A Computer’s Interpretation Of Women of Willendorf

The ancient Venus statues—the first one unearthed in 1908 by archaeologist Josef Szombathy in Austria—are some of the most important pieces of prehistoric art, as well as some of the earliest known examples of ceramic works. Carved from limestone and colored with red ochre, the tiny statues were thought to be symbols of fertility and procreation, and were considered good luck charms. Since most prehistoric societies were nomadic and relied on hunting and gathering as a means of existence, the statues’ round bodies also represented the highly-unattainable ideal of voluptuous beauty.

Artist Dominik Strzelec has recently re-imagined the statues using the open-source programming language Processing, as further research on shape as a record of field conditions. He says:

It’s a tendency to move away from industrial-design precision towards seemingly archaic, still mediated digitally ways of production and articulation of space. Saturation or detail, in this case, results from specific tool/machine resolution—here simulated by pushing voxel space towards its capacity limits resulting in glitches and repetitive patterns.

This idea of remixing or updating classic pieces of art is something we saw recently in Remastered, an exhibition currently on view at One Marylebone in London. In that installation the original source works are similarly sometimes unrecognizable or inscrutable when they stand alone, but once provided with context, the tech-enhanced reinterpretations give the classic works a whole new livelihood and layer of relevancy.

On the other hand, technology is not only enabling reinterpretations, but new practices like 3D printing are also helping to restore otherwise irreparable pieces of art like this version of Auguste Rodin’s famous Thinker statue. While we firmly believe that it’s important for artists to work in the medium of their time (i.e. new technologies), we think it’s equally as important for artists to have a sense of the vast history of creative expression and exploration that preceded them. It’s exciting to see these technological developments as helping both preserve those ancient works and push forward to create entirely new ones, revisiting age-old subjects from an entirely contemporary perspective.