Artist Statement

This work is inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper, a story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman written in 1892, and long considered a canon of feminist fiction. Its narrator is an imaginative woman, also a writer of short fiction. Her husband is John, a rational man and a very scientific medical doctor. John feels that his wife is too agitated, so he enforces a treatment contrived for unusual women in the age of Freud: complete rest, no guests, no visitors. Retired to the country by her doting husband, our narrator takes her rest in a room hung with yellow wallpaper, staring alone at the walls for three months. By the end of this cure, she has completely lost her mind, hallucinating a mad woman imprisoned behind the yellow patterns.

My interpretation of the Gilman story is called Systems Madness, a coded system translating her yellow wallpaper hallucinations into P5js. To accomplish this I invited Andrew Blanton, a composer and accomplished programmer to collaborate.

To decode the semantics of crazy wallpaper, I turned to Dall-e, Since I was working from literature, I could harness Dall-e to translate literary language into a library of visual tropes.The Dall-e database consists of reproductions of canonical images culled from the history of mainstream art history-in other words-western painting, photography and design.Dall-e is a cultural archive, simulating cultural values, cliches and assumptions. It sits on a specific cultural database, hooks into its unconscious, providing the road to travel in pursuit of the Yellow Wallpaper algorithm - the mathematics behind a story that is a literary icon of both Romantic and feminist fiction.

I typed descriptors into Dall-e, borrowing language from the short story, also intermixed with other related literary, cultural and art references from the same period, for example: “Tiny flowers in patterned wallpaper, water-colored, faded and painted by a paranoid schizophrenic woman seeing visions of dancing macabre figures.”

Andrew countered my Dall-e semiotics by prototyping our work with an MIT open-source processing library, “Post5.” Together we formally deconstructed the pattern language of Dall-e Romantic wallpapers. “Crazy” patterns consist of colors sampled from my Dall-e wallpaper archives, noises, gradients, transparencies, blurrings, layerings imitating water marks, and different fractal formations repeated irregularly.

Andrew then produced a custom shader based, scripting five poisonous flowers to create a coded wallpaper system reconstructing madness through its responsiveness to gentle human touch - the slight wiggle of a handheld mouse resetting a pattern into a different time and place. An irrational reset button. Produced by rational mathematics, our Systems Madness suggests insane hallucinations.

Together, Andrew and I framed a question - what happens when reason meets unreason? The response: the all too human desire to create order out of the chaos of this world; and identically - the truth - that too much order can actually drive you mad!

The production of this work also drove ME a bit mad. For the past 35 years, my practice has been intermedia and installation based. I translated my photo, video and painting practice into virtual realities over twenty years ago, using physical objects produced by computer-driven production machines, projections and mapped 3D animations, followed by AR and VR as they were invented. The poetics of constraint at the core of Art Blocks has taught me how to modularize a system from the ground up. This means to build it organically from concept to code, from code to image, and then from image to form. With these building blocks, I’ve created a world that expresses meaning as a story, but also as a dynamic data stream that can translate once again into an image - the most potent form of emotional expression.

Exhibition Description: ‘Systems Madness’ from Claudia Hart is a conceptual artwork that extends beyond the screen. Collectors can interact with the work minted on Art Blocks, and they can also access a set of instructions for how to install the artwork as an interactive floor-to-ceiling wallpaper at home or in public exhibition.

The artists will donate a percentage of profits from the sale of this collection to the Center for Reproductive Rights (https://app.endaoment.org/orgs/13-3669731).

About Claudia Hart

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation. Since the late 90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart embraced these same concepts, but now focusing on the impact of computing and simulations technologies. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a Professor, she developed a pedagogic program based on her practice - Experimental 3D - the first dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in an art-school context.

Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Vera List Center Collection,The Borusan Contemporary Collection, The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection, the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, The Goetz Collection,The New York Public Library, the Addison Gallery of American Arts, Andover, MA, Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection, and many other private collections . Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14, and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC California, Berkeley where she is currently a fellow. https://claudiahart.com/

About Andrew Blanton

Andrew Blanton is an Associate Professor in the CADRE Media Labs at San Jose State University and a PhD candidate in Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been performed and presented around the world in venues such as Google Cultural Lab in Paris, The University of Brasilia, The City University of Hong Kong, STEIM Amsterdam, and The American University Ciaro among many others. His current work focuses on the emergent potential between cross-disciplinary arts and technology in the context of Music Composition, New Media Art, and building sound + visual environments through software development. Andrew has advanced expertise in percussion, 3D environments/graphics programming, creative software development, and developing projects in the confluence of art and science. http://andrewblanton.com