Craig Kalpakjian

Corridor (1997) (Original image found at: http://www.kalpakjian.com/work2.html)

Craig Kalpakjian is an American digital artist born in 1961, whom I first learned about in Christine Paul's book Digital Art (World of Art). Much of his work revolves around "everyday landscapes", most notably office spaces or other indoor areas. His work is described by Christine Paul as "Seeming eerily real yet are completely computer generated" (Paul 42). His works are created through the creation of a digital model in an architectural design program which is then altered through changes in lighting, shading, and texture ("Corridor II") The above work, Corridor, is a still image that is part of a video that takes the view through an endless corridor of what appears to be an office building of some kind. The video version can be seen here.

 Room (1999) (Original image found at: www.kalpakjian.com/work1.html)

Kalpakjian's works are indeed very realistic looking in nature, but there is an emptiness to them, a lack of any sort of life that sets them apart from their real world counterparts. In this way, the corridors and buildings that Kalpakjian creates emphasize how artificial our modern day landscapes can seem when the human element is removed from them. Christine Paul describes his work as "[alluding] to the artificiality of many of the environments and office buildings we inhabit on a daily basis" and as showing "the alienating effects induced by modern architecture" (Paul 42). The landscapes have a sort of eerie, alien feel to them, many of them not including furniture or any sort of evidence of human presence at all, simply a room, or part of a room, that a computer might build or design, perfect in measurement but lacking any actual substance.

 

Lobby (1996) (Original image found at: http://www.kalpakjian.com/work2.html)

Corridor II (1998) (Original Image found at: www.kalpakjian.com/work1.html)

I was drawn to Kalpakjian's pieces because of how he captures an alien emptiness in otherwise familiar, mundane scenes. Though his works are not particularly variable in nature, focusing almost entirely on office building scenes, Kalpakjian does an excellent job in capturing how truly artificial those scenes are in the real world by creating them in a fully digital format and removing all human elements from the scene. Though one could argue that his works, though certainly realistic, are overly simplistic, I would argue that that quality strengthens the message of the work; if he were to add too much detail to his scenes, Kalpakjian's works would lose their sense of artificiality and maintain too much of the human element that it seems he has tried to remove.

Monitor (1998) (Original image found at: http://www.kalpakjian.com/work1.html)

Sources used:

"After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age". Craig Kalpakjian. Web. http://www.kalpakjian.com/index.html.

 "Corridor II". The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Corridor II. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/190036524

Paul, Christine. Digital Art (World of Art). Thames & Hudson, 2003. Print.