Anne Spalter and The Josh Craig

Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999).
Her artistic process combines a consistent set of personal symbols with a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. A new body of work, further developed at a Winter 2019 residency at MASS MoCA, combines artificial intelligence algorithms with oil paint and pastels. She is currently creating work for the blockchain.

CONTROL is a digital video created with help of artificial intelligence, based on a multitude of international airport control towers. Who is in control of the creative process? As artists, when do we exercise control, and when do we relinquish it? The modern built environment and its sphere of influence contrasts with the ever-increasing heat of the sun. An airplane taking off is distorted by unseen forces. Migrating birds pass through. The Josh Craig’s original audio provides a pulsating energy, a mysterious, evocative and somewhat menacing aural soundscape that immerses the viewer in the machine’s latent space.