Rinatto L'bank
Where digital art is no new terminology, and technology has become a vital part of everyone’s virtual life, there are stories that include deeper interrelation of the past, present and future in this electrical stimulation. In this recent interview, Rinatto L’bank, a CGI artist provided us insights into how he navigated himself as an artist and works with his own peculiar nerve of strength.
Please take us through your teenage years. How was your social and academic life? How you would describe your transitions of the several developing years and phases?
I grew up as a talented child, with a taste for creativity. I was always drawing and making things while listening to music at the table in my room covered with posters from magazines. Which I cut to pieces to make collages. In my teenage years, I actively ignored the school system, especially when I had my own personal computer, then I already had some skills of using a PC and being an active gamer. During my college days in the programming department, I began to study digital graphics. That's where my career started. Since I was 16 I've been part of the online MMORPG community, spending a lot of time communicating with people on forums. Once I got a ban and started looking for a way to solve the problem, came across a section with a design where the guys created avatars and banners for forum signatures as well as collect lessons and materials. I began to develop the forum section that would remove the punishment. So I began to develop and apply my rudiments of digital graphics skills and later became a moderator of the section. So gradually I began to acquire phases of development as an author, looking for ways to instantly implement and apply what I study. That eventually led me to six months of experience as a designer in the office, after which I was convinced of my direction and went to study the art of visual communication in design at Eastern Mediterranean University. Where I enthusiastically began to assimilate information and accumulate skills. During my years at university, I began to realize that early contributions to any knowledge come in handy in the long run. For example, my knowledge of the physiology and biology of human muscles came in useful. Which I studied while I was doing sports and then used in my drawing techniques. That was later interestingly reflected in my current practice of working with images and the phenomenology of the human body in the media. During my university studies, I tried to practice beyond the curriculum. It is important to note that being on an island in a kind of isolation from large active offline communities, I kept actively communicating online, being present in communities and chat rooms. That again gave me a lot of benefits and useful projects and connections in the future.
What are the issues that trigger you about the current global situation? What do you think about Artificial Intelligence and its good and bad aspects?
I definitely like the overall situation and the speed of technology development, I want to have time to explore new possibilities. Artificial Intelligence is an incredible tool where a human operator can synergize the knowledge and skills of the machine and his own experience. Of course, there are always two sides to the coin, but I try to focus on the good. In my circle of contacts, many authors succeed in working with AI. I actively started working on this technology during my quarantine, and at the moment I have trained my own AI based on my work together with an engineer, and I am planning a big project in the future. Already now I see a great future for the interesting development of the visual sphere with the use of these technologies.
The digital expansion has made art more technical and mechanical, what are your thoughts on new possibilities and the shifts that it is bringing for artists and their psyche?
I think that humanity in its history of art constantly goes through similar stages of development. Like the examples of the emergence of photography and printing. Which also turned out to be the advanced challenges that artists faced, dividing them into those who were able to adapt and become pioneers of their field. On this point, I can only be glad that I am living in a new era of changes and innovations. It offers new doors of opportunity to influence the course of development and the future. The mindset and psyche of artists must change with the times and respond to the present day. After all, it is our task to be a reflection of what is happening, capturing, transforming, and talking about the era through visual communication.
Working in new media and specifically digitally complex visuals, what you'd like to say about the visual impact of your concepts? What do you feel while working on them and what do you want viewers to feel?
This is a pretty deep topic for me. Since I initially approached this issue from an academic point of view. First of all, new media and digital complex visual effects are what we can observe in an exaggerated format today in every gadget. The popularization of technology has made the content very accessible to the masses, which requires more simplicity in the interaction between a person and technology. But fundamentally, new media remains quite complex in context. Which, in turn, can speak of a very tight relationship and synergy of a person as an organism with his creation of a virtual world that may seem real to us. (The way the number of subscribers or the built image in social networks affects real life) After all, our brain is a mysterious thing and it already works far from the way the human brain worked in the 19th century. With the amount of visual information and experience that we receive, we are clearly different. What I am trying to talk about is using the well-known image of ourselves - the medium of our consciousness - the human body. How new media influence and change us as humans, how the human body is presented in the media, how we imagine and know it - the representation of humanity by humanity. Of course, it does not change physiologically and structurally. But there are clear influences and changes in the mental character. In fact, I portray the image of these processes as - Humanity through the prism of new media.
How you would describe your sense of visual pleasure, what stimulates you and what names you'd give to your artworks if you were to name?
My sense of visual pleasure lies in the details of nature. When I am happy to see hidden images. In other words, I am excited and stimulated by the point of view of objects on the world. After all, the surrounding space is such that exists only in our minds, and as we all know, many living organisms see it differently. So the objects around us have some kind of their own perception or reflection of it. Once, as a child, I read a book on Cryptozoology, which I think influenced my psyche, then I began to be afraid of the dark and the images that seem to me.
But I quickly realized what was happening to me. Since childhood, I liked to notice details and pay attention to fleeting small things that our brain has learned to ignore so as not to be overloaded. So I can look at the surface of the water for a long time in which something is reflected. Such reflections are the opposition and opposite of the usual, as there are concepts of beauty and ugliness in the art. A shift in a certain paradigm of the familiar attractive. I believe that it is impossible to know true beauty without knowing its complete opposite. With the title of my work, I often act on the same principles. When creating something supposedly possibly repulsive, I try to name it beautifully or with a hint that this is something that is not customary to show. I would call my work a look at a person through a parallel universe. Some simultaneity in a frozen moment.
Please tell us your experience with the NFT world that has begun to viral around, your placements, and your thoughts on this virtual world for artists?
My experience of interacting with the NFT world amazed me. In part, it took me back to the past, where virtual communication is of great value. This movement brought together a huge number of people. It allowed those who secretly dreamed about it for a long time to start doing art. We have long seen a huge increase in the development of digital graphics and specialists who were supposedly lost - producing content for social networks without having their own world for this.
Now he appeared, with his heroes and rules. Of course, the NFT has some other side of influence and existence. Since this technology is part of the blockchain, it has its own world with its own market rules.
I felt in the moment as if I had been preparing for this from the very beginning of my journey, the skills that I acquired were useful to me again, after a period when it seemed that everything had passed and it was time to go out into the real world. When he halved again, the virtual universe. Having traveled my path, I realize that if this technology had appeared a few years earlier, I might have felt more energetic in it than today. But on the other hand, this thought makes me younger inside, I strive to be more open, sociable, and bold to new discoveries and experiments. Moreover, the NFT world allows you to monetize your favorite business in a larger open format.
Which are the artists that inspire you in NFT and meta-verse? How do you foresee yourself in the future with new media art? What is beginning for you to explore more?
I am motivated by many young artists and my colleagues and friends in the field. There are so many names that it would be wrong to mention just a few. I would say that everyone inspires me because each person finds his own unique way of development and communication in this area.
Indeed, in the NFT it is important to be interesting, potentially developing, and promising. I see for myself new problems that I need to actively work on, something that has weakened in the process of strengthening third-party foundations. Now the competent distribution of resources and multitasking is important. When an artist is no longer a unit, but an Artist and a team.
I would like to reveal the technology precisely from the point of view of art and not its representation through the NFT. After all, you can invent incredible mechanics of how artworks and their usefulness. Of course, there remain the standard tasks of creating virtual worlds of the artist through exhibitions and works, both video and static. I would like to create a large living community where each participant has his share of influence and involvement in what he loves. When art is not only a medium that can be perceived but also in which you can participate, influencing the future and feeling like a part of a new world.
interview JAGRATI MAHAVER
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