JENNIFER STEINKAMP

Jennifer Steinkamp works on a wobbly table in a small garage-turned-studio in Mar Vista. She works for hours at multiple computers and monitors, coaxing ravishing imagery out of the software: Maya, Director, After Effects, Photoshop. No music to liven the time, just the hum of the CPU and her old, arthritic dog, Cariesta, snoring on the floor beside her. There is a kind of monastic regularity to her life these days, broken by occasional glamorous trips to install her art in far-flung places across the globe--London, Taipei, Madrid, Basel, Istanbul, New York.

Her neighbors call her “that weird artist.” At night she projects enchanted electronic trees that whirl like dervishes onto the wall of their garage. Then there are two gardens in the backyard. The scrubby real one, and the one that grows from a place infinitely more perfect and difficult.

There is a stillness to steinkamp, a reserve tempered by a wary curiosity, as if she’s figuring you out. Tall, robust and earthy, even a little awkward, she pads around her house in faded black socks and a rumpled all-weather jacket when it’s cold instead of turning on the heat. Some have called her serious and soft-spoken, and certainly there’s that too, as well as a keen intelligence. But it’s strength, mostly, that you come away with. That and a nice, sick sense of humor.

There is a painting of sharks, for instance, just inside her front door. Step in, turn right and bam, a frenzy of shark heads and ocean waves and bloody human legs and torsos being chomped and tossed. Even though the sharks have funny, dazed expressions and the water is rendered in pastel washes, Steinkamp suspects that the placement of the painting is probably bad feng shui for her love life as a single 48-year-old woman.

Then there are the cannibals. During World War I, Steinkamp’s great-uncle was lost at sea and nearly eaten by his fellow sailors. For 13 days he drifted. He drank sea water, went crazy and thought he had a nail stuck in his head. But he was lucky. It wasn’t until after he was dead and chucked overboard that his buddies started in earnest on the cannibalism. Out of this story came Steinkamp’s 2004 piece “The Wreck of the Dumaru.” A giant red wave, taller than a man, sweeps across the gallery walls, as if you are at sea level, as if the water is suffused with blood. Back and forth goes the wave, like water slopping in a bathtub. Beyond it, a sky of blue. But it isn’t simply sky--it’s water made to look like sky. Even viewing it on a small screen, you can be swept away by the piece--its visceral, saturated color, the queasifying physics of its impossible motion.

Artists, Steinkamp says one evening, are by nature ruthlessly competitive. She is driving to collector Blake Byrne’s house to check on “Jimmy Carter” (2002), one of her most significant pieces, which Byrne has installed on a wall overlooking his swimming pool. She’d argued with someone the other day over the trajectory of her career. “They said it was like this”--she makes an up-and-down motion with her hand, like a seismograph needle in the middle of an earthquake. “But I said it was more like this”--she makes a smooth, swooping motion. Before making the jump into fine art, Steinkamp did special effects work. She made commercials with animated Cheerios and dancing Skittles. She digitized images of Princess Diana and Madonna to look as if they were being flushed down a toilet.

Even after his donation of a record 123 works to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Byrne’s place is packed with all kinds of stunning, important art. A Murakami here, a Rauschenberg there. But still, the first thing that hits you is the view: nearly 180 degrees of city skyline stained deep orange by sunlight filtered through smog. “Can we turn off the sunset, please?” Steinkamp gestures grandly at the floor-to-ceiling windows. “It’s competing with my piece.”

The guts of her piece are housed partly in the kitchen pantry, partly in the guest bathroom. Wires snake out through the roof, across the hallway, into a pair of computers tucked away behind the spice rack--basil, oregano and a 2.8-gigahertz PC with 1 gig of RAM.

“Jimmy Carter,” a homage to a world leader who opted for peace over war, features floor-to-ceiling garlands of flowers that sway as if caught in an invisible wind: clovers, dahlias, dandelions, roses, sunflowers, in yellow, pink, pale green, fire red, magenta, purple and white. “I need to calibrate the colors,” Steinkamp says in a frowning sort of way, then fusses with the projector suspended over the commode. The colors shift imperceptibly. “Much better.” The wall of flowers casts glittering reflections in the pool. Every now and then, some of the petals twitch crazily. At night, with the real wind blowing and the real trees rustling, it’s as if you’re in a dream where everything is both brighter and darker than it should be.

