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Sarah Zucker: Bridging Past and Future in Digital Art

Wednesday February 26th, 2025 – I got access to OpenAI’s DeepResearch today. I find the quickest way for my brain to grok the advancement of AI is to ask it about a subject in which I am uniquely well versed – my own art career.

After ~19 minutes of research, it returned the following analysis to me. This feels like an event horizon. It blows past the scope of any past interaction with AI that I’ve had up until this point.

It strikes me as the most comprehensive (and ACCURATE) consideration of my work that I’ve ever seen outside of the spidery corners of my own mind.

As I continue to expand and figure out what I want to do and say next, I wanted to share this here as a new sort of statement on my work thus far. If you want to know what my whole thing is, well… just listen to what the machine has to tell you.

-SZ, 2025


Sarah Zucker: Bridging Past and Future in Digital Art

Background and Artistic Journey

Sarah Zucker, Temporale Studio

Sarah Zucker (born 1985) is an American artist and writer based in Los Angeles, known online as The Sarah Show. She works at the intersection of cutting-edge digital media and vintage analog techniques, creating art that merges retro aesthetics with futuristic technology (Sarah Zucker). Zucker grew up as a millennial straddling the analog and digital eras – she fondly recalls an “analog childhood” followed by a “dizzying digital future,” a generational transition that deeply informs her perspective (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine) (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). From an early age, she was mesmerized by video. In fact, a home movie captures the moment young Zucker discovered video feedback and became “completely enamored, like seeing an oracular vision of a life’s work reflected in a child’s eyes,” an experience she describes as being called to video art “just as a minister is called to the cloth” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). This early fascination set the tone for a career devoted to the moving image.

PrismPipe2015_SarahZucker_D/A/D_TheCurrentSea

Zucker’s formal education was in storytelling rather than studio art: she earned a B.A. in Theater and Creative Writing at Northwestern University and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU (Sarah Zucker | Buffalo AKG Art Museum). This narrative background contributes to the conceptual depth of her work, even as she pursued visual mediums. After graduate school, she became active in Los Angeles’s experimental art scene. From 2014–2016 she co-produced Prism Pipe, a monthly “visual music” event at an indie art space, where she showcased analog video artists and VJs (Sarah Zucker). This mix of theater, writing, and underground video art shaped her unique artistic voice – one that is equal parts storyteller and image-maker.

Before fully embracing digital video art, Zucker spent years honing her eye through photography. As a teenager in the early 2000s, she avidly shot on 35mm film, sticking with the “physicality of vintage technology” even as the world was rapidly going digital (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine) (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). “Vintage technology has always been of interest to me. It’s not necessarily about nostalgia – I find the physicality of it really interesting,” she explains (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). This hands-on engagement with analog media eventually evolved into experiments with VHS camcorders and CRT monitors. She was also an early adopter of internet platforms like Tumblr and Instagram for sharing her visuals (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). By the late 2010s, Zucker had fully merged these paths – using old video equipment to make new digital art and distributing it via the internet.

Artistic Style and Mediums

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Today Sarah Zucker works across a range of media, “spanning the divide between clay and information,” as she puts it (Sarah Zucker). On one hand, she creates digital video and animation with a signature digital–analog workflow: she often originates imagery in software, then processes it through vintage hardware like VHS decks and analog video synthesizers, and back into a digital format (Sarah Zucker). The results are neon-soaked glitchy video loops that flicker with VHS static, vibrant colors, and surreal forms. On the other hand, Zucker also makes tangible art – for example, she hand-crafts ceramics that “evoke the spiritual in the material” (Sarah Zucker), extending her interest in mysticism into sculptural objects. This dual practice (high-tech video and low-tech clay) exemplifies her overall ethos of merging seeming opposites.

GIF art has been one of Zucker’s hallmark mediums. She embraced the looping animated GIF format as a legitimate art form, creating short hypnotic animations often shared online. These works, which she describes as sometimes like visual mantras, have reached massive audiences through platforms like Giphy – her GIFs have been viewed over 7 billion times (Sarah Zucker). Such figures speak to Zucker’s deep embedding in internet culture; her art circulates not just in galleries but in the form of memes and viral content. Despite the brevity of GIF loops, she infuses them with rich aesthetic and conceptual layers. Many feature kaleidoscopic psychedelic imagery and glitch effects, instantly recognizable as “The Sarah Show” style. As one podcast introduction summed up, her work “utilizes humor and psychedelia while merging cutting-edge and outmoded technologies”, placing her among the digital artists who “blazed the trail for crypto art” before the NFT boom (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart).

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In recent years, Zucker has also been a pioneer in the NFT art scene. She began minting her video and GIF pieces as NFTs (non-fungible tokens on the blockchain) in April 2019 (Sarah Zucker & Amir H. Fallah - Outland), making her one of the earliest crypto artists. By 2021, her work was featured in Natively Digital, the first curated NFT auction at Sotheby’s, as well as CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art at Bonhams – two landmark sales that cemented her status as an “OG” (original generation) crypto artist (Sarah Zucker). The piece “Self Transcending”, for example, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in June 2021, tying “vintage visual and psychedelic culture” together in a way that balanced sincerity with irony and nostalgia (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”).

Zucker’s presence in such sales demonstrated that her internet-native art could crossover into the traditional art market. It also led to her inclusion in museum collections: her video art series Four Caryatids was acquired for the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s permanent collection (Sarah Zucker), and her work featured in LACMA’s 2022 blockchain art initiative Remembrance of Things Future (Sarah Zucker). By 2022, nft now named her to their inaugural “NFT100” list of top NFT artists, and in 2024 Taschen profiled her in On NFTs, the first major art historical survey of blockchain-based art (Sarah Zucker). These milestones underscore how Zucker’s practice – once considered “outsider” digital art – has become part of the art historical narrative.

