Artists Statement 

Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving
June 10, MACBA – Convent dels Àngels. Artist Talk.

Keywords: digital, artwork, artist, gallery, data

Will our data still be around tomorrow? Digital data cannot be preserved forever because of bit rot and data decay. I am fascinated by what data degradation will look like, what if you translate and visualize the unintelligible? ‘Data Whiskers’ and ‘Ecophagy’ show my artistic interpretation of the transience of data. To avoid the data storage doom scenario, I opted also for high resolution art prints.

• Martijn Hage is a digital artist born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He studied Graphic Design and Computer Graphics at the Academy of Arts Minerva in Groningen. His early digital artwork was exhibited at SISEA, Second International Symposium on Electronic Art in 1990. Driven by the quest to find the origin of life, he creates his own semantic building blocks to express himself in a self-named morphographic language. You could use the term ‘organic abstraction’, compositions of organic and geometrical elements. His artwork evolves like artificial selection, using self-made generative algorithms. He uses a digital exploration process, iteration by iteration, always in control of randomness and order in shape, color and composition. Each artwork is created in 3-dimensions and rendered in high resolution. He finds inspiration in nature, technology, archeology and fossils. It all comes together in the real world via digital techniques like 3D Printing, CNC-milling, AR and VR.