Dirk Koy is looking for the painterly component in digital animation, and he’ll use just about anything to find it: drones, photogrammetry, 3D scanning, AR, VR, and the errors that appear when software is pushed past its limits. The Basel-based artist treats program glitches not as failures but as a visual language, building works that sit exactly on the seam between the physical world and the virtual one, where familiar streets and buildings dissolve, reassemble and refuse to stay where you left them. He runs Dirk Koy Bild und Bewegung, the studio for motion design and experimental film he founded in 2016, and teaches time-based media at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. His commissioned work has taken him to Balenciaga, Mercedes-Benz, Fila, Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio and electronic music pioneers Yello. His art has been shown at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, HeK Basel, the Supernova festival in Denver and FILE Festival in São Paulo. His piece The City received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, and in 2019 he was awarded the Basel Media Art Prize.
At Kinomural he’s showing Bildraum, made for the groundbreaking ceremony of the new Kunsthaus Baselland. A single hand-drawn line is adapted and condensed onto the 3D model of the building: architecture that doesn’t exist yet, drawn into being.