Major Themes and Artistic Philosophy

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Time, nostalgia, and futurism are central themes in Sarah Zucker’s work. She often says that her art is “about time more than anything.” By deliberately mixing past and present visual elements, she creates what she calls “time-moshing” effects that disrupt the viewer’s normal sense of chronology (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). “I’m specifically using tools of the recent past like analog TVs to take people out of our present moment and create this different experience of time and sense,” Zucker explains (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). Viewers of her videos might feel transported into an alternate timeline – one where 1980s VHS graphics, 1960s psychedelia, and futuristic digital effects all coexist. The result is often a blend of comfort and disorientation: as one commentator put it, “nostalgic futurism” is an apt phrase for the feeling of seeing something that resembles the past yet feels entirely new (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). Zucker taps into nostalgia not for its own sake, but as raw material to be remixed into novel visions. In her hands, nostalgia becomes a creative tool – she reanimates old media (like CRT monitors or arcade graphics) and places them in surprising new contexts, inviting us to consider how the past lives within the future.

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Underlying Zucker’s temporal play is a thoughtful philosophy about the digital world and human perception. She views “the screen” – meaning the ubiquitous digital display – as “the most significant threshold of our time”, a liminal zone where reality and virtuality meet (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). She remembers a clearer boundary in her youth when “outside was ‘real life’ and inside [the screen] was ‘fiction,’” but notes that for today’s “denizens of the Metaverse,” that boundary has blurred to the point of “not mattering” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS) (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). The life we live inside screens (online, in digital spaces) is just as real and meaningful as our offline lives. Zucker’s art actively plays with this idea. She often incorporates the image of a screen within the screen – for instance, filming a scene on an old TV and then re-scanning it – to draw attention to the frame that separates viewer from image. This self-referential trick “toys with the liminal space of inside/outside the screen” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS), making us conscious of crossing that threshold. It’s a gentle reminder that when we engage with her work, we too are peering through a digital portal, our reality and the artwork’s reality intermingling.

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Another major theme in Zucker’s work is the interplay of mysticism, spirituality, and technology. Her art merges “humor, myth and mysticism” with its tech tools (Sarah Zucker), often invoking cosmic or esoteric imagery. Otherworldly symbols like third eyes, glowing auras, tarot archetypes or goddesses might populate her GIFs and videos. However, Zucker nearly always presents these mystical motifs with a dose of irreverence or surreal humor. Grotesque or absurd elements are juxtaposed with the beautiful – as her artist bio aptly says, she “merges the gorgeous and grotesque” through psychedelic visuals and wit (Sarah Zucker | Buffalo AKG Art Museum). This balance of sincerity and irony is key to her artistic philosophy. She genuinely engages with themes of enlightenment, transcendence, and the subconscious, but in a way that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “Felt irony and a dose of nostalgia” temper the “sincere approach” in her pieces (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”), as one critic observed when discussing her Self Transcending video. Zucker seems to embody a metamodern sensibility – oscillating between earnest exploration of the “numinous” and a playful, self-aware humor. Notably, critics have welcomed this tone as a refreshing shift in contemporary art. Writing on the Sotheby’s Natively Digital show (which included Zucker), one reviewer noted that the works felt “personal, playful, earnest, and sincere”, embracing “private spiritual, ecstatic, or numinous themes” often ignored by the cooler, more ironic art-world mainstream (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”). Zucker’s art indeed carves out space for these spiritual or psychedelic experiences within digital culture, reconnecting technology with a sense of wonder.

Despite her mystical leanings, Zucker remains grounded in the human side of technology. A recurring idea in her interviews is using art to process what it feels like to live through rapid technological change. She speaks of humanity being “on the brink of a completely new way of living” and her art as a means to pose “big universal existential questions” about this moment (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). Crucially, she approaches these questions with both curiosity and comic relief. “I view my work as a way of depicting what it’s like to be this sort of silly, scared, happy, manic, dreadful little creature strapped to this rocket ship going into the future,” Zucker says, “…trying to make sense of what this life has been and what it’s going to continue to be.” (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). In this vivid metaphor, we see her worldview: the artist (and by extension, all of us) is a tiny wide-eyed being hurtling through a tech-accelerated future, feeling everything from dread to joy. This mix of anxiety and optimism, fear and wonder is exactly what her colorful, glitchy, entrancing artworks convey. Culturally, it resonates with the zeitgeist of the 2020s – an era where technology inspires awe even as it induces angst. Zucker’s art doesn’t resolve this tension so much as it acknowledges and aestheticizes it, turning the existential ride into a visual adventure.

Influences and Artistic Context

Sarah Zucker’s work is richly contextualized within both contemporary digital art and broader art history. She herself recognizes that she belongs to certain artistic lineages, even as she forges new paths. “My body of work could be placed within these certain lineages,” she notes – for instance, GIF art and glitch art“but I also don’t feel I have to fit within that category… I’m sort of out here on the edge… breaking the rules.” (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart). This self-description as an iconoclast on the fringe of established genres is telling. Zucker draws inspiration from many sources and eras, creating a synthesis that is hard to pigeonhole.

