The Shell in the Ghost

Alida Sun, an internet-based artist as she calls herself, is one of the most interesting artists working in the field of generative art. She reminds us again and again how much folk art, quiltwork and textiles in particular, are related to computation. Working as a conceptual artist but using coding, AI and and other digital tools, Sun’s works are often of long durations, bordering on performance art at its finest yet most imperceptible moment. For "Sentient Sun + Steel", she has visualized an entire dynamic process of light forms in the atmosphere, performing a digital “materialization” of complex natural phenomena through generative programming.

Alessandro Bavari is an award-winning visual and digital artist of Italian-French origins working across various mediums, including photography, painting and music. Human bodies and its derivatives are a recurrent building block in his works, often depicted in grotesque and macabre tones. “Arturo #01”, in contrast, is extremely vivid in colors, showing a (very much alive judging by the emotions expressed) detached from the body head of a person, looped in endless violent blows within a glass box as if it is a new material that undergoes various strength-proof tests.

The collection by Spanish artist Cristina De Middel this work is taken from, “This is What Hatred Did”, is loosely based on the ghostly stories of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola telling the story of a little boy who got lost in the wilderness populated with strange frightening creatures. Using the medium of documentary photography, largely “ghostly” itself, the collection is heavily attentive to bodies and the place they occupy at the border between the mystical and the mundane.

“Out of Body” is rooted in a personal story of Argentinian-born artist Florencia S.M Brück when she experienced a phenomenon called autoscopy and was able to look at herself from outside of her own body when she drowned at the age of five. Years later, she recreated this experience combining the traditional bodily experience of performance art with digital tools, producing what she calls the first Generative Art NFT performance.

Working within systems of affect, the bodies that Montreal-based artist Alexy Préfontaine creates are nothing short of perfect, from the color palette of sunsets that he admits to be inspired by, to the meticulous execution of their movements.Their mannequin allure goes unaffected by the inflicted deformations that often render them seemingly blind. The fact that they still strike the perfect pose questions the very origin for those deformities.