Award-winning digital artist Andrés Reisinger is taking over the world, and our screens, with pink architectural installations. The self-described ‘unclassifiable artist’ sits down with Urth Magazine to discuss the intersection of digital and physical worlds, how digital art can aid sustainability and why AI is not a replacement for human creativity.
It was a couple of months ago now and I still remember it as the beginning of something different. I was on Instagram and a friend shared a post by @reisingerandres. I didn’t recognise the name. But I recognised there being some kind of digital mastery that I needed to unpack. I clicked through to the post captioned ‘Taking Over Paris’. The images were unsettling. I stared at the scene, flicked through the carousel a bunch of times trying to discern whether the image was real or fake – as in photographed or digitally rendered. The ambiguity made the scene impactful and memorable amid the same-same of social media. It was like the lovechild of a Gregory Crewdson set and a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. Intrigued, I clicked back to Andrés Reisinger’s page, the self-titled unclassifiable artist, who had already attracted a decent following at this point.
“Instead of fearing the digital,” Reisinger muses, “we should learn how to adopt it as a complement to our physical dimension.”
A few weeks passed and it seemed Instagram was broken — every story showed Reisinger’s fabricated worlds and trademark combination of hard urban landscapes draped in soft light and colour. By now, Reisinger had taken over Paris, New York City, London, Tokyo and Rome. The series had multiplied, as did his following. Reisinger was taking over the world in more ways than one, reimagining significant architecture in major metropolises with his bubblegum hues.
It may seem like the ‘Taking Over’ series catapulted Reisinger into the ranks of the world’s best digital artists, but his practice was well-established prior to its release. In 2020, the Argentinian-born, Barcelona-based Reisinger was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Art & Culture category. His work has been featured everywhere from Architectural Digest to Harpers Bazaar and has fetched eye-watering figures on the NFT marketplace.
“It is possible, and I would say necessary, to create digital demand before embarking on producing physical (and oftentimes) unnecessary physical offerings.”
It’s 2023 and there’s a lot of anxiety today around how digital is being used as an alternative to physical mediums. But we often fail to acknowledge the coexistence, how much of our daily lives are already integrated with the digital realm, and how much of our behaviour is influenced by our experiences there. Reisinger knows that we occupy a place in both spaces, and it’s his ambition to unify these experiences.
“Instead of fearing the digital,” Reisinger muses, “we should learn how to adopt it as a complement to our physical dimension. My work expresses exactly this – a new definition of the present day where the digital and tangible coexist and inform each other in an intelligent and beneficial way.”
One real-world positive outcome from Reisinger's digital work is sustainability. Take the Hortensia Chair as an example. The sculptural armchair, inspired by hydrangea flowers and incorporates more than 3000 petals, was conceived behind the computer. Once the digital rendering did the rounds online, Reisinger was overwhelmed with order enquiries as if it were a real product. The Hortensia Chair quickly, but not without difficulty, went from screen to showroom floors. “Hortensia taught me two things,” Reisinger remembers, “It is possible, and I would say necessary, to create digital demand before embarking on producing physical (and oftentimes) unnecessary physical offerings. The digital realm can teach us to look beyond what we already know to be possible in the physical world, broadening our perspectives.”
“It’s essential to remember that AI is not a replacement for human creativity.”
In digital art, there’s a certain social responsibility artists must consider when projecting their vision – particularly in the case of the metaverse, where architects and designers alike are pioneering the construction of a new virtual environment. But Reisinger strives to design spaces, objects and environments that reflect the public’s vision as much as his own.
“I believe that digital tools have the power and the potential to be used to help conceive the ideal and the necessary,” says Reisinger. “With digital tools, we can achieve the ideal form of an object, a city even, and retouch it until we obtain what reflects actual needs. Only then, we could transform it into a physical application, saving a critical amount of resources and time.”
The digital landscape is changing fast and there are important lessons we can derive from artists such as Reisinger. The limit of our collective imagination has expanded with the development of these new digital tools.
“We are strongly preconditioned by what we think is possible, while in reality there is much that we haven’t discovered yet,” Reisinger claims.
The advent of artificial intelligence attests to this. There’s a lot of hype around AI technologies that will undoubtedly have a substantial impact on the digital design industry, from enhancing the creative process with idea generation tools, to expediting time-consuming task— but Reisinger believes the buck stops there.
“It’s essential to remember that AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but rather a complementary tool to help us push boundaries and innovate further.”