Electric Objects - Art, artists, and how technology is changing

Gabriela is a Venezuelan designer and illustrator who is interested in using isometric grids and perspectives to play with 3D geometry and architecture without leaving the parameters of a 2D world.

III from Gabriela Del Valle's new Art Club collection, Geometric/Interiors

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is arguably the most famous paintings in the world, and one of the most recognizable and reproduced images of all time. But why?

The Mona Lisa has over 6 million visitors at the Louvre in Paris each year. It is one of the most recognizable and reproduced images of all time. We all know the Mona Lisa — it's a staple in our art history classes, it's synonymous with the Louvre and has been mentioned in books, movies, and conversation our whole lives. But why? Like so many famous stories, figures, songs, or movies, we understand references about them but don't necessarily know the origin that put it on the map in the first place.

The Mona Lisa is so significant for a few reasons. It started with the mystery surrounding her—who is this woman and why is she smiling in this way? In 1503, it was considered improper for a married woman to look directly at a man who was not her husband. The Mona Lisa was put on the world's radar after it was stolen off the walls of the Louvre in 1911 by a handyman of the museum. The painting was found and returned two years later. Some people believe that if a different da Vinci painting had been stolen, it would have been his most famous.

Sharon is a graphic designer who enjoys capturing the mundane and finding unique moments suspended in time. Her new collection Halcyon, which denotes a period of time in the past that was idyllic and peaceful, combines unfamiliar imagery with memories to create imagined scenes that feel familiar.

Fresh from Sharon Park's new Art Club collection, Halcyon

John Lisle, one of the artists in our Major Arcana collection, is a freelance illustrator & art director in Brooklyn who works with bright colors, mixed media, and moving portraiture.

The Fool from Electric Objects' new Art Club collection, Major Arcana

David Kraftsow is an artist and programmer who recontextualizes familiar online interfaces and design elements to make surprising and clever art sites.

Conic Gradient from David Kraftsow's new Art Club collection, Timepieces

Sometimes when you make a playlist, or discover an Art Club collection you can't get enough of, and want to randomize the order to avoid seeing the same art in a row. And sometimes, dreams come true because now you can Shuffle!

Jordan Tate is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Cincinnati who explores process and practice in imaging. His recent collection, Prefaces, takes place in real spaces that have been digitally altered, posing the question of which is more important: the product or the documentation?

Boom Goes the Dino-mite from Jordan Tate's new Art Club collection, Prefaces

A standard tarot deck has 22 trump cards. Those cards are called The Major Arcana. Celebrate art and magic with this collection, and test out the new shuffle feature while you're at it.

Luis Mendo is a Tokyo-based illustrator, editorial designer, and art director. His recent collection focuses on quiet apartments or tiny interior spaces that reflect the person living in them

2 from Luis Mendo's new Art Club collection, TOKYO INTERIORS

We caught up with Art Club artist Simone Noronha. She shared her advice to young artists, her favorites tools, and what recent work she's most proud of.

II from Simone Noronha's new Art Club collection, Sunday Morning

Have you ever been so frustrated with the news that you just wanted to run the paper through a scanner and move it around? Well that's how Corruption of the Day was born.

Today we are excited to roll out our second generation device, EO2, a subscription service for art, Art Club, and a line of accessory frames.

The next generation of Electric Objects is here with an all-new discovery service, and major upgrades to our software and hardware. Discovering art for your home just got simpler, more human, and more personal.

Art Club: The Subscription Service

Art Club is our new discovery service designed to fuel your art curiosity — think of it as your personal curator. Every week, Art Club releases at least two new collections, including:

Classics from the world’s greatest museums, like All the Vermeers) Contemporary art made specifically for Electric Objects All EO1 owners get an entire year of the new Art Club subscription for free. And if you’re new, you get a 30-day free trial when you purchase an EO2. Welcome to Art Club

Art Club is a new discovery service designed to fuel your art curiosity—think of it as your personal curator. The subscription includes access to classics from the world’s greatest museum and contemporary art commissioned by us, made specifically for Electric Objects

All EO1 owners will get an entire year of the new Art Club subscription for free. When you purchase an EO2, you’ll get a free 30-day trial.

Meet EO2

Art looks beautiful on EO2. It’s the best display we’ve ever built. It picks up right where EO1 left off, with hardware and design improvements at every turn. 

What’s different?

