UPSTRE AM FOCUS
TABOR ROBAK
MARCH 31 — APRIL 9 2021
UPSTREAM FOCUS Upstream Gallery presents a new series of Upstream Focus exhibitions in its private viewing space. In this series of short exhibitions, we highlight a single (series of) work by one of our artists. Between 31 March - 9 April 2021 we present Lights Out, a procedurally generated software piece by Tabor Robak.
Tabor Robak’s work employs computer generated imaging to create videos of invented worlds. Working in programs including Unity, After Effects, Photoshop and Cinema 4D, the artist explores a secondary, digital reality, rendered in what he refers to as a “Photoshop tutorial aesthetic” or a “desktop screensaver aesthetic.” His meticulously produced and filmed environments are cobbled together from sources both sampled and handmodeled. The works are appropriative, both in their subject matter and aesthetic, using elements purchased and then edited for his purposes. They adopt the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games in order to isolate and comment upon digital space as an abstract fact, while simultaneously pushing up against the increasingly tenuous separation between perceptions of the digital and the real. Lights Out is part of a series of single channel, 4K generative animation works. The computer-generated imagery (CGI) is as such quantified through the color spectrum, a common practice in the likes of videogames, comic books and cartoons, as well as other works looking for universe creation.
With this series, Robak synthesizes two of his practice’s previously separate conceptual threads: the acknowledgement and exploration of digital space as a discrete, secondary reality, and the possibility of creating a temporally boundless artwork through programming. The works’ settings have real-world referents, but repeatedly break the rules that would govern those actual physical spaces; watching an apparently unending hallway, or a room collapse into itself, the viewer is confronted with the isolated fact of the medium, its elasticity and neoteric singularity. Because the pieces’ visual content is determined in real-time by the artist’s custom-written programs, they appear constantly in the process of constructing themselves. This profound ephemerality is poignant and thrilling, and unique to the artist’s modern medium. You can see a preview of Lights Out here. Use ‘preview’ as the password to view it.
Lights Out, 2017 single channel, 4K generative animation, custom PC, original software infinite duration, dimensions variable
VIDEO PREVIEW password: preview
Lights Out, 2017 single channel, 4K generative animation, custom PC, original software infinite duration, dimensions variable
VIDEO PREVIEW password: preview
Tabor Robak has been recognized for his intricate, animated digital works, so detailed and meticulously constructed that they took months to compose. For his virtuoso computer work rendered in excruciating, hyper-real detail, he has been called the Michelangelo of digital art, or, ‘Pixelangelo’. Robak lives and works in New York. Selected (group) exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; the 12th Lyon Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA: PS1, New York; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Palazzo delle Esponizioni, Rome; Kunsthal Rotterdam and Team Gallery New York. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; The Hugo Brown Family Collection, The Hague; KRC Collection, Amsterdam; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Turin; Migros Museum, Zurich; and the Yuz Collection, Shanghai. The work of Tabor Robak has been reviewed in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art Observed, Modern Painters, Interview and Mousse.
TABOR ROBAK AT THE NGV TRIENNIAL 2020 IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Megafauna 2020 is a new work by Tabor Robak, which takes the form of an immersive installation spreading across a whole gallery space. Commissioned and acquired for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Collection, Megafauna is a group of computergenerated animations that surrounds the viewer on video screens and projections.
images, feels like a sacred space or a monument.
Numerous highly detailed digital sculptures – called Magi – glow in the darkened space. On the floor a digital projection responds to our movement, and before us is a glowing control console. The imagery in Megafauna is visually derived from micro-biology, advanced robotics, data storage, and sacred iconography. The installation, lit by the light of these numerous digital
Megafauna is about the mythology of AI and advanced technology, exploring the god-like importance we place on it in our present trajectory as a society. The work explores the ethical and philosophical implications of our attitude to technology.feels like a sacred space or a monument.
Moving constantly on the screens of the Magi are animated forms – part-organic, part-machine – that recall the technologies that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is most likely to emerge from: geoimaging and cartography, military science and weaponisation, banking and healthcare.
Experience the installation virtually here.
FURTHER READING Tabor Robak interviewed by Arttuner, see here Tabor Robak interviewed by Cecilia Alemani, see here Tabor Robak interviewed by Ssense, see here Tabor Robak in The New York Times, see here & here Artist website, here Artist CV, here
Kloveniersburgwal 95 1011 KB Amsterdam t. +31 (0)20 4284284 e. info@upstreamgallery.nl