Painted Cities / Nate Mohler

“Painted Cities'' explores the subconscious and imagination of machine intelligence to create the memory and dream state of a city through the fusion of motion and ink. The digital paintings are created using multiple forms of Ai, especially Neural Style Transfer, to fuse Mohlers videos with ink, texture, and photographs often from oil and watercolors of similar areas. “Painted Cities'' explores how machine intelligence can be used as a tool to extend our imagination and when fused with human moments of familiarity can create visceral feelings of nostalgia.

The series originated from the desire to immortalize memories, specifically of moments Mohler fears forgetting.

“The cities in my work are actual places, but also a figurative representation of them during something of a dream-like state, an imaginative moment. An Ode to the presence a city has on a person. A tribute to the architecture, the people, and the culture.”

All are slow, long and highly detailed, intended for passive viewing and complementary of space rather than demanding full attention. They are all intended for physical viewing in high enough resolution for viewers to press their nose to the screen and identify details such as little people moving about.

About the Artist 

Nate Mohler (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is an emerging media artist, who works with technology as a paint brush to build conceptual and avant-garde experiences. A 2019 UCLA graduate with a B.A. in Design | Media Arts, Mohler is intrigued with the fusion of conceptual art and technology to support connectivity and social activism with unconventional space and sound. His work focuses on eliciting action and question through digital mediums such as projection mapping, immersive installations, sculpture and video art.

Over the past couple years Mohler has worked under the mentorship of artists such as Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp, Rebecca Mendez, and Refik Anadol. In 2019, Mohler completed his largest public art installation; Culver Current, which illuminates the courtyard of City Hall in Culver City with video art reflective of Culver City’s neighborhood. Culver Current, consists of a 9-foot tall cylindrical steel frame with 494 LED panels inside a custom thermoformed Corian® shell. Projected video illuminates the Corian® surface from within, diffusing along ripples cut into the surface. Culver Current’s fountain uses no actual water. Instead, a series of video art works reflective of the greater Los Angeles and Culver City area are projected on the facade of the cylindrical sculpture. The fountain’s show lasts about 15 minutes long on a loop with accompanying sound by composer Luke Mombrea. Mohler produced multiple large scale gallery installations, “Be(coming) to Terms”, “Rise and Fall” and “The Eventual Unraveling of Everything“ which explored humanitys’ relationship to nature and to each other.

Mohlers is intrigued by the way digital tools such as code and machine intelligence allows for new explorations of imagination and the development of new aesthetics. Recently, striving to fuse more human finesse and elements of nostalgia into highly digital based video work by introducing personal memories in his work; Such as, swimming naked in a pool, hiking through Europe or using his own everyday photographs as textures. Mohler has been exploring the fusion of photo texture and film through Ai tools such as neural style transfer to harness the machines ability to recognize pattern and hallucinate a painted world. By feeding machines images and forcing it to try and find patterns within video frames, Mohler is able to blend the texture from photographs or wisps from ink paintings onto otherwise sharp and ridgid video.

Working to challenge the culture and definition of fine art, Mohler actively works to further the digital art movement and help open the eyes of traditional collectors to digital mediums that are conceptual, engaging, and thought provoking. Nate is a sculptor, programmer, developer, artist, director, producer and curator; Nate's works bridge both the information technology world with the fine art/media art community.