Artist Statement_Digital

My work is created at the intersection of technology, nature, aesthetics. and ethics. I imbue objects with qualities not ordinarily occurring in nature, creating a synthetic nature. I take specific aspects of 2D and 3D still and animation software and apply them in subtle ways like using effects meant for fluids on rose petals or skin. These images have been visually genetically engineered and animated with cross species qualities. Finding meaningful ways to use these cross category effects is essential to the evocation of a seamless transformation - digital to human. In the recent past, I have made a series of landscapes, Synthetic Landscapes which are intended to function as synthetic portable gardens. These landscapes have a complex beauty and a depth of information that is mysteriously satisfying. In Weeping Hemlock a wall sized tree landscape transforms to underwater, intergalactic and subatomic landscapes. It is derived from video images of a weeping hemlock (a cultivated mutant form of hemlock) in a botanic garden. Although it is a 2D digital image, it retains its video history and is experienced as 3D and animated on the wall. In Rose Breathing, a 3D computer animation output on DVD a synthetic rose rhythmically opens and closes in human like respiration. The viewer's own breathing becomes entrained with the undulating rose. This animation brings a new subtle slow, deep and complex emotionality to a 3D character. On full screen it evokes ocean waves or streaming protoplasm, on a small screen it transforms into a tiny beating heart.

In my latest 3D animations I further develop bringing a new subtle slow, deep and complex emotionality to a 3D character now in the form of a synthetic woman. In Yawn, and Woman Waking_Paper Dissolve a virtual monochrome gray woman is at once mysteriously natural yet obviously artificial. She undergoes a series of ambiguously but deeply expressive transformations, and in the process blurs the boundaries between inner worlds and outer worlds, between the senses, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, between the natural world and the synthetic one, between the "real" physical world and the virtual one. At times she looks almost human, at others she looks more canine or reptilian or like a planetary body orbiting in space. As the viewer is induced to wonder "What is she thinking?", "What is she feeling?" she embodies the virtual in an authentic way.

copyright andrea ackerman 2006. all rigths reserved.