2012 original production, recut and structured in 2019. 16-minute-30-second 3D animated loop; Dark kNight, is Hart's response to Christopher Nolan's 2012 film, "The Dark Knight Rises," depicting the attempt of one of her avatars to break free of the simulated world behind the screen. With "Dark kNight" (spelling intentional), Hart began a personal migration out of the sanctuary cocoon of her earlier automatons. She represents the attempt of this defiant one to break free of the simulated world behind the screen, and describes it as a story about creativity and regeneration.

The popular Christopher Nolan "Dark Knight Rises," is a film about escape from imprisonment and the powers that deem who is and isn't to be imprisoned. With the film's two highly independent, physically athletic and defiant female characters, both of whom have escaped their own entrapments, Hart was immediately prompted to envision her own restless, racially-hybrid female avatar trying out various strategies to escape virtuality. In the video we see her hurling herself against the screen; swinging from her feet by a rope and hitting the screen full body; catapulting like a human cannonball into the screen; and as seen here, swinging with a rope by her hands and hitting the screen with her feet--all seen at various speeds. Hart claims the mythological source for the figure, besides Nolan's Batman, is the chained Prometheus, bound by the Olympian gods for bringing fire to humankind as well as Michaelangelo's "Dying Captives," who appear to struggle in their efforts to release themselves from their prisons of stone.

Details

Large Acrylic: 5.8 x 8.4 x 1 inches
Comes with US plug and custom cable

Artist Bio:

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation. Since the late 90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart embraced these same concepts, but now focusing on the impact of computing and simulations technologies. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a Professor, she developed a pedagogic program based on her practice - Experimental 3D - the first dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in an art-school context.

Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Vera List Center Collection,The Borusan Contemporary Collection, The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Collection, the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, The Goetz Collection,The New York Public Library, the Addison Gallery of American Arts, Andover, MA, Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection, and many other private collections . Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14, and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, UC California, Berkeley where she is currently a fellow.

Loop Duration
16m 30s