Software Art Inspired By Human Relationships And Amethyst Mines

B&W Forever!

Called the “single-named demigoddess of Austrian computational aesthetics” by Bruce Sterling, Lia is a software artist who has been creating work using code since the mid-90s. Her work has taken on many forms from video to installations to apps and she’s just released three new works, which you can purchase for the not-so-princely sum of $10 a piece.

Videos by VICE

These video works are available as limited editions on a new initiative from screen-based digital art sellers [s]edition. They often sell work from big hitters like Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst but now, in an attempt to broaden their catalogue of works and encourage artists to submit their pieces, they’re allowing artists to manually upload, publish, and then sell their own digital limited editions. Any artist wishing to submit their work can do so here.

Lia’s works are called Inside the Diamond, Not Even Love Will Tear Us Apart, and B&W Forever! and feature visuals that range from crystalline structures to monochromatic rectangles all created using code.

We fired off a few questions to Lia to find out a bit more about the artworks and the processes behind their creation.

Inside The Diamond

The Creators Project: Can you go into a bit more detail about how these three pieces were created?
Lia: I got the idea for the first piece, Inside the Diamond, some time ago when I visited a 280 million year old amethyst mine in Austria. I was fascinated by all the patterns that the different stones on display had. My work in general is always an attempt to translate something that I experience into form, movement, colors and sometimes also sound. When I was looking at these stones I immediately thought about the extreme time-spans that were involved in growing such beautiful shapes, and wanted to express this in the video. The piece B&W Forever! is a follow up of a new project that I did for an upcoming Teletext Art Festival. I actually had a lot of fun over the two days that I spent creating images in the bizarre Teletext software—I decided to make blinking black and white images and found myself totally reminded of how I used to work in the mid-1990s. Back then I created tiny elements by painting them pixel-by-pixel using Macromedia Director—working within the limits of the very old Teletext technology was a similar experience. The third video Not Even Love Will Tear Us Apart is based on a translation of my personal ideas about possible relationships between lovers, expressed as pairs of shapes that form occasional heart-like structures with each other. The shapes themselves always remain the same, but as a “couple” they can create new forms. The two shapes are always together, moving in one direction, but never letting go of each other.
Not Even Love Will Tear Us Apart How has creating software art changed for you since you started? Has technology changed your processes or are they very similar?
Mainly, my level of skill as a programmer has increased, and this has allowed me to structure my code in different ways to how I could before—this changes the possibilities I have to work with as I can build more complex structures, and at the same time it informs the process through which I discover new avenues to explore.

The tools themselves are not that important to me, because the formulas have not changed—if you want to draw a circle, you can do that in many different programmes, and the languages might vary, but at the end you always need the same formula for a circle. However, hardware of course has an influence on what is possible and what is not. For example I can now control many more elements on screen than I could in the beginning. The increasing screen resolution is a double edged sword however. On the one hand I can create much higher resolution representations of the structures, on the other hand I have lost the ability to work at the level of single pixels that were the building blocks of my work for a long time in the beginning, when the typical screen was 640×480 pixels. (My work B&W Forever! is an attempt to directly address this, at high resolution.)

B&W Forever!

What attracted you to want to sell them in this way?
When I first read about s[edition] I immediately thought that this concept is actually very similar to what people like me in the 1990s wanted from the internet, namely a platform to show our works directly without having to be part of the traditional art market. Most of my works were online for free for a long time, but I have to admit that it is a good feeling to have people willing to pay money to look at it—I feel like it is a way for an audience to express their appreciation for what I am doing, which is an important part of the process for me.