CLAUDIA HART

ARTIST

VOICES OF WEB3 is an archive of voices and statements summarising the year 2023 in digital art and culture. It is a document in time on the blockchain, bringing together some of the leading voices shaping Web3 and the history of digital art: artists, curators, and collectors.
THE VOICE GEMS The statements have been recorded in the form of spoken word, poems, and songs by the contributors and are frozen in time as VOICE GEMS on the blockchain. The VOICE GEMS were created by Harry Yeff (Reeps100) and Trung Bao, who have developed a voice-centred generative system utilizing data found in a human voice to synthesise the form and colour of the artwork.
Every voice is unique, and with that comes unique fingerprint-like data. Features like pitch, resonance, harmonics, and pace sculpt particle data points in a simulated digital space. View on <a href="https://opensea.io/collection/voices-of-web3-the-archive">OpenSea</a>.

VOICES OF WEB3 | THE ARCHIVE 2023

MORE VOICES OF WEB3

A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI by Claudia Hart was initially written and illustrated by the artist in 1995, inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, THE PRINCE, the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and a small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio, at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin in 1995.
The catalog was eventually released as an expanded hardcover by Penguin USA in 1998, along with German and French editions.
While keeping to the meaning of the original, Hart rewrote THE PRINCE, reflecting street values and the voice of youth culture, as if Machiavelli’s book, meant to advise kings on seizing power, was a primer to teach good manners to small children.
In 2019, Beatrice Books, a small experimental publisher, reissued A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI as a more contemporary book. At that time, Hart discovered among her files a series of Flash animations created for an ebook, the early 21st-century digital format that had long since disappeared, initiated by the production company Flicker Labs in 2010.
In 2022, at the height of the crypto bubble, she realized her old Flash animations could now be opened, so she transformed her technological castaways into NFTs. The animations were narrated by Hart using vocal recordings made in 2010, including sound effects and background music. With that last transformation, she ultimately produced animations that are brutal but true insights, standing as reminders that while technologies may come and go, human frailties remain the same.
<meta charset="utf-8">"We are obviously in a period of cultural crisis, with the world slipping into autocracies, war in Ukraine, and democracy dramatically destabilising in the USA. Social media is used to spread misinformation and engender fear and terror in order to manipulate the populace. The little mottos that I wrote in the early nineties are more relevant now than ever. They seem to be pointedly directed at the cultural and political world of today. Yet when I wrote them, I felt that I was translating Machiavelli’s early 16th-century text into the politics of that time."
– Claudia Hart, June 2023

CLAUDIA HART | A CHILD'S MACHIAVELLI | NFTS

EXPANDED.ART is delighted to present the solo exhibition MY TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY by Claudia Hart in collaboration with Annka Kultys Gallery on view in London and online. Curated by Annka Kultys and Anika Meier, the exhibition showcases seven video projects that span two decades of the artist’s creative output. 
The seven videos on view showcase Hart's extensive digital art practice, highlighting her prolific use of simulation technologies such as augmented reality, animation, and printed sculptures. Her work delves into philosophical themes, exploring time, history, and human desire. Created between 1998 and 2019, these artworks provide an intimate glimpse into Hart's personal voice. 
Hart's artworks are showcased and collected by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Albertina Museum, The Carl &amp; Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection, the Spalter Digital Art Collection, and The New York Public Library. She has exhibited at the New Museum, created projects at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, and is currently a fellow at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC California, Berkeley.

CLAUDIA HART | MY TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

Short Season

A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI: THE BEGINNING A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was initially written and illustrated by Claudia Hart in 1995. It was inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, THE PRINCE, the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and a small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin.
A CHILD'S MACHIAVELLI: THE BOOK In the bookstore of NGBK, Hart fell in love with Comix, a back then radical form of comic books that filled one of their shelves. She read them, fascinated. There was no such thing as a graphic novel in those days. MAUS by Art Spiegelman, the Comix masterpiece, had just been released. Hart would stand around the NGBK bookstore, reading MAUS and other related works.
"I was a figurative artist interested in historical paintings, not comic books. Nevertheless, I was inspired," Hart says.
Her response was A CHILD'S MACHIAVELLI, born as a series of 31 oil paintings, where she rewrote the Renaissance treatise by Niccolo Machiavelli as a children’s book, speaking in the youth-speak of her time. She was reflecting on the real estate and cultural war taking place in the early 1990s in Berlin. Her aphorisms focused on the workings of power. But the strategy was the same as for all of the other works she has produced since the beginning: text combined with images. It is a series of aphorisms in an illustrated book that does not need to be read in order. Each painting was a unique piece that could be combined in any order. The book has proven prescient, prefiguring the brutal tenor of contemporary US public discourse.
WORLDWIDE RECOGNITION The catalog was eventually released as an expanded hardcover by Penguin Edition USA in 1998. In addition, there was a Nautilus Edition German version published in 1996, and an Abbeville Press French edition published in 1998. At that time, Hart reinterpreted the oil paintings to produce the series of gouache paintings on paper exhibited at EXPANDED.ART.
Hart’s approach was typical of the 1990s art world. Mimicking the visuals of a picture book, she appropriated 1920s children’s illustrations known for their sugary sweetness. The irony and twisted humor of A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI are derived from its combination of opposites: the saccharine speech of kid’s books and the unvarnished reality of American politics. The book went out of print in 2000 but continues to be traded on the second-hand book market.
In 2019, Beatrice Books, a small experimental publisher, reissued A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI as a more contemporary book. At that time, Hart discovered among her files a series of Flash animations created for an ebook, the early 21st-century digital format that had long since disappeared, initiated by the production company Flicker Labs in 2010.
CLAUDIA HART ABOUT A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI "We are obviously in a period of cultural crisis, with the world slipping into autocracies, war in the Ukraine, and democracy dramatically destabilized in the USA. Social media is used to spread misinformation and engender fear and terror in order to manipulate the populace.
The little mottos that I wrote in the early nineties are more relevant now than ever. They seem to be pointedly directed at the cultural and political world of today. Yet when I wrote them, I felt that I was translating Machiavelli’s early 16th-century text into the politics of that time."
– Claudia Hart, June 2023
<quillbot-extension-portal></quillbot-extension-portal>

