Transient Visions II: Diego Mac
Welcome to Transient Artist Spotlights, where we dig into the creativity and passion of artists participating in Transient Visions, our ongoing Dynamic NFT exhibition. The exhibition highlights the unique 1/1 artworks made using our dynamic NFT technology, representing a diverse mix of established and budding artists. In these interviews, we learn more about the inspiration and processes behind their digital art.
Artist Bio: Artist. Dance director. Choreographer. Dancer. Video artist. 3D Artist. Producer and cultural manager. Doctorate in Performing Arts. He is currently dedicated to artistic creation based on mixing the language of dance with animation and 3D simulation techniques, blockchains, metaverses, and NFTs. He was selected to exhibit his work at the NFT.NYC event received the 2022 Açorianos de Dança Award as Personality of the Year for his innovative work in 3D dance and received the Cultural Trajectories Award for the development of his artistic work.
He has been working for 25 years in the cultural and entertainment area in artistic projects that move between dance, popular culture, image, technology, creativity, management, and entrepreneurship. Director of Macarenando Dance Concept. Artistic director of Muovere Cia de Dança. Graduated in Dance. Master and specialist in Visual Poetics. He started his professional career in 1997, having worked on more than 300 cultural projects. His work is recognized on the national and international scene, with more than 20 awards received.
Link to “Choreographic Time Capsule”: https://superrare.com/0xd25c5f708e6a91a820d60b8b6bc34dfa340d2bfe/choreographic-time-capsule---1-year-1
Q: Who is Diego Mac?
A: Diego Mac is a South American artist, passionate about dance and technology, who wants to reprogram the world, mobilize people and provoke transformations with art.
Q: Your artistic journey spans multiple disciplines, from dance and choreography to 3D animation and NFTs. Can you elaborate on how these diverse influences come together in your creative process?
A: Artistic creation mediated by technology is not something new to me. “Pas de Corn” (2006) is the first and most emblematic work resulting from this relationship: a video that presents a corps de ballet made up of popcorn and uses humor to satirize the dancer’s body. The work received many awards, participated in several festivals, and is used as a reference in research on video dance.
“Por Baixo da Mesa” (2007) and “Mexendo nas Partes” (2008/Prêmio Açorianos Novas Mídias) are other works created in the continuity of the research with video dance. In 2009, I received a CAPES scholarship to research my master’s degree in Visual Poetics (PPGAV/UFRGS), supervised by Sandra Rey. At that time, I had already come to understand that video is the body that dances and that I was dealing with a dance of images, not a dance in the images, resulting in the question: how does this video dance? “The Collector of Movements” (2011) is the work resulting from the research, which engendered concepts of movement, collection, hypertext, and interaction. http://macarenando.com.br/ocolecionadordemovimentos/
In 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to use 3D techniques and technologies to create dances.
Q: The fusion of dance with 3D animation and technology is a unique aspect of your work. How do you find harmony between these different mediums, and what challenges have you encountered along the way?
A: My goal is to try to apply in the 3D environment and language the fundamentals of dance and work with body and movement, such as weight, flow, volume, relationship with time and space, presence, etc. And my body plays a key role in this process. When I create dances with digital materials, my whole body is involved. In my body, there is no distinction between physical performance and digital dance. And I believe that this has to do with the future of relationships in the metaverses, with the conditions of existence, and with the forms of coexistence mediated by technologies. Other bodies, other movements, other dances.
In the pieces, I seek to create dances and choreographies from new protocols, codes, and paradigms of body and movement made possible by mixing dance with animation techniques and 3D simulation, science fiction, and biofuturism. The fundamentals of dance are used as a motto to configure the initial setup of 3D physical simulations, such as gravity, ground impulsiveness, immobilization of joints and muscle groups, movement speed, fiber tone, weight of parts, body volume, plastic bodies, expansion and contraction of force fields, wind, fluids, among other elements.
The technical and artistic differential of the works resides in the fact that the movements and final choreography of the pieces are generated, in most creative processes, by procedural physical simulation, instead of keyframe animation or motion capture.
The classic archetype of the ballerina, the feminine, romantic, airy, vaporous, enigmatic, and superhuman figure gives way to androgynous figures, neither male nor female, decentralized, with simulated physics, soft parts, procedural choreographies, disconnected movements and articulations hyperflexible. Hyperhumans. Metahumans.
