Town of Trinidad
Trinidad, Colorado
February 2/3, 2024, 6-9 pm
Time to brighten up mid-Winter with In Real Light, IRL: Trinidad, projecting digital art onto the hallowed walls Trinidad, its dynamic Space to Create and nearby surroundings.
Featured Artists
Beeple (United States)
FLUFFF (2018)
Mike Winkelman, professionally known as Beeple, is a graphic designer based in Charleston, South Carolina. Winkelman creates digitally to make artwork that includes short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, “Everydays,” and works of virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR). A native of North Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Beeple began his career by creating widely used free Creative Commons VJ loops that led to concert visuals for pop stars, including Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and others.
Joshua Davis (United States)
“The Deepest of Space” (2020)
New York City-based Joshua Davis has made a career since 1995 as an image maker using programming. He writes his own code to produce user interactions and to generate visual compositions according to rule-based, randomized processes.
Davis was an early web designer. He was introduced to the internet by a design student friend at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied illustration and art history. After a year of illustrating by day and programming by night, cash-strapped Davis was offered a job to write HTML for Pratt’s web site. He dropped out of Pratt in his junior year to work in the new field of design technology.
Nikita Diakur (Germany)
“Fest” (2018)
Nikita Diakur is a Russian-born filmmaker based in Mainz, Germany. He studied animation at the Royal College of Art in London, where he produced “Fly on the Window” that went on to screen at such international film festivals such as Zagreb, Annecy, and Edinburgh. Diakur is now making short films influenced by prominent internet stories that are animated using computer simulation.
Courtney Egan (United States)
“Extinct in the Wild” (2023)
Courtney Egan is a lens-based media artist and naturalist who weaves the tradition of botanical art with sculpture and digital technologies. Strongly inspired by the profusion of native and non-native flora in New Orleans, where she has lived and worked in since 1991, Courtney’s artworks ask broad questions about how human life and the plant world co-evolve.
Egan began presenting nature-themed projected artworks in 2010 with, “Field Recordings,” at Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans. Since then, she has had solo shows with Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Colorado State University Art Museum, and University of Louisiana’s Hilliard Museum. Her group and two-person showings have included exhibits throughout the U.S.
Emilia Forstreuter (Germany)
“Blau” (2017)
Emilia Forstreuter is a freelance graphic and motion designer based in Berlin. A native of Hannover, Germany, she studied Communications Design and Time Based Art at the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany and the University of Dundee in Scotland. After graduating in 2009 her work has been shown in film and other projected art festivals in London, Tokyo, Berlin, Miami, Paris, and elsewhere around the world. Forstreuter, among other notable awards, is a recipient of a Cannes Silver Lion award in the category of design for a brand campaign and actively seeks collaboration of all sorts.
Ian Gouldstone (United Kingdom)
“Anonymous Enemy Procession” 2018
London-based Ian Gouldstone is a founder of the Australian games collective Pachinko Pictures, a former member of the Computational Creativity Group at Goldsmiths, and also the Gesture and Narrative Language Group at the MITMedia Lab. With a mathematics degree from Harvard University he later studied animation at the Royal College of Art and received a Master of Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
Gouldstone is a former trustee of Deptford X, London’s longest-running visual art festival.
A BAFTA-winning artist and filmmaker Gouldstone’s work incorporates games, animation and new media. He has shown at or hosted festivals internationally that include Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach, Florida; LUMA Projections Arts Festival in Binghamton, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Chengdu Biennale in China; The Eden Project in Cornwall, United Kingdom; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne; Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; The National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham, England; The Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and SLEEPCENTER in New York City.
Olga Guse (Germany)
“The Astronaut” (2014)
Born in the Saratov, a city in Southwestern Russia on the banks of the Volga River, Guse’s field of study was Art History. Since 2003, Guse has called Dresden her home. Using “stop motion” to enliven her paintings as a primary medium, Guse has shown or curated works for festivals, exhibitions, and screenings around the world.
Timothy Jeffs (Australia)
“Let Sleeping Pilots Fly” (2023)
Jeffs is an animator based in Melbourne, Australia with an interest in both 2D and 3D animation. He has More than ten years of experience as a 3D animator in the VFX industry, and uses his talent on high-profile film and television projects in Australia and abroad. His personal work draws on two- dimensional animation that often features familiar objects and scenes in untethered contexts. He explores visual ideation by incorporating organic and geometric abstract forms. Jeffs straddles the line between consciousness and improvisation to create a dance between literal and abstract animation.
解像 Kaizou (Japan)
“Emoji and Pixel” (2018)
Kaizou is a media art group based in Tokyo. Consisting of an artist, a designer, and engineers, Kaizou experiments with digital audiovisual media and creates artworks with technologies and computer science theories. “Emoji and Pixel” evokes the use of iconic media (emojis) in contemporary communication (pixels). As the resolution of digital media becomes higher, more refined, Kaizou argues that we don’t recognize the still-fundamental media unit. Kaizou developed Emojineer, software that converts videos to mosaic.
