DANIEL GANDELMAN

    As an artist constantly reassessing traditional media's place within the emerging culture of a born-digital world, Daniel Gandelman (a.k.a. Ludens) is an intermedia + transmedia artist that primarily engages in painting, drawing, sculpture, conceptual art, as well as film and new-media, but ultimately deals in games as a medium for bridging the gaps between extended forms of performance and object-centered art.

    Displaced by both the Venezuelan crisis and the recent pandemic, Gandelman (and by extension his work) is deeply invested in the construction of contexts for community in a changing world. A world in which the concept of a geographical border has a progressively diminishing influence on culture.
    In this sense, he employs a perspective in which art history is intimately and immediately participatory. That is, instead of seeing it as a field based upon mere investigation in hindsight, his approach understands art history as a willful construction, and as a constant current of malleable experience. For these purposes, his work delves into what he terms the mechanics of art, an examination of the reciprocal relationship between the ephemerality of performance, collective memory, and the permanence of physical objects. Through interactions with these structures of scarcity, Gandelman takes a pulse on our connection to immortalized versions of past transient moments, and, by extension, pursues both an assembling of the present and a nudging of the future.

    Situating his art within the context of unfolding narratives (as opposed to singular isolated moments), and contributing to the exploration of themes of meaning, belonging, and the momentum of life in the context of shared human ecologies, recurring techniques in Gandelman's practice include; intra- and intertextuality, agency, reflexivity, and the synthesis of unrelated concepts through syncretism. Also influenced by the broad ideas of Complexity Science (emergence, adaptive systems, and complex structures), a background as a Computer Science researcher further informs his work with the introduction of algorithmic, computational and mathematical thinking, incorporating ideas such as networks, recursion, and infinity.

    Gandelman's artistic actions advocate for self-sublimation, aiming to expand the reach of art practice into the deepest corners of private life through creative behavior, experimentation, and unorthodox decision-making. His work's ultimate goal is to engage in an expansion of the reach of traditional artistic spaces into unexpected areas, with an aspiration of imbuing the deeply ordinary with creative potentials of expression as inherited from artistic traditions.

       He is currently bi-located in Miami and Tallahassee, FL.