NEW YORK, NY.- Today, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched Liquid Crystal, a new digital art project by artist Rick Silva, on whitney.org. The project was commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for net art commissions. Silva’s work is part of the ongoing Sunrise/Sunset series that activates across the Museum’s website twice a day at sunrise and sunset in New York City.

In Liquid Crystal, the artist explores the relationships between the natural world and the technological environments that surround us. The series comprises seven videos, one for every day of the week, each of them depicting a view of a natural surface, including leaves, moss, sand, gravel, snow, and ice, representing different seasons. The artist’s hands sweep away these natural layers to reveal synthesized video patterns beneath the ground.

“A recurring motif in Rick Silva’s work is the extraction of natural resources,” says Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. “In Liquid Crystal, Silva’s hands are digging into natural surfaces to expose video patterns below them. The artist’s hands both represent artistic creation and the labor essential in “mining” natural environments to support technological systems.”

Silva, whose grandfather was a diamond miner in Brazil, delves into the natural surfaces of the earth and unveils colorful patterns and effects within the technological environment of whitney.org. The action of digging into the ground excavates a past while also referencing future technologies that will be developed from raw materials. The series reinforces the interrelations between natural phenomena and materials, and alludes to the cycles of sunrise and sunset and the seasonal changes.

Liquid Crystal is commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Sunrise/Sunset series is overseen by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, for artport. Unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds, each Sunrise/Sunset project disrupts, replaces, or engages with the Museum website as an information environment.

Rick Silva (b. 1977) is a Brazilian-American artist whose videos, websites, and installations explore virtuality, futurology, and speculative ecologies. His work has been exhibited at institutions including The Centre Pompidou, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been featured in Artforum, Wired, and Rhizome’s NET ART Anthology. He lives in Eugene, Oregon where he is an Associate Professor at The University of Oregon.