A nice talk with Giant Swan through his art!

Giant Swan uses VR to turn movement into shapes and color. Equal parts Sculptor, digital artist, and world builder, Giant Swan currently exists between the cross-section of art scenes both in the digital and traditional space.

Here some extracts of the interview, before the entire video interview.

Eleonora Brizi:

I really truly believe that this artist is one of the most creative art stories that we have in the crypto art space. His art, really, it’s a journey that didn't finish yet. So i'm really happy that you all get to experience this!

Two of the key words in Giant Swan’s art are movement and experience, so it’s really something that involves everyone, so you will be seeing some pieces that are collected in Whaleshark The Vault , but also our goal for the month is to present the art of a Giant Swan from the beginning till today.

This is why we will organize and create a sort of a retrospective in our Arium space which i think it's very cool, sometimes it's fun to think about a retrospective in just a few years of all these artists that created in the crypto art space, but as we know the time in blockchain goes so fast and if you look through Giant Swan’s art you will see how different it is from the beginning until today. Obviously he keeps the spirit and his soul, but the techniques tools like insights and different corners changed a lot, this is why we really want to present the whole path of his art.

One of the things that i liked most of Giant Swan’s art is the fact that it’s a true act of sharing, so we don't even talk about individual anymore, we just talk about like a collective experience, so this is what i would like to ask, i mean to discuss together with Giant Swan.

You create worlds for people, so you don't only create for yourself, (…) all the artists create something that can speak to everyone in the world (…)so they start from their own experience and they speak like a universal language, but here, even the experience itself is included in this universal language that an artist is able to speak, so how do you create this shared experiences?

GIANT SWAN:

In my journey as a whole, you really can't ignore a lot of the works that are in the Whaleshark’s world, so this opportunity is really cool, it's a really important chapter of where i've been and where i've gone.

If look at my work from the early days of VR, you would be able to see that i've always been pushing to answer the questions “why am i using the medium that i choose?” and looking for techniques to use within that space, pushing that space forward over a collective amount of time to what's available now. At the same time when i came to the NFT space, I discovered language and that my art was suddenly connecting with people and i was getting feedback from that outgoing action of creating art and putting it out there, but then it was the honest conversation that started happening with my art, that i realized started to honestly embrace what i had to offer.

What is that direction for me, it's really simple. I get very introspected and reflective of moments in time and then i try to make sense of them through wonder and try to entice people through experience of art showing you a story or an action, provoking you to ask why and hoping that you come up with an answer of your own and then you create your own kind of experience from there. In video work, i control your perspective and i reveal things in a way that let you do the same thing and in VR spaces now as well, people are now able to answer my art and then they're able to come out with their own perspective and completely out of my hands at that point, it's really exciting.

ELEONORA BRIZI:

Yes, it is very exciting and it is so clear that your art pieces are so intimate, so personal, so it is truly amazing to see how you can start from something this personal and to reach out to pretty much everyone, which also i think that happens because all these characters, figures, all your creations are not perfect. They look very imperfect and that's because they are created with the most perfect tool that we have, which is our body, so you create it with the movement of your body - that's another strong point for which they really reach out, because it's almost like the eye and the mind can get something that they understand, so it's all like perfectly coming out from a computer, but it's very different. What do you think about this?

GIANT SWAN:

Traditional 3D art is mostly judged by how perfect it is VR tool, let me create in an organic way and kind of break away from that normal and i think that's why you see my work stand out against other people that create digital surreal things. Because there is no opportunity for the uncanny valley in my sculpture, there's no ticking in your brain and goes “oh that's not a real person”, instead, people i think unintentional or maybe not consciously pick up on that. The movement in my works even though that they're still people see the organic nature of them and instantly know that it's handmade in some form and i think that's the first step to connecting with an artpiece too. If you appreciate someone's craft you will go into the details and then maybe it will grasp you another way.

DC:

Your pieces in The Vault are absolutely stunning work and i want folks to see what we have in here and as a said before, in our Arium gallery we're looking to do a retrospective so we're going to put some stuff that you've been doing lately and kind of showcase your journey. Could tell us a little bit about what you were thinking?

Giant swan:

This piece here is called “Signal” and it's maybe a little shallow, it's quite literal and linear in what's going on here, it's an embrace and people are staring at each other's phones. There's something to relate here, i might have been inceptioned from a conversation with a friend or even in my own personal life. Sometimes we don't connect and we miss the signal. I wanted to place the two people between the phones and acknowledge the contact that they're making, because i also wanted it to kind of challenge being a little bit more positive, because sometimes we just communicate in different ways, so this one was a fun one to do. I think a lot of people related to it really quickly, because it's so accessible, maybe not my deepest work, but it's also one of few works that is gendered (if you use very traditional boy and girl colors here it's not very common at all).

“Bouquet” is a piece drawn, a simple idea born because i watched a movie called “Midsummer” - that i know a lot of my audience may have seen - it is a beautifully morbid movie and this piece was a tribute to that really. I love challenging people to bring them in with beautiful visuals and then hit them, like give them a high fiveand then slap them on the way out, so i put this, being in a coffin of flowers, it was something dabbling in ritual and an inspiration, when i put this piece together it was very flashy.

Other pieces of The Vault by $Whale:

Watch the entire interview in the video below and we would like to remind you that a retrospective of Giant Swan’s work, including the art pieces collected in The Vault and much more, will be curated by Eleonora Brizi in the $Whale space on the platform Arium https://arium.xyz/spaces/whale-community at the end of November.

Stay tuned!