Figure 1 Claudia Hart, the Swing, 2006. Three-Channel Animation, One of Three Channels, Each 720 £ 1280 Pixels, with Stereo Sound by Kurt Hentschla¨Ger, 10 Min
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Figure 1 Claudia Hart, The Swing, 2006. Three-channel animation, one of three channels, each 720 £ 1280 pixels, with stereo sound by Kurt Hentschla¨ger, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery, New York Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 BEGINNING and END GAMES A Parable in 3D Claudia Hart or many years, I was primarily a painter, and I exhibited F paintings, objects, and photographs in the contemporary art context, first in New York beginning in 1988 and later in Berlin. Then in the late 1990s, I began working with three-dimensional, or 3D, computer imaging for the first time. In the mid-1990s, 3D animation software, or Maya, as it is called, was not available for the personal computer. It was supported exclusively on the UNIX operating system, typically available only in large corporations or academic institutions. So in 1997 I began taking classes at New York University’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications in order to gain access both to Maya and to the center’s sophisticated computer labs. Learning 3D animation was quite challenging, and although I was an early adopter of computers, nothing I had previously done prepared me for the mathematical and technical rigor of spatial 3D imaging or the culture that surrounded it. When it came to courses in Maya or virtual reality simulations, there were hardly any women enrolled in classes. I was also one of only a small coterie of contemporary artists working with this software, since, until recently, 3D animation and imaging existed completely outside the purview of contemporary art discourse. There are a number of factors that explain this situation, one being that the technology was still quite novel, having been previously used mainly by the US Department of Defense to create flight simulations, and another is that the gaming industry that has since popularized 3D animation was then only nascent. And although Maya has since 87 Cultural Politics, Volume 9, Issue 1, q 2013 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-1907190 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Claudia Hart Figure 2 Claudia Hart, Mortification01, 2007–8. Rapid-prototype printed sculpture, ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) plastic, 7.5 £ 2.75 £ 2.75 in. Courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery, New York become an entertainment industry standard, global engineering culture. I began to in many ways this technology is alien and understand the students’ needs as remains a challenge conceptually, because vocational in nature; they desired entry not it represents a distinct break from the into the world of contemporary art but into analogical, photographic model of what historian of science Timothy Lenoir representation that has been the cultural (then chair of the program in history and standard since the nineteenth century. philosophy of science at Stanford) identified Reality is simulated in 3D animation not as the “military-entertainment complex” through “capture” like photography but (2000). The program was very demanding, as rather by modeling a parallel universe “inside it was believed that mastering the elaborate the computer” and then outputting it. In Maya software interface required hours of 9:1 March 2013 that sense, 3D animation is truly “post- memorization by rote. Its ultimate purpose † photographic,” and as such it is still little was to train digital workers to staff understood both inside and outside the art proscribed stations in the production world. pipelines of multimillion-dollar Hollywood In 2000 I started teaching as a visiting effects films or elaborate shooter games. POLITICS instructor at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in a Soon this art school training was to serve department then called Computer Graphics mainly as boot camp for the armies of the and Interactive Media. Although Pratt is a military-entertainment complex. CULTURAL serious fine arts school, at that time its Professional mainstream 3D game computer art department was “production culture has always been largely homosocial, 88 oriented” and more or less an extension of and its users generally form a kind of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 POLITICS CULTURAL Figure 3 Claudia Hart, The Seasons: Video Object, 2009. QuickTime video, 720 £ 1280 pixels, with stereo sound by Claudia 89 Hart, 10 min. Courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery, New York Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 9:1 March 2013 † POLITICS CULTURAL Figure 4 Claudia Hart, Ophelia, 2008. Single-channel animation,10-minute 3D-animated loop, high-definition animation video-object or large-scale projected installation. Sound design by Claudia