Ry David Bradley (Australian, b. 1979) produces material images of the twenty-first century by feeding digital paintings through dye-sublimation printing or weaving them into large-scale tapestries on a Jacquard loom. He trained in New Media Video and Internet Art in the early 2000s, then shifted his focus to painting, a medium he felt would not require power or software and would not become outdated through upgrades.
In 2009 he founded PAINTED, ETC., a website chronicling the relationship between technology and painting. He received a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 2013. For Unit London's 2018 exhibition “Looking For U”, he developed custom digital brushes that emulated the facial distortions produced by AI facial-recognition software, then wove the resulting images into tapestries on a Jacquard loom, a device regarded as a precursor to the modern computer. His tapestry CnN5D+YUNpy (2018), woven from vat-dyed cotton and threaded with an electroluminescent wire, draws a parallel between the history of mechanical looms and modern screen technology. He described the work as intended “To serve as a lasting screen memory of life in 2018”.
