Kiki.obj

Gif made from 3d animation. Based on Magazine Covers: DADA PHONE Paris, March 1920; 391 New York, N.3, Club Dada Berlin, 1918;  New York Dada New York, April 1921; Cannibale Paris, 25 May 1920;  Die Schammade Köln, February 1920; DER ZELTWEG Zürich, November 1919

Download image

“I made a model of Kiki in 2008 to use for another project based on all of the various photos of Man Ray.   I turned her head around, breaking her neck, to turn her into an “impossible object,” a kind of Sphinx.   I then imagined her as a Times Square billboard, and covered her with flashing billboards, but made from the original Dada magazine covers.  The purpose of the work is to turn  Kiki into a goddess, the “Kiki.obj.”

Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She works with digital trompe l’oeil as a medium, directing theater and making media objects of all kinds. These include multi-channel 3D animation installations, sculptures using industrial production techniques such as Rapid Prototyping, CNC routing, and virtual and mixed reality environments, and  augmented-reality custom apps. Hart’s works deal with issues of representation, and the role of the computer in shifting contemporary values about identity and what might be called the natural. Her project is to de-masculinze the culture of corporate technology by inserting the irrational and the personal into the slick, overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design. She is widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14.  She works with Transfer gallery in New York.  She is married to the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager, and lives in Chicago where she is a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute.