Have you always dreamed of having an artist’s physique? Gyms are closed and public beaches may be swimming in COVID right now, but you can still flex that hot bod in front of all your pets and Zoom friends. I know what you are thinking: “Jason, I can’t find the motivation to work out alone!” Fear not, Damjanski and friends are here to help!
You may remember Damjanski as the creator of Bye Bye Camera, the post-human app that removed all your loved ones from your photographs. He’s back with an even more useful app called FitArt!
This time Damjanski is teaming up with Nina Roehrs of The Roehrs & Boetsch gallery to tap into the ancient secrets of one of the most physically fit sub-cultures in the wold: Contemporary digital artists. You didn’t think it could happen, but it did — and now you will wonder how you ever lived without it.
Go download the FitArt app and start getting buff now, or read the bios first for each of the personal trainers below (along with description of their routine).
Petra Cortright – 911 king (2011)
Petra Cortright – 911 king (2011)
30 seconds video | sound
This in-app presented video is a shortened and square cut from the original 2011 work.
Petra Cortright (1986, US) is a contemporary artist whose multifaceted artistic practice stems from creating and manipulating digital files. Cortright's digitally-conceived artworks physically exist in many forms - printed onto archival surfaces, projected onto existing architecture, or mechanically carved from stone. A notable member of what became known as the 'Post Internet' art movement of the mid-to-late-2000s with her YouTube videos and online exhibitions, Cortright later began to laboriously craft digital paintings by creating layer upon layer of manipulated images in Photoshop which she then rendered onto materials such as aluminum, linen, paper, and acrylic sheets. In addition to her 2D work, in 2018 Cortright premiered a new body of sculptural work in marble. As with her paintings, Cortright's sculptures are intended to capture and represent a digital moment - in this case a digital brush stroke - that is translated into a three-dimensional object via industrial fabrication techniques. Cortright's role as an artist is an amalgam of painter, graphic designer, editor, and producer; culminating in a singular artistic reflection of contemporary visual culture that can exist on a smartphone screen, a Times Square billboard, and anything in between.
Jeremy Bailey – Tassel Twirl (2020)
Jeremy Bailey – Tassel Twirl (2020)
30 seconds video | no sound
Cardio is more than just running on a treadmill! This exercise proves you can get your heart rate up by learning to twirl Augmented Reality tassels. It's very simple to learn, you just need to bounce and let your software tassels spin. Inspired by workout videos that often incorporate gendered dance moves and Augmented Reality technologies modify our bodies with software, this video playfully engages themes of identity, control and the queer body.
Throughout his career, Jeremy Bailey (1979, CAN) has explored software in a performative context. As Rhizome author Morgan Quaintance puts it, ‘Since the early noughties Bailey has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies.’ Specifically, Bailey's works consists of all manner of performances that exist as videos, software, websites, inventions, institutions and ephemera all created and presented by his alter ego, Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey. Bailey believes that technology done right empowers us all to be famous.
Olia Lialina – Animated GIF Model – Hula Hoop (2005)
Olia Lialina – Animated GIF Model – Hula Hoop (2005)
30 seconds GIF-based video | no sound
Join Animated GIF Model Olia Lialina in swinging the hula-hoop ring. During the early days of the Internet, animated GIFs were a very popular way to personalize a website. In context of the increasing professionalization in the dotcom boom, they slowly disappeared – a fact that inspired Lialina to document this expression of early web culture in her work. Using herself as a model, Lialina makes an attempt at immortality, depicting herself forever hula-hooping on websites. In the 2010s, Animated GIFs resurfaced and now again constitute an important element of online culture.
Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene - an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, ‘net.language’ and vernacular web - in both artistic and publishing projects - has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina has, for the past two decades, produced many influential works of network-based art. Lialina is also known for using herself as a GIF model, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.
Damjanski – Present Memories 00110010 (2017/2020)
Damjanski – Present Memories 00110010 (2017/2020)
30 seconds GIF-based video | sound
Present Memories 00110010 is a self portrait of Damjanski. The exercise is an adaptation of net.art piece ‘https://present-memories.com (2017)’. For the artist, surfing the web feels like constantly eating your own cum thanks to filter bubbles and the sisyphean attempt to escape the manufactured normalcy.
