The pioneering painter and digital artist explains what makes the computer the ultimate tool of abstraction.
Few artists have made the jump from painting to digital art. Even fewer have done so as effortlessly as Samia Halaby in a way that advances the cause of both. After leaving Palestine in 1948, Halaby studied fine art in the American Midwest at a time when female abstract painters were marginalized. Today, as the art world expands to encompass new digital practices and hybrid forms of creativity, her career stands as a blueprint for the kind of radical inclusivity on which crypto art depends.
It was the mid-1980s when Halaby encountered a personal computer for the first time, programming her Commodore Amiga 1000 to produce “Kinetic Paintings” that combined geometric form with motion and sound. Here was a kind of generative art, coded in C and BASIC, that used the native capacities of the computer to extend ideas she had already been exploring for twenty years. Her decision to work across analog and digital media is indicative of her own natural tendency to challenge painting’s canonical associations with rectilinearity and western hegemony. Here, she tells Alex Estorick what makes abstraction the art of the future and why the computer is the ideal medium for it.