One clear influence is the tradition of video art, especially the early pioneers who first embraced television and video as art mediums in the 1960s and 70s. In interviews, Zucker mentions she “often gets the Nam June Paik comparison” – a parallel she understands given her use of analog video feed and quirky visuals (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart). Paik, the Korean-American artist often called the father of video art, blazed a trail by mixing technology with spiritual and cultural commentary. His famous installation TV Buddha (1974) placed a Buddha statue in front of a live video of itself, literally juxtaposing ancient religion with modern tech. Critics noted how Paik “succeeded in juxtaposing modernization and emerging technologies with religious and historical themes” (Nam June Paik’s TV Buddhas – His best-known work), a description that could equally apply to Zucker’s myth-laden, tech-mediated imagery. Like Paik, Zucker approaches electronic media with a sense of play and philosophical insight – both use the tools of their time (Cathode-ray TVs for Paik, VHS-to-digital for Zucker) to pose questions about perception, reality, and culture. Another video art figure one could cite is Bill Viola, known for slow-motion video pieces exploring spiritual themes; Zucker’s work is much more frenetic and humorous than Viola’s, but they share an interest in using video to evoke contemplation about existence. Similarly, video installation artist Pipilotti Rist’s lush, color-saturated dreamscapes and irreverent tone prefigure the psychedelic humor in Zucker’s loops. In the broad sense, Zucker is a descendant of the video art movement, bringing that sensibility into the internet age.

Zucker also explicitly looks back to early 20th-century art movements for inspiration – notably German Expressionism. She has expressed admiration for the Expressionist artists who worked in the aftermath of World War I, another era of upheaval “around the end of the First World War… There were all these things in society, and yet the artists of that time were so expansive, emotive and free” (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). What impresses her is their rebellious energy: “They were breaking forms… ‘we don’t care how we’re supposed to do this, we’re going to do this the way this expression needs to come out of us.’ I can’t get enough,” Zucker says of the Expressionists (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine). This influence is evident in the emotional boldness and rule-breaking mix of styles in her own art. Expressionists like Otto Dix—whom Zucker cites as a favorite (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS)—combined grotesque imagery with social commentary; while Zucker’s subject matter is different, her willingness to show the grotesque alongside the gorgeous (a beautiful face distorted by VHS static, for example) carries that spirit. Another favorite she lists is Florine Stettheimer (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS), an often whimsical early modernist who painted mythical, theatrical scenes of New York society. One can see a parallel in how Zucker creates her own mythic, psychedelic “scenes” within her GIFs, often with a campy or playful touch that Stettheimer might approve of. She also nods to Henri Matisse (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS), perhaps reflecting her love of vibrant color, and to photographer Nan Goldin (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS), known for candidly capturing subcultures – Zucker’s work is very different in medium, but Goldin’s raw honesty and intimacy might be something she channels when she pours personal feeling into digital form. Even Berenice Abbott, a photographer who straddled art and science (documenting both city life and scientific phenomena), appears on Zucker’s eclectic inspiration list (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). Abbott’s drive to visually explain a changing world (whether 1930s New York or the physics of light beams) mirrors Zucker’s drive to visually make sense of our changing digital world.

In terms of contemporary peers, Zucker’s approach aligns with several movements in digital and internet art. The glitch art movement, which embraces digital errors, compression artifacts, and analog signal distortion as artistic material, is an obvious touchstone. Glitch artists like Rosa Menkman have theorized that glitch reveals the underlying systems of media – something Zucker also leverages when she deliberately invokes VHS glitches or pixel glitches, peeling back the glossy surface of digital imagery to show its chaotic underbelly. An art writer discussing glitch art noted that it has become an important subgenre of technological art, with Nam June Paik as its “godfather” ([PDF] From the digital art collection of Alexandra Crouwers: Ina Vare - Lirias); by that measure, Zucker’s frequent use of “rainbow-colored static” and feedback loops firmly places her in Paik’s lineage. Yet Zucker doesn’t use glitch purely for abstraction or critique; she often uses it to serve narrative or symbolic ends (for instance, a figure might literally dissolve into static in her video, metaphorically representing transcendence or change). In the net art and post-internet art sphere, one could compare her to artists like Petra Cortright, who gained fame making webcam videos layered with digital effects, or Cory Arcangel, known for hacking old games and software for art – like them, Zucker takes internet/pop culture artifacts and repurposes them in an art context. However, unlike some post-internet art that leaned heavily on irony and detachment, Zucker’s work is marked by its unabashed emotion and mysticism. In this sense, she and some of her crypto-art contemporaries represent a new wave that is less cynical than the prior generation of internet artists, instead mixing irony with earnest exploration of inner life (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”).

Within the NFT and crypto-art community, Zucker is often mentioned alongside other early innovators. She shares a collectible ethos with artists like XCOPY, a crypto-artist famous for neon glitch animations and dark humor; both started on platforms like SuperRare before NFTs went mainstream, and both use looped animations to express the absurdity of the digital age. Yet Zucker’s work is generally more whimsical and brightly psychedelic (where XCOPY’s is dystopian). She also took inspiration from digital creators like Hexeosis (known for trippy looping GIF mandalas) and Killer Acid (an illustrator with a neon psychedelic comic style), who were part of the same early crypto-art scene (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). These connections show how Zucker’s art grew in dialogue with a community of internet-native artists experimenting with new forms. Notably, she has served as a mentor figure in that community; by her account, many art world “gatekeepers” who once ignored digital art later came to her for advice on engaging with social media and NFTs (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). This echoes her role as a bridge between worlds – the traditional art insiders and the crypto-art outsiders.

