[Premiere] Chroma Key Graffiti Reveals Reality-Bending Digital Art Gallery

Using chroma key software, artists Ingrid Jornet and Pau Sampera break the walls between the physical and digital worlds.

by Beckett Mufson

December 23, 2014, 5:00pm

Pau Sampera sprays his chroma graffiti, revealing the contents of his computer desktop. Images courtesy the artists.

Artists Ingrid Jornet and Pau Sampera have developed a knack for prying open the cracks between physical and digital worlds simply by using a combination of spray paint, plasticine, and chroma key software. Today the duo inaugurates TURISTA, an ongoing series of videos, installations, and experiments that explore the borders between these two realms and question whether the distinction even needs to be made.

The first installment of TURISTA expands on Graffiti, an experiment from about a month ago which found Sampera spraying a wall with green paint, while Jornet used chroma-keying software to effectively turn that spray art into a green screen. The digital rift revealed the same footage—but from a few seconds earlier—creating an infinite mirrorlike army of endlessly looping spray artists. TURISTA uses a similar technique in a different setting, an indoor set that, at first glance, seems inhabited only by a large computer screen. Sampera demonstrates the same chroma key graffiti technique from before on the back wall, slowly painting a window into a massive copy of the computer's desktop.

This is just an initial demonstration, however; an abrupt cut finds Sampera holding what appears to be mass of swirling colors, which turns out to be a block of plasticine rendered invisible by the same green screen effect as the graffiti. He breaks the block down into chunks, and sticks it piece by piece onto the computer screen, creating a new window into a jittery redering of a digital art gallery. The camera zooms in and focuses on the virtual room, where a sea of black and white checkerboard tiles spread out between a series of virtual paintings, sculptures, and concept art, models that Jornet and Sampera have made for future projects.

Jornet and Sampera's plasticine-based entryway into this virtual gallery incorporates the philosophical cornerstones of TURISTA. They argue that digital art is no less real that its physical counterparts: "We use real tools to dig into virtuality, going deep into the virtual world," says Jornet. "We see a room with all the art installations we always wanted to build in real spaces. Those pieces are there, even if you cannot touch it, it happened. This is real content."

The name of their project, TURISTA, reflects this position, denoting the pair's perpective on ephemeral realm of digital creativity. Jornet is an interior design student, with experience in the world of audiovisual and contemporary art, while Sampera is a conceptual street artist and painter, with a background in installation and ceramics. "We feel like tourists in this digital era," says Jornet. "We are not professional programmers, or hackers, or internet artists with all the knowledge to feel as at home while working online." But they're doing it anyway, and now the internet at large gets to be tourists along with them.

The next step in the TURISTA saga will involve a physical installation that plays this footage on loop, further confounding the borders between its physical and digital existences. After that, Jornet and Sampera hope to experiment with rendering their conceptual art gallery in 3D CGI toolkit, Vray.