Anne Spalter

The Artist

Anne Spalter is an internationally acclaimed digital mixed-media artist, inspired by Vera Molnar and her use of both digital and traditional media. She is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). 

Her artistic process combines an interest in the collective unconscious and a consistent set of personal symbols with a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. A body of work initiated at a residency at MASS MoCA, combines artificial intelligence algorithms with oil paint and pastels. Spalter is also noted for her large-scale public projects, which have included a New York City MTA Arts commission for a 52-screen digital art installation in one of its most crowded commuter hubs (Fulton Center) and a 47,000 square foot LED video work on the Hong Kong harbor. She began creating NFTs in 2020. 

Spalter’s work is in the permanent collections of museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI), and The Museum of CryptoArt. Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory.

The Wonder of it All is Anne Spalter’s most ambitious artificial intelligence work to-date. A tour-de-force of both technical and compositional drama, Spalter takes us on an epic abstract sci-fi voyage through a fantastical realm generated with the assistance of text-to-image-based custom AI tools.

The whirlwind journey begins with a multi-dimensional sequence of congested, multi-layered highways, channeling films such as Blade Runner and Inception. As cars and freeways compound and meld into buildings and tunnels (all with ghostly nebulas in the distance and vague references to timepieces forming intermittently), the viewer flies through the ever-evolving space. Following a three part sonata format, a B section accelerates into a hypersonic visual experience with a stylistic modification to match. The final section brings back the highways, although with varied motion, and a cloaked figure appears. The scene grows to resemble a more familiar planet and the word "home" mysteriously appears, despite never being in the textual prompts. A timepiece emerges in the sky and our character arrives at a final destination. The artwork restarts in a seamless loop.

Sonic landscape designed by The Josh Craig.