In 1862, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel produced a series of lithographs called Art Forms in Nature. Initially focusing on radiolarians, a group of single celled organisms whose perforated enclosing shells and radiating spicules possessed the delicate variation of crystal patterns, Haeckel gradually composed a system called organic stereometry, a genealogical classification tree of ever-increasing complexity. Over time, the medusae’s (jellyfish) bell-shaped cap and tangled mass of long fine tentacles joined the echinoderm’s (starfish) radial geometry to comprise Haeckel’s General Morphology of Organisms. These simple constellations of symmetrical patterns neatly dovetailed with Goethe’s Romantic notion of an irreducible ideal found in living nature. Dimpled surfaces, serrated edges, and ribbon-like appendages, when arrayed squarely across the page in perfect hub-and-spoke format, instantly became the new design idiom. Rene Binet’s monumental entrance gate to the Paris World Expo in 1900 -- a Taj Mahal of coral encrusted surfaces embedded in flowing Art Nouveau curves -- joined the Tiffany lamp’s drooping fractal shades to create a Baroque aesthetic which seemed to express the cellular logic of the planet. A logic that, coupled with Darwin’s theory of evolution, appeared to shred Platonism’s crypto-mystic netherworld of pure forms. Haeckel even went so far as to postulate that protoplasm had an inherent “artistic drive,” a self-organizing swarm instinct that drove each cell to miraculously arrange itself into the pocked and ribbed jewels that his plates depicted.

And yet today, Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature persists in the contemporary imagination not just because it provides a ready template for biomorphic abstractionists, but, more precisely, because the emergent behavior it illustrates -- the bootstrapping of single cells into intricately faceted Faberge Eggs of form -- jibes with the bottom-up non-hierarchical system of commands found in God games like The Sims. In an open-ended eco-system like The Sims, “feedback” from adjacent buildings is recorded by all components in the grid and the network immediately recalibrates itself, “evolving” as it were, incrementally. For modernists painters, obsessed with locating the irreducible core, the static snapshot frozen in time, this notion of constantly fluctuating, intelligent pattern formation is heresy. For Eric Chan and Heather Schatz, the artistic duo known as ChanSchatz, a Modernism focused on apprehending the perfect essence can, likewise, only lead to a gratuitous mannerism -- the kind of regressive, backward looking stance so at odds with their positivist, digitally inflected vision. Painting, these days, has become an allegory of all painting, narrating its own history through the production and arrangement of various decadent motifs. Modernist drips, gestural swaths, cubist fragmentation, hard-edged geometry, old master boudoirs, and neo-primitive figuration reappear with cyclical punctuality, fractional ghosts reanimated through Illustrator, PhotoShop, the personal photographic archive, or simply the odd anachronistic detail in a contemporary tableau that might feature lithesome ravers in demure poses or a corporate logo stripped of its signifying product. The two agree, though, that in the transition from the labor based physical economy to the “metaphysical economy” of the symbol-processing mind, artists become semionauts, forging new pathways through a sea of signs, or, conversely, providing the lone sign that the culture seems to repress. Simple juxtaposition, needless to say, doesn’t suit them.