At less than 1” thick, it’s 50% thinner than EO1

Sleek anodized aluminum finish

Make EO2 your own with maple, walnut, black or white hardwood frames

Twice as fast, thanks to a zippy 5GHz WiFi antenna

Art Club is the best way to discover and enjoy art in your home and we can’t wait for you to see for yourself.

“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because she is the only person aware of the nature of the present” - Wyndham Lewis

Most of us can name our favorite bands, or list our favorite songs. We can tell you our favorite films, our favorite directors. We can even name them according to different periods in our lives. We can give you a top ten list of our favorite books, including the last great one that we read. I can tell you what music my parents listened to when I was growing up, and reflect on the influence that might have had on my own taste (I still have that Bonnie Raitt song stuck in my head).

I can’t, however, tell you who my favorite visual artists are, or which artists meant a lot to me in high school. I can’t tell you how my taste has changed over time, or share with you a top ten list of recent favorite artworks. And I don’t think I’m alone.

If you’re not part of the art-collecting few that travel the world visiting art fairs, working with art dealers, buying from galleries, or visiting museums openings, you likely feel disconnected from “the art world.” This is not a surprising outcome for an industry whose primary business models derive value from market scarcity and exclusivity. It’s the very absence of access that makes today’s art businesses work. Think of this: value for an art collector comes at least in part from getting access to something that no one else can have.

Imagine, for a second, if we applied this model to other categories of cultural production like music? Actually, you don’t have to imagine it — we tried it with music and the results were predictably appalling: Wu Tang Clan sold just a single copy of its latest album at auction for millions. Millions of fans were outraged.

Today’s distribution models for visual art have left us disconnected from an entire category of expression that deserves as much of our attention, as much of our fandom, as much of our love and obsession as we offer to music, films, or literature. I don’t know a single artist whose goal it is to distribute their life’s work to a few wealthy collectors on the Upper East Side. That we have in our heads an idea of an “Art World” at all is symbolic of its own brokenness. There is only one world. We all live here. And there should be more art in it.

Art is more than an asset class for investment; it is human expression, and its value should increase when more people experience it.

Today Electric Objects is three years old.

“What is Electric Objects?” is a question I’ve probably answered over 1,000 times. I’ve probably offered 300 variations, ranging in length from 5 seconds to 5 minutes. I’ve probably left half of the askers confused, and maybe a few inspired.

As we enter our fourth year on this planet, I wanted to try and answer a different question, for myself, for my team, and for the community that has made this company possible. Why are we doing this?

If Electric Objects can do one thing, it can serve as an alternative model for how we discover and engage with art: one that starts from the assumption that we are all capable and deserving of a connection to art and artists, in the same way that we so easily connect with our heroes of music, film, and literature; one that gets better when more people use it.

Today Electric Objects is in thousands of homes across over 30 countries. Over the past year our curators have worked with over 200 artists to create nearly 800 works of art made specifically for the EO platform. And this is just the beginning. In a world where art is as easy to discover and enjoy as a great song, a great film, or a great book, we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Next week we’ll announce the next major leap forward for our platform.

The new products we’re introducing next week reflect hundreds of conversations with customers and artists, thousands of hours of engineering and design work, and a few trips to the other side of the world.

Perhaps we can together glimpse into a future in which the art that lives in our homes engages us, inspires us, challenges us, delights us, slows us down, and makes us think; a future in which artists and curators are in the business of reaching more people, not fewer; a future in which a visit to museum is only the beginning of a relationship with that institution; and a future in which the names of our favorite artists are always on our minds.

Perhaps we’ll look back in 10 years and with difficulty, ask ourselves why it wasn’t always like that.

We are excited to introduce Museum Collections: a new way to bring art from the world’s leading museums and institutions into your home.

Starting today, EO1 owners will have access to hundreds of artworks from The Getty, The National Gallery of Art, LACMA, The Rijksmuseum and The New York Public Library. That means you can display masterpieces in your home from Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, and Cassatt, without a plane ticket or a trust fund. (You can see them all here.)

Over the last five years, these five institutions have positioned themselves at the bleeding edge of collections accessibility, working hard to break down the walls between art and audience. Through their innovative open content programs, they have helped millions of art fans all over the world explore their magnificent collections from the comfort of their computers, tablets, and phones. Today, we’re elevating them to your wall.

