Artist Notebook: Eva Papamargariti

ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Eva Papamargariti – architecture and time-based media artist currently based in Greece — presents her digital video RandomAccessData, influenced by radical utopian groups of the ’60s, post-internet art theory, Isaac Asimov and “minimalist in a rapper’s body” Kanye West.

The idea for this project was actually born by a blending of many subjects/phrases/tags that are spinning on my mind lately.

I would say that my actual first inspiration was a title that I read as I was looking again on PWR Paper#6, along with one of Superstudio’s collages. The title was ‘Post-Internet Art: Cyberspace Is Just a Bunch of Cables.’

This and also a mix of visual content that I am collecting everyday from the internet and some books which I am reading in fragments during the last months.

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil and Isaac Asimov’s The Rest of the Robots triggered me to start composing a digital scenery which was a blend of physical and artificial objects, a virtual stage of readymade models that are re-composed on the grid of a huge surface.

The video I created is a parallel visual and verbal narration. It is a ‘ping-pong’ between references.

The references have to do with post-internet art, the strong relationship that I recognize between some radical utopian groups of the ’60s (Superstudio, Haus-Rucker-Co, UFO Club)…

…with today’s virtual field, the definitive role of searching and tagging inside the cyberspace, terms like distribution and reproduction of image, constant data flow, internet immersion, real ID vs cyber ID, auto generated content.