Chris Dorland – Painting and Technology
- Jonas
The digital permeates every artistic practice, just as it permeates every other aspect of our lives. In his paintings and videos, Chris Dorland confronts us with this all encompassing entanglement–and our simultaneous detachment from the underlying processes.
In conversation with Additive, he talks about the influence of science fiction, his stance towards AI art and the power of painting in 2026.
For someone who doesn’t know you or your art, how would you describe yourself and what you do?
To keep it short and simple, I’d say I’m a painter who works across painting and video. My work is about the increasingly blurred boundary between physical and digital space. I’m interested in how technology is changing the way we see and understand reality.
In your recent monograph, CHRIS DORLAND: FUTURE RUINS, you describe yourself as a “technical painter”. What do you mean by that?
It’s a notion I came up with to describe both myself and a certain way of approaching painting. For me, it means a system–and technique–driven way of pushing the work forward.
I’ve always been interested in the relationship between painting and technology, and between painting and image-making. Finding my way as a painter meant figuring out how to make an image that was satisfying and exciting to me. I figured that out when I was quite young. At that time, I was making paintings from existing reproduced images—photographs, printed material, things that had already passed through some kind of image-making process rather than working from direct observation.
That basic idea has pushed my practice throughout my career. Each body of work develops its own system for how an image gets put together. When I stop being excited by that system, that’s usually when the body of work changes and I have to find another one.
Robert Hobbs, the author of your recent monograph, described you as a “posthuman figure embedded in systems, flows and feedback loops”. We already touched on the “technical”, systematic aspect of your work. In what way are you “posthuman”?
Posthumanism describes a point where the boundary between the human and technology becomes increasingly difficult to separate. In many ways, that’s already happening. We’re embedded in and dependent on technological systems that we couldn’t really function without. I was thinking about that on my flight back from Europe—how vulnerable we are, relying on enormously complex systems and machine intelligence so that thousands of planes can move through the air every day without crashing.
In my own small way, I’m increasingly dependent on different technologies to produce my work. That’s one of the huge things that makes artists of my generation and later different from artists working pre-digital. So much of our lives and work now takes place through systems we don’t fully understand. We’re not simply using technology as a tool anymore; we’re increasingly operating inside it.
I’ve devoted my work to marking that process. I sometimes think about the paintings as if, somewhere down the line, we no longer existed as a civilization and they were found as relics. What would someone make of them anthropologically? In some ways, that’s a more interesting audience to me than my contemporaries.
Why do you think this is so fascinating to you?
The conceptual origins of my work go back to my childhood. When I was a little kid in the ‘80s, culture, movies and music were already starting to look at the darker side of technological progress and at humanity’s capacity for decay. The 20th century’s faith in progress and technology had started to break down, and filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven and Ridley Scott clearly understood that. Seeing their movies as a kid had a huge impact on me.
Now, in the 21st century, we’re living through the consequences of a lot of that. I think we’re all quite scared of the direction technological development has taken and its implications for us as humans. From the minute I started making art, I knew these were the ideas I wanted to deal with in painting.
Does the inherently physical act of painting feel like an act of holding your ground against these intangible developments?
In my 20s, there came a point where I started to feel like painting couldn’t address my ideas anymore. I thought it was too slow and old-fashioned, so I started expanding my practice into video. Interestingly, now, 15 years later, I feel like painting is incredibly powerful for the present moment precisely because it slows things down and works in opposition to the speed of culture.
I’ve really come to appreciate that the only way to fully engage with a painting is to physically move your body, get on a subway, take the train, and go look at it. That’s a huge luxury of time that many people have less and less of, and you can’t demand it of a viewer. Nevertheless, making something that demands this kind of physical presence is beautiful to me. I think it’s one of the key things that makes painting unique and potent in 2026. It’s a physical experience in a world of increasingly nonphysical experiences.
Furthermore, in your works, you are bringing together the physical and nonphysical.
Yes, especially in my newer paintings, I feel like I’ve found a way to merge physical paint with digital space that is genuinely confusing to the eye. Nobody seems to quite understand how the paintings were put together. They’re clearly not printed, they’re clearly handmade, they’re clearly physical objects in space, and yet it’s unclear how they were done.
That’s a huge accomplishment for me. I’ve been trying my whole life to do that in painting—to find a technical way to make something visually and materially complex enough that you can’t immediately reverse-engineer how it came into being.
