What does it mean to be human? ved.fourdimensional can take a guess.

Last month, DJ Ride dropped the astounding Yume EP on STUDIO in a whirl of mind-bending bass and obliterating sound design. However, that wasn’t the only impressive piece of work on show. Accompanying the beats; ved.fourdimensional’s latest enthralling psychotropic cover art exploration – created with our favorite generative art software, TouchDesigner.

As we inch ever closer to a perceived technological comeuppance once AI finally surpasses need of the human race, ved.fourdimensional contemplates our reality and the state of the human form in relation to the machine – virtually and in situ. His work sits poised at the intersection of humanity, sound, visual, methodology, and modularity, with the visual researcher striving to realise the multitudes of interactions between humans and their digital environment in his next great undertaking. If we struggle less as beneficiaries of automation, are we still human? Is our nature shaped by our technological surroundings?

Set against the rich backdrop of bass music, these experiments and incidental art, combine scientific principle and concept with sizzling synths and snares, in visual representations that illustrate not only human nature but also that of the machine.

We met with the mind behind the mastery to dive deeper into ved.fourdimensional, the Yume EP, the investigation of the human/machine relationship, and the aims of his artistic research.

Ved.fourdimensional
Ved.fourdimensional

Hi Vasco, it’s truly wonderful to chat. So, who is ved.fourdimensional? What shapes him? 

Hello there. Well, giving a concrete form to ved.fourdimensional is quite complex: ved.fourdimensional was born with the aim of transcending the rationality that characterizes me, creatively breaking the invisible barriers of my character while remaining anchored to real concepts from the world of technology and science, extending into the fourth dimension, that of space-time, the dimension that shapes every human being both physically and mentally. Time and space dictate the true rules of life, but if we can subjugate them, then each of us can aspire to be who we truly want to be. Essentially, ved.fourdimensional is a genuine evolution of the deepest part of Vasco, myself, as well as Le Chat Noire, the alter ego that accompanied me for many years of my life. I don’t know if it will continue to be “the ultimate goal” of my research, but it definitely plays a fundamental role in my life at the moment.

Art by Le Chat Noire
Art by Le Chat Noire

I love this. Before we discuss your current work, tell us about Le Chat Noire – how was that different to ved.fourdimensional?

Le Chat Noire was a project born from my deep passion for photography (I have a degree in photography). It was also a period of rebellion for me, just like photography in general, which I used as a way to assert myself in the society I lived in. My hometown was, and still is, a very sterile place, with no inspiration whatsoever: in essence, a dying town. The discontent I experienced back then fueled Le Chat Noire, which created with melancholy and used the body (especially female shapes) to build timeless contexts and places where I could escape.

The name “Le Chat Noire” comes from “Le Chat Noir,” a famous venue for shadow theater and cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, founded in November 1881 by Rodolphe Salis. It was a meeting place where many artists (mainly poets) gathered with the ultimate goal of creating connections, whether close or distant, in order to grow and bring concrete elements to art. The concept of “Le Chat Noir” was very close to my heart precisely because the reality I lived in was the exact opposite: a lot of bigotry, little culture, and many negative aspects that inevitably clipped my wings. My creative aim with Le Chat Noire was to escape from this situation to aspire to something tangible, to create a space where I could feel like myself, as well as a way to establish connections and exchanges with those pursuing projects similar to mine. 

Art by Le Chat Noire
Art by Le Chat Noire

A poignant yet beautiful journey that seems to have been.

While attending university and exploring new mediums and facets of art, I realized that photography wasn’t the only way I could express myself. My intense curiosity, along with my passion for technology and science, inevitably led me to change direction. I understood that photography wasn’t the right medium to create something that went beyond the tangible. That’s how ved.fourdimensional was born: a constantly evolving figure that continues to grow thanks to the endless possibilities a machine can provide. This dialogue between man and machine, which is at the core of my artistic research, is much more suited to Vasco as a person.

ved.fourdimensional still creates contexts and places where I can retreat, but with a different awareness and lightness. Moving to Milan and meeting new people and realities made all the things holding me back gradually fade away, turning me into a different person—not just as Vasco, but also as Le Chat Noire, who inevitably became ved.fourdimensional. Needless to say, the latter is nothing more than a direct evolution of what I was before, and that’s why a part of Le Chat Noire will always be present in ved.fourdimensional. They’re two similar entities, but they belong to two completely different periods of life and expressive mediums.

