Digital Combines: Curated by Claudia Hart
 

Opening Artist Reception | Saturday, April 23, 2022 | 4–7 pm 
Artist Talk | Saturday, April 23, 2022 | 4:30 pm

Mark Dorf
Claudia Hart
Auriea Harvey
Gretta Louw
LoVid
Will Pappenheimer
Daniel Temkin

bitforms presents the San Francisco debut of Digital Combines, curated by Claudia Hart and including works by Mark Dorf, Hart, Auriea Harvey, Gretta Louw, LoVid, Will Pappenheimer, and Daniel Temkin. Join us for an artist talk, Saturday, April 23 at 4:30 PM, as Claudia Hart, Will Pappernheimer, and Daniel Temkin discuss the impact of NFTs on the broader digital art community and their own personal practices. Opening reception to follow. 

Claudia Hart appropriates the term “combines” from Robert Rauschenberg to propose a new genre, the “digital combine,” a reference to the unification of a physical and virtual object. Rauschenberg’s radical version of expanded painting unites sculptural and painted elements together in single works. In a parallel construction, Digital Combines links tangible materials with a related digital file stored in the cloud. Exhibited artists present their singular understanding of a digital combine through expanded media: each physical work includes a digital component—ie. 3D models, images, video, sound—made visible by scanning a corresponding QR displayed next to the artwork. While conceived with digital processes, the presented works’ discursive transition of born-digital components to corporeal space explores the nuance between the abstract and the figurative, the digital and the analog.

Although imagined by Hart for a series of her own work, the artist’s combines suggest a single conceptual object that conceives of physical and virtual space as continuous. Digital Combines implements NFTs as framing devices; blockchain registration connects an artwork to a non-fungible token and the token is attached to a smart contract that defines the artwork’s parameters and artistic terms. The Digital Combines agreement, developed in collaboration with time-based media specialist Regina Harsanyi, attaches to an artwork’s blockchain registration: 

"Each of Hart’s works consists of two components: a born-digital image derived from the physical Digital Combine painting plus the physical painting. These two cannot be sold separately, as they are two halves of a singular whole. Separation of the parts compromises the integrity of the work and, in the event of their separation, Hart will no longer recognize this iteration as her own. In an inversion of platonic idealism, Hart’s commentary interweaves the problematics of representation through virtual simulation versus the history of representation through physical embodiment.

— Excerpt from Digital Combines contract"

Hart presents Digital Combines as a figure of speech and a poetic proposition, which, in its performative language, represents a profound ontological shift in our cultural imagination that reframes notions about reality and truth. 

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