What goes into a painting for you–what kind of imagery, technology, thoughts?
Basically, ever since I finished art school, I’ve started a work by developing an image on a computer that I’m excited about.
Then the next question is: How do I translate this into painting? That’s the crux of it, and that’s where the idea of the “technical painter” comes in. I’ve had a couple of different ways of answering that question over the years, and I hope I’ll have many more as I move forward as an artist.
What are you working on at the moment?
Currently, I have two ongoing bodies of work. For the Screenscrapes, I use computer-generated imagery to build a kind of library of screen interfaces. There are bits of code, icons, comments scraped from social media, or simply screenshots from my phone or desktop—momentary snapshots of my own digital life.
For the Interface paintings, I’m thinking further upstream in the process—less on the user end and more on a machine-to-machine level, almost “pre-language,” before information resolves into an image that’s been handled by a designer and made into a product for a consumer.
For this series, I’ve been using open-source AI tools to build processes around Stable Diffusion, generating and repeatedly transforming images rather than simply prompting the model for a finished picture. I’m interested in these strange intermediate states where an image seems to be forming but hasn’t yet resolved into something designed for human readability. What I’ve been ending up with is just fascinating to me.
To me, the final results simultaneously feel dystopian and beautiful. Do you see this as a contradiction?
In many ways, I’ve always had a dystopian disposition. I think it’s very hard to be born past a certain year and not feel like we’re showing up at the end of something. We’re surrounded by things collapsing and breaking down, so it’s difficult not to develop a post-apocalyptic sensibility. I certainly have had one since I was a little kid.
On the other hand, making art is a fundamentally optimistic project. You have to believe in something to make art. I’d be very surprised if somebody truly didn’t believe in anything and still devoted their life to being an artist.
I wouldn’t necessarily call my work beautiful, although I’m not trying to make something ugly. I have a pretty dim view of what the human spirit ultimately wants, but I go into the studio with a lot of positive sentiment, trying to find some version of beauty within a fairly fucked-up and chaotic situation. I’m not trying to bring more darkness into the world, but fear and violence are driving forces behind why I make art. So if the work ends up dystopian but also sort of strangely beautiful, I’m happy with that.
This “dystopian but strangely beautiful” quality is something I strongly connect to the term “cyberpunk”, which comes up often when reading your interviews or texts about your work. What does cyberpunk mean to you?
Cyberpunk is a moment in science fiction when writers stopped believing in progress. They started to see the world as wrecked and damaged and found creative agency within that. My dad introduced me to William Gibson when I was a little kid, and his novels felt incredibly true to my own experience of the world. A lot of my love of cyberpunk also came through film adaptations of Philip K. Dick. His sense that reality itself could become unstable or fractured—that you might no longer be sure what was real—had a huge impact on me.
It’s not something I adopted later in life or came to intellectually. I came to it emotionally as a very small person looking at the world, and my work has been a lifelong exploration of those feelings and how to put them into pictures and moving images.
Since Covid—or really, going back to Brexit and Trump’s first election—the world seems to have taken a decidedly ominous turn. I see that period as a real break in the sense of unity and progress that drove a lot of postwar thinking.
In a strange way, I find that quite thrilling. That’s not to say I’m not scared about what’s happening or where it will take us. But I think that’s part of the cyberpunk ethos: it’s not a utopian sensibility, and it’s not dismayed by entropy, corruption and collapse. It’s a weary-eyed way of continuing within that mess.
You already mentioned your positivity towards art and towards wanting to produce and create. Maybe the cure is not theoretical but practical?
Totally. I believe that behind any art practice there is some kind of paradox. If everything were resolved, where would the need come from? With any artist, if you dig deep enough, you’re eventually going to arrive at some likely unresolvable contradiction that’s driving that person to make art.
I’m having a lot of fun being an artist, and as the world gets weirder, it provides me with more subject matter and inspiration. With every passing year, I get more inspired and more excited to make art, even as more of the structures I grew up surrounded by seem to be falling apart. I feel very fortunate to be able to say that.
Is there anything you have learned about the digital world through your (mainly physical) practice?
I think being an artist is about constantly asking questions and coming up with answers or solutions. It’s a process of constant learning, but it’s not so easy to put into words like, “I learned this or that”. It’s more that the studio becomes a filter for navigating the world, almost like a coping mechanism.
This process of making something intangible tangible is deeply fulfilling to me. I think my experience of the world is richer because of what I get to do in the studio.
