Digital Tapestries

In Stream Processing, LoVid present digital flux in a tangible format through the hybridity of a work that exists as both an on-screen NFT and a limited edition print. Maximalist, yet deeply considered, the artwork draws from a vast array of personal and public references as layers of inputs are edited, remixed and re-inputted to create a piece of ever-changing data streams. Its variety of colour, shape and texture creates an emerging sense of movement as motifs unravel, patterns surface and disappear, and each new input subtly differs from the next. Through this inherent hybridity, LoVid bridge the gap between the virtual and the real and invite viewers to engage with the transient beauty of data as it transforms before their eyes.

The data pulled to create this work is extremely personal to the artists. Stream Processing’s source materials include stills pulled from archival video footage of LoVid’s own previous artworks, primarily created using analogue video instruments which date back throughout the history of LoVid’s studio practice. The footage is accessed and its signals reinterpreted into new works. Frames are pulled from the video to reveal intricate wave forms or tactile shapes, which are then zoomed into, moved around, cut up and reinterpreted using hand-crafted and digital processes of manipulation. A dense collage of analogue, digital and handmade visual materials then forms, which is further painted upon, sewn into and scanned so that new digital images can be reintroduced to the mix. Here, the archive is made tangible, not just as an object of technological history, but rather of the personal histories of the artists themselves.

Images: 1: ‘Stream Processing’, 2023. Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. 2: Detail of ‘Stream Processing’, 2023. Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. 3: Detail of ‘Stream Processing’, 2023. Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. 

Hedgerow Expansion similarly comes to life through iterative practices that embrace repeated motifs and their physical manipulation. Acting as a modern reinterpretation of a tapestry, the work was initially inspired by a study that translated video footage into painting. Hedgerow Expansion’s composition was printed onto canvas using a dye sublimation process, before being further manipulated through sewing, with stitches tracking paths between the design’s shapes. Against a backdrop of linear motifs, swathes of pink fabric move against the grain in gestural flourishes, disrupting the composition like noise on an analogue video screen. 

Here, the artists abstract the inherent glitches of the screen, not out of nostalgia for past technologies but to reflect on the recent moments those technologies inhabited. By reimagining their contexts and creative possibilities, the idea of the screen becomes tactile, material, and lucid, evolving from a mere reflective surface into a device where its hardware capabilities become the materially-specific instruments of creation.

Images: 1: ‘Hedgerow Expansion’, 2: ‘Hedgerow Expansion’, 3: Detail from ‘Hedgerow Expansion’. All images courtesy of the artist.

Tapestries, banners, and jacquard fabrics have a long history spanning handmade, mechanical, and algorithmic methods. Patented in 1804 by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the jacquard loom was one of the earliest machines to incorporate automation and programmability. In Hedgerow Expansion, LoVid taps into this rich legacy, collapsing the history of computing into a single moment by referencing the historical significance of textile production alongside the materiality of recently obsolete analogue video and signalling technologies. In both works, the materiality of their form offers a new perspective on technology, emphasising its continuous flux rather than a purely forward-facing trajectory.

In his seminal work, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), Brian Massumi describes time as continuous and interconnected, challenging traditional linear conceptions. Massumi writes, “Time is an asymmetrical, dynamic process that cannot be fully captured by the static, linear sequencing of measurable moments.” LoVid’s work captures this sensibility, embracing a more fluid and embodied perception of time. Stream Processing and Hedgerow Expansion both reflect a contemporary experience of palpable escalation and acceleration, which defines the aesthetic and existential narratives of our time. In these works, all time is experienced simultaneously; past personal memories are remastered and expanded into the present through texture, colour and form. Time is no longer static and linear but rather embodied and lived, referencing a distinctly human experience where memories and the present co-exist in a single instant.

Images: 1: ‘Double Bass’, 2: ‘Sines and Decoration’, 3: ‘Bubbly Wetware’. All images courtesy of the artist.

This collapsing of time into affective, pure experience imbues the work with a highly contemporary sense of direction and movement. Peter Osborne’s thesis in Anywhere or Not At All (2013) encapsulates this: “To be contemporary is to exist in disjunctive relation to one’s own time, a relation of timely untimeliness or, in the best cases, of untimely timeliness.” As soon as something becomes truly contemporary, it slips away, just out of reach. The intangibility of the present moment is perfectly captured in these works, which relinquish fixity, turning established patterns on their heads with fluid, disruptive momentum. Addressing the hypermobility of time in our age, they exist between the digital and the physical, presenting a radical form of hybridity. Much like the chimaera, evasive and fantastic, these works defy singular categorisation, embodying a transformative and transient aesthetic that reflects the disjunctive temporality of the contemporary.

Image: 1: In the studio at Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) at Alfred University.