The genesis of Basement Drawing came from a concept I developed for our avatar of David Bowie. In 2019 I was exploring a soft way to introduce Bowie as an avatar to the world. Bowie’s manager, Bill Zysblat, suggested we use Bowie’s paintings. Bowie had painted throughout his life, often using the medium to work though his musical ideas.

 

‘David Bowie Is Painting’ would have built on the work I had shown at Sotheby’s NYC the year before using real-time projections straight out of Unreal. A life-sized Bowie would be seen with this back to visitors as he painted at an easel - a real-time UE character and scene displayed on a wall-sized 8K screen. Epic Games awarded us a Mega Grant to have real-time Bowie driven by a performer on a vertically mounted 8K Samsung tv. With David Bowie Is Painting we would’ve taken this concept a step further using a synthesis of performance capture and AI to animate him painting. Spatial sensors detecting visitors movement would’ve triggered the Bowie avatar to pause and look over his should directly at the viewer. I was seeking funding for that piece when HTC, the makers of the Vive VR headset, introduced me to Albert Oehlen. Albert loved the idea of having an avatar represent himself and so we developed the idea of capturing him drawing or painting and then recreating in virtual reality.

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Production for Basement Drawing got underway in 2020 just as the pandemic lockdowns were put in place. Albert was stuck in Switzerland so I reached out to my friends at Artanim in Geneva to capture Albert's performance. I directed the shoot remotely via Zoom from Los Angeles. Originally intended to go on show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, it was delayed by pandemic restrictions and eventually went on show at Art Basel Switzerland in June the following year.