Strabismus

May 01, 2024

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.”

Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld Season 6, Episode 6

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.

Madame de Gateau

October 07, 2021

Laisse-moi me manger comme un gâteau – Let me eat myself as cake!

MADAME DE GATEAU is a signature VideoPainting I created in my Hollywood Studio in 2021. This organic channeling of the camp feminine is a celebration of self-sovereignty – and self-consumption.

I took some inspiration from The Edible Woman, a Margaret Atwood novel I read in college that left a huge impression on me. It examines how women are traditionally consumed by society, and at one point the central character eats a cake she baked shaped like a woman as a metaphor for her own empowerment.

I see this piece as a spiritual descendent of Ouroboros, my 2020 VideoPainting currently in the Metapurse collection.

On a personal level, the concept makes me giggle a bit: I used to be exploited as an artist in the days before I could develop support through NFTs. And now, no one can exploit me… but me!

And of course, there’s the reference to that icon of royal excess, Marie Antoinette. I don’t seek to condemn or exonerate her, but I do feel the decadence she personifies and the precarity of her status are relevant to our moment.

Largely I’m tickled by the cake-like personal fashions of the 18th century!

Madame de Gateau is now available on SuperRare with a reserve of 12Ξ.

Self Transcending – Sotheby's Natively Digital

June 03, 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!

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.

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. 🤯

The Future Of GIFs As Gallery Art, According To The Current Sea http://t.co/OhSjsN18GE pic.twitter.com/ardkM9Uymt
— Creators (@CreatorsProject) March 11, 2014

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.