Pieter Schoolwerth
Rigged

The word ‘rigged‘ is a vivid monosyllable during an age of discontents. Used equally in the US by the alt-right and far left, the term is tossed promiscuously at any system that seems unfair and fraudulent (which is to say, a lot of them). ‘Rigged‘ captures a slurry of disempowerment and frustration, a fear that we’re not the protagonists of our own stories, but rather playthings for shadowy tech billionaires who tug our strings and make us dance.

Every discrete aspect in these paintings, from a burnt-out Soviet factory to an ascot-wearing yachter, were purchased by Schoolwerth on sites like Turbosquid and CGTrader, global marketplaces where animation artists from Ukraine to Brazil sell their CGI wares. Purchasing more than 200 lower-end figures and set dressings, Schoolwerth’s casual encounters with globalized capitalism—at once anonymous and direct—mirror the transactional tenor of other, less explicit marketplaces like Tinder and LinkedIn. Schoolwerth collects characters whose expertly generic names (‘Caucasian man naked‘, ‘Alexandra pro bundle pack‘) avail them equally to discourse on appropriation and authorship—and to the facile meditation of one-click shopping. 

To animate these characters’ jelly-like constitutions, Schoolwerth intervened by breaking the ‘rig‘, a hinge system that prescribes a character’s movement, not unlike a skeleton. Breaking the rig requires disconnecting a character’s surface, known as the ‘mesh‘, from the underlying infrastructure to which it is mapped. This process releases the image of the body to slide around on the rig like a cloth stretched over a bowling ball, a process Schoolwerth calls ‘UV map shifts‘. The formal possibilities are as endless as the binary digits that subtend the system: producing a portrait in the style of Picasso’s Cubism (a pathology unto itself) is achieved in Blender and other free internet software used by 12-year-olds across the world. This technology is easily obtained, but that does not imply democracy or liberation. Schoolwerth presents, with psychedelic clarity, how online platforms are not stable places to be a person. The violent lexicon of CGI animation—the system that mediates most images we see in each day—dissects people like an anatomical chop shop. The flexing of animated muscles are called ‘deformations‘; the surface of a character is a ‘texture file‘, attaching the texture file to its underlying polygonal mesh is called ‘binding the skin‘. Schoolwerth mines these linguistic excesses and other irruptions of meaning that the ‘rig‘ lets loose.