Explore artworks extended through animation—and, in the Metagraphs, sound.
About the AR experience
Augmented reality (AR) adds a digital layer that you experience through a phone or tablet. The works here began as digital drawings, paintings and works on paper. Their animations were created later as a way to extend the original images. The Metagraphs use WebAR by Artivive: there’s no app to download. Scan the QR code next to the work with your phone’s camera, then point the phone at the artwork, and it comes to life with animation and original sound in your web browser. It works on all iPhone and Android phones. Each work’s AR activation is covered by a lifetime Artivive license, so the animation stays live for as long as you own the work. For a Motion Painting or Motion Work on Paper, scan the QR code specific to that work to open its animation in the mobile browser. The videos on this page preview those animations.
Metagraphs
Metagraphs are abstract digital drawings whose gestural lines can take form as prints, animations and augmented-reality experiences.
About this series
Goldberg began the Metagraph series in 1999, drawing in Adobe Illustrator with a tablet. These are vector drawings: their lines and shapes are described mathematically, allowing an image to be rendered at different scales. The name Metagraph refers to this underlying description of the image, which can exist in more than one physical or digital form. Gesture and automatic drawing give the compositions their expressive character. Physical prints and editions are recorded separately from the digital originals. Beginning in 2021, Goldberg extended selected drawings into animations with sound. These moving versions also appear in augmented reality and in the Metagraphs book. Scan the work’s QR code with any phone to view it in AR through WebAR by Artivive, no app needed; the video above previews its animation.
Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art
Colin Goldberg began the Metagraph series in 1999, in a small studio on Avenue A in Manhattan’s East Village, where he supported himself as a freelance designer and coder in ad agencies and media companies, building some of the earliest websites for brands such as Snapple, Popular Science and Merrill Lynch. He drew the works with the tools of that day job: vector graphics software, a drawing tablet and stylus, and a Mac. They are the same tools he uses in his studio today.
Kneeling Icon at Hearst Tower
In 2023 the Hearst Corporation acquired Kneeling Icon, a 100 × 75 in. Metagraph, for its permanent collection. It is installed at Hearst Tower in New York. The work was first shown at this scale in Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond, a group exhibition Goldberg curated for the Southampton Arts Center in 2022, and was then included in Art Now at Hearst Tower, curated by Betty Levin. Read more →
Why Metagraphs?
A photograph or a JPEG is a bitmap, a fixed grid of pixels. Enlarged past a certain size, every curve turns into steps. A vector drawing is stored differently: as code, the mathematics of each line, so it can be redrawn at any size with perfect clarity. That is why logos are made as vectors, so the same file works on a letterhead or a billboard. Goldberg named the series for this idea. The early Metagraphs were saved as EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files. PostScript is the page-description language Adobe introduced in 1984, and the PDF format later grew out of it. Opened in a text editor, an EPS file reveals the code that describes the drawing. The artwork is the code that describes the image, not any one physical version of it. That code is a meta-representation of the image: a Metagraph.
The 23 drawings in the series were made between 1999 and 2004 through automatic drawing, the Surrealist practice of setting conscious control aside and letting the unconscious lead. Twenty years later, in 2021, Goldberg began animating them, each with its own original audio composition. The number 23 runs through the work: there are 23 drawings, and each animation runs 23 seconds. Every animation is paired with the drawing it grew from, so the two are experienced together.
How the augmented reality works
The augmented reality runs as WebAR, which means it works in the phone’s web browser, through Artivive, a platform for augmented-reality art used by more than 750,000 creators in 190 countries and by museums including the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery and the Albertina. Visitors scan the QR code on the wall label with their phone’s camera, and a web page opens. When they point the phone at the artwork, the drawing on the wall begins to move on their screen, line by line, with sound. There is no app to download, and it works on any iPhone or Android phone.
No app. Any phone. Every Metagraph has its own 23-second animation with original sound. The animation is anchored to the physical work: when a visitor holds up a phone, the drawing on the wall starts to move on the screen, line by line, in place and at full scale.
- Scan. Point the phone camera at the QR code on the wall label.
- Open. A web page opens in the browser. Nothing is installed.
- Point. Aim the phone at the artwork and it comes alive, with sound.
Each work’s AR activation is covered by a lifetime Artivive license, so the animation stays live for as long as the work is owned, with no subscriptions or renewals. The wall itself stays a finished work of art, with no screens, cables or power.
Formats and commissions
Because the drawing is code, it can be made at the scale of a room. Unique works are printed up to 9 × 12 ft, and larger walls are made as multi-panel works, each produced for a specific space.
Large unique works are printed as digital monoprints on heavyweight 18 oz vinyl and stretched like a canvas, the same construction as Kneeling Icon at Hearst Tower. The vinyl ships rolled and the stretcher is assembled on site, so a large piece reaches the wall through standard doors and elevators without crating. The surface wipes clean and there is no glass. The vinyl has passed the NFPA 701 flame test (California State Fire Marshal); the certificate is available. Walls larger than 9 × 12 ft are handled as multi-panel works that install as a single composition.
- 18 × 24 in., edition of 10, archival pigment print on canvas
- 36 × 48 in., edition of 5, archival pigment print on canvas
- Site-specific, unique (1/1), on stretched vinyl, up to 9 × 12 ft
Editions are signed and numbered, with a certificate of authenticity. Price list and proposal renderings on request.
Inquiries: studio@goldberg.art or the contact page.
Cape Cod Museum of Art, 2027
For Goldberg, the 2027 exhibition Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art at the Cape Cod Museum of Art closes a circle. Drawings begun more than twenty-five years ago on a Mac in an East Village studio now come alive, with motion and sound, on a museum wall. It bears out the idea behind the name: the artwork is the code, and the code can take many forms.
The book
Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art brings the 23 Metagraphs together in print, each with a haiku, with a foreword by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky. Every drawing in the book comes alive with animation and sound through the free Artivive app.
About the artist
Colin Goldberg (b. 1971, Bronx) fuses gestural painting with digital drawing. He coined the term Techspressionism in 2011; it has since grown into an international movement of artists working with technology. His studio is at the Sage Street Mill in North Bennington, Vermont.
- Hearst Corporation collection, Hearst Tower, New York
- Stony Brook University Hospital
- Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection
- Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
- Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis MA: Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art (upcoming, June 4 – August 22, 2027)
- Interior Landscape, 22 × 150 ft, 150 Media Stream, Chicago, 2025
- Book: Metagraphs: Augmented Reality Art, foreword by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
- Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant
- MFA, Bowling Green State University
Exhibition inquiries: studio@goldberg.art