Where Can You See a Real Filip Hodas Art
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Filip Hodas, "Bikini Bottom," 2018
"I believe nature will always find a way to survive, fifty-fifty if people call back we can control it."
View "Bikini Bottom" in the K21 gallery here →
In the last decade 3D fine art has increasingly emerged as a legitimate form of art due not only to its massive exposure to the public, but mainly to the technological advancements that accept allowed artists to single-handedly achieve product-quality results on a single workstation.
Filip Hodas is one of the showtime artists who have been heavily leveraging GPU render engineering since its inception and pushing forward a new artful. A trailblazer of hyperreal and ultra detailed environments, he has influenced tens of thousands of artists and opened a new realm of visual possibilities within the newly broadened limitations of 3D.
The 28-twelvemonth-old Hodas is best known for his series Popular Culture Dystopia, which envisions decaying pop civilization icons in desolate and abandoned post-apocalyptic landscapes.
His digital portraits depict pop idols including Mickey Mouse, Pac-Man, Hullo Kitty, and the Mario Kart Mushrooms in a state of severe neglect and corrosion. Semi-robotic beings, graffitied, dirtied, and damaged beyond repair, from McDonald's Happy Meal boxes and Coca-Cola cans.
In 2015, Hodas started a daily render project on his Instagram that lasted nearly 400 days and helped him gain initial traction online. Since then he has become one of the most followed 3D artists in the world, accumulating over 650,000 fans across his social media platforms. Several of Hodas' renderings went viral and made the front page of numerous sites and social networks from Bored Panda and 9gag to Reddit. He has been included in several exhibitions across Europe. Hodas is based in Prague.
Hodas' NFT Bikini Bottom is the most popular work from Pop Culture Dystopia.
How did your exercise every bit a 3D artist brainstorm?
I used to hang out with DJs and music artists and get to a lot of festivals, and I made 2nd graphics, posters, and various promotional bits for them. And then I hitting a plateau in terms of inventiveness, considering at that place were ever constraints nigh typography, legibility, size, logos, and and so on. I decided to try to explore more than personal work instead of only doing purely client-based projects. I e'er liked 3D as a medium, especially for stills, and I like the idea of creating virtual sets and taking pictures of them. And then I decided to dive into movie theatre 4D and Octane Return. I noticed that since my last see with 3D, there have been a lot of advancements in terms of how speedily 1 can produce images, specially thank you to GPU rendering. Then that got me really excited because that was one of the big hurdles, why I never really pursued 3D any further before I started doing daily projects, where I would create ane slice every day, trying to become the hang of the basics, how to operate the tools. From my creative standpoint I explored what I find fun, what I want to explore. Ever since 2015 I've kept pushing to get out of my comfort zone, attempt new things, run into what sticks and what doesn't.
You lot started with dailies, just evidently your work evolved in a way that would brand information technology impossible to exercise 1 piece every day. Yous started staging your piece of work more. How did that happen, and how did y'all get a super detail-oriented type of artist?
There were a agglomeration of artists that I actually looked upwards to when I was younger. There was this Slovakian artist, merely he lives in Czechia, Marek Denko. He was doing insanely detailed stuff back in, like, 2006. It's crazy. I ever wanted to endeavour something similar that. But with the dailies, as yous mentioned, I hit a plateau of what is achievable inside a mean solar day. I didn't actually want to go downwards the route of using assets for everything, and I wanted to have a more personal touch in the work. So I decided to try spending a couple of days on a project instead of just one day. I started enjoying that, and it felt way more rewarding when I finished, because I could really see the work put into each piece. All the endeavour, time, and overtime got a little fleck out of paw in some ways. Information technology started snowballing into trying to add too much and do most everything from scratch. That became a piddling bit of a problem. I try to figure out a nice residual between doing something really detailed, simply also not getting likewise hung up on tiny details that matter for me but aren't a major point of the slice.
Your work is seemingly happy in terms of colors and themes, but there's a lingering sense of sadness, especially subsequently in your career. A sense of abandonment and these rundown elements, the deserted environments. What does that mean to y'all, and why did you start going downwards that road?
I call up it was mainly due to the constraints of doing the early work in a much shorter time frame. I couldn't really create as detailed or realistic work as I would love to, so I had to acquire to create environments that seemed more than "lived," more than consumed by happenings and time.
…from squeaky clean to "let me endeavor to dirty this up"?
Yeah, exactly. I could afford it in terms of time. Also my skill set grew, and I learned how to utilize tools more efficiently. I could explore more of the whole workflow behind creating a model, texturing it properly, adding all these nooks and crannies and details and trivial bits of wear and tear. This was a big office of the sweetness, deadening, gradual abandonment of the unproblematic, colorful things. I always try to do something that looks realistic, but not so there is an overarching theme where I trick the viewer into thinking, "Oh, this could exist real, simply it isn't because…" In terms of emptiness or abandonment, I sort of view it equally I had more infinite to build more worlds, or more story behind the pieces. Once I started putting in more time, I was like, "Oh, I don't want this to simply be like a shiny, absurd affair." I wanted to tell a little flake of a story or have a sure feeling. And that's why I chose these pop culture themes. People can relate to these relics of childhood and by memories, to the melancholy of how it used to be fun but now is pretty much forgotten.
There'south a significant melancholic aspect to your piece of work.