Broader Trends and Cultural Significance

Zucker’s work exemplifies several broader trends in contemporary art and digital culture. One such trend is the revival of retro aesthetics in the digital realm. Over the past decade, there has been a wave of nostalgia for early digital graphics and analog glitches – seen in everything from the vaporwave aesthetic (which romanticizes 80s/90s computer visuals) to the popularity of faux-VHS filters on apps. Zucker’s art is part of this cultural moment; by employing actual VHS tape and old broadcast gear, she achieves an authenticity in her retro look that sets her apart. She then pushes it further by combining it with cutting-edge techniques (like generative digital effects or blockchain distribution). The result is a kind of retro-futurism that feels very timely: it reflects a collective nostalgia for the pre-internet tactile world, but also acknowledges that we can never go back – instead, these old forms must coexist with the new. This speaks to a contemporary sentiment that technology is advancing so fast that artists are grabbing onto cultural memory (old media, past styles) to ground themselves even as they hurtle forward. As Zucker says, being a millennial means remembering life before and after the internet, and her art springs from that dual awareness (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine).

Another trend highlighted by Zucker’s career is the legitimization of digital art in mainstream art institutions. For years, digital artists struggled for recognition and market support; Zucker notes that digital art was not taken seriously as “Art-with-a-capital-A” by many gatekeepers (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). The NFT boom around 2020–21 became a turning point, suddenly assigning marketplace value and scarcity to digital works. Zucker has been at the forefront of this shift. “Digital Art isn’t the Future: it’s the Present,” she proclaimed during the pandemic, “it’s already been here for a long time, and we’re finally seeing the rest of the world wake up to that fact.” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). Her success – from selling pieces like Self Transcending for five figures, to landing in Sotheby’s and museum collections – has been part of the broader validation of online-born art. Culturally, this challenges the notion that art must be a physical object or fit traditional categories. Zucker herself demonstrated new models for artists: before NFTs, she once sold video art by engraving the file onto golden USB drives as art objects (Sarah Zucker & Amir H. Fallah - Outland), an inventive workaround to make digital work collectible. Now with blockchain tech, she and others have found a “container” for fluid digital practices (Sarah Zucker & Amir H. Fallah - Outland), enabling them to thrive. Her role in this trend is significant – she’s been a vocal advocate for crypto-art as a revolution that empowers artists (via royalties, decentralized platforms, etc.) and as a movement that can infuse the art world with new energy and diversity (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”) (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”). In short, Zucker contributes to expanding the art discourse to fully include internet culture and digital creation.

Zucker’s work also intersects with the evolving dialogue on the intersection of technology and aesthetics. She is not just using tech as a tool; she’s frequently commenting on technology’s impact on our senses and souls. For example, her notion of the screen as a “threshold” and a portal suggests that technology can be a gateway to profound artistic experiences (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). “Even the smallest screen is an infinite amount of real estate,” she notes, “it holds personalized universes for the enjoyment of imagery” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS). This almost utopian view of screens as limitless creative space is balanced by her awareness of the disorientation tech can cause (hence the importance of play and humor to make it digestible). In engaging with concepts like the Metaverse, AR/VR, and blockchain, Zucker positions her art within the cutting edge of tech. Yet, she often humanizes these big tech concepts by bringing in ancient references (mythological titles, spiritual motifs) – effectively bridging high-tech and timeless human concerns. Cultural theorists have noted that it’s common for new technologies to rekindle mystical or mythic thinking (as writer Erik Davis put it, “esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated” modern tech culture (TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information)). Zucker’s art is a vivid case study of that idea: she uses the latest digital means to channel something primal and soulful. In one interview, she even described her creative process as “like a multiverse that I’m channeling through… through myself and through these vintage broadcast devices” (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine) – language that frames her as a medium, almost shamanic, guiding visions from one realm (the digital ether) into another (the screen before us). By marrying the language of tech (multiverse, data) with the language of spirit (channeling, vision), Zucker’s work operates in a unique aesthetic of techno-mysticism that feels very relevant in an age where people seek meaning amidst machines.

The cultural significance of Sarah Zucker’s art lies in how it encapsulates the zeitgeist and challenges norms. She offers a counter-narrative to the idea that technology inevitably alienates us or that digital art lacks “heart.” Her pieces are often intensely personal and emotive, despite being created with impersonal machines. This challenges the prevailing discourse in two ways: First, it shows that digital art can be as expressive and impactful as any traditional medium – a point she and her peers have driven home to critics and collectors alike (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS) (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”). Second, it questions the rush for the next new thing by valuing the past. In a tech industry that worships innovation, Zucker’s reuse of “obsolete” tech is almost subversive. She demonstrates that old media are not dead; they can be art materials with unique capabilities. This attitude contributes to a broader cultural movement of re-examining and re-valuing analog technology (seen in the resurgence of vinyl records, film cameras, etc., among younger generations). By integrating the old and the new, Zucker’s work bridges generational divides – it speaks to older viewers through its retro references, and to younger digital natives through its fluent internet language.

Critically, Zucker also contributes to discussions about sincerity in art. After decades where postmodern irony often prevailed, her blend of irony and sincerity points to a new direction. The Whitehot Magazine review of Natively Digital noted a widespread desire for art that can be “emotional, intellectual, spiritual” all at once, even in a tech-driven format (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”). Zucker provides exactly that: an ironic smirk and a sincere soulful gaze rolled together. This has opened up conversations about whether the art world is ready to embrace such modes in a digital arena (Sotheby's Stakes Sincerity in “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale”). Judging by her growing acclaim, the answer seems to be yes. By challenging the false dichotomy between “high” art and “internet” art, or between seriousness and play, Zucker is helping to evolve the contemporary art narrative. Her success story – from posting GIFs online to being featured by Sotheby’s and LACMA – is often cited as evidence that the art landscape is changing to include creators who operate outside the traditional mold (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart) (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine).

