The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

18 And how does this happen? It all startswith imagination. Imagination for me is the act of creating an image, or perhaps "imagining" would be a more accurate term. Most artists, I suppose, are driven by an intuition and the desire to give it tangible expression, to bring a daydream to life. By the way, realizing a dream, turning it into a concrete object, always involves a certain degree of compromise, even a small heartbreak. Out of all the paintings that exist in the imagination, only one ends up on the wall, the one you actually work on. So there you are, standing in front of the canvas, imagining. The image that has been living in you, comes to the screen, then to the studio, to reality. Painting is about touching a specific image, the one that is in front of your eyes and occupies your field of vision. I mean, when you hang a painting on a wall, you also see your hands. Painting is based in this concrete reality, with the body, the paints, the brushes, the tools, and the canvas. Throughout the workday, painting means alternating between what you imagined would happen and what actually happens before your eyes. What do I see? And what am I imagining? Is it what I see or is it what I want to see? While painting, these are operational questions that are constantly linked together." As a serious painter whose works have been exhibited in important exhibitions, what sparked your interest in exploring the mediums of video and using AI? I've always had a desire to move paintings in time, as if they were frames in a movie. It's not a unique desire. It seems to me that this is a common fantasy among painters, like the Futurists, but also Velázquez and Tintoretto and others. When I paint, I sometimes imagine the moment before and the moment after what appears in the painting. There’s also a hidden sound dimension within painting, but it remains metaphorical, as paintings are a mute and static thing. During the long days and nights of the pandemic, I started learning a programming language called Touchdesigner, which allows for real-time video manipulation 2 . This was part of a collaboration with Yaron Trax, founder of "The Block" night club, on creating a visual experience for electronic music, in the club or in a virtual space. The software allowed me to animate images in real-time in a way that was more intuitive for me than editing programs like Premiere. It allowed me to modify the video while listening to the sound and music, as if I were "playing the image", which is perhaps what I also try to do when I paint. 2 TouchDesigner is a node-based visual programming language for real-time interactive multimedia content, developed by the Toronto-based company Derivative. It's been used by artists, programmers, creative coders, software designers, and performers to create performances, installations, and fixed media works.