses a moral condition or atmosphere without making a moral judgment. I gravitate towards communities like 4chan, because I see in them a compelling mix of attraction and repulsion. This ambivalence is reflected in the current cultural moment.” If we use Rafman’s work to gauge the cultural moment that is now unfolding, what is revealed is an anxiety-prone, self-destructive tendency that’s running rampant through the Internet, for better or worse.
Nicolas Sassoon’s work makes elegant use of digital technologies. There is nothing clumsy about his flowing web-based animations and GIFs, which feel tied to early computer graphics, yet mature and completely of their own aesthetic. Sassoon’s Studio Visit is eye candy for anyone who loves the Internet and digital art; we are treated to an empty office chair with a glowing laptop that seems to beckon visitors to try to log on. Within the scene, digital artworks (including an artwork for Electric Objects) exist in multiple dimensions, and appear to be wholly immersed within Sassoon’s beautifully contemplative world. Pay his site a visit and let the rainbow waves of a pixelated waterfall wash over you. You won’t be sorry.
