Valeria Federici

Claudia Hart is this year’s recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. 🏆
 Earlier today on the phone, she laughed and said: »We’ve been joking for years that once I turn 70 things will start to happen for me as an artist.« And it happened. First the museum retrospective, then the publication of her book »Patterns and Politics« together with Francisco Carolinum Linz, an exhibition at the Boijmans in Rotterdam, and now the SIGGRAPH Award. Past recipients include Lynn Hershman Leeson, Frieder Nake, and Tamiko Thiel.
 From the first time I met Claudia, she shared with me what it meant to be a female digital artist over the past decades. She laughs a lot when she tells her story: from not being allowed to watch TV for more than 30 minutes a day as a child, to losing her job as an editor at Artforum because she was too busy becoming a painter, to falling in love with decorative arts at 25, and from then on appropriating classical genres of art history.
 Like Hershman Leeson and the pioneers of early computer art, such as Herbert W. Franke, she experimented with new technologies to test their artistic potential. But unlike Franke and his contemporaries, she did not come from science but from art. Her motivation was therefore not scientific curiosity, but questions of identity and power. Who is visible, and why? Who is excluded, and why?
 Today, I asked Fräulein to publish one of our conversations online in full, originally intended for publication with them at a later point, so that you can read Claudia reflecting on what it means to struggle to become an artist and to receive recognition late in life. »When I look back at my life, I realize I was very open and willing to try new things, and willing also to be fluid, to go with the flow. Then as I grew older, I began to notice patterns. The secret, I think, is both to move with the flow and to stop at times to analyze and redirect.« – Claudia Hart

No one tells you what to do if your career completely collapses around you in your late thirties