Sara Ludy’s solo exhibition, “Later Fields,” runs until May 18, 2025 at Smart Objects, Los Angeles.

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‍Rachel Falconer: I understand that a drive behind your practice is the desire to solve problems “through process.” I am curious about the value you place on process in your work and how it reflects in the final outcome.

‍Sara Ludy: I see it less as problem-solving; I’m not directing any particular outcome. My approach is more experimental. I like to find my way through mediums rather than coming in with a fixed idea. I don’t need to know everything before I begin; what matters most is staying open to the process and figuring things out as I go.

My process is largely guided by intuition and being present — letting things unfold rather than forcing them into form. I’m not drawn to technology for its mechanics; I’m interested in where it meets the unconscious. 

It’s no different from painting or writing a poem. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m making, I just know when something feels right, and that’s enough.

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‍RF: You describe your practice as rotating between the ephemeral qualities of energy and unconscious states of human lived experience, and then a more solid and empirical description of “the computational.” I wonder how set this binary is in your mind and if there are any grey areas?

‍SL: I don’t hold that binary in my mind; I see those elements as fluid and deeply connected. 

Just as the mind and body aren’t separate, the intuitive and the computational aren’t opposites for me — they inform one another. 

I might begin a work with a kind of logic or structure, but that often dissolves into feeling, and then that feeling finds its own form or structure in return. There’s a constant back and forth, a collapse between the two, and that space in between is often where the most interesting things emerge.

‍RF: What more can you tell us about the “unseen” qualities of your work?

‍SL: The unseen is about sensing the present — the presence of the present — and everything that exists within it: faint sounds, subtle feelings, sensations, new awareness, or knowledge. Sometimes, when you’re really attuned, you encounter things — ideas, emotions, hunches — that move from the unseen into the known. I’m trying to tap into something beyond the material.

‍RF: Can you speak about the positive or negative aspects of the technical systems with which you create, including AI, which often go unseen?

‍SL: I’m focused on painting right now and haven’t kept up with the latest AI discourse, but every tool carries its own complexities. Conversations around technical systems often get flattened into binaries: good-bad, ethical-unethical; but it’s always more nuanced than that. It’s a shame that so many people are quick to react negatively to art made with AI. That response usually stems from a misunderstanding of both the tools and the medium. 

Since Web3, there’s been an intense backlash against digital art, but I think that has more to do with the timing — people were learning about digital art just as it became tied to crypto and speculation. That association made it feel cringe to some, and AI art became the next thing to pile onto.

Yes, it’s easy to generate an image with AI, but artists who are truly dedicated to digital practices aren’t surface-based, they are deeply aware of the complexities and nuances involved. There’s really good work being made, but it’s often dismissed because people don’t want to take the time to understand it. It’s easier to look away than to look deeper — but when someone criticizes art made with AI in a blanket way, it often says more about their own resistance than about the work itself.‍

RF: How would you describe your approach to storytelling in your practice?

‍SL: I don’t. My work operates in a different kind of space — one that resists narrative and leans more toward feeling. I’m interested in what can’t be easily described or explained, in what is sensed rather than told. 

‍RF: Your work takes a strong cue from nature. Do you see any challenges in representing nature generatively beyond the aesthetic?

‍SL: I’m not very interested in literal representations of nature. 

The goal isn’t to create a digital version of the natural world, but to explore how natural energy — movement, instability, impermanence — can be felt through digital material.

I’ve always been drawn to forms that feel alive, things that shift, erode, or hold layered time. That isn’t about rendering a plant or a tree. It’s about capturing something more subtle: a sensation, a presence, a kind of attunement. That way of working continues in my painting now. I’m still trying to hold onto that moment where nothing is fully named, but everything feels oddly familiar. A loose suggestion of nature might emerge through a horizon, weather, or light, but it’s never fully declared. That ambiguity is important. It leaves space for the viewer to feel rather than name, to sense rather than define.

One also can’t ignore the irony of using heavy computation and resources, which extract from nature, to represent nature. Even in the context of digital preservation, there’s something conflicted in trying to hold onto the inevitable while sidestepping real action in the present.

‍RF: What are the qualities, attitudes, or indeed biases of your “digital lens”? 

‍SL: It feels more postdigital than digital at this point, not in a theoretical sense but in a lived one. I haven’t made a digital work in almost a year; I’ve been painting. 

Being in the desert and being present rather than glued to a screen has made the digital feel like a distant dream. I don’t feel as connected to it anymore. That said, the digital still lives in me. The way I perceive light, space, and surface is shaped by years spent working in that realm. 

Even if I’m not actively engaging with digital tools, that lens is embedded in how I see and make. The idea of the postdigital actually resonates more now than it did when I was making work about it. It’s not about rejecting the digital, but about having moved through it — letting it live in the background while something else takes the foreground.

‍RF: What do you consider to be the homogenizing tendencies of the digital and how do you negotiate them?

‍SL: I tend to think more about the digital’s potential and expansiveness than its homogenizing tendencies. That said, when crypto co-opted what digital artists had been building pre-Web3, it shifted the focus. It turned the space into a kind of shopping mall; in that climate, a lot of work started to look the same. People wanted to make money, and many believed the way to do that was by adopting a recognizable “style” or trend. But digital art, at its core, was never about style. It was about the medium — about process, materiality, and new ways of seeing. I’ve never worked with a fixed style, so I don’t really feel I have to negotiate that pressure. The aesthetics I engage with aren’t the point; they’re containers for something larger.

‍RF: Where do you position yourself in the debate about the “phygital” — that the physical and the virtual have collapsed into one another?

‍SL: I didn’t realize there was a debate! Pokémon Go (2016) was a mainstream moment that made it undeniable, but the physical and virtual had already merged in everyday life. Artists, including myself, have been working with this hybridity for a long time. Net art, postinternet practices, and even earlier conceptual and media-based work all explored the entanglement of digital and physical space. You can trace it back through cybernetic art, early video experiments, and even 1960s conceptualism.

‍Phygital flattens something deeply nuanced into a buzzword. It has the same energy as Randi Zuckerberg’s “We’re all gonna make it” video — overhyped, awkward, and completely missing the point. This collapse isn’t new, it’s just newly branded. Those of us who’ve been living and making in that space never needed a term for it.