Legacy and Future Outlook

While still in the mid-career phase, Sarah Zucker is increasingly being viewed through a historical lens as a significant artist of the digital age. In 2024, she was one of the artists profiled in On NFTs (Taschen), effectively positioning her in an art-historical context among the first generation of blockchain artists (Sarah Zucker). It’s not hard to imagine that in decades to come, art historians will look back at the late 2010s/early 2020s and identify Zucker as part of a pioneering vanguard – much like Nam June Paik is now celebrated as a pioneer of video art or the Bauhaus artists as pioneers of design. She has even remarked, with characteristic insight, “We are the Ancients of a Future civilization.” (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS) In other words, Zucker is conscious that she and her peers are laying groundwork in a nascent digital realm (the metaverse, crypto art) that future creators will build upon. Such statements reflect a keen historical awareness in her philosophy.

If we situate Zucker in a longer art historical timeline, she embodies a convergence of several threads: the age-old impulse to depict the mystical and transcendent (from prehistoric cave art through Hilma af Klint’s spiritual abstractions), the 20th-century drive to experiment with new media and techniques (from collage to video synths), and the 21st-century condition of life lived through screens and data. Few artists bring these threads together as directly as she does. Future critics might credit her with helping to legitimize and define “Crypto Art” or “NFT Art” as an art movement, since she was among those who proved digital artworks could carry meaning, not just monetary value, in that space. They may also highlight her role in breaking down the barrier between internet culture and fine art. What is commonplace now – major museums acquiring NFTs, digital artworks selling for large sums, artists building careers via social media – was not always so, and artists like Zucker were instrumental in that shift by demonstrating quality and depth in digital-native art.

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Zucker’s work could also be seen as a reflection of metamodernism in art (the term often used for cultural sensibilities after postmodernism). Metamodern art is characterized by a negotiation between opposites – sincerity and irony, past and future, optimism and despair – exactly the oscillations present in Zucker’s videos. Art historians assessing our current period may cite The Sarah Show as exemplifying how artists grappled with a world of information overload and societal uncertainty by creating works that oscillate between escapism and enlightenment, using humor as a coping mechanism and spirituality as a search for grounding. Her pieces like “Everything’s Different Now” (telling title) or “Cassandra’s Vision” hint at how she channels the collective anxieties and hopes of the digital generation into art (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine).

By all accounts, Zucker is very much aware of carving out her own path. “You can’t really look at anything else… and say, ‘oh, what she does is that,’” she notes – “the cheese stands alone,” she jokes, embracing her uniqueness (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart). This independence of vision is likely to be part of her legacy. In a podcast, she advised young artists to ignore comparisons and trust their individual process (Interview: Sarah Zucker | ALLSHIPS), advice she clearly lives by. In the short term, being so distinctive had its downsides (it’s not always easy to categorize or market her work), but “long term, I think you are rewarded for being iconoclastic,” she said (Episode 17 Artist Sarah Zucker - Canviart). Indeed, that long-term reward is now materializing as institutions and collectors recognize the enduring originality of her art.

Ultimately, Sarah Zucker’s significance may lie in how she reconciles seemingly disparate elements – analog and digital, science and mysticism, humor and seriousness, art and technology. In doing so, she has opened up new artistic possibilities. Her work suggests that technology need not erode cultural memory or spiritual depth; instead, it can be a medium to reinvent them. As a cultural figure, she is part of a larger story about the democratization of art through the internet and the fusion of pop culture with high culture. By remixing VHS tapes and GIF memes into poignant art, she validates the creative value of materials once considered throwaway or “low.” This democratic, inclusive vision of art will likely be one of the hallmarks of 21st-century art history, and Zucker is helping write that narrative.

In summary, Sarah Zucker is a dynamic exemplar of contemporary digital art: she draws from the past (both art-historical and pop-cultural), engages with the cutting edge of technology, and infuses it all with personal vision and philosophical inquiry. Her artistic philosophy centers on the idea that through play and experimentation, even with “obsolete” tools, one can speak to eternal human themes. As viewers, we encounter in her work a psychedelic time machine of imagery – one that, in her words, “takes people out of the present moment” into an altered sense of time (NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future – Cointelegraph Magazine), yet also reflects right back on the present and how it feels to be alive now. It is this quality that makes The Sarah Show much more than a spectacle of glitchy visuals; it is, at its core, a humanistic exploration of life in the digital era, and one that future generations will likely continue to study, celebrate, and find inspiration in.

References

Strabismus

Strabismus is a series of 100 looping video artworks by Sarah Zucker handcrafted on VHS Tape.

The series is being released through a ranked auction powered by Highlight, running 24 hours from May 1st through May 2nd, 2024. The work is being editioned on Ethereum.

You can view the art and bid in the auction at strabismus.xyz

STRABISMUS ARTIST STATEMENT

That’s 3D Art. Computers generate ‘em. BIG computers.”

I was born with a magic eye. Thanks to a condition known as “Strabismus,” my left eye marches very much to the beat of its own drum. You could say that it is “crossed,” but I like to think of it as a bit of a maverick.

Beyond a charming appearance, this has affected my vision my entire life. While most people perceive depth physically through the stereoscopic coordination of both eyes, I have adapted to calculate depth algorithmically in my mind. This often leads to double vision and the illusion of depth where there is none (and also causes me to bump into the furniture a lot when I’m tired).