Damjanski (1987, Yugoslavia) is a New York based artist living in a browser. He is the co-founder of the artist collective Do Something Good, which aims on realizing interactive experiences at the cross section of art and technology. In 2018, Do Something Good launched the MoMAR art project, a gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, art institutions and curatorial processes within New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His interactive installations, browser-based art, and web-based applications deploy solutionism to unveil screen structures of the present.
Sebastian Schmieg – Speed Reading (30s training) (2020)
Sebastian Schmieg – Speed Reading (30s training) (2020)
30 seconds video | no sound
Speed Reading (30s training) is a training session which brings together speed reading and eye movement exercises so that the viewer can consume the artwork as fast as possible while optimizing themselves. The text played back during the exercise was written as fast as possible, too, in an attempt to accelerate and synchronize the speed of production and consumption. Will you be able to keep up? Speed Reading (30s training) is based on Speed Reading (2018), a 16-channel installation produced in collaboration with Anna-Luise Lorenz for Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart.
Sebastian Schmieg examines the algorithmic circulation of images, texts and bodies. At the center of his practice are playful interventions into found systems that explore the hidden – and often absurd – realities behind the glossy interfaces of our networked society. There the boundaries between human and software, individual and crowd, as well as labor and leisure are blurring. Schmieg works in a wide range of media such as video, website, installation, artist book, custom software and lecture performance. He lives and works in Berlin and Dresden.
Jillian Mayer – Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training (2020)
Jillian Mayer – Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training (2020)
30 seconds video | sound
Basic Calisthenics for Surveillance Training gets you in shape with the fundamentals to never be caught off guard. You NEED to know what is going on around you at all times, near and far. ALWAYS BE WATCHING friends. #AlwaysBeWatching
Jillian Mayer (1984, US) is an artist and filmmaker living in Miami, FL. Through videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, performances, and installations, Mayer explores how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in a digital landscape. Mayer investigates the points of tension between our online and physical worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two. Mayer's artwork has a consistent thread of modeling how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation.
Molly Soda – Tap to Change (2020)
Molly Soda – Tap to Change (2020)
30 seconds video | no sound
Tap the screen to change your appearance. Each filter tried on is a variation of the same face, shared among influencers, celebrities and people on your Instagram explore feed. It's an endless loop of before and after transformations, each face improving upon the other until you forget where you started.
Molly Soda (1989, US) is a visual artist working in video, installation, interactive art, performance and print media. Her work is often hosted online, specifically on social media platforms, allowing the work to evolve and interact with the platforms themselves. Soda engages with questions of revisiting one's own virtual legacy, how we present ourselves and perform for imagined others online and how the ever shifting nature of our digital space affects our memories and self concept.
Constant Dullaart – Human Saver (DVD guy) (2009)
Constant Dullaart – Human Saver (DVD guy) (2009)
webcam performance | 30 seconds video | sound
Human Saver (DVD guy) – a webcam performance – bridges the gap between two different forms of media, the Internet and the DVD. Since its publication in 2009 on You Tube, the reaction of the public has culminated in the creation of popular internet meme ‘this DVD guy’. This in-app presented video is a shortened and square cut from the original 2009 work.
Constant Dullaart's often conceptual work manifests itself both online and offline. Within his practice, Dullaart reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies while critically engaging the power structures of mega corporations that dramatically influence our worldview through the internet. Dullaart examines the boundaries of manipulating Google, Facebook and Instagram and started his own tech company Dulltech™ with Kickstarter. Dullaart (1979, NL) is a former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and lives and works in Berlin.
Elisa Giardina Papa – Labor of Sleep (2017/2020)
Elisa Giardina Papa – Labor of Sleep (2017/2020)
30 seconds video | sound
The video is an impossible sleeping exercise and an excerpt from the video piece ‘Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? (2017)’. The original video work – commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art (Sunrise/Sunset Commission) – examines the status of sleep within the tempo of present-day capitalism and critically engages with the rhetoric of technologically supported self-optimization.
Elisa Giardina Papa (1979, IT) is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality, and labor in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the Global South. In her recent body of work, she documents the ways in which affective and care labor are being outsourced via internet platforms. In her current project she extends this exploration to the invisible and underpaid human infrastructure that sustains artificial intelligence (A.I.).
