Electric Artefacts, an online venue for new media art, has published a list of the top 15 innovative artists. As reported by the magazine Comments, the list includes Stepan Ryabchenko, a Ukrainian media artist who works with such directions as sculpture, conceptual architecture, and light installations.
AIN.UA lists all the artists whom Electric Artefacts named the best in digital art and shows their artworks.
Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)
An extremely talented artist and designer, Mike Winkelmann, best known for producing concert visuals for some of the world’s biggest pop-stars, and for posting a digital artwork online everyday for over a decade.
Beeple has grown a reputation for darkly comic visions that draw on science fiction and the imagery of American media culture.
Jakob Kudsk-Steensen
Kudsk-Steensen is an artist who works in immersive simulation and augmented architecture and uses cutting-edge technologies to explore the biological world.
His 2020 exhibition The Deep Listener, which uses augmented reality to make us take a fresh look at the plants and animals that inhabit the city, can now be viewed in Hyde Park in the United Kingdom.
Karlifetz
The familiar and otherworldly digital creations of the artist nicknamed Karlifetz stunningly combine references to modern pop culture and cyberpunk futurism.
His most exciting animation work hovers somewhere between Mortal Combat and Sin City, all to a soundtrack of Juice Wrld and Lil Uzi Vert.
Keiken
Keiken is a cross-dimensional artistic collective consisting of Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos, and Tania Cruz, whose artworks in the field of speculative fantasy spans installations, films, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
Keiken’s video installation, from which the image above is taken: Metaverse: We are at the End of Something (2020), asks questions about the consequences of unlimited consumerism, the new ubiquity of the digital paradigm, and the changing nature of virtual and physical realities.
Rosa Menkman
While the tradition of glitch art has its roots in Nam June Paik’s early work with video feedback and distortion, exemplified by works such as Magnet TV (1965), the technical advances and the mass accessibility of digital image and video processing tools in the 20th century allowed Rosa Menkman to carve out her niche by revealing the hidden stories behind digital image processing techniques.
Menkman turned her attention to the notion of the resolution, asking “what is it?” and “how does it organize and renders our contemporary cultural imagination?” In A Vernacular of File Formats (2009), the same RAW image file was compressed using different formats, making the same or similar error each time and comparing the resultant images.
Reza Hasni
Working in various media, Hasni’s special talent for projection mapping has been influenced by rave and psychedelic culture.
Reflecting the seamless integration of Eastern and Western spiritual motifs that characterize his work, and the globalist mythologies that are woven into his works of art, Hasni has proven a popular artist in both Europe and Asia.
Stepan Ryabchenko
Stepan Ryabchenko is a leading Ukrainian media artist. His work spans conceptual architecture, sculpture, and light installations.
Ryabchenko’s photographs animated artworks depict alien landscapes inhabited by imagined plants and animals, often inspired by computer viruses.
His Electrical Artifacts series shows otherworldly structures roaming the world of calm oceans and hazy purple skies.
Michael Benisty
Although his sculptures are usually made of steel, they are nonetheless digitally designed and polished to a mirror-like sheen that could be confused with renderings of computer graphics.
When photographed in the Nevada desert, surrounded by steampunk hedonists who reside in Benisty’s favorite exhibition space, the annual Burning Man festival, the sculptures take on a dreamy, ethereal feel reminiscent of the Ryabchenko landscapes we mentioned above.
Léa Porré
Porré’s practice tells alternative histories to unsettle the rhetorics and mythologies of various nationalisms, including French. Porré depicts the return of the French monarchy, the King, and the wellness guru.
The edition, created especially for Vacation at the End of the World, introduces a “new luxury product,” water fit for a King.
Miao Ying
Miao Ying is an artist working at the forefront of contemporary Chinese Internet art. Having grown up in a digital media space protected from the tide of globalism by the great firewall, the Chinese web has developed many socio-technological idiosyncrasies, which Miao manipulates in his art.
On the one hand, the result offers outsiders a glimpse into the digital culture and subcultures that flourish behind the great Chinese firewall, while on the other, it criticizes state censorship practices and argues for a more free and open Internet.
Lu Yang
With a body of work that synthesizes complex and contradictory perceptions of technology, gender, disease, religion, suffering, death, and the human-machine relationship, Yang combines the playful with the macabre in her visual-multimedia art practice.
Inspired by manga, anime, video games, and Eastern polytheism, Lu’s exhibitions are as likely to take place in galleries as in an art museum.
Suzanne Treister
After switching from painting to new media art in the 1990s, Suzanne Triester began experimenting with video games, websites, and augmented reality. Now her work can be experienced in AR.
El Carna
While 2020 saw the meteoric rise of at least two of his colleagues from Ghana working in non-digital media, Amoako Boafo and Kwesi Botchway, El Carna, whose work is just as powerful in terms of its unapologetic treatment of blackness and African identity has proven to be as skilled a businessman as he is an artist.
Thanks to the Internet, his works have proven extremely popular with art fans, so that it can be bought by anyone, whether on canvas or print, as well as on a t-shirt, mug, or phone case.
Kamran Behrouz
Kamran Behrouz draws inspiration from Iran’s artistic traditions and posthuman critical theory. Short films such as Deuterostomia (2020) and An “I” for an Eye (2020) make one think about posthumanism in conversation with the thoughts of scholars such as Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers.
Kang Hee Kim (TinyCactus)
The whimsical and surprising photo collages by Kang Hee Kim, also known by her Instagram name TinyCactus, imagine a world in which any surface or shape found in nature can be a portal to another place.
