Welcome to Part III of our 3-part survey of video art since its inception in the early 1960s to now. In the first installment, we looked at the pioneers of the medium. In the second part, we racked focus on the artists who took the medium to greater cinematic and performative heights from the 1980s onward. In today’s survey, we will look at artists working in digital video, 3D software, and AI.
A quick word about our selections. Regarding the artists we chose for the 3D section, we focused on those making art that approaches or hints at narrative in the same way video art does. We did not include any of the fantastic artists who build environments or create looping visuals. A survey of those artists can be found in our Guide to 3D.
For the AI category, we faced an embarrassment of riches. In the interest of treating this as a survey rather than a comprehensive look, we unfortunately could not include many great artists whom we adore and admire, instead opting to give a diverse overview.
Regarding web3 at large, we did not include traditional animation, though a guide to 2D animation in web3 is certainly on the docket.
Video Artists in web3
Sarah Zucker
Sarah Zucker, also known as @thesarahshow across the internet, is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work fuses humor, mysticism, and myth with an innovative use of both futuristic and archaic technologies. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, with a signature focus on video synthesis, animation, and performance. She is particularly known for her use of analog video equipment, through which she channels her work onto VHS tapes, creating a unique digital-analog flow that speaks to a time-warping aesthetic.
Zucker’s “Four Caryatids,” now in the permanent collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, series, offers a modern reimagining of the ancient Greek caryatid—a column sculpted in the shape of a woman. Zucker transforms these static symbols of art and victory into vibrant, digital avatars.
Each of her four caryatids — Vision, Thought, Wink, and Recursion — represents a pillar of her own creative practice. Through video feedback loops, costume, and humor, Zucker queers and modernizes the classical form, infusing it with dynamic gestures and digital iconography, such as Wi-Fi symbols.
Joe Pease
Joe Pease is a self-taught artist from Australia, now based in Southern California, whose work explores the surreal and absurd within the mundane aspects of human existence. As a video artist, Pease’s work is hypnotic and dreamlike, layering everyday scenes with uncanny elements and unnatural rhythm. This subtle commentary on the absurdities of modern life has garnered him recognition for his ability to present the ordinary in ways that evoke a sense of wonder and reflection.
In works like All At Once and 11:22 am, Pease transforms everyday moments into mesmerizing visual meditations on time, routine, and the human experience. All At Once presents a continuous collage of people and objects moving in predetermined paths, creating a chaotic yet calming flow that reflects the rhythms of life. In 11:22 am, characters are distorted through repetition, with figures falling to the ground or multiplying in strange, wave-like sequences. This juxtaposition of the mundane with the surreal is a hallmark of Pease’s style. Everything Is Temporary further amplifies this theme, with a central character who remains static as the world around him shifts in surreal, illogical ways.
David Henry Nobody Jr.
David Henry Nobody Jr. (born David Henry Brown Jr.) is a New York-based performance and multimedia artist whose work challenges identity, reality, and social norms through a combination of humor, absurdity, and deeply provocative social commentary. Self-taught and deeply embedded in New York’s underground art scene since the 1990s, David has developed a distinct practice blending body art, photography, and performance. His work often involves elaborate self-transformations using found objects, food, wigs, and trash, creating what he calls Resemblagè, a form of physical collage that critiques consumer culture and the internet’s impact on personal identity.
In his own words, “My motivation is always to take the propaganda apart by literally wearing it myself on my body and living it as real life.” His piece Trophy Boy, one in a series of five created for a Unit London show, casts an absurdist light on “cookie-cutter male perfection,” a testosteronic fiend so hell-bent on winning that he becomes a “freaky trophy encrusted hoarder,” in David’s words. That said, many of his works are absurd to the point of being beyond interpretation but beyond delightful to watch and wonder at, such as Mental Marionette With Dancing Dogs below.
For a fascinating and detailed look at David Henry Nobody Jr.’s practice, see this studio visit with Outland.
tjo
Tjo is a Quebec-born visual artist who delves into themes of mental health, particularly pure OCD, and the human psyche, using his art to explore the complexities of inner struggles. His work is distinguished by vivid, emotionally charged imagery set against dark blue backdrops contrasting against the red figures of human archetypes. Tjo’s art is both a personal exploration and a universal reflection on emotional and psychological challenges, using collage, painting, and material destruction to create a balance between chaos and order.
