The art of Pieter Schoolwerth
Topic: The art of Pieter Schoolwerth
Student name: Lee Ching Chi (Billy)
Student number: 60170220
Pieter Schoolwerth’s works always question how the human subject is supposed to perform in the modern age of the digital avatar. Even though Schoolwerth is an artist, his process of painting is a complex hybrid of computerized and traditional painting.By using a multi-layered process that includes photographing subjects, building physical models, 3D-scanning them into a digital form, erasing and editing figures on the computer software, then manually painting their remaining pieces of the human subject back in real life, Schoolwerth performs an “archaeology” of modern human existence. Contrary to paintings, Schoolwerth’s art is not just a static image, but a record of a moving action. For my research this week, I’ll be discussing Schoolwerth’s Accidental Megastructure #1—a choreographed dance between a human and its shadow, the object and the void behind it, ultimately staging the "accidental megastructure" of the internet as the defining scene of contemporary life.
Schoolwerth completed Accidental Megastructure #1 in 2018, again dealing with the memory and existence of a human being in a data-saturated world. I was particularly drawn to it when I was scrolling through his works, not only because I found it digitally aesthetic, the multiple layers even though chaotic, felt organized in a way that was able to depict the very structure of a dancing human through its material construction.
After observing the work in detail, I concluded that Schoolwerth had used a number of digital images other than mere colors. There is a green grass background at the bottom right corner, a concert stage light setup on the left-hand side, with a human being wearing a white top hat glitching through left and right, clearly implying that the person is having a fun time dancing around at a party. For me, this element of creating art evoked a connection to the code and data structures that form the vast "space" of the internet, where human creativity blends with digital forms of media. I noticed that this feature of the work does not serve as a passive background but is as active as the figures themselves, much like the multiple layers in a Photoshop file that pile up a final image.
Schoolwerth’s work allowed me to reflect about how I can produce creative work in the future, where I could explore the appropriateness of digital error in showcasing human impressions. Schoolwerth does not see glitches as mistakes but as the authentic texture of our time. Since I believe that the imperfections in art is one of the keys that makes the art natural and appealing, I very much agree with Schoolwerth’s stance, and his take on using carefully rendered “glitches” to reveal a deeper meaning. For my own work, I could experiment by intentionally introducing digital artifacts, and to use different forms of physical material to translating the digital image into a living form of it.
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