Jonathan McCabe (Australia)
fr_sinet_scroll_B_01 (2018)
Jonathan McCabe is a generative artist living in Canberra, Australia. He currently works as Assistant Curator of Digital Archives at the National Library of Australia. McCabe’s interest in computer art dates to the early 1980’s.
He is fascinated by the ability of natural systems to generate form. In his recent work, he turns toward generating artworks based on a theory of biological pattern formation, such as spots and stripes on tropical fish, as first posited by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1952.
nushypeas (United Kingdom)
“A Love Story” (2019)
Anushka “Nush” Naanayakkara enjoys the soulfulness of the tactile fusion of a narrative with experimental elements for the creation of shorts, music videos, and commercial projects. She holds a master or arts from in Directing Animation from the National Film and Television School, named consistently by the Hollywood Reporter as a Top 15 International Film Schools, in Beaconsfield, England. “A Love Story” was the recipient of a BAFTA award in addition to awards of excellence or achievement at both the Japanese Media Arts Festival and the British Animation Awards. Using texture and patterns to tell stories, Nush explores human relationships and behaviors.
Matt Pearson (aka zenbullets) (United Kingdom)
Frosti (2013)
Matt Pearson refers to himself as a “Maker of abstract things. Author of ‘Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing.” In a 2013 issue of Vice magazine, Pearson “ponders whether we’re entering a new artistic era, one defined by the possibilities of real-time art” in an article titled, “The Third Era of Visual Art Is Finally Upon Us.”
Robert Seidel (Germany)
“Sfumato” (2021)
Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel is pushes boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as those drawn from science and technology. By the organic interplay of various structural, spatial and temporal concepts, he creates a continuously evolving complexity. Out of this multifaceted perspective emerges a narrative skeleton, through which viewers connect to the artwork on an evolutionary-derived and phylogenetic-fixated symbolic level. His projections, installations and experimental films have been shown in numerous international festivals, as well as at galleries and museums such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Center Nabi Seoul, Young Projects Los Angeles, Museum of Image and Sound São Paulo and MOCA Taipei. His films have been honored with various prizes, including the KunstFilmBiennale Honorary Award and the Visual Music Award.
Balázs Simon (United Kingdom)
Leon Lour – All Our Dreams (2018)
Hungarian-born, Balázs Simon, refers to himself as a yogurt inhaling, music noob who’s a cold-weather enthusiast. London based, the artist’s body of work operates in the language of feeling through cinema and film craft, both in camera and VFX. Simon has received global recognition for several music videos over years that have ranged from nominations at SXSW to the UK Video Music Awards for his music video for German musician, composer, and producer, Nils Frahms. Noisey, Music by VICE, described Simon’s elegant film as the backdrip to Frahms’ “re” as “an animated slow-motion dream.” A member of the blinkink team of creatives, Simon also took home a prize at the 1.4 Awards for the animation and production of “Heart Attack” for Electronic Powerhouse, Bronson. Most recently, Simon has dipped his into the world of live action and directed David Guetta’s music video, “Save my Life.”
Tout Court (France)
Reulf (2016)
Literally translated “Tout Court” means short: figuratively, it means simply, with no addition or qualification. In the case of Charles Klipfel, Quentin Carnicelli, and Jean-François Jégo, Tout Court’s collaborators, they combine the best of both definitions for the creation of short animated films that are delivered simply and pointedly. Their landing page on Vimeo says it all, “We love to make short films.”
Joel Swanson (United States)
WebColorBubbleSort (2022)
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Swanson is an Associate Professor in the ATLAS Institute and the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at the University of Colorado Boulder. There, he works and teaches at the intersection of language and technology. Swanson directs the TYPO Lab, a speculative design lab that explores critical commonalities between text and technology. He received his Master of Fine Art at the University of California, San Diego, where his focus was Computing and the Arts.
Danny Upshaw (United States)
Unheard Sigh (2023)
Graphic design and videography may be Danny Upshaw’s day job, but he’s a photographer first. Born and based in Phoenix and a member of the Navajo Tribe, Upshaw can often be found biking around Downtown either chasing storms, designing photoshoots with friends, or immortalizing the soaring Westward Ho—always with the goal of documenting the city he loves. His photographs range from the contemplative to the awe-inspiring, the subdued to the positively electric. Upshaw, whose work was recently featured on the latest cover of PHOENIX Magazine, originally studied architecture, an interest that continues to drive his work today.
Wintergatan (Sweden)
Marble Machine (2016)
Wintergatan is a Swedish music group known for its unique blend of electronic, folk (folktronica), and experimental music. It is characterized by a fusion of acoustic and digital instruments with a strong emphasis on melody and intricate arrangements. The group was formed in 2012 by Martin Molin, a talented musician and inventor, in Gothenburg, Sweden.
