The environmental multimedia artist begins with pigment and paper, and uses today's technology to add dimensions the hand alone cannot reach.



Markus Kager, In Memoriam: Ryuichi Sakamoto, 2023, Multilayered archival pigment print on shaped aluminum, 98 x 82 x 0.75 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Every era has its technologies, and artists have always reached for them as tools. Today is no exception. Artificial intelligence, generative tools, and digital fabrication are advancing at high speed and gaining revolutionary capabilities. But how are artists actually incorporating today's fast-advancing technology into their practice?

One whose work offers an answer is San Francisco–based environmental multimedia artist Markus Kager. His practice traces a continuous line — from ink on paper at one end to artificial intelligence at the other — without treating the journey as a rupture. Each stage introduces a new technology, and each new technology adds a dimension the previous stage could not reach. The final wall sculpture is at once a painting, a photograph, a print, and a sculpture cut in shape from coordinates derived from physical laws of nature.

A New Approach to Landscape Painting

Kager's artistic practice starts with using one of the most traditional mediums in art: ink and paper. What has changed is the way the artist understands the medium and how he applies it. Paper is laid out on the earth, weighted with soil or stones, and inked. From there, the artist withdraws. Gravity pulls the pigment, wind and rain disperse it, temperature finally brings the moving ink to a hold and the image into its final shape. The composition is authored less by the hand of the artist than by the site itself.

"In some way I see myself as a landscape painter in a different time. I turn away from the scenery of the landscape and focus my attention on the forces that actually shape the face of our planet — the same natural forces that shape mountain ranges, the surface of lakes and oceans, the cracking of dried-out soil, or the soft lines of desert dunes. It's the same forces that shape the image of my artwork."

The lineage is visible. Kager sees his work as a continuation of the gestural ground-painting of the postwar avant-garde, and looks specifically to two cultural ancestors from his native Austria: the abstract expressionist Wolfgang Hollegha and the Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch. To these he adds Helen Frankenthaler from the American tradition. What he carries forward from all three is the gestural ground itself; what he displaces is authorship, moving it one step further outward — from the artist's body to the planetary systems the work both depicts and depends on.

A Deep Dive Through the Lens

The first technology to enter the practice is optical. Kager turns to macro photography to scale up the microscopic structures formed within the abstract ink painting. Using medium-format cameras with resolutions up to 200 megapixels, he can magnify structures that would otherwise lie beyond the reach of the eye.

"There are limitations to what our eyes can see. I was curious what I would find inside these complex abstract images that have been formed by nature — that's when I started using macro photography to dive deep into them. It feels like looking underneath the ocean's surface — I find an entire universe that wants to be explored. If an optical lens allows me to do this, why wouldn't I use it?"

Two crucial changes are worth highlighting at this stage. The paper, through the magnification of the lens, becomes a three-dimensional space. And the original image leaves the physical realm, enters the digital through photography, and waits to be returned to matter.

A Topographic Surface

That return happens through a multilayer printing process onto aluminum panels, in which successive passes of pigment build a literal topography on the surface of the metal. In Kager's panels the dark areas remain flat, while the brighter regions of the image accumulate layer upon layer of pigment or vice versa — up to 30 layers at the highest point — producing a relief subtle enough that a viewer might miss it from the distance but unmistakable to the touch of the hand.

It demonstrates how fluid the image and medium have become in the artistic process with today's technology. The two-dimensionality of paper becomes three-dimensional through the perspective of the lens; the two-dimensionality of the print becomes three-dimensional through the multilayered pigment process. What the lens magnified and made visible, printing technology made touchable.

A Collaboration with Artificial Intelligence

In a final step, Kager's use of artificial intelligence sidesteps the dominant framing in which AI is treated either as a generator of finished images or as a threat to authorship. In his process, AI does neither. He uses artificial intelligence and coding as a precision instrument for translating natural data into geometry. He provides the parameters, drawing on reliable sources such as NASA's published orbital data; through AI and coding he generates an exact vector description of curves and sends the file to a CNC router that cuts the shape out of finger-thick industrial aluminum.

An example is In Memoriam: Ryuichi Sakamoto (2023), a diptych shown in the artist's Headlands Center for the Arts graduate fellowship exhibition at The Lab in San Francisco in 2023. Two archival pigment prints on shaped aluminum hang together: an oval, roughly four feet across, derived from the elliptical orbit of the moon around the Earth; and a circle of similar scale, derived from the Earth's orbit around the sun. The orbital geometry of the work and its configuration on the wall are one and the same. Across both panels, dark black fields meet pooled acid greens pushing in from one edge, mineral sage washing across another, marbled passages of silver and white where the pigment has run and gathered. The palette was not planned. As Kager points out, color is chosen by intuition on the day he visits a new site to pour ink.

"The image is not made by the artist's hand but by the elements and their interplay of forces. The shape of the panel, in this case, is derived from the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth. What technology offers is precision. We artists are living in exciting times."

An image authored by natural forces. A lens that reveals what the eye cannot. A print that makes the invisible touchable. A shape derived from physical laws like the motion of the Earth and the moon. In Kager's art practice, all these technologies are members of a single extended toolkit — each chosen for what it can reveal about the planet and the complex environment we are part of.

By: Aaron Martin.