If open content programs are designed to empower the public to access and explore these treasures of our cultural heritage, our role at Electric Objects is to help the public see these works of art as opportunities for personal expression in their homes. The idea that Cassatt can live alongside kyttenjanae, that Rembrandt can appear next to Dina Kelberman’s video art is a unique characteristic of the Electric Objects platform. We celebrate these apparent incongruities because from the perspective of a person in their home, the differences tend to fall away. Each artwork is an opportunity for personal expression, an object of conversation, a connection to an artist, a community, an idea, or a moment in time.

There are millions of artworks in the public domain, and museums all over the world are embracing the power of the internet and beginning to explore how it can support their institutional priorities. We're thrilled to play a small part in that experimentation.

We’re thrilled to announce a major redesign of the Electric Objects apps!

When we started working on Electric Objects, it was home to just a few hundred works of art. Our early designs were meant to accommodate a small number of artworks.

As the community has grown, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of artworks available in the system, both from our own commissioned original artwork in Art Club — we just committed $100,000 in 2016 and crossed 500 works commissioned to date — to the works our users are finding and uploading from all over the web.

As the numbers grew into the thousands, it became clear that our original designs could no longer support the sheer volume of artwork available in the system. So today we’re excited to announce a better way to browse and discover art in the Electric Objects platform.

Now when you go to the Electric Objects app, you’ll see a section called “Explore” where you’ll be able to view art through new categories. You’ll find traditional categories like “Classics”, “Photography”, and “Video Art” in addition to categories that are more unique to Electric Objects like “Cinemagraphs”, “Web-based”, and “Digital Art”. Each category shows Popular and New works uploaded by users in addition to Art Club works made just for Electric Objects.

The updated Electric Objects app for iOS is available today in Apple’s App Store. These updates will be available in the coming weeks for the Android app in Google Play.  

Since the launch of the new Playlist feature a few weeks ago, the Electric Objects community has created over 1,200 (!) playlists of art filled with more than 5,000 works of art. 

Today we’re announcing another important update to the Electric Objects app! Now you can view and display Playlists created by other users.

From "Spring is sprung,” to "NASA Travel Posters,” to “Dark,” “Minimal,” and “Calm,” the Electric Objects community has created thousands of Playlists that represent an incredible range of creative subjects and themes. Now you can discover these Playlists in the Electric Objects app, and enjoy them in your home.

With over 15,000 artworks available, including over 400 works made specifically for Electric Objects in Art Club, Electric Objects has grown into one of the largest platforms for digital art in the world.

Making Playlists public and shareable is an important milestone for us. It represents yet another step closer to a world in which discovering and enjoying art in your home is as easy and accessible as the phone in your pocket.

The updated Electric Objects app for iOS is available today in Apple’s App Store. These updates will be available within the next couple of weeks for the Android app in Google Play.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the Electric Objects Art Club Fund. In support of our mission to create a digital art experience for every home, we are committing $100,000 to commissioning new works of digital art in 2016. That’s $100,000 for JPGs, GIFs, PNGs, MP4s and art websites.

All artwork funded through Art Club will be made available immediately in the homes of thousands of Electric Objects customers, and on the web for everyone else. To date, we’ve published hundreds of new and original works of art, and have awarded commissions to over 100 artists. You can explore the current Art Club collections here.

With the Art Club Fund, Electric Objects will be one of the biggest commissioning bodies devoted exclusively to digital art. Our goal is to create one of the largest and most forward-thinking collections of digital art on the planet.

Since we started Art Club last year, we’ve commissioned and released over 100 collections of new and original art — working with artists like Björk, Ai Weiwei, Zach Gage, YACHT, Sam Cannon, and many more. 

We’ve displayed Art Club artists’ work at NADA Miami, the New Museum in New York City, and at the Electric Objects Showroom in SoHo. And through our EO1 loaner program, Art Club artists have used EO1 to display their work at great events like SPRING/BREAK Art Show, GLAS Festival in Berkeley, Sónar in Barcelona, and the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica.

Today, we’re also kicking off our next Art Club Open Call. In the past, we’ve received over 1,000 submissions from artists all over the world. Through this Open Call, we’ll select 30 artists to be featured and promoted in Art Club, Electric Objects’ collection of new and original art for EO1. 

To learn more about Art Club, visit our Art Club overview. And if you’re interested in applying for the Open Call, you can find all relevant info, including deadlines and requirements, right here.