Tjo’s interactive video series Plaques and Tangles is an ambitious and deeply personal immersive exploration of Alzheimer’s disease, examining the deterioration of memory and cognitive function over time. The project, which took over a year to develop, combines intricate set design, choreography, and digital art to create a multi-sensory experience that invites viewers to engage with the subject matter in a profound way. Each interactive piece corresponds to a different stage of Alzheimer’s, guiding the audience through the progressive loss of memory and identity.
Click here to visit and experience Forget me not, a segment of Tjo’s Plaques & Tangles.
Video Artists Using 3D Software
Cool 3D World
Cool 3D World is a multimedia studio founded in 2015 by digital artists Brian Tessler and Jon Baken. Their work blends 3D animation with their twisted, shiny-sweaty aesthetic and stream-of-consciousness storytelling, creating grotesque alternate realities that captivate and unsettle in equal measure. Both Tessler and Baken are self-taught animators with backgrounds in music, and this duality of sound and visual art has become their signature style.
Like the work of David Henry Nobody Jr., that of Cool 3D World defies logic and interpretation but evokes a sense of hypnotizing repulsion that has garnered worldwide attention and acclaim.
Quantum Communications
Quantum Communications, known in the graffiti world as waxhead, turned to digital art during the COVID-19 lockdown. Using Blender and the MidJourney beta, he’s created a space for himself to explore new styles and emotional vectors. His unique approach incorporates a grainy, VHS-like texture, giving his work a touch of nostalgia and realism.
Quantum’s digital pieces explore the concept of liminal spaces — transitional areas that evoke intrigue and unease. These themes resonate throughout his work, combining elements of reality and surrealism to challenge viewers to reconsider the spaces they inhabit. His use of liminal horror aesthetics invites a deeper engagement with the eerie and the overlooked in both digital and physical landscapes.
Read our interview with Quantum Communications here and see his MakersPlace profile here.
LEViT∆TE
LEViT∆TE is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles with both established art and music careers. LEViT∆TE specializes in CG/CGI, rendering visual content for music labels such as UKF, Noisia’s, Division Records, Deadbeats, Tchami’s Confession, and many others. He has toured the US playing audiovisual shows featuring his own music and visual content.
LEViT∆TE minted his genesis NFT in August 2020. He’s since amassed a notable and dedicated base of collectors on the SuperRare, 1stDibs, and MakersPlace. His hallmark style features narrative mini-films set to his own musical creations, notably his Legacy series, an audiovisual project that is both an electronica music album and a series of 10 short videos that cohere into a single storyline.
Read our interview with LEViT∆TE here and see his MakersPlace profile here.
Logan Sprangers
Logan Sprangers is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Los Angeles, working in film, television, music and advertisement. His eclectic and versatile artworks cover many mediums, genres and art styles and are noted for their vivid detail, evocative themes, and cinematic composition.
Sprangers’ work bears a noticeable influence from photographer Gregory Crewdson and quite likely filmmaker Roy Andersson, though his most ambitious piece of video art to date, 2021’s We, the Gods, pays homage to René Magritte and Remedios Varo while being a remarkable piece of work all its own.
See Logan Sprangers’ MakersPlace profile here.
Ignis Santander
Details are sparsely available on audio-visual artist Ignis Santander, so we will skip any biographical details. Artist LEViT∆TE, mentioned above, has said of Ignis’s work that “[e]ach piece is a concept trailer to your favorite movie you have never seen.” The two artists certainly share sensibilities — moody, tinged with science fiction elements, and set to dark electronic scores.
In Ignis’s recent short, Terminus, he explores parallels between human creativity expressed through dreams and the burgeoning sphere of machine creativity. In this, he attempts to tie Jung’s concept of the universal unconscious as a wellspring of human creativity to the latent space of AI. In it, we see a series of white globes collapse into each other, be swallowed, expanded, and aligned as the face of what is either a human woman or the personification of a computer intelligence awakened from a dream that delivered the insight that the globes represent.
Visit Ignis Santander’s MakersPlace profile or, for a much more comprehensive look at his body of work, see his Instagram.
