Dataerase - Maddison Morgenstern
Dataerase is the apt moniker of artist Maddison Morgenstern. These works, whether on the wall, in games, or worn like abandonware camouflage, are an intense combination of roiling, lurid-colored pixels, fractured pornographic Japanese text, and disintegrating fantasy anime bodies. Merging a mix of consumer fan-anxiety and queered cyberpunk, her overarching Dataerase project combines fashion, visual art, web art, and even collaborations with iconoclastic videogame creators such as Christine Love. Two aspects unite all these endeavors. The first is the source material, which is all repurposed from DIY and low-budget Japanese hentai (anime porn) anime videogames from the 1990s, often from defunct and dead-end systems such as the PC-98. The second main element is the use of glitches and digital painting techniques that mimic glitches, as a form generator and mutator. The works have a datamoshed quality (a technique that involves purposefully manipulating the underlying data of a movie file to misapply it to other parts), resulting in a tumbling confusion of body parts, figure and ground, person and object. In Morgenstern’s work, boundaries dissolve—subcultural aesthetic fetishes, gendered narrative tropes, bodies and VFX—and repressed desires and anxieties blossoms together from these barren lost videogame histories into unending fluid configurations for our future imagination.
Artist: Maddison Morgenstern
Clothing Link: https://liveheroes.com/en/brand/dataerase
Digital Art Link: https://dataerase.itch.io
Connections:
Rachel Rossin - Hologram Combines
Takashi Murakami - Klien’s Pot A
Chairlift - “Evident Utensil”