Recently, I was a part of a discussion on Place and the Future of Urban Living. Set in the stunning Oakland Old Train Station. A short video capturing our night and Rimma Boshernitsan, CEO speaking about the mission.

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For the last few months I have been an Artist in Residence at Autodesk’s Pier 9 Workshop, a state of the art industrial shop and advanced manufacturing facility. Artists of diverse backgrounds are invited to train on software and equipment, as well as encouraged to use these new industrial technologies in unconventional ways. With this in mind I began collaborating with the latest machines to create a new type of painting.

The work that grew out of these investigations looks for the tension between digital and analog processes. These paintings of new geologies are based on autonomous robotic photography of NASA, ESA and JPL labs and created in part by hand and in part with Epilog’s and Meta Beam laser cutters.

As I collaborate with these machines, be it my MacBook pro, the JPL instruments on the Mars Rover or the Metabeam and Epilog lasers at Pier 9, I embrace the glitches that occur throughout the process, viewing each glitch as our machines opportunity for creative self-expression. Creating a truly collaborative human + machine paintings.

To learn more about Yulia’s work at Pier 9, check out the video of her artist lecture below.

The laser etching part, also featuring the artwork inspired by Rosetta and Philae’s images of Comet 67P, starts about 15 min into the talk:

A step by step Instructable to explain the techniques used to create the artwork can be found here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Charcoal-and-Acrylic-Laser-Raster-Etchings/

Images courtesy of the artist.

Yulia Pinkusevich is an interdisciplinary artist whose vision is influenced by our rapidly evolving urban landscape and the impact of globalization on the everyday. Her works physically engage with the surrounding environment and call upon architectural framework as a construct to guide the viewer through a direct experience.

Born and raised in the USSR and relocating to New York City at a young age, Pinkusevich’s background is rooted in change. Her ability to adapt and observe has served as a central tool for harnessing a unique and fluid vision. Concerned with breaking through conventional perspectives, Pinkusevich creates illusions of impossible spaces and non-places that shift viewpoints away from logic and play with the viewer’s subconscious understanding of space.

Yulia Pinkusevich’s work has been shown extensively in the US and abroad, in cluding site-specific installations in Paris and Buenos Aires. She has been awarded residency grants from Autodesk, Facebook HQ, Cite des Arts International in Paris, Recology SF, Redux in South Carolina, Headland Center for the Arts, Goldwell Open Air Museum, and The Wurlitzer Foundation, among others. She was also the recipient of The San Francisco Foundations 2011 Phelan, Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts as well as Stanford University SiCA’s Spark and ASSU Grants. Pinkusevich holds a BFA from Rutgers and an MFA from Stanford University. She was a lecturer at Stanford University and now is an Assistant Professor of Art at Mills College while maintaining a studio in Oakland, California.