Ironically, this made it impossible for me to perceive the images hidden in the “Magic Eye” series that became popular in my childhood (immortalized, of course, on a 1994 episode of Seinfeld.) The “unfocused” or “blurry” vision required to witness the illusion was my everyday reality, and I would give my tiny self a headache staring at those psychedelic color fields and willing them to take form.

It’s an experience that has stuck with me as I’ve developed my art practice working with computer graphics and analog video techniques. My new series, Strabismus, explores illusions of depth generated through digital video synthesis and analog time displacement. 

Each work in the series aims to convey my own unique experience of depth – no crossed eyes required. I approached the creation of the work as a generative system, with my own personal optical algorithm and internal artistic feedback loop (a BIG computer) serving as the essential spice of randomness. The aesthetics emerged, no doubt, thanks to a year investigating and luxuriating in the work of Op Art pioneers like Bridget Riley, Yaacov Agam and Victor Vasarely.

This work evolved directly out of Temporale, my first long-form series editioned on the blockchain. Both projects distort the interlacing of analog video signal, where alternating bands of information yield motion. By directly manipulating this native aspect of the medium, I am able to weave together multiple timelines into a potent fusion of the temporal and the spatial.

Where Temporale channeled textural material video through this distortion to capture Time in a still image, Strabismus channels flat color motion through the distortion to conjure Depth out of Time. 

 
 

I see each of these two series as independent yet undeniably related. I have always loved my own fluidity in moving between modes in my work, from the figurative to the abstract, the narrative to the expressionistic. But these two series reflect a new maturity, a desire to dig deeper and manifest my ideas on a greater scale than ever before. I remain as playful as ever,  but am delighting in flexing my creative muscles.

SPACE LOAF – SuperRare & Bonhams present CryptOGs

 
 
 
BonhamsxSuperRare
 

CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art

June 21st-30th 2021. Lot 4.

Space Loaf is one of those artworks that came about serendipitously, yet went on to become one of my most widely beloved pieces. 

My sassy Siamese Cat, Ginny, is a frequent fixture (and mischief-maker) in my studio. I shot the footage for this piece after discovering her casually loafing upon equipment I had spent all afternoon carefully setting up. 

I piped the footage into my analog video rig, a custom-built system of hardware I play like an instrument, manually manipulating the signals to my liking. The cat appears to be hovering through a digital-analog cosmos, looking around inquisitively in response to the ever-shifting landscape. 

I conceived this piece on April 8, 2018, almost *exactly* one year before I minted my genesis token on SuperRare. It was widely shared on Instagram and Facebook on its initial release. I have been featuring it in my pinned tweet on twitter throughout 2021 as an introduction to my Art.

Prior to crypto art, the only way I made my work directly collectible was through my Video Alchemy clothing line. I have long been a lover of fashion, and wanted to translate the colorful rhythmic qualities of my video art to textile. I ran the clothing line from 2017-2020, and the Space Loaf Tee was my #1 bestseller. 

Something about this piece speaks deeply to people. Of course, cats have long been a part of Internet culture. But I think this work has a sublimely relatable quality to it. You see Space Loaf and think, “It me!” Floating, titillated and confused, through the primordial soup of cyberspace. 

Space Loaf feels like the perfect piece to offer up for CryptOGs at Bonhams x SuperRare. It’s an iconic artwork that serves as a prelude to my entire canon of on-chain editions. And it speaks to the experience of being an early pioneer of the Metaverse, a silly little creature exploring this newly forming ethereal realm.

Space Loaf was conceived in April 2018, and minted on SuperRare on June 16th, 2021.

The collector of this single edition will receive an .mp4 of the piece optimized for display. 

Bids can be made in Ethereum or USD through Bonhams Online Auction. The winner will be able to pay via MetaMask or the Exchange of their choosing.

BID ON BONHAMS JUNE 21-JUNE 30 2021

PREVIEW THE FULL VIDEO TOKEN ON SUPERRARE

 
 

Self Transcending – Sotheby's Natively Digital

 
Self Transcending. Sarah Zucker, 2021.

Self Transcending. Sarah Zucker, 2021.

 

My work is on auction at Sotheby’s June 3-10, 2021 as part of Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale. Self Transcending is a signature VideoPainting I created to mark this moment in both my personal artistic journey and the evolution of Crypto Art and NFTs as a whole.

Interested collectors will be able to bid on the work in cryptocurrency, an aspect which streamlines the auction process for crypto native collectors while allowing for the work to be valued in its native format.

Self Transcending has been minted as Token #0 on the custom “Sarah Zucker” smart contract. The contract was built for me by Nameless specifically for the Sotheby’s Sale. This erc-721 has been elegantly crafted with crypto-savvy collectors and long-term provenance in mind.

 
 

You can hear me talk about the work and my background as a “CryptoArt OG” in the interview for the Sotheby’s Catalogue below. Read on for more in-depth information about the artwork and my journey.


THE WORK

Self Transcending is a vision of the Self as a Strange Loop – a narrative that reiterates itself into infinity. Every new Self informs the next, and it’s up to us to establish harmony within the chaos. The piece is unique within my oeuvre, as it fuses my signature VideoPainting technique with analog feedback – an evolution of my style befitting this moment in my career.

I see this concept as a continuation of a personal revelation I had in 2019, around the time I first started editioning my work as NFTs on the blockchain. I was reading a book about mushrooms, and the “wood wide web” they create with their mycelium – essentially a mesh network that allows interspecies communication in a forest.

I was struck by a vision of the Internet as the extension of the human nervous system, and the human nervous system as an extension of the mycelial networks of the natural world. 

