Shane Hope

Whenever someone asks who my favorite artist is, from now on I might go with Shane Hope. I get the feeling this guy could be personally difficult, which I love in people, especially when they turn it into this kind of immersive post-humanism. The point is, just because I think he's brilliant and I love his work doesn't mean I want him to sign my boob, or even that I want to make this kind of work. There's no way. Anyone writing about his work will describe it as "mind-blowing" because that's what people say about hyper-intellectual, involved weirdness. It's not necessarily, though - he's the fine art tendril, and critic, of speculative programming and Singularity fetishism. I like that he's managed to THINK in gibberish, or at least always respond in interviews that way.

You have no idea what this is just from looking at it. It's a print of an open source 3-d modeling program that visualizes molecules. Lots and lots on nonexistent molecules. Nobody writing about this can figure it out, either, and the way Hope describes the process is not exactly transparent. But they sure are pretty. h_bond_from_proton, 2010, lenticular 3D pigment print, 24″x24″

I found out about him through Edward Winkleman, who probably has the best taste of any gallerist and seems to pick artists on cerebral-ness : he shows Jennifer Dalton, as well.

The "compile-a-child" series may be the best lay introduction to Shane Hope, since fake children's drawings often serve as simplified versions of inconceivably different cultures. It also highlights what hard SF is really talking about, with the singularity: if it's about machines being able to make machines smarter than themselves, that's just children outdoing their parents. To be Imortel, 2081, pencil and crayon on paper, 9″x12″

These were all in a show in 2009 titled "Your Mom Is Open Source" (<3!). Winkleman's showing the latest hijinx at SEVEN in Miami, your typical 3-D printer printed on a 3-D printer (also known as an objectum-sexy Von Neumann Machine)


so. wankerrrr.