This month, Los Angeles-based nonfungible token (NFT) artist Ellie Pritts is celebrating “In the Screen I am Everything,” her first solo show in New Y
This month, Los Angeles-based nonfungible token (NFT) artist Ellie Pritts is celebrating “In the Screen I am Everything,” her first solo show in New York City — and her first time taking over pioneering net art gallery Bitforms.
Eight animations from the technicolor exhibition are available to mint as NFTs on Ethereum, displayed on screens alongside a few physical prints. The multilayered process Pritts used for all three series on view unites them across media.
Pritts broke onto the NFT scene in 2021 when she tried minting a few existing video artworks — and watched them take off.
“I had this cache of video art,” Pritts told Cointelegraph. “I’d put it on Instagram or in different projects, but I certainly didn’t think there was any way I could ever monetize it.”
Her video practice had been mostly therapeutic, but suddenly the blockchain boom made her work valuable enough to fund the acquisition of new tools, which Pritts used to make more sophisticated video artwork.
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She’d shot concert photography before the COVID-19 pandemic and performed as a professional cellist — until 2021 also forced her to confront medical issues she’d been avoiding, like her newfound inability to hold her bow. Pritts made a New Year’s resolution to begin painting portraits in early 2021 but couldn’t use a pencil to draw preliminary sketches.
“I went to the doctor, through a lot of testing, and found out I have this degenerative neurological condition,” Pritts recalled. “They had no answers or comfort. They said, ‘You’re losing these abilities, they’re not going to come back, we don’t know how much worse it’s gonna get. Sorry.’”
Introducing artificial intelligence
Pritts began leaning into artificial intelligence (AI) upon receiving her diagnosis. Her show at Bitforms opens with “Relative Minor” (2023), a trippy animation mounted alone in the entryway’s tangerine alcove. In the work’s foreground, a feminine face conjured by Stable Diffusion zooms infinitely inwards, morphing through colors, expressions and angles atop a glitch art background Pritts made herself using vintage, circuit-bent hardware she acquired from a now-reviving breed of artisans.
“Relative Minor” is a sneak peek of the show’s eventual climax. The work’s central visage is AI’s vision of text prompts from Pritts’ dream journals. She has hundreds of pages of self-history on Google Docs, and physical diaries from her sleeping and waking lives going back to age nine.
Dream material makes for particularly great prompts, though, Pritts said, “because I can create libraries and themes that keep coming up in my own subconscious.” One theme, the divine feminine, drove most of this show. Pritts coaxed the AI’s biases to achieve archetypal faces that didn’t read quite so stereotypically pretty as the algorithm thought they ought to be.
Pritts then ran the AI’s animation through video hardware from the 1990s, resoldered to produce visually warped outputs. “That’s basically what glitching is,” she said. Still sensing the work wasn’t complete, she created its background with a modular video synthesizer, “which works really similar to a modular audio synthesizer with little cables,” Pritts said. “Same thing, but it’s video output.” She’s made probably 20 such animations so far — this exhibition collects seven.
Glitching flowers
Next, viewers enter the flashing garden of Pritts’ “Fleur Glitch” series, where flowers bloom and wilt on film — a shine, flash frozen and brilliant in polychromatic giclee prints. The artist applied techniques from her recursive dreamscapes to footage of cut flowers. Some footage is her own; some is from stock websites. Rather than mounting the floral animation atop her synthesized glitch graphics, though, Pritts incorporated digital abstractions into the interior of these flowers’ shifting forms. With each passing moment, they present shifting portals into alluring digital voids.
“It’s a cool juxtaposition between nature,” Pritts stated, “And the texture of something completely manmade and computerized.” Bitforms founder Steven Sacks told Pritts she should isolate and present a few frames from the animations. They’re hung on the lemon-hued walls surrounding a mural Pritts also installed, composed of stills from this series. The prints resemble silkscreens, evoking Andy Warhol and drawing profound parallels between his superstars and Pritts’ blooms.
Self-exploration through AI
The show’s final room opens on a wonderland of six framed screens illuminated by Pritts’ surreal scenes, a spectacle scintillating with the movement of varied tempos and directions. A few works even feature momentary cameos from Pritts herself. The affair begins with a still homage, however — two new prints from her “Divine Recursion” series, which she’d initially planned…
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