I'm not quite sure, to exist honest. With the first images — like the Happy Meal, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Mario — I suppose I was remembering how I used to adore these things when I was younger. I grew upwards in a post-communist country, then when I was younger a lot of Western culture was just starting to get here. For example, Happy Meals were a really special and large deal for me. Back then there weren't that many McDonald'south in Prague, and when they opened 1 quite shut to my home I wanted to go there all the fourth dimension. I'd fifty-fifty force my parents to take me there to celebrate my birthdays.
The same with old reckoner games. We didn't have a computer at home until I was viii, and all the computers we had at schoolhouse were super old. And then while people elsewhere played cool 3D games in the '90s and early on 2000s, my friends and I would play vintage games on 486 computers for hours every day in the figurer lab at school. Both of these memories seem a fleck baroque to me at present, but I can't assist just experience a bit melancholic.
I approximate this sort of vibe translated over to the rest of the series, because I wanted to make it both visually and thematically unified.
Your work often portrays nature reclaiming what nosotros took abroad from information technology.
I believe nature will always find a way to survive, even if people think we tin control it. Last year I went on a trip to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and I was simply amazed at how quickly nature took over the ghost town of Pripyat. The accident happened in 1986 and it contaminated the area so much that all the plants died for years. Simply now, only thirty-five years later, it is really hard to tell yous're in an abandoned town. Information technology looks similar a regular forest with apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and factories scattered across it.
There are a few things that recur in your world, and overall there's a dystopian mood and temper. In some pieces in particular, like the Dr. McDonald Airplane and the Starbucks, there'southward also a PopCap element of pop culture, brands that have kind of decayed. Is that a critique of consumerism? Is there a political element to it?
Yes, only when I endeavour to effigy out ideas for a series or concept, I commonly similar to piece of work with subverting expectations. For instance, with the plastic pollution series, I also piece of work with the irony of the absurdity of the piece. And if there is an eye, information technology's actually squeamish for it to have a fiddling scrap of actress meaning, maybe in an ecology management, or even a fiddling political. I don't get too deep into that, because people can interpret things in very different ways and I don't go a kick out of trying to explicate things over and over. You know, I prefer that the piece of work speak for itself. I retrieve it's very articulate that, for instance, plastics are a big issue. And so I don't run into it as some shocking artistic point of view. I but communicate it is a problem and here is an absurd fashion of displaying it or reversing information technology.
People see Beeple in your work, but you were really the trailblazer of this fashion. Is that true?
I think everything is an iteration of something else, in a style. My piece of work was very influenced by Marking Denko, as I mentioned, only it was also heavily influenced by Simon Stålenhag and loads of concept artists I've seen, because that'south a large part of my inspiration process. I tried to look by and large in other media in 3D and to incorporate parts of what I similar. It tin can be compages, photography, sculpture, 2D fine art concept, or any. I similar to option and choose elements and put them together. In terms of 3D that was popularized on Instagram, I don't remember anyone doing something similar this. So I gauge in a manner, yes. But I think it was a pretty natural process.
Bikini Bottom, the piece you contributed to the K21 Collection, suggests the themes of decay, abandonment, and being kind of forgotten or out of style. What does this piece mean to you? And why did you pick it out of all your pop icon series?
I picked it because I mostly meet the technical part of it. I know that I spent crazy amounts of time on the floor texture and I tried to go super-realistic with everything and practise everything from scratch. For the environment I've done a fair corporeality of inquiry most draining canals in LA — not sure I'll ever utilize this knowledge in a meaningful style again! Information technology was probably the most complex piece I'd done until that point. I also think at that place is this affair about SpongeBob in full general. It's very much a kids' show, simply compared to other kids' shows, if you watch information technology as an adult there is something the kids don't run into or realize. I don't call back there are many shows that have this sort of underlying thing that adults tin can pick up on while the kids are simply oblivious. From the conceptual standpoint, I idea SpongeBob is this washed up guy under the bridge with the h2o gone. It's an empty culvert, and he's sitting there, rusty and old. I actually enjoyed it because he has such a jolly confront and the expression is so happy, merely it's a dire situation. I like the weird juxtaposition of emotions or vibes. That's why I idea it would be a good choice for K21. Information technology's probably my favorite piece in the serial to this solar day.
So y'all recall it's a parable of, permit's say, the American movie star?
Yeah. I tin totally meet some parallels there!
It'southward a critique of consumerism and hype culture, the movie business, fandom quickly forgetting their idols. Information technology'south a story of misery. A lot of your work is basically maxim, "Yeah, everything is being forgotten, will be forgotten, will be gone. And will rot for good." When y'all run out of pop items, what'south next in your piece of work?
I take a long, long list of ideas. Only it's really difficult for me to pick i, because I e'er like to piece of work in series. Afterward years of trying, I figured out that I am not capable of continuously creating one way/concept — it quickly stops being fun and starts beingness a chore. And then these series always encapsulate ane feeling or vibe or stylistic theme. It's a bigger commitment than it probably would be if I worked in separate, single images because I accept to create several pieces that piece of work together. If I do the showtime one and realize, "Oh, this isn't working out," and then I wasted a lot of fourth dimension and effort on this whole concept. And so I'g however trying to determine which to do. It might take a while, but hopefully we'll get there this yr at least.
Source: https://medium.com/kanon-log/filip-hodas-bikini-bottom-2018-29938048ccd7