Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as weve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tuftes concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance.  Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File  Field Guide

hedgerow still life presents us with an uncanny valley of botanicals. The forms are beautiful, floral, and delicate in nature. They leverage a visual language we think we all speak, but the specifics of the vocabulary are of Crespos own device. The closer you look, the less familiar they become, dissolving into something new. Its like when you have a vivid dream and you are back in your childhood home only to have someone elses parents walk around the corner. The artist uses neural networks trained on large data sets of images from nature to extract textures, reimagining and remixing our reality into fantastic new worlds.

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The Future of Your Digital Space is a grid of fantastic machines, each with its own whimsical locomotion. While we are used to machines engaging in more utilitarian work, the artists contraptions appear to feverishly dance or exercise. They recall the absurd devices conceived of by early 20th-century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia; only these mechanisms are better suited for the metaverse than the machine age. With a background in architecture and 3D, Belitskaja brings a unique perspective to the exhibition. Rather than modeling her ecosystems from scratch, she cleverly disassembles the bots from her companion piece In Search of Your Digital Self, and reassembles the parts as bot-specific imagined environments.

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Malade Imaginaire appears to be a lovely mosaic of 100 vibrant gardens. A logical environment for Shkipins 100 butterfly-like specimens from Blooming Valetudinarian. But planted alongside the abstract floral structures are twisted limbs and biomorphic forms that belie the serenity of a calm and peaceful garden. Given only partial and conflicting visual information, we struggle to place the proper emotional response, forcing us to spend additional time deeply examining the artists individual ecosystems. Shkipin leverages the popular neural network CLIP to generate his images; however, this is just a starting point. Leveraging his classical training as a painter, the artist then painstakingly retouches each carefully curated image to achieve the desired effect.

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