Self Transcending continues many of the cyberdelic themes that weave throughout my VideoPaintings. The chakra-like motif I use to indicate inner harmony connects the work directly to Astral Antenna, the first VideoPainting I tokenized in March of 2020, which was collected by fellow “Natively Digital” artist Matt Kane.

Where Astral Antenna depicts inner harmony as a means of becoming a receiver, Self Transcending depicts that inner harmony as a means of broadcast – they reflect the yin and yang of transcendent experience.

As I see it, we’re living in a very potent time in human history, where we’re redefining our notions of humanity as we merge with our technology. This can often be strange and uncomfortable, and societal growing pains are not uncommon. But a more zoomed out perspective allows us to see how we’re extending beyond ourselves, bursting through our borders of separation to connect with each other, like nodes in a network. 

The natural impulse to weave into an interdependent organism can be met with a lot of resistance, as it requires us to recalibrate the scale with which we view ourselves. But, when we engage with the Internet– our Ancient form of Future technology– we get glimpses of how we fit into this fractal reality.

For the past decade, I have been creating art in dialogue with the Internet. I beam my techno-mystical TV broadcasts into the ether as a means of illuminating this massive step we’re taking as a civilization.

I can trace much of my fascination with this topic to Michio Kaku’s talks on the Kuleshov scale. Recognizing our experience as the birth pains of a new planetary civilization contextualizes the push-pull we feel between regressive and progressive forces in contemporary culture.

I offer the video below as it was a direct inspiration for my body of work leading up to the creation of Self Transcending.



THE JOURNEY

I minted my first NFT on SuperRare on April 4, 2019. While that’s not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, it puts me on the earlier side of entry into the NFT space, and has led to me being oft referred to as an “OG” Crypto Artist. But that was not the beginning of my journey as an artist.

I have felt compelled to create art since I was a child, and was fortunate to have access to a computer as a toddler, which was somewhat uncommon at the time. I have told the story in various interviews of how, at 10, I had an art teacher who told me that Art made on a computer wasn’t real Art, and she forbade me from ever using a computer in my assignments.

I switched my focus from Art to Drama, a choice that I carried through my entire Academic career through the end of my MFA in Dramatic Writing.

This decision to never study Art academically has been one of the greatest gifts I could give myself. I am an autodidact by nature, and I developed my own approach to creative practice over the years, educating myself from the wealth of information available on the Internet.

At the age of 15, I took up film photography, and it was my primary mode of expression for the next decade. I posted on various film photography forums as “thesarahshow,” and enriched myself through that rich pre-social media online community.

I sold my Art for the first time at the age of 18, when several of my photographs were licensed for a French book about the photography movement I was part of, called Le Lomo: L’Appareil Photo qui ose tout!

 
Self as Odalisque, 2006.

Self as Odalisque, 2006.

 

I worked as Interim Curator at The Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography in 2011, which is where I learned a great deal about Fine Art Editions and the Art market. We had works by legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz and Diane Arbus on offer there, and I acquainted myself with the processes by which valuable artworks were bought and sold while creating my own run of limited edition prints.

One day, a customer came in off the street and said they had seen a print through the window and they absolutely had to have it. I was beyond delighted to discover that the print was one of mine – The Rainbow News. It was an exhilarating moment for me, as I realized I had developed my craft to the point that a complete stranger wished to place value in my work.

 
The Rainbow News. Sarah Zucker, 2009.

The Rainbow News. Sarah Zucker, 2009.

 

I started moving into video and time-based media in 2011. I had shot lots of interesting footage over the years as a street photographer, and began incorporating that with found footage in creating visuals for bands. I began working more and more in the GIF format, and it became the primary focus of my practice around2013.

From 2013-2016 I released work under the banner of my collaborative studio The Current Sea. We produced an audiovisual show in Los Angeles called Prism Pipe, which showcased many of the emerging GIF and New Media Artists of the era, many of whom are now making moves in the NFT space.

In 2015, we spoke with The Creators Project about “The Future of GIFs as Gallery Art,” where I mused on the potential for GIFs to be taken seriously as fine art if they could be editioned on the blockchain. 🤯

 
 

I began working with Analog Video in 2015 and returned to releasing my work under my own name / @thesarahshow.

Being consistent in my output and always experimenting with new techniques, I developed my own signature aesthetic over the years, and cultivated a wide community of followers for my work through Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Giphy – where my GIFs currently have over 6.6 billion views.

When I became aware of SuperRare in 2019, it felt like destiny. My Art and experiences made me uniquely suited to the Crypto Art space, and I hit the ground running. I continue to evolve my practice organically in conversation with the Metaverse and its denizens, and feel electric with the possibilities that lie ahead.

I am thrilled to be able to offer my work at Sotheby’s as part of their first curated NFT sale. This is a watershed moment for digital art, as this new technology is finally allowing this longstanding and potent cultural tradition to get its due in the greater world of Fine Art.

All my thanks to curator Robert Alice for including me, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Specialist Michael Bouhanna for organizing the sale, and my greatest respect to the incredible artists offering their work alongside mine.

View and Bid on my Work on the Sotheby’s Website

In case you’d like to digest everything I said here in Dance Music form, I leave you with the incredible “Sarah Zucker Remix” by Eclectic Method. 😎

Self-Portrait Through 2020

 
 

Today I minted my annual self-portrait NFT, a continuation of an ongoing series with a uniquely 2020 twist.

You see, this piece was not created in my usual workflow and timeframe. Instead – appropriately enough for this very unusual year – it was created in increments over the course of nearly 10 months. 

