CLAUDIA HART: "I WANT MORE LIFE"

Claudia Hart: I began doing illustrated books in the mid-1990s. I hand-drew and lettered them. They were fake children’s books, but really for adults. I was inspired by “Maus: A Survivor's Tale," the graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized between 1980 and 1991.

I was living in Berlin at the time. I moved when the wall fell and stayed for 10 years. I did two fake-kiddie books in Berlin, both inspired by issues that were important then and remain so. They were "A Child’s Machiavelli," that you exhibited at EXPANDED.ART last year, and "Dr. Fausties Guide to Real Estate Development," in which Faust, the central character from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 19th-century play, was reborn as a real estate developer who was also a pink stuffed teddy bear.

I didn’t know how to animate then, but inspired by TOY STORY, I decided to teach myself 3D animation. Dr. Faustie was my first avatar. MORE LIFE is my favorite animation from those early days.

CH: The audio clip is inspired by BLADE RUNNER, the 1982 movie directed by Ridley Scott, adapting Philip K. Dick's 1968 sci-fi classic "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" It was set in a dystopian future in Los Angeles that looked remarkably like the current Times Square, the center of New York, my home town.

AI-driven synthetic humans ("replicants") were bio-engineered by a fictional Tyrell Corporation to work on an imaginary space colony. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) escaped to Earth, a cynical cop, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), hunted them down. "I want more life, fucker," were the last words uttered by Batty before Deckard blew his computer's brain out. I think the words reflect the way we biological beings all feel, living our short lives in our fragile bodies, just struggling to survive.

CH: The pink bear is Dr. Faustie, inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 19th-century character Faust. He is seductive and diabolical at the same time. That’s why he is so scary. He embodies the “evil doll” meme that appears in so many horror films. He was also very easy to model using the simple 3D animation tools available back then.

I was an early user of what is now called Maya, a 3D computer graphics software that was originally developed by Silicon Graphics Computer Systems and is currently owned and developed by Autodesk. At that time, Maya only worked on Unix operating systems while sitting on an expensive Silicon Graphics machine, which was not possible on a PC. MORE LIFE has a small pixel dimension (640 x 480 pixels, then "high definition") and is only 500 frames long. It also took about a week to render.

CH: This is only a conjecture, but I think Carolyn was interested in the line "I want more life" because it so much reflects the psychology of animators and the practice of animation in general. Animators are artists who live in their imaginations. We flee from the world and want our secret, imaginary worlds to be real with such fervent intensity that we believe we can actually breathe life into them.

Animation is very slow and labor-intensive, and animators are willing to spend a crazy amount of time bringing our worlds to life. We are like the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, the amorous sculptor whose marble stature came to life to become his bride. There was a famous book written in 1980 called "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, early animators from the 1930s and 1940s, considered the Golden Age of American animation.

CH: I was really naive when I chose that location! The MoMA PS 1 show was my first institutional show. Before that, I had exhibited paintings, sculptures, super-8 movies, and photographs in stagey configurations in galleries. I worked with the Pat Hearn Gallery in the East Village in New York for 10 years in the late eighties. With MORE LIFE, I wanted to make a site-specific installation reflecting computer "logic." Computers are code-driven recursive systems—systems that use themselves to build themselves. I wanted to show MORE LIFE in a small, enclosed mechanical room, in a small box (TV’s in those days were!), displaying the Dr. Faustie avatar sitting in a small box in front of a TV where he was sitting in a small box in front of a TV, ad infinitum. An elevator! I didn’t understand that NO ONE took the elevator at PS1, because it was only 2 stories high!

Carolyn offered me a much better position at the entry to the exhibition, but I insisted. I was very wrong. But I am very stubborn. I think if I had listened, my artistic life would have evolved very differently!

CH: MORE LIFE is my plea for a more civil and humanistic world. In a world in which everyday people still struggle to maintain their dignity in a culture that has become increasingly technocratic, bureaucratic, and competitive. The science and technologies that we thought might liberate us from the limits of our fragile bodies have become more powerful and more advanced.

Perhaps it was equally true back when I made the piece as it is today. I was probably just too inexperienced and naive to understand that!

CH: I made my first NFT in 2021; it was already blowing up. I could only react to what was happening; I couldn’t just act, meaning I couldn’t follow my inner compass without the noise that comes from an active scene in the outside world.

Being early means chartering new territory, and to me, that means territory that is more open, more quiet, and more free.

My other reason is more practical. MORE LIFE is an early work and is very important to me. Because an Ordinal is encoded directly onto the blockchain, a work that has been inscribed can be preserved! With my early animations, which are so small and so short (out of technical necessity), it is a fantastic means of conservation.

CH: At the same time as MORE LIFE, I did two related projects. One was called SAVE ME, a forty-second animation from 2000 that I showed on a computer monitor and also on large public billboards in Louisville, Kentucky, produced by the Speed Art Museum. Later, I also showed them in Pittsburgh on public animated billboards, sponsored by the Wood Street Media Art Center.

Like MORE LIFE, SAVE ME is haunting, with a sad sound track of a laughing woman who also seems to be crying at the same time. The imagery is of an American suburban house, the sky raining happy-faced EMOJI. But in those days, there actually were no EMOJI! The HAPPY FACE meme had just hit and was everywhere. SAVE ME was also inspired by a movie, the David Lynch 1986 film "Blue Velvet," about a post-war America then reified as the fake-happy culture of Disney: oppressive, horrifying, and cloyingly sweet. An important early horror film.

At the same time, I produced a series of photographs of an avatar I called E, a cyber supermodel. They were photographic C-prints into which I integrated a 3D simulated avatar into alienating New York City street scenes in which contemporary flaneurs are pressed together physically yet cannot connect to one another emotionally, turning their eyes and being ineffably sad. Interestingly, I was just invited to show E in an exhibition in London at the Royal College of Art.

CH: There’s something to be said for working in isolation! It suits me. I was a lonesome pioneer, and that meant that I had a lot of space and time to myself. The McCoys, who are also pioneers (and in fact shared the same page in the catalog of the ANIMATIONS PS1 exhibition where I first exhibited MORE LIFE) are now friends. I met Kevin for the first time when he helped me mint my first NFT for the Christie's auction.

When I started, I didn't know anyone else who worked with a computer except, most significantly, the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager, who I later married and to whom I remain married (for the past 28 years). Kurt introduced me to his world—a world, I might add, that showed no interest in my practice (because I was a woman and because my work was and remains more personal, though I didn’t understand that at the time).

CH: They always say that! I was told that my graphic novels and the giant watercolors that I also produced from their pages were also "not art." Yet they were gouache paint on linen! Not even acrylic.

CH: Digital art will separate from digital design. It will become more personal, more expressive, and more emotional. It’s already happening!