To contextualize Baker Cahill’s ongoing creative entanglement with literature and her digital practice, which is the focus of the new work she is currently creating her residency (WIPs to come!), we thought we’d share another recent work she created for her solo show in September 2022 in LA at @vellum_la.

‘Every day, 4 am, awake. Did Sisyphus ever push the boulder over the hill? she wondered. Hers grew inside her.’

Hungry Ghost is part of Slipstream: Table of Contents - a series of ten immersive, abstract videos, exploring digitally-mediated storytelling, authorship, and more via ten self-contained chapters presented as a “book.” Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on paper, launching a long odyssey of production and mutation. The drawings are torn into pieces and then reconfigured in bespoke sculptures. Documented as 3D objects through photogrammetry, they are then altered, lit, and animated using CG software. Additive and subtractive in their construction, the drawings’ transmutations embody a shifting logic as they traverse the softwares that shape them. Some videos include brief textual collaborations with the language model GPT-3, to further blur and layer the artist’s creative intentions. There are also written “excerpts” from each chapter in lieu of traditional wall descriptions. These excerpts invite conversation about storytelling, blending text and image as an animated graphic novel. As stories they reckon with the core question of the Ship of Theseus; what, after version upon version, remains of the original?

Nancy Baker Cahill is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. She creates research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual blockchain projects rooted in the history of drawing. Her monumental augmented reality (AR) artworks extend and subvert the lineage of land art, often highlighting the climate crisis, civics, and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression.

Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 'Deciders'. Her work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries, including Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage, The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), Kunsthalle Zürich, Honor Fraser Gallery, and Vellum LA. In 2022, she was one of two featured artists in the Luma Foundation's Elevation 1049 Biennial in Switzerland. Her work was featured in the Immersive Main Competition at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and was exhibited on 90 screens in Times Square for the entire month of July 2022 as part of the Midnight Moments program.

Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute, a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ Encoding Futures focused on AR monuments, and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received the C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient and will be the January 2023 GAZELL.iO Resident Artist at Gazelli Art House in London.