Tabor Robak
[US]
“Terminator” (2010) / “Rocks” (2011) / “Explosions” (2010)
Tabor Robak’s work blatantly exhibits a decisive love for virtual culture and a digital-only, “post-retro” aesthetic that throws each and any desire for authenticity overboard.
The hyper-synthetic and hyper-kitsch renderings of 3D computer graphics are this artist’s prime habitat, who, in place of a bio displays the performance specs of his computer system. Through installations, videos, gaming environments, digital paintings, and image manipulations, he engages with the brutal sensory territory provided by digital capitalism’s vast and over-stimulating entertainment offerings. In exploring the surfeit of techniques and effects with which instant gratification, excessive thrill, and oversaturated emotion are engineered, Tabor Robak’s playful works ambiguously oscillate between affirmation and irony, the high peak of endless pleasure, the mad laughter of accelerationist resoluteness, and neverending dread.
“Terminator” is a large-scale c-print that depicts the stormy red dawn or catastrophic end of a paradisiacal landscape that looks like the Bikini Atoll struck by a nuclear shock wave. The two-part work, “Rocks”, shows the heroic inventory of 3D-rendered rocks as if from a Wunderkammer or a cabinet in a museum of natural history – specimens of the building blocks of new virtual worlds, collected and brought home by venturesome explorers. “Explosions” is a 90-minute, full HD, high-paced total mayhem of explosions, blood splatter, flying debris, and sound-fx that feel as if extracted and collaged from 3D action games.
Born 1986 in Portland, Oregon, New York-based visual artist Tabor Robak’s work exhibits a decisive love for virtual culture. Affiliated to the New York satirical art/fashion site DIS Magazine and the internet-based boyband #HDBOYZ, Robak is also known for his work with artists such as Ford & Lopatin, and Fatima al Qadiri.