Like Haeckel, ChanSchatz work from an encyclopedic database of minutely differentiated forms. Crab-like clusters joined in tight rings hover next to starburst mandalas. Tiled mosaic borders abut spectral buds. Broad, oscilloscopic curves dance across the picture plane like errant lassos intent on reigning in the excess energy. Although a certain psychedelic profusion obtains, nowhere present is the lava lamp’s squeezed lozenges or the kaleidoscope’s perfect symmetry. Amid the vibrant archipelagos of fruit-loop colored graphics -- hot fuchsias, smoldering yellows, and glowing limes (in keeping with the pixel’s retinal afterimage) -- ChanSchatz are exceedingly mindful to create a delicate load-bearing superstructure, a tightly composed connective armature that prevents their paintings from devolving into kitschy Mobieus loops, and Escheresque circuit board recessions. Their database is indeed digital, but their paintings are composed additively, from the bottom up, and not algorithmically in measured parcels of increasing complexity. In fact, this aggregate superimposition of warped curves and hive-like cells is merely preparation for ChanSchatz’s eventual distortions. But while textbook distortions as various as Giacomo Balla’s Flight of Swifts (1913) and Zaha Hadid’s exploding Suprematist cities attempt to memorialize machine age speed and post-industrial information flows -- the blurred aesthetic that unfortunately persists today -- ChanSchatz harness flux as a raw material for customization. True, Hadid’s swirling tectonic shifts and spiraling cantilevers -- what looks like the aftermath of seismic upheaval -- bear some resemblance to ChanSchatz’s density of pictographic information, but the architect is more preoccupied with breaking down the verticality of the modern city, whereas ChanSchatz exalt density as a mirror of infinite consumer options.

Nicolas Bourriaud argues in Postproduction (2000) that “the ecstatic consumer of the eighties is fading out in favor of the of an intelligent and potentially subversive consumer: the user of forms.” [1] Where the ecstatic consumer privileges quantity (not unlike an avaricious golem amassing a shiny pile of coins in his lair), the subversive consumer expropriates, tweaks, and then redistributes the customized fetish back into the distribution network, keeping nothing for himself save the osmotic afterglow of accumulated cultural capital. Think: sampling, bootlegs, filmic loops. Think: DJ Shadow as pop star, Douglas Gordon as cinematic auteur. ChanShatz, then, simply hastens this process by asking invited guests (myself, for instance) to select characteristics from an Interactive Design Module. The IDM, though, is already pre-customized based on extensive conversations with potential participants. Unlike typical interactive projects, though, where the receiver “completes” the piece, ChanSchatz merely takes the selected color scheme and abstract avatar and begins a complex process of hand drawing, digital layout, acrylic airbrushing, and finally, hand touch-ups on the resulting inkjet canvas.

Customization, here, links smoothly with everything from Modern Primitive body adornment and tattooing, to skin “cultured” in the lab with polymer scaffolds, epidermal growth factors, and cell seeding. Additionally, beat-em-ups like Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and Tekken 3 offer players character menu screens featuring a wide gamut of alter egos ranging from Hawaiian Sumo wrestlers to blond, sandal-wearing Greek women in gold lame miniskirts, while chat rooms, it goes without saying, are filled with a Sybil-like glut of multiple personality disorders. Still, ChanSchatz maintains near-total creative control by constantly updating their dynamic archive of formal imagery (administering their own planned obsolescence, so to speak), so that a blue phosphor six-pointed comet bleeding into a jade estuary of floral blooms, is merely an aesthetic accommodation to a savvy public already primed for customization by burning their own MP3s, or rearranging their desktops icons and selecting screensavers. Case in point: after completing my own IDM, which, given my preference for data pile-ups and exacerbated difference, bore faceted shards of an exploding diamond eclipsing an aurora borealis of pink and lavender, I was not surprised to find that subsequent “psychological portraits” looked nothing like my own.