This opens doors to create and present other bodies, other movements, and other dances, provoking a dialogue between the classic and the contemporary and reflecting on the future of Art and Dance.
One of the biggest challenges in technical and creative terms is choreographing the simulation, as the control is initial, in the setup, and it is difficult to adjust the movements along the way. So sometimes just accept the choreography that the software itself does in collaboration with you. I think that’s the challenge.
Q: Let’s talk about your “Choreographic Time Capsule” piece in Transient Visions drop, can you tell us how did you come up with this concept?
A: When the possibility of creating a dynamic NFT came up I was completely excited!
The conception behind my piece “Choreographic Time Capsule” for Transient Visions is the search for a way to explore the intersection of art, dance, and time in a way that challenges our conventional understanding.
The idea is to create a journey through different time periods: 1 year, 10 years, and 100 years. Each segment of the choreography is divided into small parts, represented by 365 frames, 3650 frames, and 36500 frames, corresponding to each period of time. What makes this intriguing and unique is that each frame is only revealed once a day, forming a unique sequence of movements that only completes after the passage of time.
In the first piece, which covers 1 year, the complete choreography is only presented at the end of the period, resulting in a video that brings together all the images revealed throughout the year. The choice to start counting on Michael Jackson’s birthday, who has had a significant influence on my work.
And this is just the beginning as I am planning to expand this series to span 10 years and even 100 years. In these future pieces, collectors will have the opportunity to follow individual pieces of choreography on a daily basis that accumulate over time, providing an evolutionary experience. Each day adds a new element to the dance, building a narrative that slowly unfolds over the decade or century.
More than just a work of art, this “Choreographic Time Capsule” becomes a symbol of the ephemerality of time. By participating in this experience, the audience becomes part of something bigger, being a privileged witness to the evolution of the choreography over time. The project challenges traditional conventions of art and time, inviting everyone to explore the multiple layers of meaning and complexity that only the passage of time can provide.
Developed by me, Diego Mac, an artist dedicated to uniting dance and advanced digital techniques, this work represents the fusion of body movement with the infinite possibilities of the digital world that only dynamic NFT technology can provide. My vision seeks to transcend the boundaries between visual and performing arts, resulting in unique pieces that challenge conventional notions of temporality in art. I am excited to share this journey and invite everyone to connect with the gradual transformation and unfolding of this choreography over the course of a year.
Q: You run a Youtube channel, how did you start and does it have any influence on your NFT career?
A: I use this tool more as a repository/portfolio than as a channel to attract an audience and things like that.
Q: Being recognized as a Personality of the Year for 3D dance in the 2022 Açorianos Dance Award is a significant achievement. Could you share a specific project or moment that you believe exemplifies your innovative approach to this genre?
A: One of my biggest goals as a dance artist is to discover creative strategies and formal solutions capable of revealing an expanded and democratic notion of dance, in which dance occurs not only in the standard human body, thin, hard, and muscular but also in other bodies, including non-human ones, establishing other and different perspectives on what dance can be and the bodies that dance can have. And the naked, raw 3D body, stripped of all the social masks that make us up and hide us, seems to me to be one of the ways to free the body from certain standards.
I make art to reprogram the world. Currently, I create art to answer some specific questions that guide my work: how to dance in Web 3.0? How to choreograph in the metaverse? How to reprocess the revolution brought about by the relationship between dance and 3D simulation? How to show other bodies, other movements, and other dances? As a dance artist, I seek creative answers to these questions by articulating dance and 3D, NFTs, web3, and metaverses, provoking a dialogue between the classic and the contemporary and reflecting on the future of Art and Dance.
Q: In the world of NFTs, uniqueness and digital ownership are crucial. How do you ensure that your NFT artworks stand out and offer value to collectors?
A: I think that the work I do, mixing the language of dance with animation techniques and 3D simulation, combined with highly elaborate aesthetics and visuals, is unique in the context of digital art.
And my experience with dance gives me unique and exclusive skills around the body and movement.
