Artist Statement + download pdf version: (ClaudiaHartArtistStatement.pdf) My current work consists of digital “paintings” that take the form of 3d imagery integrated into photographs, animated film loops, and multi-screen animation installations. This work transposes discussions about digital technology and a materialist critique of media through a metaphoric and feminist lens. In the context of ideas about a technology that has replaced nature by threatening to eclipse and permanently alter it, I argue that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology are not a rupture but a reflection of very conventional ways of thinking. Technological culture is still functionally an all-male engineering culture - what the historian of technology David Noble has identified as “a world without woman.” He describes the high-tech ethos as actually emerging from medieval Christian monasteries and describes it as still being driven by an unconscious millennial desire to recreate the world afresh, without women and outside of nature. I have experienced something similar on a personal level in the vocational schools where I have taught 3D animation over the past seven years. In the absence of women, the masculinist culture of technology, colored by what Noble has connected to Christian Millennialism (so relevant to our current fundamentalist religious era), defines the impulse behind much of technological development, from atomic weaponry and space exploration to cybernetics and robotics. This is an impulse that is one of both annihilation and of purification. Such religious values still pervades the technological research of the military/entertainment complex and influences its visual manifestations, particularly in relation to the realm of the body. An example of this is the typically hyper-erotic femme fatale populating mass-culture representations in the technological gaming and animated film milieu. By creating virtual images that are sensual though not pornographic within mechanized, clockwork depictions of the natural, in my new body of work, I try to subvert earlier dichotomies of woman and nature pitted against a civilized, “scientific” and masculine world of technology and science. In my own way, I am staging a romantic rebellion against our technocratic and bureaucratic culture.        .   + view high res image