GIRL+BOY AVATAR from ALICE UNCHAINED by Claudia Hart is released as a PIONEER GRAIL on the occasion of the artist‘s solo exhibitions at EXPANDED.ART in Berlin and at Annka Kultys Gallery in London to celebrate and share her visionary spirit.

GIRL+BOY AVATAR is on the cover of the fourth edition of DIGITAL ART (Thames and Hudson) written by Christiane Paul, Curator of New Media at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Paul’s book is considered to be the canon of digital art history; the first edition was published in 2003, the fourth edition in May 2023.

The image, a scene from ALICE UNCHAINED, portrays Hart’s gender-fluid avatar performing in the FLOWER MATRIX, her personal interpretation of Alice’s Wonderland: an endless labyrinth from which there is no escape. Hart covers the wall of her matrix with emojis using the addictive symbols of casino capitalism and computer languages, both sweet and disturbing. GIRL+BOY AVATAR is a metaphor for contemporary life in the age of the metaverse as Hart imagined it in the year 2018.

Hart’s ALICE UNCHAINED is a 3-channel animation and interactive virtual reality world. It was inspired by the technology theorist Donna Haraway. She imagined a Utopian future in her A CYBORG MANIFESTO in which advanced bio-technologies would liberate human culture from the constraints of gender binaries. In response, Hart directed and motion-captured professional wrestler Isaias Velazquez and choreographer-dancer Kristina Isabelle, mixing their movements together to create a singular, cyborg ballet performed by a gender-fluid avatar. This adds up to a new chamber music experience, one strangely referential to the 19th-century salon for chamber music. Lewis Caroll wrote the original ALICE IN WONDERLAND in 1868. ALICE UNCHAINED exists in a realm between the real and the digital, in neither time nor space.

ALICE UNCHAINED is a virtual chamber for chamber music consisting of a cyborg performance rendered in three virtual cameras and a VR experience. It is the third work created by Hart that is loosely inspired by ALICE IN WONDERLAND. The work includes music by the composer Edmund Campion. It mashes 3D animation, motion-captured live performance, and music performed by living musicians. Their sound is computer analyzed and reinterpreted in real-time. It feeds-back the virtual and the live, blending them together in a liminal, uncanny mix.

ALICE UNCHAINED is the first mixed-reality piece–including a headset VR–purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It inspired generations of younger mixed-reality artists and world-builders that worked directly with Hart as a professor. She developed a program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: EXPERIMENTAL 3D. Her intention was to expand contemporary installation-based practice into the realm of post-photography simulations, from 3D animation to VR, AR, and sculpture produced with 3D printing and other computer-driven tools. The students in classes such as her Basic Course (inspired by the Bauhaus original), Virtual Installation, Digital Bodies, Atmospheric Animation, among others, moved generations of future artists and world builders–including Sophie Kahn, Katie Torn, Sara Ludy, and Mitchell F Chan–that went on to move contemporary art in a new direction.

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