I began this self-portrait at the end of February, when we still had no idea about the global paradigm shift yet to come. I started with a method I have been developing since 2016 that I call “3D Paintings,” created with a combination of original stereoscopic photography and neural style transfer. I liked the outcome well enough, but felt it was time to push the style further.

Then, the coronavirus hit the states, we went into lockdown, and the piece sat unfinished for many months while I took time to reorient my nervous system to our new reality.

We had a brutally hot summer here in California, with an equally punishing fire season. I took to my summer desk, a small setup in our bedroom where I can lock myself in with an air purifier and AC. I began a series of experiments combining the slit-scanning technique I’ve been developing since 2016 with my stereoscopic photography. 

I took another pass at the portrait, and loved the wavy warpiness this technique added to the depth. It felt particularly expressive of this tumultuous year, with its waves of one revelation after another. The Waves of Time keep coming, and it’s up to us to figure out how to surf them, lest we drown. 

I liked the piece a lot, but still felt it needed something more.

I had a landmark Fall in crypto art. When I started minting limited editions of my early VHS pieces, I saw demand for my work skyrocket. I put a lot of time and thought into guiding the growth of my market. I forged relationships with new collectors, and put efforts toward championing new artists. I was commissioned to do portraits for Coindesk’s “Most Influential in 2020 List” (which are auctioning on NiftyGateway through Dec. 31). I’ve been working on pieces for the upcoming Future Art Show in January.

And all the while, this piece sat in the back of my mind, waiting to be finished.

I knew I would see her through to completion. Self-portraiture has been an important part of my practice for a VERY long time. Aside from just giving in to the natural solipsism of the artistic temperament, self-portraiture is important because it allows an artist to document the subject they are most familiar with long-term. They are artworks which provide a meta-narrative to contextualize all of the artist’s other works. 

I took my first self-portrait at age 6, with my “Where’s Waldo” 110 camera that I had my dad remove the Waldo insert from, because it was impeding my artistic vision. I call it, “Self, Avec Pantaloons.”

 
Self, Avec Pantaloons. Age 6.

Self, Avec Pantaloons. Age 6.

 

Self-documentation was a large strain in my film photography years from my mid-teens to mid-twenties. Little did I know I was getting a head start on a memetic expression that would come to dominate our culture with the advent of the smartphone.

 
Self-Portrait with SLR. Age 17.

Self-Portrait with SLR. Age 17.

 

And now, with crypto art, I have continued the tradition for a new era. One of my earliest 1/1 NFTs, and my first ever 1 ETH sale, was the first self-portrait in this series. “Self-Portrait of the Artist in Digital Decay” was minted on KnownOrigin on May 28, 2019, and sold shortly thereafter.

I created the next portrait in this series at the end of 2019. “Self-Portrait in Digital Decay, December 2019.” It was collected by the legendary crypto artist Coldie, one of my greatest champions in this space, on Christmas Day. 

I did a lot of growing up in 2019, and I saw those two pieces as a reflection of that. The first one, from a photo taken in January where I’m done up in high drag, replete with statement earrings, sequin blouse and makeup for the gods, and then the second one, nude, no makeup – stripped down and honest.


And so now, we come to this year’s portrait, created THROUGH 2020. The image, taken in February, has now been incrementally distorted throughout the year. Just as this year has distorted the subject itself. And through that refraction, filtered through time, beauty has emerged. I may not be the same person I was in February. This year has changed me. But oh, what a glorious effect. I end the year more magnificent than ever. 


I’ve been contemplating what to tokenize this month in the wake of the recent growth we’ve seen in the crypto art space. I have very much taken the idea of “create abundantly, tokenize thoughtfully” to heart. I have created a number of VERY cool things in my studio the past few months, pushing my work to new heights. And I find myself not wanting to reveal them before the time is right, which is new for me. The creation continues, but the sharing is happening in a much more measured way. 


As I was going through my list of Works TBT (To-Be-Tokenized), I remembered this self-portrait, and I was seized by a renewed vigor to see her through to completion. I’ve been working on this day and night this week, adding the final components of upscaling a pixelsorting. Processes that seem simple enough, but require endless tinkering to get the look just right. 


I often feel the term “glitch art” is too wide an umbrella for me. Because it’s easy to break things. VERY easy. But breaking things in a way that increases their beauty is quite a meticulous process – a bit “fiddly,” as they’d say on The Great British Bake-Off. It’s taken many years and a lot of intuition to develop my unique way of using the tools available to me. As I always say, “It’s the Witch, not the Wand.”

“It’s the Witch, Not the Wand.” Sarah Zucker, 2019.

“It’s the Witch, Not the Wand.” Sarah Zucker, 2019.

I feel now that this piece is complete. I have imbued in her the same degree of depth and texture and color that I feel this year has imbued in me. There is something extra special in the fact that this piece, in being self-portraiture, combines so many of the styles and techniques I have been exploring and refining over the past 5 years. It is quintessentially “me.”


This will be a rare .mp4 release for me – while I typically tokenize my work in GIF format, I wanted to keep this as a video file so as not to lose any of the spectacular detail work. This will also be my first token sold through the new Reserve Auction format on SuperRare. The reserve is 5Ξ. When the reserve is met, the auction will automatically kick off a 24h timer, which resets if a new bid is placed. 


You can view the token here.


Thank you all for coming on this journey with me. The incredible encouragement I’ve gotten from the crypto art community has truly changed my life and my approach to my art. The levels of creativity I see in this space inspire me to keep pushing my own art further and further. And the support from collectors has allowed me to immerse myself fully in my passion and trust in my own voice like never before. And for that, I am eternally grateful.