Bill Powers: Before we really knew each other I read your bio text on instagram and it made me laugh.
Emma Stern: Like my pics or I’ll kill myself….which instagram later flagged and then disabled my account for promoting self-harm and/or suicide. I was devastated. I think it’s mostly bots doing the flagging these days, but you can contest it and have a human review the situation. Eventually I was reinstated so I guess the review panel decided I was way too much of a narcissist to ever actually harm myself.
BP: The bot couldn’t tell that you were intentionally being provocative.
ES: It’s coming.There’s a whole field of study trying to program common sense into AI right now, hopefully they program sardonic wit into them too.
BP: Do you imagine that robots or AI would ever put you out of a job as a painter?
ES: Yeah, eventually. They already have AI making art. Did you see Google Deep Dream? Or there is that AI making “new” Rembrandt paintings.
BP: Of course a computer might be smarter than you, but it doesn’t have your level of damage and vulnerability. It reminds me of Lisa Yuskavage saying how in the end our mistakes are the only things we can truly claim as our own.
ES: But you could also make a ‘mind file’ of me, which contains all of my memories and all of my “damage”, as you say, and digitize that and just keep it on a hard drive…..Do you remember at the mall there used to be these kiosks that were like a photo booth you could go into and a robot would draw you? We had one next to Dip ’n Dots at the Menlo Park Mall in Edison New Jersey.
BP: Let’s talk about Beeple? I think he sold an NFT last year for 69 million dollars.
ES: He’s one of the godfathers of the 3D art community, he used to make a lot of resources available to people online so you could back engineer his art. : I downloaded his VJ files when I was first learning how to use 3D, pulling them apart and seeing the guts was very helpful to me.
BP: So Beeple was essentially posting the recipes to his art-making it sounds like. How did you decide you were going to be a 3D painter?
ES: When I graduated from Pratt in 2014 I had been exclusively doing figure painting and also working as a figure model at Cooper Union. I knew I wanted to paint female bodies, but particularly the female body in the context of the artist and the muse as it appears throughout art history. Like the way the Surrealists essentially invented these generic, depersonalized female protagonists who recur in their work as creatures made to exist only in painted form. So when I got out of art school, I’d lost that resource of a human coming to pose for me in the classroom which is when I decided to start making my own models. I thought it would be cool to use the avatars I’d built in leui of figure models, creating my own muses and inverting that art historical dynamic.
BP: Which computer programs?
ES: I use software that’s mostly for game developers to do character design. It also gets used a lot by the 3d erotica community.
BP: Who would you consider the OG of computer art? Like the equivalent of what William Eggleston is to color photography.
ES: Painting specifically or CGI fine art? Because that would be Jon Rafman. I don’t know if he was THE first but he was one of the first artists I can remember seeing using this technology outside of its traditional context and inspiring me to follow suit.
BP: Technology has always played an interesting role in art creation whether that manifests as Basquiat’’s employment of the color copier in the early 80s or Albert Oehlen drawing on a Texas Instruments computer for his paintings a decade later.
ES: I was thinking more Post-Internet art.
BP: Does an artist like Avery Singer use Blender or other 3D modeling software?
ES: I read somewhere that she uses SketchUp? Please fact check this before printing.
BP: Lisa Yuskavage received a lot of criticism for the sexuality in her work early on. Can you relate to that? Did people accuse you of promoting body dysmorphism?
ES: Not so much recently. I’ve always said the avatars I create are a form of extended non-literal self-portraiture so if there’s images of a teenage girl, it’s a stand-in for me at that age. I have those memories and carry those experiences with me and sometimes I make art about it. I never imagined that would be problematic. There’s a part of me that still feels like a vulnerable sixteen year old but then there is another part of me that feels like a hot centaur girl.
BP: You had an exhibition last year titled Revenge Body. What was the impetus for that show?
ES: I came up with the name for it after all the paintings were finished. It was really looking at the paintings and noticing how all the characters seemed to have a chip on their shoulder, a lot of them carrying weapons, in positions of power. One of the paintings was a body builder, another of two girls evidently winning a game of pool. Lots of swordplay.
BP: Are there rules in your world about what’s allowed in? Prior to last year I’m not sure I’d seen “natural” light in your paintings.
ES: I have come to recognize this work as a universe-creation project that has kind of taken on a life of it’s own. The longer I work at it, the more I build, the more characters I create to populate it, and the universe expands. The way I see it at this point is, I’m creating these virtual worlds and these paintings are the artifacts. It can feel archeological at times, like I’m building this universe but also exploring it as I go. The light is a part of that. I always remember something you said to me a while ago, abut how there are three kinds of light in painting: natural, artificial, and divine. When I create virtual environments, its kind of all three; it simulates natural light, but it is certainly artificial, but because I am the master of this universe, I act as God when I create the light and therefore it is divine.
BP: Are the fictional spaces ever based on actual places you lived?
