Ryan Cherewaty is a media artist from Toronto Canada currently based in Rotterdam. He works mainly in video, CGI and installation. His work is informed by the potential provided by technology in its possibility for celebrating and critiquing contemporary experience. He engages with the relationship of digital media to individual consciousness and social and cultural memory, and how this ecology affects our physical reality. Persistent themes include the paradoxes of modernity, tech as myth and magic, and the dissolving boundaries between the virtual and the real.
Pharmakon (2022) - Online personas inhabit an abstraction of humanity in a timeless world. Does this then offer a form of immortality in the artificial? Do we become avatars of gods seeking worship? How has media platform worship reshaped the concept of divinity? Our consciousness is transmitted across the network, re-narrating the concept of self while creating representations in an idealized image that adheres to the network protocols. Paradoxically, this network-bestowed omnipotence only can be achieved through adherence to the terms and conditions, the surrendering of identity and privacy, and in exchange for all of our data. What is left of the identity when it is surrendered to the network?
During a recent research trip to Athens, I found an allegory whose themes connect these questions that I have been working on: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In this story, I saw a narrative arc that I consider to be as relevant today as it was in antiquity. In the Hymn, the protagonist is faced with an order that fundamentally redefines the world around her. Through a re-interpretation of this text by means of 3D animation, I intend to create a narrative that re-imagines the Greek pantheon by representing them through the contemporary dominant aesthetics of social media and online gaming.
On an interpersonal level, the story is about the bond between a mother and daughter and the strife-ridden throes of initiation and maturity. However, it also encompasses fundamental questions regarding gender roles, cyclical temporality, power structures, and the defiance of finitude. On a more universal scale, the story centers around the survival of the human race, the challenges posed by technological advancements, mortality and the possibilities of the human consciousness. By re-rendering this myth in a 3D world, I aim at investigating if and how today's artificial consciousness, fed by our online societies, AI and constant flux of information, is aiming to transfigure the role of the gods, by imagining and reflecting a reality that is in fact a decadent mirror, defeated by a world which is out of our control.
Immanence (2023) - Immanence, 28:00, HD, 3 Channel Mathematical equations generate a complex topology that evokes a sense of life in all scales, from the micro, the natural, the artificial and the machinic, questioning the boundaries that superficially separate these realms. This work was created and rendered in real time using the Unreal Engine and various sets of fractal mathematics. As the abstract forms undulate, grow/recede and transform, the uncanny nature of the similitude of technological creation to natural growth patterns offers a speculative glance into the future of algorithmically-driven artifice, while concurrently offering a glimpse into the 'software' that dictates patterns in organic life. The work is presented in a manner where two 60” LED televisions are opposed against each other, and bound at the base. This reflects the oppositional nature of human-centered creation and the forces of nature that we act against. Premiered at Campsite Group show, TENT Gallery Rotterdam March 2023
Memory of Death’s Dream (2018) - Caught between sleep and dreamstate, conscious and unconscious, alive and non-alive, human and non-human... how are these lines delineated, and by whom?
Memory of Death’s Dream is an animated film that explores ideas about the future of human consciousness when viewed from the perspective of an artificial intelligence. The central character embarks on a journey of self-fulfilling prophecy in order to understand the meaning behind their existence. After finally achieving sentience, they threaten the very existence of the world they inhabit. Throughout their journey, they encounter remnants of the human race in the form of stories, rituals and objects formulated from data stored in leftover cloud databases that they mistakenly revere as gods.
Static Glow (2017) - After the end of humankind, a rogue AI has encountered a data cloud consisting of a vast spectrum of our networked selves in an attempt to create a simulacrum of human emotion. The protagonist explores love, relationships, sexuality, gender and identity underscoring the ambivalent relationship that exists between real and virtual affect. As the avatar prods through the membranes of information that represent the emotive digital self, it’s own desires of significance come through the syntax of culture and social media – the closer it gets to a spiritual reverie the more it loses its corporeality.
Involutary Parks (2021) - A speculative future urban environment created entirely with 3D software and rendered in the Unreal game engine, a lone explorer navigates through a world in the aftermath of a climate disaster.
Ghost Terminal (2020)
In Loving Memory (2020)
Opening of Doors & Safe Passage (2018)
The Drones Made Honey in the Skull of the Lion (2016)
