We were joined by Andrea Chiampo and Seneca for a conversation about their artwork featured in the inaugural Offline show, Digital Decadence: The Art of Falling Apart
Andrea Chiampo: You want to start?
Seneca: Okay, I'm Seneca. I have a new painting in the show at SuperRare.
Andrea Chiampo: I'm Andrea Chiampo, and I'm a digital artist experimenting a lot with physical as well. I'm very happy to be here and exhibiting and showing everyone my piece. Very excited about SuperRare opening the gallery. I'm excited to be part of it, meet old friends, and meet, of course, new ones.
Seneca: it's always a good time, isn't it? And especially because we're like all over the world, so it's hard for us to, like, really gather for this one moment. But this is a special moment.
Andrea Chiampo: Yeah, definitely.
Andrea Chiampo: We're taking shape online as well.
Seneca: Yes. Offline.
Andrea Chiampo: Sorry. Offline. Offline. Oh, no. Glitch. Temporary glitch. Yeah. Sorry.
Andrea Chiampo: At first, I said, "Oh my god, what am I going to do? I don't want to do like the obvious take of, you know, like something falling apart like in terms of like figurative way. So I didn't want to make, I don't know, like the the human against the machine or whatever. But it's been years that I....I will stick to figurative because that's what I love to do, and it was a passion and became, you know, from a hobby, a profession before getting in the industry of movies. And then also to get away from the movie industry, I started this style years ago, but still, I stick to figurative. That's what I, I love to do.
I want to go for more conceptual work that in a way still leads to figurative as the end result, the artwork I made, an artwork, you know, in my style, it's nothing different from what I used to do. But the only difference is that actually you can't see the file because the file has been scrambled and the ash of the ash of the file of the JPEG has been stored onchain. But actually what you see on the physical print is part of the string of the arithmetic JPEG encoding.
Seneca: It's fascinating.
Andrea Chiampo: Basically the JPEG is there, but you can't see it. You know, I like the concept of it's a falling apart the other way around. You know.
Seneca: It's like you're putting things together.
Andrea Chiampo: Exactly. Yeah.
Seneca: I love that.
Andrea Chiampo: Which is, you know, a paradox in a way. Like few years ago, I think was the first year I was on SuperRare, 2021, when I got the idea of taking one of my 3D files and actually store it on chain. But then I said, "Oh, wait a minute, I I need to, make sure to make a name in the space first with like consistent work." So I stick to the figurative, you know, but it's been years that I want to do something like more conceptual, more uh, triggering, more uh, provoking in a way. And I think this was a perfect occasion to also show that I don't only do digital work. I've done like physical prints in the past.
Andrea Chiampo: Yeah, I think most of the the people in the space, they know me for my digital sculpting and probably even actually they know me for my JPEGs, and they don't even know it's a actual digital sculpting. They think it's like illustration or something.
Seneca: My work leans more fantastical. It It's like very surrealistic. I take inspirations from comics and animation, the cover art of like horror manga. There's a question posed where as technological tools become such an integral part of humanity, you know, what does it actually mean to be human? What does that mean for our future? And I think with the rise of AI and these tools as we embrace them, can we expect to see like a hybrid of sorts where humanity really is technology and technology is humanity? So in my piece, I was trying to portray a godlike presence, like technology human being, this hybrid entity I've been exploring. Themes of like religious imagery, dark romanticism, bit of pop culture in it too. So it was like a mixing of all that. I have all these characters like a three eyed little like white surrealist dog named Shermie.
And then in this piece, I have this girl character. She is probably the most humanoid character that I've made thus far. I don't know if she's like a representative of me, but rather she represents our gateway to this new world, and she is reacting upon this entity, and it's sort of like a very neutral expression. My audience will actually notice my characters don't have exaggerated expressions, and there's a reason for that. When I was younger, my sleep paralysis was terrible as a kid and I still lucid dream to this day, but it's always that feeling of like being the observer in a way. Lucid dreaming, you're interacting with the dream, but like I felt very helpless. And I think in this piece, I was trying to evoke that feeling, just like a take on like being helpless. Like the world is shifting with or without you. You know, that's the feeling that I was trying to get at. And also like a bit reflective of like my childhood being sort of mute back in the day and not being the speaker. In this case, this girl is not the speaker. I'm using her that character in a lot of my other works. This is not the the first one of the this series that I've made, but just the first one to be present.
Andrea Chiampo: Yeah. Amazing.
Seneca: Yeah. So I'm really excited about that to continue to continue drawing her in these stories.