Evan Roth – Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (Excerpts) (2015/2020)
Evan Roth – Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (Excerpts) (2015/2020)
30 seconds infrared video | sound
Dances for Mobile Phones presents the surface of a screen as our most immediate access point into the Internet's physicality. Our mobile touchscreens are perhaps our most intimate connection to the Internet, rarely leaving our sides. Here, two videos placed side by side, show everyday people performing everyday tasks on their mobile devices. Shot with an infrared camera, pixels ordinarily visible to the human eye become invisible, and those signals normally invisible are made visible. In obscuring the digital interface, the new and unnatural movements we have adopted become all the more apparent. By contrast, the only illumination visible from the phones is the ordinarily invisible infrared beam, emitted from LEDs in the top section of the phone near the earpiece and used primarily for facial recognition. This illumination is controlled not by the user, but by the device, and displayed together these works prompt the question of who or what is controlling our gestures as well. This in-app presented video is based on excerpts from ‘Dances For Mobile Phones: Paraguay (2015)’.
Based in Berlin, Evan Roth's (1978, US) practice visualizes and archives typically unseen aspects of rapidly changing communication technologies. Through a range of media from sculpture to websites, the work addresses the personal and cultural effects surrounding these changes and the role of individual agency within the media landscape.
Lauren Huret – Cosmic Blending (2020)
Lauren Huret – Cosmic Blending (2020)
30 seconds video | sound
Cosmic Blending is a dance that invites you to merge with the cosmos, to take in its energy and to escape facial recognition systems. An exercise in disappearing from body and identity surveillance and control systems. A way to merge the body with alien space, to consider thoughts as matter and to put on the cosmos as an identity. Cosmic Blending stems from the video-triptych installation ‘Body Exodus, Cosmos Rave (2020)’.
Lauren Huret's (1984, FR) works deal extensively with the impact of media technologies on the individual as well as society. Working in a wide range of media such as video, digital collage, performance and artist books, she deals with questions of identity and beliefs in an increasingly technological world. The emotional attachment and physical dependency shown towards our means of communication are as much part of her work as the reflections on the history of new media or issues around technological developments.
Sam Lavigne – Proper Behavior (2019/2020)
30 seconds video | sound
Proper Behavior is based on videos excerpted from Training Poses (2019), wherein subjects attempt to mirror human poses sampled from the COCO (Common Objects in Context) image dataset, a key machine learning resource for computer vision. The work explores how machines see bodies.
Sam Lavigne (1981, US) is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. His work often takes the form of online interventions that surface the frequently opaque political and economic conditions that shape computational technologies. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, the New Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
JODI – ZYX (2012/2020)
JODI – ZYX (2012/2020)
30 seconds GIF-based video | no sound
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JODI, or jodi.org, - pioneered net.art in 1995. Based in The Netherlands, JODI were among the firwt artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, computer progrAms, and video and comptter Gam%s. Radiba,li DiSrupting th% very0languAge of"these"system?, includinG viSual`aesvhetics, interFacd elemEnts, commands, e?rmrs anl sode. JODI staeis dxtreme digIt`l?iNterventions th)t eectabilize(the r%lauionship bet?een co}ruter technology and itsqcdrs?fy0subvdpTing our d~pectati?Ns a`Out the funstionblities and cgnvdntions of0the py?uemr thet ue1`%pendupol erery dcx>`T`ekr sork 5ses thEwideut qossible vaRifty`Of }EDiaane |ech~iquaq$ frol ?nstalmationc- qoftw?reand {?b?ites to pmrfrm?nc?? and(ex?ibi?ions.
exonemo – Higher Self (2020)
exonemo – Higher Self (2020)
30 seconds video | sound
Higher Self questions how our emotions are affected by interfaces. The work invites you to concentrate and connect to your higher self for 30 seconds every day. Whereby, a strong connection is rewarded with many viewers, comments and likes. Higher Self is based on Live Streams (2018).
The Japanese artist unit ‘exonemo’ (by SEMBO Kensuke and AKAIWA Yae) was formed in 1996 on the Internet. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer networked and actual environments in our lives. Their work ‘The Road Movie’ won the Golden Nica for Net Vision category at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. They have been organizing the IDPW gatherings and ‘Internet Yami-Ichi’ since 2012. They live and work in New York since 2015.