Artist and software designer Katherine Frazer creates layered and meditative works of digital art by subverting the presentation and productivity software she helped design. Synchronized across the screens of Times Square every midnight in March, Magic Move 4 features layers of self-portraiture and floral imagery, manipulated in presentation slides and sequenced through a default setting in Keynote called “Magic Move” to extend, cascade, rotate, and dance around the frame in a never ending loop.

“I was previously designing the constraints and limitations of these apps. Now, I am looking for ways to surprise myself, and use them to unintended ends. While they’re built for professional use, it’s heartening to think there are opportunities for play even in the most mundane of places. Tools are what you make of them.”
— Katherine Frazer

The source material in Magic Move 4 includes videos taken on the artist’s phone as well as images from Frazer’s Ikebana explorations, in which she takes 3D scans of fresh-cut floral arrangements, sometimes disrupting the scans to form deliberate glitches before layering and remaking them. Ikebana is a process-oriented style of Japanese floral arrangement based on iterative incremental shifts rather than a predetermined end result. The leisurely and meditative nature of Magic Move 4 and Frazer’s practice disrupts the fast-paced productivity of Times Square, privileging process over productivity.

A musical accompaniment to Magic Move 4 has been produced by Estle, an electronic music project created by the Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Keegan Gomm. Created to capture the unfurling and elegant maximalism of Frazer’s work while simultaneously serving as a background ambient accompaniment, this musical piece is the embodiment of a slow and peaceful afternoon.

"My aim with the track was to capture the unfurling and elegant maximalism of Katherine's Magic Move 4 while still serving as a background ambient accompaniment. I titled the track 'Becoming Visible.' It is a slow peaceful afternoon and the silhouette of a loved one with the sun behind them."
— Estle