DAVID HARTONO
Today we present our interview with David a digital creative, from Indonesia living in Florence, Italy. He is the co-founder of MONOGRID a digital production company working for international brands. To keep his creative energy sharp he collaborates on personal projects from projection mapping on historical buildings to playing audio reactive visuals in electronic music festivals.
David your greatest inspirations or influences?
I was 18 years old when I saw the Weather installation by Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern, it had such a strong influence on me on how installation art can completely change the identity of a space and it's inhabitant. My other biggest inspiration is remediation, how all media inspired each other and made things trendy again in different cycles of time and space, besides that I feel it is important to surround myself with creative friends, colleagues and community.
Tell us a bit about your creative process? things you are looking forward to this year?
I love artistic collaboration and exchange, I started teaching last year at IED Florence and the students gave me lots of inspiration, It's interesting to see how other people apply the same knowledge differently. Also during lockdown I did a lot of virtual collaborations with artists who I've never met before and it was such an inspiring experience for me.
Being a technical nerd, I love sharing my technical knowledge and possibility with other artists just to see what they create with it. Universal is an important concept for me, in the sense that I tried to remove the demographic and geographic boundaries in my projects both for collaborators and for the user. I want my work to be enjoyable for all kinds of audiences.
As for what I am looking forward to this year, I'm developing and experiencing mixed reality, I feel that this past year virtual experience has seen a massive upgrade, physical experience will catch up and integrate latest virtual technology creating a next level mixed reality hybrid.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?
I think the main activity for me this year was evaluation in every aspect of life. I started to analyze and questions what is most important to me. Health, nature and efficiency are 3 topics that interest me as an artist. Health is an obvious self reflection for everyone, but I have seen how our approach toward nature in art evolved. There is a tendency for us to convey nature in our artwork be it in form or color, softer and natural colors has become trendy again like earthy tone color that reverberates calm and mindfulness to help reconnect us to nature as most of us were confined at home last year.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
It's difficult to pick one, but maybe as a digital art person I would pick Beeple, he represents a lot of values that I really like as an artist which beside the obvious creativity and technical prowess also demonstrates consistency and resistance on creating your own identity and self improvement over a long period of time and that inspired productivity to the other artists. If it is possible to answer with an item or product, I would say the mobile phone. Being born in the 80s I witnessed how mobile phones completely changed our lives, from mobility to tactile experience with touch screens.
Do you think the art world needs to change, and if so how can it be improved.
I always believe that art needs to shock and create conversation between artist and audience or between audiences which is increasingly difficult. We live in a hyperconnected and well-informed era, where almost anything created has been seen or made before, it's a constant remix and remake in the art world now and originality is rare. I believe as an artist it's important to sometimes look away from all these social channels and outside influence and do more internal exploration and self improvement to create something original.