Quantum Digital Artist Journal, Season 1 with Guest Marjan Moghaddam
We sat down with Marjan to get a glimpse of her life, and her creative world. We were able to ask some intimate questions about her process and more
Marjan Moghaddam is a pioneering digital artist and animator who works with 3d CG and digital media for animation, NFT, Net Art, print, sculpture, installation, and AR/VR.
The 20 unique 3dCG animations from Marjan Moghaddam’s new collection #GlitchGods are a counterpoint to her project #GlitchGoddesses. With humor, precision, and striking technical skills, the OG female crypto artist reflects on facets of modern male identity
We sat down with Marjan to learn more about her vision and what brought her to create her collection #GlitchGods
Quantum: Who are your biggest influences?
Marjan: The shortest list I can do is: Nam June Paik for his use of electronics and video in the fine arts; Louis Bourgeois for her non-stop persistence in forging a lifelong, independent art practice; Dali for his artistic genius; Picasso for his courage and visual badassery; Pollack for his shamanic performative approach to painting; Sarah Lucas for wrestling deconstructed females away from Picasso and De Kooning as a female centric aesthetic, David Wojnorowicz for his memorable and deeply personal 1980s installations, Cindy Sherman for inverting/subverting the “gaze” and coming into its full possession as a woman; Nicki De St Phalle for creating joyful, iconic, sculptural volumes of womanhood with her Nanas; Ansel Adams for the profound, haunting beauty of his photos; Kubrick for delivering masterpieces of the cinematic Sublime; Tarkovsky for killing it with his cinematic shots using only a 16mm camera; Tex Avery for his total genius in pioneering squashing & stretching in animation and remaining unrivaled in his mastery of the technique; and Chris Landreth for establishing an avant garde approach in 3dCG through a vision that remains important, original, and unique, till date.
Quantum: Can you tell us a little bit about your process and or how you create?
Marjan: I use a proprietary pipeline/technique for my original style of figuration and animation that combines 3d CG, Mocap, Procedural mesh deformation, nodal animation, simulations, and procedural, AI GAN, and painted 2d maps, in addition to compositing SFX. In other words, the full CG tool kit. My standing art direction for myself is to always avoid 3dCG cliches, and to dig deeper for the aesthetics that have never been seen before, and the ideas that are profound and significant in our world.
For the base male I used Mocap for the looped runaway walk, and the mesh deformations evolved after extensive experimentation. I wanted each one to be an animated painting with its own artistic agency, while still part of a collection, so the finished 20 were a result of many rejects and heavy vetting.
Ultimately, each #GlitchGod emerged out of this chunky pipeline in its own way, some took a lot of effort and time, and others just happened miraculously and fluidly. Usually, I morph between many different body types in the same animation, but with this collection, I got to work with one deformation idea at a time, which I explore a second time with a variation. I tested each one on a display, and they work exceptionally well as wall-hung animated paintings, and that was very important for me.
I holed up for the entire production, working around the clock feverishly with every GPU I had rendering, it was one of those epic, driven, magical, artistic explosions that went on for days, and I kept at it, trying to capture the stream. On some levels I think, these dudes somehow made themselves through me as digital beings that capture our world and moment.
Quantum: What is your favorite era and how has it contributed to your work?
Marjan: Every era in art history presents styles of figuration that capture the essence of how humanity is changing. As we straddle the physical and the virtual simultaneously, something is fundamentally shifting about who and what we are. Are we precise replicas of our physical forms as avatars in the metaverse? Or, are we also evolving digitally, memetically, culturally, aesthetically, and artistically, as new bodies and beings? What is the posthuman figure in the age of the metaverse? These are the questions that I work with in my art practice.
For me, painting in the 21st century can also be time-based, which is why I describe my pieces as animated paintings. In my style I always use morphing bodies in flux and various figural ambiguities that resist singular forms as they shift through the conventional and the digitally glitched and transformed. The Glitch here is not just the aesthetic style, but also how as Posthumans we are being glitched by the technology. The #GlitchGods are the expressionistic, artistic response, and each one becomes an exploration of various iterations of this new way of being in the metaverse. And lastly, men are complex as a phenomenon and identity in our physical world and the metaverse today, so on some levels this collection also speaks to that, the Posthumanist dynamic complexity of male identity.
Quantum: Is there a piece that embodies the overall collection and can you share the story behind it?
Marjan: Like I said there were many rejects, so I feel like each one truly embodies the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of the #GlitchGods collection or else it would not have been included, and I absolutely love them all! But if I was totally forced to pick one, I’d say the Pink Elvis Glitch, mostly because of the memorable and strange way that it happened. No aspect of him was planned, he was completely a spontaneous result of me patching a bunch of math & geometry nodes mixed with other Modifiers. Nothing about what I did should’ve resulted in an abstracted suggestion of Elvis, but it happened, like a total Ghost in the Machine moment. I initially named the file Peacock, not after the bird, but the idea of male beauty in a highly constructed, stylized, and iconic manner. But the green textures didn’t work. He really wanted the white of Elvis, and I added the pink designs to the white, and that’s when he roared into being as the Pink Elvis Glitch. I live for these moments!
Quantum: How did you hear about NFT’s?
Marjan: I remember laughing when I read about people buying Cryptopunks in the early days. But sometime in early 2020, someone dmed me asking me to tokenize my art so he could buy it. I was intrigued, but I was in production for a bunch of different projects, so I shelved the idea for when I had time. Then later that summer I decided to give it a shot. I had always sold my work in some materialized form, like prints or sculptures, but I loved the idea of selling my work in its original digital form as mp4s, GLBs or Jpegs, and it felt like I had waited for this technology my whole life. So, I got on Superrare in September 2020 and proceeded to sell into some of the top collections. My Genesis piece was even in the first IRL museum show of NFT art and accompanying book. Many of these early NFTs that I sold can also be seen as clips in the BBC documentary Art Goes Digital. But when I saw my Collectors hanging these works in their museums in the metaverse, that’s when I saw the potential. They say every new media or technology goes through 3 stages, first there’s the toy stage, then its magic, and then it becomes art. Clearly the toy part did not interest me, the magic part was interesting, but it was the art stage of NFTs that got me, or that’s where I see myself.