Only give things away when people are watching

MORE FROM THIS ARTIST

Claudia Hart is one of the most well-known female pioneers of digital art, with a career that began in the early 1990s. Starting by defining all that photography was not, the New York-based artist reimagined image-making in the early days of virtual reality. She pioneered what are now ubiquitous technologies: 3D rendering, printed sculptures, and virtual and augmented realities.

Hart’s influence on contemporary digital art is substantial. Her work is in prestigious collections and exhibitions such as, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the THOMA Foundation, and is the cover image of Christiane Paul’s fourth edition of DIGITAL ART, published in May 2023. The book is considered to be the canon of digital art history.

DIGITAL ART HISTORY AND POST-PHOTOGRAPHY

CLAUDIA HART: "I AM NOT A FUTURIST", CONVERSATION WITH ANIKA MEIER PART I

Claudia Hart wrote her way into visual art. Leveraging her positions at ID and later at ARTFORUM, Hart took the opportunity to explore the obscure corners of design and contemporary art and became obsessed. Her obsession led to her curating an exhibition in 1984 about art and design crossover, an impulse that then swept the art scene. It was called HOUSE ON THE BORDERLINE, and was staged at White Columns, New York's oldest alternative non-profit space. The artists, curators, and writers she met—from the gallerist Holly Solomon to artists Dan Graham and Ericka Beckman—guided her. Hart's explorations led her to rediscover herself as an artist using multiple mediums, from the decorative arts to painting and animation. 

In the mid-1990s, Hart saw the movie TOY STORY at the Berlin Film Festival. It inspired her to animate A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI (Penguin Edition, 1996), her most well-known illustrated book. This piece has lasting relevance. First because of its profound human theme—political strategy and the will to power—but also because the artist translated her version of Niccolò Machiavelli's Renaissance treatise THE PRINCE from one new technology into the next over the course of thirty years. 


CULTURE WARS AND ANIMATIONS

CLAUDIA HART: MIND AND BODY, CONVERSATION WITH ANIKA MEIER PART II

With a background in architecture and writing, Claudia Hart came into the spotlight in the 1990s as a multimedia artist  interested in investigating themes of representation and identity. Hart integrates subjects from art history, philosophy, and cultural studies to examine themes of feminism, embodiment, and temporality through symbolic poetics that embroider onto real-world politics. She does this by drawing on computing, virtual imaging, and 3D animation technologies. No matter the medium, Hart has made a name for herself by creating uncanny, mesmerising images.

In the third and final of three conversations with Anika Meier for EXPANDED.ART, Hart speaks about her journey from painting to animation, virtual reality, and NFTs; her background in architecture and its influence on her practise of creating uncanny images; and how Hart, as an artist of our time, sees the present.

UNCANNY IMAGES AND SIMULATIONS

CLAUDIA HART: ON VISION AND THE VISIONARY, CONVERSATION WITH ANIKA MEIER PART III

Herbert W. Franke first encountered Harry Yeff’s work in Linz in the summer of 2021. Both were part of the exhibition PROOF OF ART at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the first museum to tell the brief history of NFTs. Franke, who was also a caver and rock collector, became interested in Harry Yeff and Trung Bao's work, VOICE GEMS, and soon a collaboration emerged: Yeff asked about the potential of using Franke's voice in an audio-visual production, and Franke responded by sending one of his voice gems, which is a vocal work of art in itself. 

In conversation with Anika Meier, Susanne Päch, the wife of Herbert W. Franke, Harry Yeff, and Trung Bao talk about the collaboration that began in 2021. Päch, who today heads the art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke and lived with the artist and scientist for 40 years, also tells more about Franke's fascination with stones and what this has to do with the beginning of his artistic career.

The Beauty of Nature and An Archive of Voices

"YOUR VOICE IS YOUR IDENTITY"

MAGAZINE

VOICES OF WEB3 is an archive of voices and statements summing up the year 2023 in digital art and culture. It is a document in time on the blockchain bringing together some of the leading voices shaping Web3 and the history of digital art.

THE ARCHIVE 2023

VOICES OF WEB3 | GALLERY

EXHIBITION

Do not miss this and save in your calendar:

Voices of Web3

VOICE GEMS x Claudia Hart

ARTIST

MORE VOICES OF WEB3

MORE FROM THIS ARTIST

MAGAZINE

EXHIBITION