Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process: Artists - Art exhibition on Feral File

Alida Sun is an artist and activist based in Berlin. For over 1,200 days and counting, she has created and shared a new generative artwork. Her current art practice spans choreography, code, installation, and architecture. Her activism focuses on networked community building against racism and authoritarianism in both local and international digital contexts. Sun is the creator of the Art Blocks Curated project glitch crystal monsters. Her works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Ars Electronica, and experimental audiovisual festivals around the world.

Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and RISD in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts. Her artistic process explores imagery of the modern landscape. Spalter has drawn on the writings of Carl Jung as well as science fiction novels and movies to develop a consistent set of personal symbols using a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. Her crypto art has been auctioned by Sotheby’s and Phillips, and featured in the New York Times. She recently completed a successful 501-piece drop: AI Spaceships. Spalter is also noted for her large-scale public projects. MTA Arts commissioned Spalter to create a 52-screen digital art installation, New York Dreaming, which remained on view in Fulton Center for just under a year. Spalter’s work is in the permanent collections of the V&A Museum (London), the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY), the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), The Museum of CryptoArt, and others. Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory. She recently completed an alumni residency at MASS MoCA.

Botto is a decentralized autonomous artist governed by a collective. Launched in October 2021, Botto’s artistic capabilities are based on an art engine, a proprietary blend of algorithmic models that have synthesized millions of works of art. Each week, 350 art pieces are presented to the community, a growing group of thousands of users, and this community votes on which piece they deem to be the most aesthetically pleasing. This voting mechanism allows the collective to select a singular artwork to be minted while also using this information to train the artist’s algorithm. Botto incorporates these preferences in its growing sense of taste ultimately evolving Botto’s aesthetic and body of work over time.

Born and raised in Iran, Behnaz Farahi is an award winning designer and critical maker based in Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice from USC School of Cinematic Arts. Currently she is an assistant professor at the department of design, California State University, Long Beach. She explores how to foster an empathetic relationship between the human body and the space around it using computational systems. Her work addresses critical issues such as feminism, emotion, perception, and social interaction. Farahi has won several awards including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Digital Design Award, Innovation By Design Fast Company Award, and the World Technology Award. She is a co-editor of the issue of AD, “3D Printed Body Architecture” (2017) and “Interactive Futures” (forthcoming).

David OReilly is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. His work spans animation, video games, and interactive art. He started his career as an animator, creating numerous short films which inspired a wave of lo-fi digital aesthetics. In collaboration with Spike Jonze, he created the holographic video games in the film Her. He then went on to develop interactive nature simulations such as Mountain and the universe scale Everything. His pioneering AR works have received over 3 billion views across social media.

Itzel Yard–recognised as Ix Shells–is a Panamanian-based artist and self taught coder. By playing video games during her childhood, Yard was able to tap into her creativity which prompted a deep fascination for coding at an early age. In recalling her pathway towards where she is now, Yard attributes a lot of her growth to her five-year stay in Toronto, where she studied architectural technology. Though this period was a tumultuous time in her life, it pushed her to find her own voice and creativity, through the safe space of computer science. By combining her observations of patterns in nature with her appreciation for Brutalist architecture, Yard had allowed computer science research to act as a digital simulation of an extension within her own mind, ultimately translating into generative art. While her creations portray a visual interpretation of the physical world, Yard intends every work to act as a metaphor of internal exploration. This narrative is written within each of her works through lines of code, acting as a context-based portrait of what Yard is experiencing at the time. She explains that her home is in her head– welcoming her audience to open a digital door into the artist’s own visual portrayal of self reflection. Her gentle nature, personable warmth, and sincere appreciation for the creation of her work produces a visual form of ingenuity that is unmatched.

john gerrard is widely regarded as a key figure in the development of simulation within contemporary art. Deceptively looking like film or video, his works are virtual worlds, made using real-time computer graphics, a technology developed by the military and now used extensively in the gaming industry. Recent exhibitions include Surrender (Flag) 2023 at Hayward Gallery, London, Western Flag at Dark MOFO, Tasmania, NGV Triennial 2023, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Plásmata II, Onassis Foundation, Greece, Corn Work at Galway International Arts Festival, travelling to Gwangju Biennial; X. Laevis at Okayama Art Summit, Japan; Western Flag at Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; Solar Reserve, LACMA, Los Angeles, USA; Western Flag, Somerset House with Channel 4, London, England,; Power. Play, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; and Solar Reserve, Lincoln Center in Association with the Public Art Fund, New York, New York. Gerrard's work is in the collection of Tate, London; MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Kistefos Collection, Norway; IMMA, Dublin; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; M+, Hong Kong and many private collections internationally. His work Western Flag (2024) was the first tokenized artwork (NFT) to enter LACMA's permanent collection. John Gerrard received a BFA from Oxford University in 1997 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He is represented by Pace Gallery globally.

Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist whose work is about people, places, and things that are difficult to count and collect. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and archival video to make sense of the complex ecological, digital, and historical systems that surround and co-create us. Ọnụọha’s work has been exhibited widely at venues like The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, La Gaitê Lyrique in Paris, FIBER Festival in Amsterdam, Mao Jihong Arts Foundation in Shanghai, and Le Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has spoken and been in residence at The Royal College of Art. In Ọnụọha’s own words, “I am an eternal hybrid, drawn always to in-between spaces. I am fascinated by how metrified societies require the fluid, organic, messiness of people to be secured, tagged, categorized, and abstracted. In a world mediated by computers, everything begins to look like data, and that which doesn't fit the mold is at risk of being forgotten. My practice begins with these patterns of absence, which are always real and material and often located within people. I aim to trouble the assumptions baked into the technologies that mediate our experiences.”

Monica Rizzolli is a surface designer at Contrast Studio and a type designer at Just in Type. She has released two collections: “Fragments of an Infinite Field" and “Tropical Garden.” She has exhibited in the United States, Brazil, Germany, China, and Spain. Monica aims to create generative rules that resemble an organism’s growth and/or evolution. In this sense, her projects approach digital morphogenesis and the development of procedural organisms and landscapes.

Qianqian (Q) Ye is a Chinese artist, creative technologist and educator based in Los Angeles. Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigrants, power, and technology. Their most recent collaborative project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. At the Processing Foundation, Qianqian is the Lead of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users. She currently teaches creative coding as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. For 2022-2023, Qianqian is a NYU ITP/IMA project fellow and civic media fellow at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Harry Yeff aka Reeps100 is a London born neuro-divergent artist and technologist specializing in voice and tech-based expression. Yeff has been visualizing the voice for 15 years and is globally celebrated as a leader in a new wave of voice technology-focused experimentation. He continues to build on his world-class skillset, utilizing an almost inhuman vocal range to drive his works. His performative installations, AI-driven voice work, and machine-like vocal control have amassed a global following, rendering over 100 million views online. Yeff has completed three artist residencies at Harvard University, is a culture leader at The World Economic Forum, and has followed in the footsteps of John Cage and Rauschenberg by joining the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology program at Bell Labs. His multidisciplinary new-media spectacles and theory have established artist in residence roles at Factory Berlin and Sonar Barcelona. In 2020, Yeff won the Arts and Science Breakthrough with the Falling Walls Foundation for his ongoing portfolio of cutting edge voice and technology experimentation.