Live | Verse

JAN 15

50 artworks

The mid-grey chiseled computer interfaces of the late nineties tend to evoke early sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique arcing all the way back to stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art. By carving into a flat surface, the play of shadow and light holds strangely between drawing and sculpture. – Flat and three dimensional at the same time, the bas-relief is an art discipline on its own. Skipping past the more elaborate reliefs found in classical traditions around the world, this discipline takes a wondrous turn with chiaroscuro grisailles. Painted using only grayscale tones, these faux three-dimensional surface sculptures are created by only using highlights and shadows in paint. It is this bridge that leads to the early computer interface, like an expanded grisaille, hyper-charged with interactivity and live procedurality. A double flattening of perception, brimming with its own reality. Both practices wish to be in two places at the same time, making the bas-relief appear destined for the computer interface: existing in a space of illusion, but also right here at our fingertips. Similar to the most ancient uses of bas-relief, communicating early language in stone walls and tablets, these Bas-relief works are also scribed with coded shapes. Their boxes represent the language of data behind their making – programmatic code that allows humans and machines to communicate. The concentric shapes, columnar and tabular layouts, and interactive boolean states are presented as artifacts of digital language in a form like ancient tablets. These works immortalize this era for cultures looking back thousands of years from now, curious about the computer age and basic units of communication during this time. Bas-relief, by Jan Robert Leegte, is a dedication to this long history leading to the computer interface, and an offering for millennia to come. — Bas-relief, 2024  An engraving, a drawing and an interface. These digital works are available directly from the Bas-relief algorithm, and are specifically chosen by initial collectors using the seed generator.

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DEC 17

Jan Robert Leegte

Bas-Relief: Artist Proofs

6 artworks

Heft

The mid-grey chiseled computer interfaces of the late nineties tend to evoke early sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique arcing all the way back to stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art. By carving into a flat surface, the play of shadow and light holds strangely between drawing and sculpture. – Flat and three dimensional at the same time, the bas-relief is an art discipline on its own. Skipping past the more elaborate reliefs found in classical traditions around the world, this discipline takes a wondrous turn with chiaroscuro grisailles. Painted using only grayscale tones, these faux three-dimensional surface sculptures are created by only using highlights and shadows in paint. It is this bridge that leads to the early computer interface, like an expanded grisaille, hyper-charged with interactivity and live procedurality. A double flattening of perception, brimming with its own reality. Both practices wish to be in two places at the same time, making the bas-relief appear destined for the computer interface: existing in a space of illusion, but also right here at our fingertips. Similar to the most ancient uses of bas-relief, communicating early language in stone walls and tablets, these Bas-relief works are also scribed with coded shapes. Their boxes represent the language of data behind their making – programmatic code that allows humans and machines to communicate. The concentric shapes, columnar and tabular layouts, and interactive boolean states are presented as artifacts of digital language in a form like ancient tablets. These works immortalize this era for cultures looking back thousands of years from now, curious about the computer age and basic units of communication during this time. Bas-relief, by Jan Robert Leegte, is a dedication to this long history leading to the computer interface, and an offering for millennia to come. — Bas-relief, 2024  An engraving, a drawing and an interface. Artist Proof series.

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DEC 2023

Jan Robert Leegte

Mountains and Drop Shadows

55 artworks

Upstream Gallery

Mountains are grand natural statements of sculptural expression. They are birthplaces of sublime monumentality and romanticism. Their crumbs are the raw materials that provided us with a long tradition of sculpture. In another realm there is the ambiguous materiality of the digital, the human-made bits and bytes, in constant flow through systems, from which a new order of materials emerge at the surface of the interface. Among them is the user interface phenomenon of the drop shadow. A material bereft of all our notions of materiality, it being nothing but the absence of light cast upon a surface due to an obstructing object. In the work the shadow has been severed from a non existent casting object making it less then nothing. But also the drop shadow being a digital simulacrum adds another step deeper into ethereality, making it almost a shadow of shadows. This places it in direct opposition to the most earthly rooted of them all, the mountain. Mountains and Drop Shadows is a continuation of a line of work going back to 2013, with the net art piece https://www.mountainsanddropshadows.com in which a live script would continuously fetch images tagged ‘mountains’ from online databases. Because of this, the landscapes would become anonymised and delocalised, merely becoming an image, often ending as a humble desktop image. For this most recent iteration of the work, querying databases felt like a thing of the past, as all those images have been added to the datasets of various image generating AI services. Mountains and Drop Shadows, 2023 uses AI generated mountain images, a mashup of all images of existing mountains, fully erasing the subjectivity of the photographer and a-localising the image. The work is a sculptural desktop standoff between a mountain dreamt up by the internet and a drop shadow. Embodiment vertigo on the summits of the interface. Jan Robert Leegte

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MAY 2023

Jan Robert Leegte

Buttons

256 artworks

The button has been in a continuous state of shapeshifting over the expanding history of collective interface design. Endless webpages filled with designs, haptics, styles, expressions, subcultures, interactions, effects, all layered over this simple and elemental entity leaving in its wake a fundamental material presence within interface culture. The internet is an unimaginably vast ecology of data and processes. Deeply stored data is immutable like buried granite, where other is constantly in flux like a rushing mountain stream. The whole system is in continuous evolution through endless processes reshaping the data interacting with each other and with ourselves. At the opaque surface of this churning ocean of bits is the exchange between both the realm of the computer and that of ourselves. The interface. And in the centre of this human machine culture lives the button. A binary entity reaching out from the very core of the machine's logic to touch, at the surface, our reaching finger, after which it dives back down in order to toggle some state from a zero to a one.

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