Dr Formalyst
When visiting the website of architect, designer and creative coder Dr Formalyst, you are greeted in large print: I AM NOT A STORYTELLER. Instead, I am a visual artist making curious and intense experiences that evoke raw emotions and stimulate your imagination. Abstracted out from the first-person singular, this could easily be a manifesto for the video artist contra narrative filmmaker (though with people like Chris Marker, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage caught in the crossfire).
Nenad Katic adopted the moniker of Dr Formalyst so he could “experiment without the burden of rational thinking.” He uses mixed digital techniques like generative CGI, code and AI to play with forms in motion at the edge between figuration and abstraction, in order to evoke elusive stories that live just outside of the limits of our comprehension.
A representative example of his approach is Egomorphs, a series of AI-driven self-portraits where the artist explores his relationship with identity, mortality, and transformation. To create these works, Dr Formalyst performed a spontaneous choreography in response to an AI-generated soundtrack. This instinctive reaction to music, captured by an AI-based motion capture system, drove the narrative of each piece in the series. After the initial performance, the artist then transformed the results into surreal shorts using a mix of CGI and generative AI.
Video Artists Using AI
Andrea Ciulu
AI artist Andrea Ciulu burst onto the web3 art scene with his surreal post-photography series On These Streets. As an Italian and a fan of classic American hip-hop, Ciulu created On These Streets as a series of artificial memories, “those vivid, imagined experiences that, despite never having been lived, resonate deeply as if they were one’s own.”
Ciulu also created AI video companion pieces in a series called OST Mixtape, which focuses on the musical culture hinted at in the still images of On These Streets with a particular visual focus on breakdancing.
Jess MacCormack
Jess MacCormack is “a queer, mad artist” whose art fuses extreme camp with socio-political critique. Their animations have reached a global audience, screened at notable festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, Inside Out Film and Video Festival in Toronto, and the Mix Brazil Film Festival of Sexual Diversity across various Brazilian cities.
With a massive catalog of AI-based video work carrying forth Jess’s own version of a Leigh Bowery vibe, few of the videos exceed the 1:15 mark but they follow continuous themes and create mutant storylines across the dozens of pieces they’ve produced in a short period of time.
noper
Noper is a multidisciplinary artist who explores both the tangible and intangible aspects of life through technology. Drawing inspiration from human emotions and life experiences, he uses a unique blend of chaos and hallucinatory visuals to invite viewers to observe contemporary life through an analog lens of childhood wonder and nostalgia.
The vast majority of noper’s AI video output takes advantage of AI’s warped and shoddy outputs as a feature, not a bug. In an ongoing series of hallucinatory natural disasters, typically befalling bland ranch homes, noper leans into the surreal with the disasters ranging from fires to floods or shark attacks or unicorns as constellations of lightning bolts.
Nathan Boey
Nathan Boey, also known simply as Boey, is a Canadian filmmaker, animator, and editor who approaches AI work the way a sketch comedian might, truer than ever since Boey — alongside equally great AI artists Bengt Tibert and Mind Wank — released AI or Die: The First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show. Even before AI or Die, Boey’s longer pieces like LOOK AT ALL THIS or How to Make Healthy Workday Choices leaned into the surrealism of AI outputs to great comedic effect.
Of all of the artists mentioned in this survey, Boey is the one most veering into narrative filmmaking territory, and despite the AI doomsaying (much of it justified), his work — unimaginable without AI — kindles some optimism for a future of AI in the mainstream arts.
Rachel Maclean
Rachel Maclean is a celebrated Scottish visual artist and filmmaker known for her bold, satirical work that blends pop culture, politics, and technology. Using vibrant, surreal aesthetics, she often tackles themes like identity, power, and societal norms, all while subverting familiar tropes from film, media, and advertising. Maclean frequently stars in her own films, taking on multiple roles to create immersive and thought-provoking narratives that challenge contemporary culture.
In DUCK, Maclean explores the use of deepfake technology for the first time, resurrecting Marilyn Monroe and Sean Connery in a world of artifice and intrigue. Drawing on references from classic Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi, the film raises questions about truth, power, and conspiracy. The narrative, fragmented into 20 segments, reflects the nature of conspiracy theories, blending fact and fiction to form a new, distorted reality. By reimagining Monroe as a self-aware AI, DUCK subverts patriarchal depictions of female sexuality and critiques the cult of masculinity, pushing postmodernism to an absurd and thought-provoking conclusion.
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