What an evolution… You recently created the incredible 夢 Yume EP artwork for DJ Ride, take us through the creative process. How did the idea start and progress?

The creative process behind 夢 Yume is primarily driven by the “dialogue” between me and DJ Ride’s EP, while also considering the artist’s requests and inspirations. 夢 Yume is a highly varied and dynamic EP, and that’s why these nuances needed to be reflected in the artwork. With each kick, there’s a color change, an increase or decrease in entropy (the amount of force acting on the particle system), and a change in shape. Meanwhile, with each snare, there’s a shift in the direction of the particles and the background. This reactive and dynamic system allowed me to analyze DJ Ride’s EP in great detail, visually capturing the sensations that the audio conveyed.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C5TbgD9CTvp/

Remind us, what is TouchDesigner for those who haven’t come across the software before?

TouchDesigner, in short, is a node-based software primarily used for interactive and multimedia systems. It’s a program that ensures real-time performance, which is why it finds its greatest expression in interactive and immersive installations. Due to this nature, it’s the ultimate software for working with music, as musical reactivity aligns perfectly with that of the software. In the case of 夢 Yume, as mentioned earlier, the kick and snare of each track, extracted through careful sound analysis, were used to map specific values of the particle system.

What led you to it?

I’ve been working with TouchDesigner for just over a year and a half. It’s a complex software, and I enjoy that complexity, but what has interested me the most is definitely the ability to create complex, customizable systems procedurally, all in real-time (which is by no means a given). Essentially, it’s like having a canvas on which to write your own program, customize it, and make it usable for different purposes and/or projects.

CURLNOISE EYES by ved.fourdimensional
CURLNOISE EYES by ved.fourdimensional

How would you describe your genre of digital art?

A great question. My style is constantly changing, just like my interests, so I can’t label what I create. My aim is to visualize and synthesize complex concepts in the simplest way possible; that’s why my digital art is “scientific” digital art, in the sense that almost all my projects reflect what actually happens in nature, like growth systems, from plants to minerals. The rest is pure aesthetic taste. I consider myself more of a “researcher” than an artist, a title that has never felt like me and I don’t think it ever will.

This is honestly fascinating and it’s incredible that the software exists to execute projects in such a way… Looking at your work, the organic themes of flesh and sinew are evident, specifically within ‘How we are made?’ and ‘Infection’. What are your thoughts on the human form?

The human being is the most complex form of existence in nature. But how does it change when it comes into contact with technology? One of the fundamental aspects of my artistic research is certainly to investigate this very close relationship that, especially today, concerns all of us. What I think is that the human body, both physically and mentally, ceases to exist when it comes into contact with these realities, becoming a kind of chimera between flesh and electronic components, between mind and artificial intelligence. The further we go, the more these two realities, currently separate but not too much, will become a unique entity. 

'How We Are Made' by ved.fourdimensional
‘How We Are Made’ by ved.fourdimensional

The project “How We Are Made?” arose from the need to understand how artificial intelligence can interpret us through an accurate description of what we are physically: the result was a biomorphic being, full of wrinkles and hair, very distorted and hard to label as a normal person. It was as if the machine was delirious, even though it had been, in principle, trained with images of real people, and that’s precisely the aspect that fascinated me the most. Obviously, this research has ceased to exist for a long time because AIs have reached a point where they are extremely precise, and the difficulty in distinguishing generated images from real ones has become truly tangible.

'How We Are Made' by ved.fourdimensional
‘How We Are Made’ by ved.fourdimensional

An issue already outdated to us. Your pieces are so varied from one to the next, how do your ideas come to you?

