With the sudden absence of places to show artwork amid the coronavirus pandemic, many artists are looking at digital platforms for showing work. I have been learning to make a scale model of a gallery space in Blender, a free and open source 3D creation software, and I hope to move into a game engine in the future to make an environment that a viewer can walk through. Until then, I figure it could be helpful to many to share a walk-through of how I'm making my model in Blender.
Right now I'm laying out a duo exhibition with Josie Johnson. Here are some shots of what I've rendered so far:

And this is what the model looks like not rendered:

It's a work in progress!
Read on to see the tutorial.

"To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress. No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine."
- The Machine Stops
​E. M. Forster

Franz John

​Turing Tables
An Untitled Composition for Tectonic Spaces

"Several million earthquakes of different intensities occur each year. Seismological institutes throughout the world measure these vibrations and exchange and communicate this collected data among themselves via automated internet-transfers. It is this meta-perception that Franz John makes visible in his project “Turing Tables,” siphoning this human-machine-communication data stream directly from finger-servers and bringing it into his online installation.
In a matter of seconds, this installation converts these measurements from the seismological stations into sound and image. From the perspective of a "global eye" the internet directly connects the observer with the pulsating core of the earth. This project is therefore not about the catastrophes that cause these movements in inhabited areas, but instead about the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.
“This artistic realization is based on the machine-theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, wherein my interest is not in the number-chain itself but rather in the tectonic forces and energies of a matrix which is visibly and continually updating and renewing itself.”
A project in collaboration with sound artist Ed Osborn (Oakland, CA) and Sascha Brossmann (Berlin, Germany)."

Nam June Paik
​
Paik was "at the forefront of a new generation of artists creating an aesthetic discourse out of television and the moving image. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he also worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other artists and working to realize the potential of the emerging medium." (Source)

Miltos Manetas
"Privileged European White Male Artist"

ÑEWPRESSIONISM
​"FROM SCREEN TO NATURE" AND Back AGAIN

"We live in days of Metascreen. Screens and networks are-for good or bad-part of nature. Screens "project", "transmit", "translate" but also "protect", "conceal" and "isolate". Screens hide from us the large view and isolate us from the whole showing us just a bit."

A SLOW YEAR

Ian Bogost

​"The Atari applies certain constraints that contribute the ideas I wanted to get across with this work.

For one part, it all but eliminates the need (or indeed the possibility) of creating complex instantial assets like images and sounds. Many of today’s “artgames” adopt coarse visual and sound design as a way of recovering the simplicity of earlier games while extending them to new subjects. The Atari invites such designs by necessity. Its limited technical abilities and small file size demands invite symbolism.
For another, it lets me harness the platform’s history of more abstract gameplay, even if such gameplay was once about concrete things like dogfights or dungeon crawling. This fact should remind us that older forms are worth returning to for their aesthetics.
For yet another, even in its commercial heydey Atari games were created by a single person, which mirrors the production process for a poem. And for yet another, it imposes serious constraints on development while still allowing for many different kinds of games. And finally, it gives me a natural excuse to adopt a very small file size as a constraint."

​SPRING

One humid sweater
One puddle busts up each drive
The sogginess strikes



SUMMER
​
Sleep smells of mosses
While insects wink atop them
Wild precipitate

In May 1974, Joseph Beuys shared a room in West Broadway’s René Block Gallery with a wild coyote for eight hours a day, for three days.

"It was a performance, entitled I Like America and America likes Me, taut with caution (the animal at first was erratic, and tore apart a blanket in the room), but one that was ultimately a success: the coyote grew tolerant, accepting, simply through Beuys’ desire to heal.
​It’s a potent, profound image, and one that today is as prescient as ever. The United States of America is in a troublesome situation as a declining global power, having to now deal with the failings of modernity and late capitalism." (Source)

​"The animal appears as a heteronomous Other. Whereas humans never cease to reconfigure their societies and their identities within them, a coyote, it seems, is always a coyote. The animal is in this sense a limit, the outermost edge of the human." (Pinto, Ana. The Post-Human Animal, 2015.)

Note: he regarded teaching as an essential element of his work as an artist.


This brings to my mind the film Never Cry Wolf (1983), and the following video.

In 2005, Mircea Cantor brought a wolf and a deer into an empty white-cube gallery room. While Beuys' coyote eventually became comfortable with him, the deer and wolf in Cantor's Deeparture remained eager to avoid each other for the full duration of the performance. (Pinto.)