Portal, 2023

Animated GIF / NFT and poster (53.5 x 42 cm, 170 g/m² paper Iona Art)
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This hybrid work encompasses an NFT — a digital moving image work produced with input from AI algorithms alongside hand-drawn digital elements and digital collage — and a physical art poster edition of the digital hand drawing. In this way, the piece fully integrates digital and analogue elements, highlighting the dissolution of the digital/physical dichotomy in this post-internet age.

The project was commissioned by the German newspaper WELT AM SONNTAG and developed in collaboration with Office Impart for the 75th-anniversary edition of WELT AM SONNTAG. It’s an ideal combination as WELT AM SONNTAG is part of the 360 degree media brand WELT producing digital as well as printed and thus physical news and the media industry in total undergoes a huge transformation lead by AI.

Gretta Louw, Portal, 2023. Poster (53.5 x 42 cm, 170 g/m² paper Iona Art).

The approach, fusing old and new technologies, is indicative of Louw’s practice, which typically utilises notionally ‘opposite’ strategies of algorithmic and digital processes on the one hand and a range of traditional textile, embroidery, and painting techniques on the other. Thus unifying art, craft, and tech methodologies, Louw’s work examines the overlapping impacts of technologies on society, culture, and environments.

The new hybrid NFT and poster edition Portal explores the passage of time and how our experience of it can be disrupted or dislocated by sudden, profound transformations in technological, political, or environmental landscapes. In Louw’s thinking, portals exist around us at any given time, representing radical shifts in the material fabric of the lived experience. Functional wormholes, they transport us from one reality — one state of being or understanding — to another.

Portals are antithetical to any notions of a clear path forward, or chronological, objective ideas of ‘progress’. Rather, they are connections between moments of possibility and parallel paths that are networked together in a quantum formation. They are interfaces between the past/present and myriad futures; they shunt us from one pathway to another, disrupting our sense of continuous, chronological momentum.

Using a portal, or even recognising one, requires us to let go of ideas of linear logic and categorisable hierarchies of knowledge. Portals require us to relearn thinking in a way that is both futuristic (quantum) and ancient (cosmological).

On another plane, portals can show us the throughlines between vast, complex, seemingly disparate systems; the entanglements between nature, culture, and technology. This is a form of tentacular thinking, both in the way that it expands, connects, and grasps, but also in the sense that it embodies thinking in a multifaceted/multi-limbed manner; a gestalt; something more than the tyranny of centralised (Cartesian) intelligence.