Art as teleportation via the internet

I’ve recently moved from London to Saigon, and last night I phoned my grandmother to let her know all is well here. When I told her I was phoning from my computer via the internet, my nan, who has never used a computer, was  amazed that technology could do such things. Imagine if we’d used video-link! Her sense of wonder is not out of place. I can safely say that computer literate people also find intercontinental links heart-warmingly extraordinary!

Artist Mariele Neudecker has expressed a fascination for the ability to create art in multiple locations simultaneously, via the internet.

‘Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived’ (2000) is her sculpture of a stretched skull based on the skull in Holbein’s 1533 painting ‘The Ambassadors.’

Holbein’s large canvas is wonderous, so perfect and full of detail, but with that mysterious shape hovering in front of us. Oh, I wish I’d gone to see it one more time before I left London. At least I did visit my revered Carlo Crivelli’s next door… There are so many great things to see in life!

Mariele Neudecker, in awe as the rest of us with Holbein’s floating metaphor, created a 3D digital image of the skull, and the file was used to machine-carve it out of resin. ‘The stereo lithography machine cut that 3 dimensional, virtual object out into resin,’ she says of the new technology, which she sees as ‘a kind of a forerunner of teleportation, I suppose, because in theory, you could have a computer sitting in Cardiff and send all the information and data down to Australia, and have the machine cut out exactly the same object. You can put any object, any three dimensional object, from the computer into reality’

Mariele Neudecker, 2002

#Inspiration #NewMedia #WomenArtists #Sculpture #Collaboration