ES: There’s a bedroom I use a lot that’s not literally my childhood bedroom but it’s what it my childhood bedroom felt like. A lot of the environments I make have a generic quality to them. I think it’s because the texture of the objects and the characters and the surroundings are all made of the same material which I call lava. The floor and the bed and the chair and the people are all made out of lava.
BP: And why no men?
ES: I’ve created this perfect little universe so why fuck it up now? I’m sure they’ll make it in eventually. They always do.
BP: You talk about universe creation which I guess makes you the god of your world-
ES: Goddess.
BP: How has your world view been shaped given that your father is a rabbi? Has that impacted your notion of God?
ES: I remember even from a very young age being fascinated by the creation story. I couldn’t wrap my head around how there was nothing and then all of a sudden something. I still haven’t gotten over it.
BP: But you would never consider your paintings religious?
ES: Painting can be a religious experience. I’d like to think the light in my paintings is divine. I spend a ton of time building the light on my computer. The software oddly mimics a pre-creation universe in that the first thing you do is insert an object and then reflect light off of it.
BP: Do you ever think of the ethical challenges embedded in different software? The writer Yuval Noah Harari points out how a self-driving car might have to pick whether to spare the child wandering into traffic over the driver of the vehicle, for example.
ES: To get biblical on you, God can only create in his own image so on some level we are always inserting our own biases into the work. Our machines are an extension of our values. And the same applies to the avatars we create.
BP: Why do people always make avatars that are the better-looking version of themselves?
ES: What is the point of being able to transcend biology if you can’t make yourself hot? The fantasy element is the most exciting part, especially if you are someone who feels trapped in your body.
BP: You think in certain cases an avatar can help a person become their real self?
ES:It’s hyper real. It’s more you than you because you actually have a say in it.
BP: In Spring 2022 you are doing your first ever solo show in New York called Booty! which is all paintings of female pirates, right?
ES: I got really interested in the idea of pirates when the city flooded during Hurricane Ida. The images I was seeing on social media were straight-up apocalyptic. The night of the storm I was trying to fall asleep I had a vision of the Statue of Liberty with only her head above water, and I thought about what City life would be like once it is totally submerged the way they predict it will be within the next century. Then I recently learned there used to be tons of pirates in New York, all along the coastline. So I started formulating this concept of “future pirates”, these sea-faring nomads who inhabit the hinterland formerly known as New York City after the ice caps melt and the grid goes down.
BP: Isn’t that pretty much the plot of Waterworld?
ES: Yes, I realize this now but before you pointed this out to me a few months ago I had never seen it! This is like that time where I thought I had single-handedly developed the concept of The Matrix independently and then when I finally watched the movie for the first time I was so pissed.
BP: Waterworld was a bomb when it first came out and now seems horribly dated. Can paintings ever be dated? Or is that mostly a pitfall of cinema?
ES: I like when there is something in a painting that grounds it to a specific era. Then again I hate iPhones in paintings.
BP: I was in Madrid last week and finally got to see Bosch’s masterpiece at The Prado. His paintings from the 15th century still have quite a futuristic quality.
ES: That’s because hedonism is always relevant. If Bosch had painted The Garden of Earthly Delights now it would be on the cover of Juxtapoz magazine.
BP: Do you think there’s a prophetic quality to your paintings? I feel like we were promised that virtual reality or augmented reality would be more ubiquitous by now. Do you ever feel like technology is taking too long?
ES: You have a glowing brick in your pocket that contains the combined knowledge of everyone who has ever lived and you feel like technology isn’t moving fast enough for you? Some of the things I see really scare me. I saw an article recently about a cluster of cells that accidentally grew eyes in a petri dish somewhere. I felt sick to my stomach. You can’t tell me that thing isn’t conscious on some level and living in an indescribably horrific plane of reality with enough sensory perception to feel terror but not enough to comprehend what any of it means. I don’t even know if it can blink.
BP: What about future heads who think we are already living in a simulation?
ES: All religions lend themselves to some level of simulation theory. God created the world in seven days! Almost every religion has an architect who creates this sandbox we all play around in. It’s not that much of a leap to Nick Bostrom’s simulation theory. Or think of the whole concept of reincarnation. Save your game!
BP: What’s the worst shit people say about your paintings?
ES: Here’s what I hear a lot. I hated your work when I first saw it but I think I get it now.
BP: Is that meant as a compliment?
ES: I guess so. It means I’m converting people.
BP: How proud would your dad be?
ES: But you’re not supposed to convert people to Judaism because it waters down the tribe. If you want to convert - at least the old school way - is to go knock on the Rabbi’s door and he’s supposed to slam it in your face three times.
BP: Do you ever think this capitalist notion where everyone is a brand now does internal damage to our psyche?
ES: Anyone on social media is promoting an avatar of themselves already, a hyper-curated virtual self. If we’re all doing that now anyway, might as well make it art, right?
BP: Who makes art now that feels like the future?
ES: I’ve always thought Rothko’s were kind of futuristic and I’m not even a Rothko fan. Those things are so fucking bleak. People say they are joyous and meditative, but I find them completely impenet.