ChanSchatz’s studio, in order to accommodate a project of this magnitude, operates like a mini-Bauhaus, a factory or atelier for the production of paintings, rather than the seedy, paint-splattered myth of the lone, tortured genius locked in hand to hand combat with the canvas in his claustrophobic garret. Not just computers, but commercial garment industry embossing machines, abound. Walter Gropius, notably, in an effort to elevate craft to the level of other fine arts, introduced wood-carving, metalwork, stained glass, bookbinding, and mural painting to the Bauhaus curriculum. Gropius himself designed furniture, wallpaper, a diesel locomotive, and the interior décor for a railway carriage. Studios, back in 1919, were known as workshops; artists as apprentices or journeyman. The comparison to ChanSchatz is apt since silk-screened designs applied to silk scarves become integral elements of the paintings as well. Their pleats and folds mingle with the digital icons floating on the primed surface to create a deeper recession un-reliant on traditional foreshortening and vanishing points. In fact, a weird oscillation occurs between the scarves’ plateaus and ravines and the sticker-like emblems laminated, as it were, to the picture’s surface. Unlike the neutrality of modernist abstract space--a blank vessel waiting to be filled performatively with the painter’s subconscious archetypes -- ChanSchatz views space topologically, as the study of a surface structure’s behavior under active deformation. Architect Greg Lynn’s digitally rendered “blobs,” for instance -- bulbous welts in trussed steel expressly designed to create dimpled pockets of space on his facades -- are not arbitrary cosmetic parasites, but record the building’s passage through fields of pressure and stress. In a similar sense, ChanSchatz literalizes gestation and birth metaphors since, far from a fragile, house-of-cards placement on the 2-D picture plane, each celestial hieroglyph exerts tension on its neighbor -- at times, “docking up” like a pod to the mother ship, at others, nestling into an opportune vacancy like a heat seeking, heliotropic plant. The result is what they call a “crystal trap,” a kind of unified lattice that, optically at least, gently bobs and sways as if borne aloft by structural pontoons.

But ChanSchatz’s figure/ground distortions are not simply an Op-Art remnant left over from Bridget Riley. Abstract paintings, after all, struggle harder to envelop the viewer since they don’t have the arsenal of trompe l’oeil devices available to figurative works -- say, the winding path snaking into the distance in a Hudson River School landscape, or the receding checkerboard tessellation in a Renaissance piece. The scarves, then, increase the interface points, multiply the sites of contact between random graphic clusters and their own neatly enfolded tucks. Deleuze, in remarking on Leibniz’s concept of the Baroque fold, noted: “Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small, each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages, surrounded and penetrated by an increasingly vaporous fluid, the totality of the universe resembling a ‘pond of matter in which there exists different flows and waves.” [2] ChanSchatz activate this fluid, freeze it in time, so that the amplification of a panoramic volume can be read as a temporary screen grab that dreamily fades into succeeding paintings without obliterating what’s currently on view.

It’s worth mentioning that Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus, said painting is “built up piece by piece, no different from a house.” Klee could not have foreseen, though, the advent of graphic compositing programs that allow silk, paint and photography to be combined on a seamless, matte surface--that is to say, without traditional collage--but still he would have applauded the degree of integration that ChanSchatz achieves in their finished paintings. Unlike Takashi Murakami, who “contracts out” his signature smiley anime designs to Marc Jacobs, who in turn emblazons them on Louis Vuitton handbags, ChanSchatz never attempts to piggyback on the fashion world’s much larger and infinitely more well funded promotional apparatus.

In the age of Final Fantasy’s perfectly undulating strands of Breck Girl hair, it goes without saying that AutoCAD programs based on Cartesian x, y, z coordinate systems don’t readily lend themselves to the kind of fluid, streamlined curves and wild arabesques that are ChanSchatz’s stock in trade. Plot two points and connect the dots -- rinse, then repeat -- is woefully inadequate when NURBS-based (Non-Uniform Rational Bezier Spline) 3D modeling programs like Alias and Maya come bundled with your G4. But despite the nods to Persian minarets and their onion shaped torque, ChanSchatz can get nostalgic, though minus the sentiment, in their simpler, more illustrational line use. Luminous outlines, no doubt a holdover from Battlezone’s spare “wireframe 3D,” where planes are marked by glowing green lines, yet the demarcated space itself has no surface, no solidity, crop up as a repeated motif. William Gibson would no doubt be proud since the corporations in Neuromancer were described as “green cubes,” or a “stepped scarlet pyramid,” while the landscape of the matrix contained “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data like city lights receding….” ChanSchatz have fractured those cubes and split open those pyramids with an idiosyncratic verve that lodges them squarely in the next generation of painting, digital or otherwise.

1. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, trans., Jeanine Herman, (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002), p. 33.

2. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 5.