“Celebrating Womxn Artists” Featuring Carla Gannis, Anthromorph and More Using Playform’s No-Code AI
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Playform Studio announces Celebrating Womxn’s Artists, a curated selection of Playform users and creators who identify and honor the vital role of womxn in history.
Every year the month of March is designated to honor women’s contributions in American history. Specifically in the Arts, “social conventions limited the training available to women artists, the subjects they could render, and the ways they could market art to patrons for centuries,” according to The National Museum of Women in the Arts. While “gender bias is less overt today, contemporary women artists still face obstacles and disparities.”
At Playform we focused on building AI that fits the creative process of different artists of all types and backgrounds. To help chip away at these disparities and biases in the art world, Playform honors womxn artists and womxn Playform users to build the canon of contemporary and AI art.
Anne Spalter
At the intersection of fine art, algorithmic and digital software, artist Anne Spalter challenges the “Modern Landscape” through AI technology.
Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. With a decades-long goal of integrating art and technology, Spalter has authored over a dozen academic papers and the seminal, internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory. She is on the Digital Art Acquisitions Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
For the digital art component of her mixed media practice, Spalter uses custom software and algorithms to transform both still and video source footage—which she captures in high resolution during multisensory experiences such as riding the Coney Island Cyclone; walking through an open-air flower market in Bangkok; and gazing down from a helicopter over downtown Dubai—into psychedelic, vibrantly rendered “Modern Landscapes.”
“Not knowing what the outcome will be can inspire new creations. Playform gave me new ideas, new inspirations.”
—Anne Spalter
Qinza Najm
Social Activist Artist Qinza Najm explores gender roles and female gaze through artistic practice utilizing AI in “CL-AI-MING SPACE” series.
Qinza Najm is a Pakistani-American artist whose interdisciplinary artistic practice explores gendered violence and female subjectivity. Utilizing performance, video, painting, and other mediums, the artist, originally trained as a psychologist, understands herself as a denizen of the world, using artistic means to create empathy and understanding between societies and cultures in order to address the deepest social traumas.
Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Najm pursued her studies in fine arts at Bath University and The Art Students League of New York. She has exhibited internationally at the Queens Museum (NY), Christie’s Art (Dubai), Art|Basel (Miami, FL), National Museum of China and the Museum of the Moving Image (NY), among others. Her work has been featured in Artnet News, the Huffington Post, the NY Daily News, International Business Week, Buzzfeed, and Herald. She lives and works in New York.
“I started thinking of AI as my studio assistant, but also like a little pet. You develop affection for it, because it surprises you.”
—Qinza Najm
Anthromorph
Mixed media artist Anthromorph explores mythical realms and worlds through AI collaboration.
Through performance and virtual manipulation, mixed media artist Anthromorph challenges the human form and social constructs, which inhibit us from endless possibilities of identity and self-presentation. The artist offers viewers a reality where natural influences like animal patterns, alien textures and forms integrate with human features. Through Playform’s AI capabilities, Anthromorph’s body of work investigates themes of transformative process, metamorphosis and state of becoming.
Previously exhibited at Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada, the artist received a Bachelor’s Degree in 3D Effects in Performance and Fashion from University of the Arts London, UK.
Anthromorph’s latest series "Unnatural Selection: AI Portraits” is the culmination of the artist's month-long residency with Playform. The exhibition is constructed using a hybrid of experimental creative practices by using masks that the artist created, as well as photography and digital manipulation. The end result is 111 selections of AI portraits.
“AI opens a world of infinite design possibilities, drawn and presented to you. It became the perfect tool for experimentation and broadening of concepts. It becomes an infinite mirror of all your inputs.”
—Anthromorph
Katya Grokhovsky
Exploring the new realm of digital multiverse, through collaboration with a fictional AI assistant, Aisa, Katya Grokhovsky discusses her solo exhibition "Guest from the Future” as part of a month-long residency with Playform.
Katya Grokhovsky was born in Ukraine, raised in Australia and is based in NYC. She is an artist, independent curator, educator and a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB). Grokhovsky holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Australia and a BA (Honors) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.
Employing hundreds of web based images of vintage postcards and snapshots of American theme parks, digitally collaged, manipulated and painted, juxtaposed with the artist’s scanned copies of faded hand printed Soviet childhood photos, as well as film stills of a popular 1980’s Soviet Sci Fi teen movie, trained and reassembled through the Playform platform, images from Guest from the Future propose innovative artmaking possibilities.
“I call my experimentation with AI a collaboration, and I view the AI generation process as an assistant.”
—Katya Grokhovsky
Roxy Savage
Interdisciplinary Artist Roxy Savage works with print, digital media, objects and food to explore personal female identity and domestic life.
Daily life has always been the focus of the artit’s work. Following years of creating artwork Savage’s hands, she is employing digital recording tools to log audio and video, creating pieces of “moving time.” Through this process she brackets and embraces ideas about domestic space, blurring the lines between studio and home in layered installations with objects and sound.
Savage’s current work intersects technology with Jell-O, a processed food product. Working with gelatin as an art material is an act of feminist domestic resistance and artistic expansion. By pairing Jell-O with technology the artist is redefining and repurposing an ancient substance made from animal collagen or (plant-based) seaweed. The work is inspired and driven by an underlying love for this gem colored, translucent, porous, alchemic material. Through the invention of an audio responsive vibrating sculpture, she has arrived at a place in time where the “woman’s voice” is literally heard and set in motion.
“Playform’s "Creative Morph" tool brings the magical glow and blur to the work.”
—Roxy Savage
Seda Turec
Digital Animator Seda Turec utilizes her background in engineering and Tattoo design in confab with AI to explore new realms of art.
Seda Turec is a digital animator with a background in engineering and design. She was born in Izmir, Turkey but is truly a global citizen having lived and studied across continents in cities like Paris, Istanbul, and Bangkok. Her artistic background is as diverse as her upbringing and includes experiences in the world of design, technology, engineering, and tattooing. She’s participated in and organized exhibitions and workshops across the world notably in Paris and Istanbul.
Turec takes a holistic approach to her artwork, both in ideation, practice, and medium. Her wide range of experiences across industries and cultures has provided her with a unique approach and perspective to digital art. Her technical background often manifests in her artwork, which is often abstract in nature. She applies multiple forms of thought and intelligence to her creations resulting in multi-faceted style. As a self-proclaimed “math freak,” Turec’s artwork is heavily influenced by geometry.
“Playform gave the Artwork life. Abstract patterns resembling loneliness and being together were uploaded to Playform to create the bridge in between”
—Seda Turec
Noortje Stortelder
Artist Noortje Stortelder utilizes photography and visual design in AI incorporation with Playform
Based in Rotterdam, digital artist Noortje Stortelder explores the human experience. In line with technological developments and due to a lack of resources and studio space she started to experiment with manipulating images from home using photography, film and creative software and this has kept her consistently curious.
"I want to give the viewer a new experience. This experience is based on my own reality and search for life, meaning of existence and purpose on earth. Who am I in relation to time, space and other beings? How do others see themselves and the world?”
“I really feel this as a collaboration, a collaboration with numbers. Where I feel that I am the spectator, waiting for a present.”
—Noortje Stortelder