The Goldenrod's First Digital Art Gallery

Henry Fritz's futuristic work can help reframe how the region thinks about the intersection of art and technology.

Eastern Kentucky has a long heritage of celebrating and archiving traditional arts and crafts, from dulcimer and mandolin-making at the Appalachian School of Luthiery, to broomcraft across the region, to Appalshop’s 50-plus years of cultural documentation and beyond. It’s a voluminous and beautiful thing.

What the region isn’t so adept at doing (yet) is thinking futuristically about local art that’s left-brain-meets-right-brain, digital-forward and computer-savvy—the stuff that’s trippy and cutting edge and skews more 2100 Space Odyssey than High Lonesome. Augmented Reality creations and digital manipulations that are mind-expanding and deep-feeling styles of boundary-pushing technology, working to swirl a viewer’s understanding of how science and art are two sides of the same coin. Big concepts that are, well, new to most of us.

Richmond-native Henry Fritz, 32, has been creating this kind of art for years, and I’m thrilled to share some of his work (including Goldenrod exclusives!) today. I’ll let Henry take it away below with his version of an “artist statement” and ideas for how a more forward-thinking way of understanding art could reshape our local small towns for the better.

Henry Fritz

@henryamster | henryfritz.xyz
Richmond, Kentucky

I have no formal training in the arts, and I find most “artist statements” are way over-the-top and loaded with a bunch of art jargon that’s meant to scare away those without the $120,000 degrees you can get in a big city. We are all capable of drawing distinct and purposeful meaning into and from artwork. In the good stuff, it’s innate, and giving that a name seems to only diminish its power to do the unspeakable, wondrous duty of art: to reflect and appreciate the beauty of the odds falling so much in our favor that we—can you believe it!—get to experience life.

Exclusive for The Goldenrod (2021)

With the pandemic, it’s become apparent that technology needs to be a much larger part of the curricula in Kentucky’s public schools. I’m glad to see a larger emphasis placed on the traditional STEM subjects, but I posit that it’s missing the most important piece: art. The idea of STEAM— Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics—has emerged as an alternative.

I don’t have the data to support it, but my anecdotal experience working in a tech-related field has proven that the creativity of practicing art—music, visual art, writing, etc.—is invaluable in whipping your brain into the frenzied state required for engineering software or other specialized fields that require a systems-thinking approach. Speaking from experience, applying technology within the arts, like creative coding and generative art, leads to building incredible problem-solving skills and a greater appreciation for folks who didn’t have our modern tools to create their work.

Next, it's not a requirement to move to New York, Chicago or even Lexington to try and make art. I think aside from the traditional brain-drain that causes the “most educated” to leave this area, anyone who's kind of an art weirdo (and isn't also a scion of some untold, ill-gotten fortune of yore) is told you must “get out of here” if you ever want to be successful.

They may be right about the successful part, but it doesn't have to be that way. I think it's time to call on the the folks who left for greener pastures—if they feel any debt to the culture that helped shape them—to return and build infrastructure that supports and promotes the arts. (Maybe they don't feel that way and have never uttered, “Well, back where I'm from…”)

Personally, I know that it can be tough around here if you’re not into football and muddin’, but at least when I was growing up, we had a coffee shop downtown [in Richmond] where kids could go and play shows. That doesn’t exist anymore. The alternatives to investing in afterschool programs and arts programs is that kids aren’t going to have anything to do and will either:
a) retreat into being online or gaming (or something worse?) and become further alienated and insulated from their local communities or;
b) get into all kinds of trouble and run afoul of the law.

Seems like an easy choice to me!

There’s pre-existing infrastructure in Central and Eastern Kentucky for the arts, and it could use the care and attention of folks who’ve struck it big—or those who haven’t! There’s also an extensive and important history of art in Appalachia, and there are art unions throughout the state that specialize in the traditional crafts (quilt-making, woodworking, glass, etc.) but there is very little room for new media artists.

Exclusive for The Goldenrod (2021)

In the big cities, there are galleries that are more accepting, but the brain-drain I mentioned before is part and parcel with this approach. If there is no place to show off an Augmented Reality gallery, there will be no attempt to create one. Eastern Kentucky University has an excellent video game development program (nationally ranked!) and there are many skilled folks who have this new artistic skillset, but they don’t have anywhere around here to show it.

The flexibility of new media—specifically computer-based media—means a gallery can be as simple as a projector facing the side of a storefront. There are little steps we can take to make kids who express an interest in these fields feel like they can plant down some roots and maybe—just maybe!—they won’t feel the need to move in with eight people in a 1200 sq. ft. apartment in Brooklyn.

I use a combination of many tools and processes, including 3D modeling software, parametric design tools, machine-learning and GANs. Also, a lot of little scripts I learned to write in my other life as a software engineer supporting state social workers.

Thank you to a couple of people who’s work I’ve built on including the Blender, p5js/Processing and Sverchok teams; RiversHaveWings and advadnoun on Twitter for their work on VQGAN + CLIP; and the great Daniel Shiffman who is an excellent educator specializing in teaching art through technology.

Exclusive for The Goldenrod (2021)—give it a whirl by moving the art around for an Augmented Reality effect!

---

We’ll be featuring more artists doing under-the-radar work throughout the year—so share this story with all the garage art tinkerers and middle-of-the-night online makers and digital holler brainiacs you know shouldn’t be hiding their light under a bushel: