Located in Barcelona’s creative Poblenou district, the Load Gallery is the latest addition to the city’s vibrant art scene. Equipped with bespoke next-generation screens and an elaborate sound system, this innovative space brings digital art to life, showcasing ambitious works by internationally acclaimed artists. The Load Gallery is set to redefine the exhibition, distribution, and management of media art and NFTs, seamlessly integrating them with physical art to craft a coherent narrative. The gallery features a total of nine screens—five at the front and four in a smaller room designed as a sandbox for artists. This intimate space encourages experimentation, enabling artists to push boundaries and create immersive experiences for viewers by incorporating physical objects.
“I got the inspiration for these circular screens from the works of Gaudí, renowned for his organic shapes and fluid curves that captivate the eye. This space—unofficially dubbed as “round room”—is intended to enrich the gallery, bring an additional dimension where architecture and art intersect, and open a door to another universe. It is a space where artists can blend the physical with the digital, creating an immersive environment. Each new exhibition will showcase a unique space, a door opening to yet unexplored worlds.”
–Alex Simorre, the Load gallery founder
Load’s debut in Barcelona marks an important development in the city’s efforts to establish itself as a leader in digital culture. Barcelona is already home to the Loop art fair and festival, OFFF, Sonar D+, and other initiatives centred on media art and digital culture. Load complements these events with a dedicated space for showcasing digital artworks with the sophistication they merit.
Load offers collectors a full-chain solution: its sister company Artbox designs, manufactures and install screens, boxes for streaming and other hardware, while Load proprietary software makes managing and distributing digital art easy and intuitive.
Group show opening July 4th
This week Load gallery opens a new group show, Unity in Variety that investigates the diverse techniques trending in contemporary digital art. From the 4th of July to August 10th 2024, the exhibition will feature video works by 12 media artists.
The show focuses on video as an artistic output, a result of various creative processes, rather than a medium. Load highlights several methods–generative art, data visualisation, filming, and AI-powered deep learning–that artists use to produce video, emphasising equally the creative journey and the end result. Rather than an exhaustive survey, it aims to capture a snapshot of 2024, reflecting the current trends and innovations in digital art.
Traditionally, the most common way to get a video has been filming—using cameras to capture real-life scenes. Video art, a form of artistic expression that relies on video technology as its primary medium, branched out of the cinema in the 1960s as a more experimental field, often manipulating time, motion, and sound to convey the artist’s vision.
Hamill Industries
True mavericks of digital art, Hamill Industries–a Barcelona-based duo whose studio resembles a mixture of a lab and workshop–present two video works that utilise a range of in-camera techniques such as time-lapse, slow-motion pigments, and Schlieren flow visualisation. Both videos are themed around ecology and human impact on nature; the artists employed photographic techniques to capture light beyond the visible spectrum (UV and Infrared) to explore ways of seeing complexities, forces, and natural phenomena that are not obvious to the human eye.
YonkersVidal
YonkersVidal, a Canadian video artist, films chemical reactions under a microscope, creating colourful and intricate visuals that seem digitally enhanced but are purely organic. Thomas Vanz, a French piano composer and director, made his award-winning film “Novae” by dropping ink in water and filming the resulting stains. This ‘analogue’ approach forms the cornerstone of their practices.
Claire Droppert
Photographer Claire Droppert presents live photos depicting surreal animals made of shifting sands suspended in the air. At first glance, her work might appear to be AI-generated or CGI, but in reality, the images are exactly what they seem: Droppert threw sand and flowers into the air and photographed them, achieving a sense of the unreal through the play of light.
Together, Hamill Industries, YonkersVidal, Thomas Vanz, and Claire Droppert are juxtaposed with a group of artists who generate their art on the computer, rather than filming real-life phenomena.
The rise of generative art in digital media
Gaining traction over the last two years, generative art has become one of the most prominent currents within digital art. It is an artistic practice that relies on autonomous systems, often through algorithms and computational processes, to create art. Instead of making artwork, an artist sets up a system with specific rules and parameters that generates unpredictable and unique outputs. Generative art often incorporates randomisation and iteration, so that artworks can evolve in real time or in response to viewer interaction. Andy Duboc, Dimitri Thouezry, Jason Ting, Josef Pelz, Mario Carrillo and Simon Rydén used the generative output to create narratives, that gradually unveil while visitors walk through the gallery.
Cao Yuxi’s “Shan Shui Paintings by AI” series used an advanced artificial intelligence deep learning algorithm to study tens of thousands of pixel data from diverse oriental freehand ink paintings found online. Then the AI, trained on this extensive dataset, autonomously generated video landscapes. Additionally, Cao Yuxi incorporated 3D software to simulate dynamic effects such as water flow, creating captivating “naked eye 3D” visual effects.
CLAUDE‘s videos are based on data visualisation: the artist leverages site-specific data, such as sea movements, wind flow, and air quality, transforming it into signals that become elements of his abstract nature depictions.
Each artist will present a mini-solo show, with all nine gallery screens dedicated to their work for eight minutes. This creates a comprehensive two-hour experience, allowing viewers to immerse themselves fully in each artist’s unique vision.
“While preparing catalogues, I was struck by the contrasting techniques of artists who sent us videos—one created using CGI, another traditional filming. This exploration of varied methodologies is fundamental to digital art. It’s fascinating to observe how technology shapes the medium and is, in turn, shaped by it, with artists continually pushing boundaries and discovering novel ways to articulate their visions. This exhibition aims to start a dialogue on the latest trends and future directions in digital art.
As a gallery, our mission extends beyond showcasing art; we aim to educate and inspire our audience, fostering a deeper appreciation for various ways of artistic expression.”
–Alex Simorré, Load founder
Exhibition Dates
4 July – 10 August, 2024
Location
Load Gallery, Carrer Llull 134, Barcelona
Founder, Alex Simorrè
Alex Simorrè is a tech entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Artbox, a company that has brought creative light, sound and LED solutions to the next level. With numerous bespoke projects under his belt, including the first in France curved LED screen 32×6 meters, over 5m pixels and entire LED-enhanced bowling, Alex brings over 19 years of deep experience and his precursor’s spirit to the art world through his latest initiative, the Load gallery.
Situated in Barcelona’s Poblenou area, it is a venue to showcase physical and digital art, and a supporting ecosystem to exhibit, distribute and manage digital artworks, including NFTs.
Alex is based between Paris, where Artbox has headquarters, a lab and a showroom, and Barcelona.
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