I realize that until recently, one of the challenges of the art and technology relationship was to represent bodies in digital environments. However, we are now entering a new paradigm: the presentation of bodies in virtual environments. And it is exactly at this point that I, as a dance artist, play a fundamental, unique, and exclusive role. Dance is a rich source of data on how bodies move, interact, express themselves and present themselves in space-time. While technology advances in the imitation of the human body behavior, it is the artist who visualizes, creates, directs, reimagines, and re-signifies this body and nourishes it with sensitivity and emotion.
The idea of “presence” is fundamental in dance, as it deals with the living and organic body as a support for artistic work. To achieve this presence, dancers, choreographers, and directors develop techniques capable of updating the body at the moment the work is established, so that it is intact, committed to the action, and connected to the space and its stimuli.
In the digital environment and in the context of robots, there is also a search for this presence, in order to enable enhanced immersion and interaction. However, in this environment, bodies are different: they have no flesh or bones. They are soft, rigid, plastic bodies, pixels, and machinic, avatars, subject to different gravities, with hyperflexible articulations and mutual interpenetrations. The question arises: how to give presence to these bodies? Dance, through its choreographic logic, offers a specialized approach for the emulation of physical presence, for the generation and training of updated and responsive digital and robotic bodies, endowed with weight, flow, speed, focus, and volume, fundamental elements of this artistic language.
This quest for the presence of bodies in virtual environments is closely linked to the future of relationships in the metaverse and ways of living with machines, in which the connection between the digital and the physical (phygital) will require different approaches to the body and its movements. By bringing the fundamentals of dance to technological languages, I seek to produce new creative possibilities and reveal an expanded and democratic notion of both art and technology.
I believe that these are the unique values connected to my work that could interest collectors.
Q: With the rapid growth of digital and NFT art, where do you see the art world heading, and what role do you envision yourself playing in this future landscape?
A: NFTs are a new way to create, distribute, and market art. And that has been revolutionary for me and my work. First, because the profusion of artistic creation with 3D technologies and NFTs has to do with a vital artistic need for expression, to talk to people, to be in the world, acting, creating, publishing, criticizing, and that dance, in its form more traditional, does not allow, and perhaps even castrates, either because of the necessarily physical and face-to-face elements or because of political-economic contingencies. Second, because of the possibility of creating my own things, deciding when, where and to whom I want to sell, how much I want to charge, setting royalties, monitoring the movement of the work, and continuing to receive payment for subsequent sales made are actions that deconstruct and rebuild my self-image as an artist, bringing necessary empowerment in a reality where art is increasingly being swept under the rug. In fact, these technologies have brought me closer to a goal that I have pursued for many years: “putting my dance on the Amazon shelf”. More than a commercial goal, it is, above all, the desire to popularize scenic/performative dance, form an audience, and dominate the economic processes that involve artistic making. As these new technical possibilities allow dance to be understood and operationalized as an item, as a digital object, possibilities also open up for placing this object on shelves, marketing, and distributing it as a product, keeping the due specificities. This is one of the applications I’ve been making in these environments: using technologies to distribute and market the artistic work I do in different marketplaces and communities.
I think that artists will increasingly play a crucial and indispensable role in the development of technology. The idea of “thinking outside the box” has been valued in recent years, especially in the field of innovation. As for the artist, this mentality is not an option or an occasional strategy: it is the starting point of everything they do. The artist is, by nature and training, a questioner outside the box. Unlike other professionals, the artist does not need to leave the box, as he has never been inside it. He was always on the sidelines, outside the center, looking at the world with a unique perspective, pushing boundaries and creating new territories.
Artists have the ability to subvert the status quo and question established norms and forms. While other industries focus on solving problems and developing specific products, artists challenge the purposes and functions of these solutions. Through divergent thinking, they allow the birth of disruptive ideas and alternative worlds, with different realities to be explored and reimagined. By programming this new vision, they influence the way people interact with the environment and understand their own reality.
Technological advances require complex ethical, social, and emotional considerations, which artists are sensitively trained to deal with, which allows for a more humane and inclusive technical contribution; raise important concerns such as privacy, diversity, equity, authorship, intellectual property, and environmental impact, sometimes overlooked in the pursuit of progress.
I see my work as an artist getting closer and closer to these contexts of collaboration in the development of technology to create innovative processes and products.
Diego’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/diego_mac_arena
Diego’s LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/diego.mac
