Grasping at Bits
A nonlinear work on art, resistance and control in digital culture.
Patrick Lichty
media systems as reality machines
I make work about the ways technology shapes what we see, believe, inhabit and call real — from tactical media and virtual worlds to low-resolution images, Jacquard tapestries, augmented space and AI. My work is about mediated reality and how it affects the way technologically enabled beings see the world.
Art, writing and curation across mediated reality
My work follows media as it moves between signal and body, screen and textile, corporate language and political theater, virtual world and physical object. The question is not whether something is digital or material. The question is how mediation enters the world and begins to act there.
This site gathers selected projects from more than three decades of practice: Haymarket RIOT, RTMark and The Yes Men, SPRAWL, Grasping at Bits, Second Front, 8 Bits or Less, the digital tapestries, machine drawings, AR works, Confinement Spaces, NPTProjects and recent AI works including Studio Visits: In the Posthuman Atelier.
Current concerns
AI and posthuman authorship; tapestry and pattern; virtual travel and forbidden countries; low-resolution seeing; postalgoristic drawing, public space as augmented inscription; the archive as an unstable media object.
Selected works
SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition
A nonlinear documentary on suburban expansion and the American landscape as mediated interface.
Second Front
A pioneering Second Life performance collective extending Dada, Fluxus and tactical media into virtual space.
Digital Tapestries / Jacquard Works
Pixels, glitches, AI images and screen culture translated into woven computational objects.
Confinement Spaces
An existential record of COVID isolation in the UAE made through 3D scans, video and fractured virtual space.
Studio Visits: In the Posthuman Atelier
A speculative exhibition in which a human curator visits the studios of 50 AI artists.
New here?
Start with Grasping at Bits, SPRAWL, Second Front and the Digital Tapestries. They outline the central movement of the work: mediation becoming world, body and object.
NPTProjects
Collaborative projects with Negin Ehtesabian use VR, video, performance, textile and installation to think through home, distance, cultural memory and transnational life. Read more →