This month, Los Angeles-based nonfungible token (NFT) artist Ellie Pritts celebrates “In the Screen I am Everything,” her first solo show in New York City – and her first time taking over the groundbreaking net art gallery Bitforms.
Eight animations of the technicolor exhibit are available as NFTs on Ethereum, displayed on screens alongside some physical prints. The multi-layered process used by Pritts for all three series on display unites them across all mediums.
Pritts broke onto the NFT scene in 2021 when she tried to create a few existing video artworks – and saw them take off.
“I had this cache of video art,” Pritts told Cointelegraph. “I had put it on Instagram or in various projects, but I certainly didn’t think I could ever make money from it.”
Her video practice had been mostly therapeutic, but suddenly the blockchain boom made her work valuable enough to fund the purchase of new tools, which Pritts used to create more sophisticated video artworks.
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She’d shot concert photos before the COVID-19 pandemic and performed as a professional cellist — until 2021 also forced her to confront medical issues she’d been avoiding, like her newfound inability to hold her bow. Pritts made a New Year’s resolution to start painting portraits in early 2021, but was unable to use a pencil to make preliminary sketches.
“I went to the doctor, through a lot of testing, and found out I have this degenerative neurological condition,” Pritts recalls. “They had no answers or comfort. They said, ‘You lose these skills, they don’t come back, we don’t know how much worse it will get. Sorry.'”
Introducing Artificial Intelligence
Pritts began leaning on artificial intelligence (AI) after receiving her diagnosis. Her show in Bitforms opens with ‘Relative Minor’ (2023), a trippy animation that hangs alone in the mandarin niche of the hall. In the foreground of the work, a female face, conjured up by Stable Diffusion, zooms in infinitely, morphing through colors, expressions and angles atop a glitch art backdrop.
“Relative Minor” previews the show’s eventual climax. The central face of the work is AI’s vision of text prompts from Pritts’ dream diaries. She has hundreds of pages of self-history on Google Docs and physical diaries of her sleeping and waking life dating back to age nine.
However, dream material makes for particularly good clues, Pritts said, “because I can create libraries and themes that keep popping up in my own subconscious.” One theme, the divine feminine, drove most of this show. Pritts overcame the AI’s biases to create archetypal faces that didn’t appear as stereotypically beautiful as the algorithm thought they should be.
Pritts then ran the AI’s animation through 1990s video hardware, re-soldered to produce visually distorted output. “That’s basically what glitching is,” she said. Still feeling that the work was incomplete, she created the background with a modular video synthesizer, “which basically works the same as a modular audio synthesizer with small wires,” Pritts said. “Same, but it’s video output.” She has probably made 20 such animations to date – this exhibition collects seven of them.
Glittering flowers
Next, viewers enter the flashy garden of Pritts’ “Fleur Glitch” series, where flowers bloom and wither on film – a shimmer, flash frozen and resplendent in polychromatic giclee prints. The artist applied techniques from her recursive dreamscapes to images of cut flowers. Some of the images are her own; some are from stock websites. Instead of mounting the floral animation on top of her synthesized glitch graphics, Pritts incorporated digital abstractions into the interior of the changing shapes of these flowers. With each passing moment, they present shifting portals to enticing digital voids.
“It’s a cool juxtaposition between nature,” Pritts said, “and the texture of something completely man-made and automated.” Bitforms founder Steven Sacks told Pritts to isolate and present a few frames from the animations. They hang on the lemon-colored walls around a mural that Pritts also did, composed of stills from this series. The prints resemble screen prints, are reminiscent of Andy Warhol and draw deep parallels between his superstars and Pritts’ flowers.
Self-examination by AI
The final room of the show opens on a wonderland of six framed screens illuminated by Pritts’ surreal scenes, a spectacle that sparkles with the movement of different tempos and directions. A few works even feature temporary cameos from Pritts himself. The affair, however, begins with a quiet tribute: two new prints from her “Divine Recursion” series, which she had initially intended to paint with her hands, but which debuted in Fall 2022 at Bitforms’ groundbreaking AI show in San Francisco.
After her diagnosis, Pritts took whatever collection of preliminary sketches she was able to finish and used machine learning to build a model that would portray her. She fed that model her sketches as visual prompts, combined with text prompts from her diary — this time from her waking life, where she often wondered what it would be like to feel more confident. Pritts found the results very personal. She added the final embellishments using Procreate graphics editing software.
“These are extra recursive because they are based on off [AI] paintings I did the first round,” Pritts said of the portraits. “That was an earlier version of Stable Diffusion. We are three versions later.”
Painting first attracted Pritts because she wanted more tactility in her practice. Due to her health and evolving remote technology, Pritts has mostly gotten her hands dirty figuratively, in a collaboration between the conscious and subconscious of the artist – empowered by AI’s mysterious ability to imagine what we have only words for.
“It’s kind of a magical process because you don’t know exactly which part of the prompt affects the output,” Pritts said. “One of the first I did, part of the prompt was I wanted to feel better about myself, boost my self-esteem, carry myself with confidence. I didn’t know what the hell that would give me. None of that draws a picture in my head.” For the first time, Pritts fully understood what it would be like to live as a queen – courtesy of AI.
The perfect moment
Only the show’s titular artwork evades the confines of a frame, rendered through a projector to provide a more immersive viewing experience. It shows Pritts coyly positioned in front of a greenscreen in her studio – she then added AI and manual edits. She then ran that altered video through her curved hardware “to give it that warmth and texture,” Pritts said. If this show’s printed portraits portray her past and the framed dreamscapes her present, then this work is Pritts’ future.
“If I were not alive right now, many doors could close for me right now due to physical problems,” said the artist. “I feel the opposite, like doors are opening for me.”
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Blockchain helped Pritts find new exposure, audience and revenue for the first time. On-chain transactions still help her sell work with integrity. Now the technology is also supporting her continued explorations in AI, allowing her to manifest her regal self that once seemed impossible.
“Having that view when I start a project has a huge impact, even if it’s psychological,” said Pritts. “To not run into things and think ‘how am I going to do it?’ but instead, “I can do anything.” I never felt that until recently.”
What’s next? Hard to say. AI is always evolving.
