Tabor Robak

Tabor Robak's interactive 2010 piece Plateau does for videogames what Malevich's Black Square did for painting: It isolates the abstract fact of digital space, which precedes all particular content. Plateau, an online interactive virtual environment, drops the viewer onto a faintly checkered grid, a space that unfolds through mouse navigation to the sound of droning chords and birdsong. It is as if the surface of a painting had fallen backward and become the ground of a landscape that is at once unbounded and illusory.

The impression is at once sublime and gently comic. Those chirping birds let us know that the God of this space is laughing-not ironically, but with the confidence of a creator at play. Robak is one of the first artists to reflect on the immense change in the human sensorium that is currently taking place thanks to advances in computer-generated motion graphics. What does it say about this moment in history that our most compelling images are produced using tools that generate a wholly synthetic universe-but also strive as rigorously as photography for a "reality effect"?

While Plateau reduces 3-D modeling to its minimal coordinates, Vatican Vibes, a music video produced for Fatima Al Qadiri in 2011, pushes the new medium to a baroque extreme. The weird blend of imagery in this clip, which is styled as a trailer for an invented video game, demonstrates with ecstatic flair how the same energies that once found expression in religious art and ritual have been redirected toward consumer experiences. Today, the pilgrim bowing before holy relics takes the form of a child placing a Skylander Spyro figurine onto his plastic Portal of Power. The names of church benefactors, once embossed in gold on a cathedral altarpiece, have become logos that flash at the end of a wristwatch commercial. And the absolute power that the Catholic Church exercised over people in the Middle Ages has morphed into our total enthrallment with the culture industries. Of course, the medieval pilgrim's religious faith was sincere prior to its appropriation by powerful interests. Likewise, Vatican Vibes honors the genuine human instinct for beauty that leads us to fetishize commodities, with nods to our attendant reverence for medical science and our wish for eternal life.

In Screen Peeking, 2013, presented as part of "Empire State," Robak divides a single screen into four quadrants, each depicting a different food and using various visual styles: cartoonish close-up, science-class demo, security footage, and editorial photography. The piece reminds us that we can never have access to the object itself, only to a multiplicity of ideological distortions-and that people rarely share the same daydreams. Yet the fact that food is a fantasy object doesn't rob it of its nutrients; there is nothing more real than hunger. To survive we all need to eat, and we all need to wish-we have that much in common. Perhaps that's why Screen Peeking doesn't come across as a jarring montage. Despite the diversity of visual codes on display, the piece is stylistically harmonized. Every element is rendered with the same disciplined joy, the same winking wonder that unites all of Robak's art. Precisely by showing us the extent to which his most personal thoughts are mediated by commerce and technology, Robak succeeds in making something genuinely individual and free-which is to say, human.

Melissa Tuckman