Patterns and politics is the first museum retrospective of the work of US media artist Claudia Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has constructed complex scenarios in virtual 3D spaces in which mathematical structures, scientific models, and the visual rhetoric of consumer society are abstracted and merged. This creates dense, mythologically charged worlds in which virtual bodies, ornament, and algorithmic processes are inextricably intertwined. A simulated eye—the virtual camera—records these worlds; the resulting rendered sequences form the basis for Hart's films, installations, pigment prints, rapid-prototype sculptures, quilts, augmented reality wallpapers, and paintings. This creates a visual cosmos in which scientific forms of thought, historical narratives, and questions of perception, body, identity, attention, and power intertwine.

Again and again, she focuses on what is socially repressed – for example, when she pays tribute to forgotten female artists of the early 20th century in new “ghost paintings” or digitally disintegrates classic still lifes to reveal the fragile hierarchies of the art canon.

Her work deliberately engages with contemporary artists and activists; by integrating their contributions as data streams into her simulations, Hart demonstrates how strongly visual culture continues to be shaped by exclusion. Patterns and politics thus condenses past, present, and possible future scenarios into a multi-layered visual space, inviting visitors to perceive the virtual space as sculpture and reinterpret ornamental structures as political texture.