Rick Silva is an artist and professor who was born in Brazil and is currently based in Eugene, Oregon. His videos, websites, and installations explore virtuality, futurology, and speculative ecologies. A selection of Silva’s work is currently being featured in “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” at the Modern in Fort Worth, where it is up through the end of this month. His newest piece, LIQUID CRYSTAL, 2023, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will debut on the institution’s website on April 11.
Being in the path of totality during the North American solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, was like experiencing the largest Light and Space installation ever. There is an anticipation and cosmic weirdness to it all that is reminiscent of taking psychedelics. I now understand why people travel the world chasing them. The next total solar eclipse in North America will take place on April 8, 2024, and after that, one will not occur until 2044.
While the title of this YouTube video gives away the ending, the events that unfold are still incredible to watch. As amped-up skydivers prepare to jump from an airplane, a GoPro camera flies off one of their helmets, gets sucked out the door, and then tumbles down to Earth. The camera spins faster and faster until the horizon turns into an abstract pattern. The object lands facing the sun, and within seconds a pig walks into the frame and tries to eat it. Watching this roughly one-minute video feels like you’re taking in a condensed timeline of the entire history of Western art.
I’ve watched this video more than any other in my life, and you can see its influence reflected in my artwork. There is a mix of aerial landscape photos mapped onto 3D surfaces; the animation effects look like they were lifted from an old science film about plate tectonics. It ends with the camera circling Björk standing on top of a mountain, and then moving into her body to reveal an island. This end scene reminds me of something Agnès Varda once said: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
Brakhage made this legendary work of experimental film by gathering moth wings, plants, and other organic materials found near his Colorado cabin and fixing them between layers of 16-mm Mylar editing tape. He described this flickering film as “what a moth might see from birth to death if black were white.” When I was an undergrad film student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I was fortunate enough to take several classes taught by Brakhage. His lessons on art and his expansive approach to the moving image have been incredibly influential.
Making big turns on a powder day is often what I visualize as I fall asleep at night.
This annual electronic-music-and-digital-art festival, which began in Montreal, has been going strong for more than two decades. I’ve attended only the 2009 and 2010 editions, but in those years I saw many amazing musicians perform, such as Actress, Ben Frost, Gas, Ryoji Ikeda, Nicolas Jaar, DJ Koze, and SND. I plan to go again this August.
A play about seven friendly metalheads creating an amusement park in the snowy woods, featuring plenty of fog machines and large inflatable sculptures. In 2015, I was handed a last-minute ticket to see a performance, and I had no idea what I was getting into, which made this quietly beautiful and hilariously touching work that much better.
Lialina’s Net-art piece, which has been called “the most fragile GIF on the WWW,” is a twenty-one-frame loop of her on a swing that looks as if it’s attached to the browser bar. As she moves back and forth, you notice that with each new frame, the URL changes, and it’s soon evident that she is swinging between twenty-one unique artists’ servers. The animation speed is dependent on the speed of the network, and if even one site is offline, the loop will break.
DJ and musician Four Tet’s playlist, at the time of this writing, is clocking in at 160-plus hours and 1,969 songs. A few times a month, he adds new tracks and gives the playlist a new emoji-laden title. The songs span nearly every genre but lean toward electronic music. This playlist is often the soundtrack in my studio.
Wynn is a critical theorist who creates elaborate self-produced YouTube and Patreon video essays dedicated to topics like envy, opulence, and cringe. Smart and funny deep dives into timely issues.
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