RAW MATERIALS
Designer: Sean Trayner
Project Type: Animation
Details: 13s loop / 2048x2048 / 25 FPS
Production: Rendered in C4D & Redshift
Status: Listed May 11, 2021
Artist’s Description:
“Raw Materials” is an exploration into the value of identity when distorted and transformed in a new digital milieu. The bust featured is a digital representation of the Venus of Martres, an antique replica of another Venus, Aphrodite of Knidos. When one artifact is broken down and reconfigured through time, space, and cultural context, it challenges the symbolic meaning and values applied to it.
According to -SITE:
Sean Trayner’s piece was selected as the first NFT to be released within the -SITE-NFT-S project for its subversive use of digital content and the questions it raises related to interpretation through replication. The animation takes a familiar representation of the bust of Venus — one that has been reinterpreted over time through classical and modern eras — and performs a series of operations on it. Scanning, slicing, segmenting, distorting, and regenerating the bust use digital animation to understand the form in ways not possible in the physical world. Given the familiarity of the form and the novelty of the actions, Trayner’s NFT will remind collectors that in the digital context, ownership of form may be less interesting than the ownership of generative actions.
Designer Bio:
Sean Trayner is a Canadian photographer, designer, and digital artist whose work explores the collision of body, form, and gender in both time and space. His professional career began with fashion photography, and has evolved to include conceptual portraiture, digital animation, architectural photography, and game development. His professional work has been featured in The Globe & Mail, Glassbook, The Atlas Magazine, Georgie, Superior Magazine, , and The Site Magazine. Sean’s work focuses on the abstraction of figurative photography and seeks to undermine conventional perspectives and coded norms of body and gender..
Previous work with -SITE:
Sean’s photo essay “Body, Space, Object” was the driving force for the creative direction of Volume 37: Feminisms of The Site Magazine and an exhibit named after the photo essay. For this project, he worked with performance artists and sculptors, photographing their bodies intertwined with soft sculptures in a variety of public spaces. The project has the visual qualities of a fashion editorial, but subverts a gendered gaze or any objectification by making a femme form unrecognizable in conventional terms. The relationship of the female-coded form to public space is put into question, and the wearable sculptures stress the constant mediation of the body in the public sphere. Trayner’s project won a Prize in Art Direction at the 2019 National Magazine Awards in Toronto.
-SITE Info + Contact:
website: thesitemagazine.com/site-nfts
Email: info@thesitemagazine.com
Instagram: @thesitemagazine
Twitter: @thesitemagazine