Julian Brangold is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic research looks into the ways in which technology rewrites the definition of what it means to be human. With a background in film and video art, his work explores a wide spectrum of media including video game engines, online databases, digital imagery and artificial intelligence to create critical spaces in which technology and aesthetic production can merge to open up new pathways in thought and experience.

I studied film direction in 2004 in Buenos Aires, and the subject I was into the most was Video Art. After a trip to Europe and some exposure to visual arts, I decided I wanted to be a painter. Fortunately, I was fairly successful quite young and was picked up by a small gallery. I was exclusively a painter for a few years but became frustrated with the gallery system and the art world in Buenos Aires. I moved to Berlin where I started tattooing for a living and researching new mediums and materials to reinvent my art practice. I came back to Buenos Aires and reformulated my whole art career, going into new media, technology, 3D art, and the cryptoart space.

I see my art practice as a research and inquiry tool. I stopped understanding art practice as expression and realized that art is a way to ask philosophical and social questions and to elaborate ideas around certain impacts in society and the individual. My process begins by investigating image or from some sort of premise or question that I’m trying to elaborate on. I’m constantly thinking about the ways in which technology redefines what it means to be human, and art is the tool that I use to understand that phenomenon. Ideally, my images create experiences that make people question their environment and their relationship to technology. 

I began my research in 2D because in that series of works the hand-drawn factor was very important and part of the investigation had to do with a mixture of human handmade things and digital resources and possibilities. Recently I’ve been thinking about the different degrees in which the digital is part of reality. How real is the virtual world? How real is a 3D rendering? I mean, of course, it’s real, but how much? What’s the measure of these “levels” of realness? So I decided to go into the 3D space to explore this aspect of the digital as an object that exists in the broader philosophical sense. I also like the poetic speculation that arises from inserting these historical pieces (3D scans of archeological and cultural discoveries) into these pristine or destroyed but evidently digital spaces.  

Coming from a traditional gallery system, it’s been a journey (it still is) to adapt to this whole dynamic. As I consider myself a researcher on the topic of technology, I love this whole experience. Even the hardships that arise at times. I think the crypto world has a real potential to make a huge difference in the AFK art world. My personal experience so far has been surreal, especially community-wise. I’ve made a crazy amount of friends in the past months and was lucky to be invited to the Cryptoarg community, an incredible collective of artists from Argentina. Right now I’m very invested in the whole crypto space and look for a long-term engagement as these platforms develop and grow. I was very lucky to begin my career as a cryptoartist in SuperRare, where the support from the platform and the collectors have been very present from day one.

I’d like to share a little bit of the process of the most recent series of images I’m working on. As I mentioned before, I’m thinking about the objectuality of the digital, the measure with which we can decide how real the digital is. In this series of works, I’m placing 3D scans of classical sculptures in what I like to call an “unstable environment.” These environments show their “ins” through error. They’re full of elements like blown-up fragments that show their structure, intertwining with the main figure, or decimated sky textures, modified to almost look like abstract backgrounds. The main figure itself is also broken using a pattern that deliberately emulates machine error. I want to explore an aesthetic of uncanny realism, taking advantage of the contrast between the cultural heritage of these classical sculptures and the digital milieu they’re thrown into. These works are a part of the series “Skies” and will be available on SuperRare. 

I am known as Goldweard, I am sitting here in my flat in the south of England musing on my time as an artist. I have always been a digital designer, I was making artworks on my computer when I was a kid, and I have been making art the same way since I was 14.

I am interested in cultural memory and craftsmanship. Since the advent of mass production, design has become standardized, generic, functional, minimal, and disposable. Beauty in design is often subjective, I find extravagant designs beautiful, they sometimes lack functionality, are expensive to produce and delicate, the type of object you would expect to find in a chateau or antique store. They are coveted objects, they were loved, never forgotten, handmade by expert craftsmen, relics of the days before machines and mass production took over. 

A turning point for me was meeting an old man, he had a wardrobe, it was very old and worn much like the man himself, it was in 2 pieces and he referred to them as ‘mum and dad’ the wardrobe had been a family heirloom past down from generation to generation and it was our job to move it to his new house. He was so attached to this wardrobe that he couldn’t bear to watch for fear of it being damaged, as the team was carrying it down his stairs and loading it onto the van he covered his eyes almost in tears. I realized at this moment that people can invest a lot of emotion into an object with history. To everyone else it was just on old piece of wood, but to that man it was his connection to history, it was his mother and father, his grandparents and it was part of his family. I found it strange someone could feel such a strong connection to an inanimate object, everything in my apartment was machine made, bought for functionality and low cost rather than how they made me feel. At this point I decided to seek out beauty in design, I wouldn’t own an object unless I felt emotionally connected to it in some way.

There is an ongoing struggle between technology and craftsmanship. I want to use technology and computers to create art in a way that honors the hand-made works of the artisan, for me their patterns, textures, structure and materials have history, they are talkative, they tell a compelling story. 

I explore many other themes in my artworks from femininity, to fear, love, life and death, my designs are nomadic, spontaneous, and disorganized, I like to explore a variety of ideas. I spend a lot of my time designing so when an idea arrives, I find it difficult not to materialize it right away.

I always start with an idea, sometimes I write it down or sketch it, other times I jump right into 3D design. The process of designing in 3D is therapeutic, shaping objects and building up complexity from basic geometry still feels like magic to me.

I would love to bring some of my 3D creations into the real world and create larger than life sculptures to display at NFT events around the world. However, with corona and lockdowns I have decided to postpone this idea.

I entered the NFT space in 2019 after seeing posts on twitter, I was drawn in by the idea of a market for digital art. It was the answer to a question I have been asking since I was 14 “how do I make a living from my own digital art?” the question had gone unanswered for the better part of 2 decades. I had worked on commissions and spent some time in a marketing department, both shared the same problem, I was working on designs for other people, materializing their ideas and not my own. NFT’s and Cryptoart was the opportunity I had been waiting for and a seized it with both hands.

The NFT community has been welcoming, helpful and open, it is easy to start a conversation with artists and collectors, people are always willing to talk about their experiences and share their thoughts on the industry. I have spoken with many artists and collectors from SuperRare and there is a shared belief that we are at the forefront of a digital art revolution. Everyday new artists and collectors are joining the space and discovering NFT’s through sites like SuperRare. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to sell my work and be part of the community.

I believe the future is very bright for NFTs, as more people discover the world of digital collectibles, the market cap could hit $600 million by the end of 2021 and $1 billion by 2022, I can see SuperRare solidifying its place at the top of the art auction market place. It is not unlikely that we will see a work by an artist sell for 6 figures by the end of the year.