Carla Gannis, Into the Ether: A Cosmology of the Imaginarium, No. 2, 2021
As an artist, I most often respond to shifts in culture and society through image making. Given this, I collaborated with playform.io to imagine and get a grasp (albeit a surrealistic one) on the invisible "Universe of Ether.” The words ether and etherium are elements from science and science fiction respectively that programmer Vitalik Buterin found inspirational when he was looking for a name to call his newly-developed blockchain and currency. For this image, I trained playform using the Freeform algorithm, on a dataset of images representing ethereum (primarily as a coin or logo). Playform generated hundreds of images "in response" which I downloaded and then began to cut and paste, collage and layer over each other. Constellations and “planets” began to emerge reflexively as I worked in 2D and 3D imaging software. A new universe was born, if only from Playform's "cosmological interpretations" and my imagination.

AI Dreams of Web3: A Playform Studio Exhibition
This collection of artworks was created by members of Playform Studio, a community of artists pioneering new ways of creating art in the age of AI.

This collection is permanently limited to 16 artworks (1 of 1).

About the Artist
Carla Gannis is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces works that consider the uncanny complications between grounded and virtual reality, nature and artifice, science and science fiction in contemporary culture. Fascinated by digital semiotics, Gannis takes a horror vacui approach to her artistic practice, culling inspiration from networked communication, art and literary history, emerging technologies and speculative design.

Gannis’s work has appeared in exhibitions, screenings and internet projects across the globe. Recent projects include “Portraits in Landscape,” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY and “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport. A regular lecturer on digital art and extended reality, in March 2019 Gannis was a speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival on the panel “Human Presence and Humor Make Us Better Storytellers.” Publications who have featured Gannis’s work include The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, El PaÍs and The LA Times, among others. In 2015 her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press.

Gannis holds a BFA and MFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Boston University, respectively. Currently, she is Industry Professor at New York University (NYU) in the Integrated Digital Media Program, Department of Technology, Culture and Society, Tandon School of Engineering. She is also a Year 7 Member of NEW INC, in the XR: Bodies in Space track, New York, NY.
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