Most of my inspirations come from the natural world and the laws that govern it, but also from more complex concepts related to human-machine interaction, as I mentioned earlier. My work is heavily based on concepts from mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, but also on randomness and unpredictability. We are in an era where it’s possible to overturn the form and concepts of anything, and that’s my real creative process.

Starting from concrete concepts, real formulas, and existing studies, I recreate certain forms attributable to reality, which I then transform based on my current creative needs. As I mentioned before, many things stem from aesthetic taste, which is constantly changing: this allows me to use a few techniques but modularize them almost infinitely, so each project differs from the previous one, even though some characteristics often repeat, such as symmetries, proportions, and perspectives.

…a visual expression of scientific principles. Do you listen to any specific electronic genres or styles that inform your work?

Music has always been the mother of my passions. In 2010, when I was 11 years old, I discovered Skrillex purely by chance through the UKF YouTube channel: I was still too young to fully understand what that sound was, but I immediately grew after listening to it. From that day on, music, especially bass music, has literally accompanied me in every single moment of my life. High BPMs, aggressive sounds, structural complexity of the tracks, and a focus on sound design have set many rules in my various creative phases and have pushed me to continually improve.

I think we all feel you on that. Is there a favorite project you’ve worked on in your career?

Probably the project I care about the most is “Contro il morire della luce”, my bachelor thesis project, completed in 2022 and still unpublished. It’s a project based on the importance of memory and its relationship with the photographic medium. The focus was on the memories of my family and the archive of tens of thousands of photographs taken over a specific period, examining the purest moments that defined us and allowed us to live carefree, before my father’s cancer took over. However, the project was viewed from the perspective of an artificial intelligence: the latent space of the algorithm stored visual information and reinterpreted it, producing unexpected results, emulating what the human mind does when it remembers: distorting its visions while trying to piece things together, fading the concreteness of something that was truly lived. It’s a very intimate and self-reflective project, as well as the most important one I have ever created.

INSTALLAZIONE part of the 'Contro Il Morire Della Luce' thesis project by ved.fourdimensional
INSTALLAZIONE part of the ‘Contro Il Morire Della Luce’ thesis project by ved.fourdimensional

Thank you for sharing this with us. What’s the next big innovation, advancement, or technology in digital art?

Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence will be the next big step for digital art, and it would be foolish to say otherwise. This new medium, especially over the past year, has proven to be a winning tool for human creativity. The ability to transcend the medium and, in fact, communicate with it by establishing a real dialogue is definitely one of the most exciting and interesting (and in some ways, also frightening) innovations that humans have ever made. Another technology that could change the form of what we know is haptic feedback for virtual systems, such as those in VR. In recent years, the exploration of virtual spaces, both for creative use and in the medical field, has sparked a lot of interest. The introduction of technologies for tactile responses could redefine one of the most important senses we have: touch. Imagine sculpting like Michelangelo while feeling your creation, all at zero cost!

Insane! Thank you Vasco. Finally, we’d love to know – how do you envision the future of humanity, art, and music? What role does digital art have to play in our lives?

If I were to think about the future of humanity, I would probably envision a scenario that is not overly positive, as we live in a historical period where we are destroying the environment in which we live. I have always placed a lot of trust in progress, but while we are good at achieving many things (such as scientific advancements in medicine or technology), on the other hand, we are experiencing a complete regression, which brings me a lot of discomfort. On the other hand, though, through music and art in general, it is possible to contribute to change, and this is why many influential people use their art to give a voice to those who, like us, are just a miserable pawn in a world of “powers.” Undoubtedly, art may not be the ultimate solution to major crises, but it is certainly one of the most effective ways to inspire reflection and raise awareness about important matters.

Hypershape by ved.fourdimensional
Hypershape by ved.fourdimensional

Interview conducted in September 2024 by Gianina Mesina.


Read more interviews about visual creators on our website here (Dimitri Thouzery) or here (Funi).

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