Today we’d like to introduce you to Davey Whitcraft.
Hi Davey, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Growing up in a household where my mom was busy testing and writing technical manuals for computer games but also found time to expose me to museums and art classes, I garnered a passion for art and technology pretty young. Later, I formalized my interests at UCLA by studying Design and Media Art. The program at D|MA showed me the potential for combining different mediums and misusing technology to create artwork. Still, my more recent exploration of machine vision and artificial intelligence put my artistic process on its current trajectory. As an artist who works with AI, my videos, stills, and installations attempt to reveal the possibilities of experience by juxtaposing human and machine vision. I draw inspiration from the natural world to make pieces that pay homage to and reconfigure the natural world. What excites me most about working with AI is its endless possibilities. I continually experiment with different techniques and mediums, and AI always surprises me with unexpected and exciting results. It’s like having a creative partner who pushes me to explore new ideas and approaches. I aim to find new artistic possibilities with AI and art. As I continue to learn and grow, I strive to make thought-provoking pieces. AI is having a moment in the art world, whether for better or worse, and I am honored to be here for it.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Being a fine artist is interesting because there is no particular road map to guide you. Studying Art at University can teach you history, tools, and techniques and allow you an opportunity to meet peers and make connections. Still, the majority of day-to-day activities involved in being an artist, at least at my level, without an assistant, is so much about trying to wrangle with spreadsheets, writing proposals, meeting with dealers, scheduling transport, and generally finding ways to make sure that the works are available to those who are interested in them. I try to dedicate the beginning of my day to creative pursuits – conceptualizing a body of work, writing a proposal or artist statement, or even making new work – while my mind is fresh and uncluttered with administrative tasks.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
During graduate school, I was busy making installations that included video projections, custom software, and hardware and required a fair amount of dedicated space and custom fabrication to present. For several years after school, I continued with work like this, and my work was shown in a few groups shows each year. After more than a decade of working as a professor at Art and Design Universities internationally, Covid shuttered the school I was teaching at and allowed me the time to pursue art full-time. I wanted to work in a way that allowed me to try more ideas and produce more work faster and on a more continuous basis. At the same time, I became interested in vision, the way we, as a culture, see our surroundings, and also began to learn how machines, Artificial Intelligence, and General Adversarial Networks, in particular, see the world. I also began experimenting with full-spectrum, Infrared, and Ultraviolet sensors in my video and still cameras. This led to my current work, the large-scale abstract landscape color field photographs and video pieces depicting worlds with alternative geometries and physics.
I became interested in how other beings see the world after reading Jakob Uexkull’s essay, A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men. The text describes how for each different entity, an environment is created and understood by sensing. For example, a Tick can feel one thing, the presence of a specific biological compound in the air (a smell unique to its prey), and is programmed to ‘release’ its grip when it senses this compound, hopefully dropping itself onto its target for feeding. How does the world look to a Tick, with its sensing capabilities? The same idea can be followed through to any entity capable of sensing – and creates a curious notion that humans may not have a monopoly on what the world consists of – as we cannot possibly have every sensory organ possible.
As I continue to study how others see, my fascination with learning about the world through the eyes of non-humans grows. In my work, I am translating views of earth-based natural landscapes using technologies generally reserved for surveillance, image recognition, and other types of machine vision, and hopefully give the viewer a unique position, one usually hidden behind layers of code, buried deep in the black box of neural networks and algorithms.
By using full spectrum cameras modified to allow all light spectrums, not just the light that the human eye can sense, we get an idea of how other eyes see light and color. By exploring alternative geometries of the vision plane – deconstructing the horizon and re-evaluating the hierarchy of detail – we may glimpse the world anew, which is not only observable and conceivable to us.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
My San Francisco gallery, Themes+Projects, inside the fantastic Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch neighborhood, has transformed my career by letting me focus more on creating work. They have an amazing gallery space, a dedicated network of collectors, and are also just really fun and nice to work with. It took some time to find the right people there to represent my work in Northern California. I am looking forward to seeing what is possible here Los Angeles, in New York, and in Europe. I have two artist residencies coming up, one in Genoa, Italy, and then one in Berlin, Germany, and am really looking forward to developing new bodies of work and making some new connections there as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: daveywhitcraft.com
- Instagram: @davey_whitcraft
- Other: https://vimeo.com/user73664585
Image Credits
Davey Whitcraft
