Digital Artist Carla Gannis Uses Playform in VR Experience “peep-o-rama”
Digital artist and early adopter of Playform Carla Gannis debuts latest VR sculpture “peep-o-rama” in new exhibit from Feral File. According to the Curator’s note by Julie Walsh, “the exhibit examines, 1) the real and (un)real in digital sculpture; 2) questions about what it means to view and collect digital sculptures; and 3) the role of NFTs in the creation of the feature artists’ work.
June 3rd, 2021
As written on for the exhibition, “Carla Gannis’s ‘peep-o-rama’ playfully examines what it has meant to gaze at a sculpture throughout the canon of art history. Inspired by one of Gannis’ vivid dreams, the piece was further informed by the Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) peep box show at the National Gallery in London. To create the colors and forms in the peep box backgrounds, she trained an AI (Playform) using images from Times Square pornographic peepshows (to inform the colors) and images from Dutch painting (to inform the structures).” After a collector has purchased the work, they have access inside the peep box through a variety of unique experiences, including a view single-person VR view (which allows you to visit inside the peep box itself), and a social VR version where you can hang out with your friends in a space-age bachelorette pad.. “peep-o-rama” explores ideas on the spectacle of voyeurism, gender and the body in art history, and the ways which technology determines new ways of seeing.
Playform’s Studio Director Mirabelle Alan sat down with Carla Gannis to discuss “peep-o-rama” and her use of Playform in the creation of this work.
Mirabelle: Can you walk me through the work and what it means to you?
Carla: When I was first invited to participate in the show in early January, blockchain and NFTs were not part of our everyday conversation like they are now. There was one premise to the show, that it would be about questions of reality and how digital artists think about "realness" when they're working with mediums that seem completely immaterial, like pixels and code. That was a really exciting provocation, to stake a claim on the realness of my art, but I was also excited to participate, because the feral file platform offers works in their exhibitions for sale as Bitmark NFTs. Thinking about this distribution model made me reflect on how so many digital artists, including myself, have had trouble "legitimizing" our work, as Art, in the past. Addressing issues of what is reality, what is sculpture, what is art essentially in the twenty-first century, dovetails into the conversation about NFTs where it’s a contract, an algorithm, a virtual block of code that can potentially shift some of our attitudes about art.
M: And was there something that inspired you to create this work?
C: I had a dream that inspired this work. At first, I didn’t know where I was or what the context was, but I was looking through a peephole. It was this fantastical, weird space. Then I realized I, myself, was inside a box, and so from that abstract dream I started formulating this idea of the peep box. Earlier in my art practice, I actually used to make physical peep boxes. I would take apart jewelry boxes with the windup ballerina and turn them into peep sculptures. So, I landed on the box, and I began to think about the idea of surveillance culture as it relates to the history of peep boxes; through my research I found throughout the world there was this emergence of different forms of peeping. In bringing this concept into today’s "reality", I began to think about digital surveillance. We’re online all the time, and we’re constantly being surveilled, our data is being tracked, and so I wanted to subvert the sense of being the voyeur through the VR part of the work; an inversion, where the viewer becomes the inhabitant of the peep box in virtual space (our real positionality in surveilled society).
M: You trained Playform AI with images of Times Square pornographic imagery to inform the colors of the peep box, and Dutch paintings to inform the configurations within it. Can you speak more on your use of Playform in your bodies of work?
C: Working with Playform became very important. Over the past few years, I’ve almost always incorporated Playform and AI into some aspect of my work and for me that is a metaphor for the nature of our world today, whether it’s visible or not, our day-to-day existence is informed by machine learning algorithms and AI. It’s become part of the fabric of life today, so why would it not be part of the fabric of my art? After that dream I had, I came across the seventeenth century Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten. There’s a whole tradition of classical Dutch paintings involving domestic interiors, and quite often a woman is the focal point. In the Hoogstraten there's a woman in the very back room with a man at the door looking in at her. Subtle, erotic undertones seem to permeate the scene, but the act of peeping here is still "polite and respectable," and the artist seems more compelled by the optical illusion he is creating, than pure objectification of the female in her domestic sphere. Running concurrently throughout history is the more illicit act of peeping, and from here peep theater emerges and finds its full form as spectacle and exploitation in the twentieth century Times Square peep show, particularly exploitative of those who are female-identified. Both forms of peeping, whether they are considered highbrow or low, involve spectacle and suggest that peeping is an act that is hard for us curious humans to resist. I worked with Playform to mash up these different contexts and histories into colorful tapestries that I could layer over my peep construction. The walls, floors, ceilings, and various post-human characters, including a "robot angel" and a post-human cyborg female, are all texture-mapped with the patterns of human voyeurism, suggesting that peeping will continue long into our digital future.
M: And so what did your artistic process look like while making this work?
C: I initially looked at a ton of different pictures of Hoogstraten’s peep box from the National Gallery, in London. What is really fascinating about the piece is how he employed optical illusion through trompe l’oeil techniques and the placement of the peepholes on the box. When you look at it from the open side, everything is completely distorted, "unreal" or even, "surreal" looking, but viewed through one of the peepholes, everything comes into perspective. It appears to be a life-like "real" interior of a multi-roomed house. So, that was my initial jumping off point. From there I began constructing the peep box as a 3D model and texture mapping it based on Hoogstraten’s piece. I also started building out the two-dimensional scene in the Hoogstraten as a 3D environment, so I took different cues from his work that I then expanded into dimensional architecture. But I wanted to do more than copy and simulate, I wanted to explode the concept, branch out from the original and see what happened when through my collaboration with Playform, the diverse histories and politics of "peeping culture" got imagistically mixed together.
M: What does incorporating AI into your work mean for you?
C: I studied oil painting for a long time. I have two degrees in painting, but after moving to New York way back in the 90s, I began to reconsider my arts practice. A lot of this had to do with exposure, meeting artists who were working with computers and pixels instead of paintbrushes and pigment. I wanted to be an artist of my own time, and for me that meant using the tools of my time and visually communicating with digital language. When you decide to make a choice like that particularly in the digital age, that means that you’re constantly developing and evolving, and Playform AI just seemed to be a natural addition to my studio practice.