I totally understand that this is a difficult question to answer. Maybe it stems from my perspective as a viewer, because I can often learn something from good art. I just thought of the current exhibition “TRON” at the Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin, which I absolutely loved because I felt that with such basic, tangible means—color fields and a repeated screen printed motif—Majerus illustrated our detachment from the digital sphere so well.
I’ve always loved the TRON series.
Concerning your question: To me, it’s in an artist’s development that you see the thinking and the learning. You ask: Is the work growing? Is it changing and going deeper? If the work stays vibrant and continues generating things for the world and for viewers, that’s how you can see that an artist is getting something out of their practice and learning from what they’re doing.
That’s easier for me than specifying exactly what I get out of my own practice, because it’s such an abstract jumble in here—moving forwards, backwards and in a million different directions. The studio is a very strange, nonlinear space for me. The greatest clarity isn’t necessarily found in me talking about my work. It’s in what leaves the studio and gets put into an exhibition. That’s me at my clearest.
So it’s rather a learning through your process? Maybe not knowing why but being able to take the next step in your artistic practice—like having unlocked this little door?
Exactly. Art is so different from just about anything else. It’s not functional. You’re not building something that other people use in a specific way. It requires incredible specificity and clarity and, at the same time, a kind of mystery that keeps it working and moving forward.
I can only imagine that once you understand what you’re doing to the point that you can completely describe it, it has ceased to have some of its magic for the maker. It stops being a need.
I love that answer. You actually just summarized what the next print issue of Additive will be about. What you just described, I would call “precision” — and I think it’s such an interesting idea to think about in an artistic context. An artwork needs to be 100% clear but enigmatic at the same time. It mustn’t be too much or too little, just the right amount of everything.
Coming to a very different topic: What is your stance towards the use of AI in art?
I think everyone will be using it in some capacity. It’s just going to be built into people’s workflows at various stages, much like Photoshop is today. Frankly, I think it’s amazing. It might be our demise, but it’s an incredible tool that allows more to be produced, tested and developed.
I don’t have a negative position on it, nor any particular anxiety that it’s going to get in the way of art. It’s not going to make art better and it’s not going to make art worse. It’s a powerful new tool.
And I don’t really see AI making art autonomously in a way that makes human artists irrelevant. As long as we’re humans, we’re going to care about other people being involved in the decision-making process. Art isn’t interesting simply because an image exists. We’re interested in why someone made something, the choices they made, and how they went about making it.
In recent years, there has been a rise in digital and AI art, operating mostly in a parallel realm to the traditional art world. What’s your stance towards this kind of art? Do you follow it?
Generally, I think the funny thing about painting and technology is that they attract quite opposite audiences. Painting is fairly old-fashioned. By nature it’s at odds with contemporary speed; it’s a little elitist, expensive and inherently nostalgic. Technology, on the other hand, tends to be characterized by an excitement about the future.
Your question makes me think about NFTs and this whole world of digital art that erupted during Covid. People suddenly had huge exposure, lots of money was made, and there was an enormous amount of attention, but it all happened almost completely parallel to the “trad” art world. Personally, I got a huge kick out of that, especially in the beginning. It was destabilizing. Simply the fact that everybody in the art world suddenly had to say the name Beeple cracked me up because it was just not what the trad art world wanted to do.
I wouldn’t say I’m anything close to an expert or even an avid follower, but I’m aware of what’s happening and I’m excited by anything that destabilizes things and pushes art into new territory. The traditional art world is an audience that’s fairly well-versed in art history and has a particular set of assumptions about what art is. Some of these newer audiences are coming to it from a completely different, less art-historical background, and that can be reflected both in the work being made and in what’s being celebrated.
Of course, I still have to be excited by what I’m looking at. But I don’t take a snobby position toward what’s happening. If anything, I’m interested in things getting destabilized and in more digitally native artists making work and getting attention. I don’t feel a great need to pass judgment on the overall quality of it.
That would have been my next question.
Let’s put it this way: I feel like, as a society, we don’t get the art we want. We get the art we deserve. Categories of good or bad don’t really matter in the end. It’s a mirror, and that mirror is super important. Art doesn’t have to do anything specific other than be a record of a moment in time, of its people—or its machines.
Chris Dorland was born 1978 in Montreal, Canada. He lives and works in New York, USA.
His current exhibition “Chrome Shelter” at Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf (GER) runs until Oktober 4, 2026