Hart. Courtesy the artist 90 and bitforms gallery, New York Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 BEGINNING and END GAMES Figure 5 Claudia Hart, Empire, April 23–June 20, 2010, Wood Street Galleries. Installation view, clockwise from left: Timegarden 02 (2005) and Ophelia (2008). Image courtesy Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA hypermasculinist boys club. Unsurprisingly, subculture of male-dominated digitality, and perhaps, my colleagues and later my I found that I wanted to subvert earlier students tended to be somewhat more rigid dichotomies of “woman and nature” as in their outlook than the typical art student pitted against the “civilized,” scientistic, was; they were not interested in seeking out masculine world of technology. Hence I the unfamiliar, and they were closed to started exploring themes that incorporated reflective thought and resistant to an analytic unequivocal romantic imagery, reading of the world around them. As a predominantly the 3D female figure, often POLITICS woman and as a contemporary artist nude, moving slowly and sensually. submerged in this militaristic and highly Before long, my art and my pedagogical macho-oriented pedagogical environment, work began to merge when I produced a I experienced an unanticipated series of short films as in-class tutorials for CULTURAL pedagogical/political awakening. I was 3D character animation. These shorts fed making art as well as teaching, all while into the process that developed my current 91 coming to terms with this particular body of work: sensual virtual images of the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/9/1/86/247059/86.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Claudia Hart female figure moving within mechanized She is at once dead and fake and yet depictions of “nature.” Introspective and hyperreal, alive in a tense, uncanny slow moving, these works present a distinct fusion. This is also reflected in my still lifes, departure from the way women are depicted or “timegardens” (fig. 5), slow-moving in first-person shooter games, which is animations that fuse multiple time schemes usually pornographic or extremely violent into single, apparently integrated scenes that and dehumanizing. By using the same 3D portray nature as an elaborate asynchronous medium to create figures that reference clockwork: Chaplinesque mechanical visions romantic femininity while eschewing for a technological age. ubiquitous strategies of speed and endgame Soon after I began teaching as an shooter mentality, I am positing feminine adjunct at Pratt, traumatizing world events beauty and erotic sensualism as a kind of intervened, and in the aftermath of refusal. September 11, 2001, a hard and decisive Ophelia (2008) (figs. 4 and 5) is one shift toward a boot-camp mentality occurred example of such slowed-down sensualism in the popular culture of 3D animation. and subversion of the shooter game. Changing along with it was the demographic Inspired by British artist John Everett of students enrolled in computer graphics Millais’s 1852 painting depicting Hamlet’s programs at Pratt and all the other Ophelia drowned in a stream, I was engineering and vocationally oriented interested in using this image partly for its schools where I later taught. Students now Luddite pedigree. Millais was a Pre- flocked to the vocational training schools Raphaelite, part of a movement that connected to art schools, community promoted a return to medieval arts and crafts colleges, and polytechnic universities to at a historical moment that coincided with learn 3D animation techniques they believed the birth of the Industrial Revolution. His was would lead to a job. Notably, a plethora of an e´ poque that, like our own, sustained a shooter games were produced that became tremendous technological paradigm a significant part of an at-war American shift. With that in mind, I thought that I would military consciousness; later, during the Iraq invert the Luddite mantra and make my war years, 3D games were to grow into a Ophelia the harbinger of the new digital era. larger, more profitable industry than that of Also, Ophelia is the embodiment of 3D-animated children’s films. This change romantic tragedy, a feminist figure who bears a direct relationship to the strategy of embodies the Electra complex, a madwoman economic cross-fertilization promoted by the who drowned herself for love of a man who US military in order to develop simulation 9:1 March 2013 † murdered her father. There is even a third technologies for military training enactments tragic subtext here: the collision between the (Lenoir 2000). Lenoir in his various writings technological and the natural worlds. My on the subject describes a history in which mechanized Ophelia floats at the bottom of a military scientists entered the commercial POLITICS sea littered with refuse and plastic bags, an computer game industry, with its vastly ode to our own, possibly lost, natural world.