Opposing Forces: VICKIE VAINIONPÄÄ PAINTS THE GAP BETWEEN EXPERIENCE & HUMAN PERCEPTION
ABOVE: Portrait of the artist, photo by Emelle Massorial
I did not always know that I would be making this particular work,” says painter Vickie Vainionpää, “but that’s the beauty of being an artist. To follow your interests, pulling at threads and slowly but surely a path becomes clear.” Her work is nothing if not forging new paths. Her paintings feature organic forms which undulate, even writhe, around the canvas. There is an asemic quality. Stare too long and you will be sure there is a message—a hidden meaning. That curve could be a “c”, that loop could be a vowel. The forms are opaque, some crystalline or glasslike. And if you look within, there are visions of something nearly familiar: a hand, a face.
For Vainionpää, the works are a kind of abstraction. “Every artist who practices abstraction,” she suggests, “is interested in that gap between what we see and what really is. We’re all trying to find some sort of underlying truth, and abstraction is a way to visualize something beyond our default physical reality.”
The overarching theme of her work is to investigate the fault lines between the human and the artificial. The natural and the machine. The questions of authenticity where bleeding edge tech meets fine art.
Over time, Vainionpää has realized that there is no difference between the human and the machine. In her terms, humans have sprung out of the universe, and machines of all types exist within that universe, so what is the difference? Whether we are talking about outer space, inner space, or digital space, they all exist in the same place—here, now, before us. And if we are natural then whatever technology we invent or discover must be natural to this universe as well.
WE’RE ALL TRYING TO FIND SOME SORT OF UNDERLYING TRUTH, AND ABSTRACTION IS A WAY TO VISUALIZE SOMETHING BEYOND OUR DEFAULT PHYSICAL REALITY.”
“I think it is pretty egotistical and yet so very human of us to think that only human-made constructions are ‘unnatural.’ There’s this amazing documentary on ants where researchers pour concrete into a huge colony, revealing the structure of its underground architecture. It is so sophisticated and looks like something out of a sci-fi film. We call that nature just doing its thing. How come our skyscrapers and cities are seen differently? In my opinion, the answer is that it is a very effective way to morally separate ourselves from problems we inflict on our environment or on other species. We offload blame onto what we deem as unnatural. It is convenient but problematic at scale because it allows us to forget that we are one and the same process as the universe,” says Vainionpää. “We are the ants.”
For Vainionpää, abstraction is the perfect language to communicate this discussion. (She also has written some well-researched essays on these topics, available on her website.) It all comes back to what it means to be a painter today.
And what, specifically, does all that mean? Communicating via two-dimensional media about this, our “post-digital” world. Vainionpää’s used this phrase—post-digital—in answer to one of my questions, and it took a while for me to understand what that really meant. I live not-too-far south of San Francisco and it is difficult to look at the world nearby and see it as post-digital. Everything is online. Digital technology pervades and encompasses daily life. But her invocation of the “post-digital” era raises an interesting question: Are we beyond the digital, or just beginning to digitize? So I’ll take Vainionpää at her word that this is art for a post-digital world, but I understand it to mean that the newness is gone, and we’re left to deal with the ramifications of digital life.
In her writing, Vainionpää sees a long history of artists interested in the digital world. She cites the late, great Frank Stella as a major influence. Especially his smoke statues from the early ‘90s, in which Stella took photographs of smoke billows, had them translated into 3-D images, had those translated into plastic three-dimensional sculptures, and then translated those into metal works at scale.
We’re left with a sense of process. Of translating one thing to another. Just like the thoughts in my head are translated to the keyboard in front of me, and the computer on my desk turns those into the glyphs, that are now on the page before you. The digital world is transformation. It is alchemy. It transubstantiates. Although that implies not just process but progress. And I think Vainionpää would hesitate to describe her art as improving anything. Her world is more about the fact of change. Articulating and isolating a single frame in a longer diachronic movement. More about the capturing of a moment that could never be captured before and may never be captured again. It is possibility, not result.
She says, “When I was studying at university, I was really focused on harmonizing what I saw as two opposing forces: the human (organic and natural) with the machine (rigid and unnatural). Over time, however, I slowly recognized that they weren’t actually as opposing as I thought, and so I began to realize more formal and conceptual connections, adopting a more holistic view. I started learning 3-D modelling and learning how to code, in search of new forms, something that ‘clicked.’ This is how I stumbled upon the concept of generative Bezier curves. I had learned via one random YouTube tutorial some tips about modelling hair accurately, so that, for example, your character would have hair that looked realistic. The key was for each individual strand to have slightly different shape and curves. So, the solution was to randomize the curvature of the strands. It clicked instantly for me that this is a drawing tool, a way to generate a single unique stroke. That became the starting point for my paintings.”
Much of Vainionpää’s art starts with generative computer programs. It is easy for us lay folk to hear or read something like that and assume that means something like AI (the artist provided a gentle correction to the writer on this very subject.) Vainionpää’s work, however, does not use any AI or machine learning.
…THAT’S THE BEAUTY OF BEING AN ARTIST. TO FOLLOW YOUR INTERESTS, PULLING AT THREADS AND SLOWLY BUT SURELY A PATH BECOMES CLEAR.”
One important distinction here is what is being generated. AI tools like Midjourney and Dall-E tap into massive stores of information to figure out what you want from a prompt. Generative art in Vainionpää’s method, however, only uses the information she provides. “Part of the beauty in generative art is that the artist has a deep knowledge and familiarity with their program and its inputs. The creative control involved is much greater, resulting in less ‘slop,’” she says.
Her older works under the Soft Body Dynamics series are, in her words, “chance-based” works. Much like her description for how to convincingly generate digital hair, these works used a custom plugin for Cinema4D to randomly generate curves. The plugin is called VVV, a mashup of the initials for herself and her partner-slash-data scientist Harry Vallianos.
Some of her more recent work includes the Gaze series. This uses VVVi, the next gen iteration of VVV, to import raw data collected from eye tracking glasses that Vainionpää wears while looking at favorite and famous works of art. VVVi takes puts that data into Cinema4D to generate curves based on how the artist engages with the artworks.
Her latest works, such as “The Dream” and “The Painter’s Studio,” have taken this process to scale. These two paintings collected “gaze data” using VVVi and webcams, from more than one hundred people. These works needed a new look to show the increased data, hence their thinned-out worm-forms. The result is more fluid, and lends an even greater asemic sense to curves and swoops.
Vainionpää says, “Although there are inevitably always surprise results, a generative artist fundamentally controls the parameters since we are the authors of the systems which create the work. Although the system can be seen as autonomous, the artist is still instrumental to its creation and definition, but also in selecting results and realizing the work in its final form.”
She is constantly looking for the next direction to take her work. From a YouTube video about generating digital hair, to enlisting scores of volunteers to create data for her works, to developing and tweaking custom systems to interpret and re-interpret that data into visual form—she has an uncanny ability to innovate, to create, to delve deeper.
Her work, ultimately, is about connection. Connecting humanity to creation in both directions—to the generative process of evolution and birth which led to each of us, to the generative process of inquiry and discovery which has led us to create machines that can create. She asks us to wonder and to hope and to be curious about the world around us. The world that we make. The world that makes us. The world we have, the world we would like to see.
In her words, as she reflected on the meaning in one of the essays on her website, “…the gap between experience and perception, the ultimate interconnection between all things, the distinction (or lack thereof) between natural and unnatural, and a certain optimism required for creating real, inspired futures. *
This article is featured in Hi-Fructose Issue 71. Get the full issue in print here.
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