“I walked into ACME Gallery and there it was, this incredible piece,” Byrne says of his decision to buy it. “I went home and still it haunted me. It was a living, breathing painting, but created on a computer. It had beauty and mystery. And”--he leans in conspiratorially--”it depends upon the mood you’re in when you’re looking at it, but sometimes it can be a little scary.” He’s lucky to be the keeper of the piece, he continues. “We can’t carry it with us when we go, right? So many things change. But that’s what makes art terrific. A piece of art--it stays the same. It creates history for you.”

Unlike a real flower, a Jennifer Steinkamp flower will never die.

Or maybe it will. When a projector burns out at Byrne’s house, technicians come to repair it. “I’m so sorry,” Steinkamp says sheepishly. She has retooled many of her pieces after their original installation, increased their running time or made colors brighter. Software gets upgraded, resolution improves. Another iteration of difficulty arrives. Steinkamp hopes that when she dies a foundation will be in charge of migrating the works onto the next generation of file storage, whatever that is.

What seems like her lameness at explaining her work is actually the language of this next generation. “There’s an invisible surface that the cloth reveals as it rolls down, so it’s a virtual image of cloth revealing an invisible surface,” she says. This by way of describing a piece that looks like silk scarves being dropped from the ceiling. Or: “Basically, I made the flowers run along a curve, and bent it forward, and it boing-boing-boing-boings back home. I attached flowers to that line and they kind of have to hold on for dear life.”

She looks at me, expectantly.

The addition of “basically,” I say, does not help.

But she is a code poet. “If counter<=loopstart then up=true speed=random (1,3),” Steinkamp writes in Lingo, her code of choice, making the flowers in “Jimmy Carter” twist and sway, slower, then faster, in an unpredictable pattern.

When people talk about Steinkamp, her predecessors, the California Light and Space artists, inevitably come up--such as James Turrell, who has been transforming an extinct volcano into a celestial observatory for the past 30 years, or Robert Irwin, who designed “Two Running Violet V Forms,” the giant chain-link fences hovering in the eucalyptus grove at UC San Diego. Though the discourse on so-called new-media arts is still in its infancy, it’s the rare critic who isn’t seduced by her work outright. Christopher Miles, in Artforum, says of “Jimmy Carter”: “This isn’t a fun room. It’s a joy room, and if I could swing the deal, I would live in it.” When they don’t like her, critics complain that her pieces go cold without the shadows of people playing in them. Or they take issue with the very premise of her work. “The technology showroom aspect doesn’t impress me,” says LA Weekly critic Doug Harvey. “Steinkamp is essentially a decorative abstract picture-maker who has evolved into a decorative nature-study picture-maker.”

Her pieces are insistently non-narrative. They have no beginning or end. They are pure middle. They do not tell stories, Steinkamp speculates, because she loves abstraction so much. She is concerned with the large things in life, the universals: Male and female. War and peace. Life and death.

Why does she love abstraction so much, I ask once.

“I don’t know,” she says, genuinely baffled. Then, days later, she decides: “It is intriguing to make an image about nothing.”

A portrait of the artist as a young girl: Jenny Steinkamp is 12 and living in suburban Edina, Minn., the land of grassy parks and snow and more snow. For years her mother kept having babies. Five of them, one after another. Because her parents are busy ignoring them, and because she is the oldest, Steinkamp plays mom, raising her siblings, cooking them dinner, cleaning house, buying groceries. She builds huge, elaborate dollhouses for her younger sister. Sometimes she takes her bicycle apart and puts it back together again in order to repaint it, but also to see how it works. Her mother (who studied biology) and father (who studied engineering) are high-risk gamblers on Wall Street--they’ll both eventually become stockbrokers--investing in wildly fluctuating stocks. So sometimes the family is rolling in money, sometimes they have none. It is a scary way to live.

One Christmas, however, her parents give her a set of colored pencils. It will become her favorite memory of the holidays.

“Do you want to know what heartwarming thing my mother said to me once?” Steinkamp asks as she walks to Starbucks one day to fortify before beginning the afternoon’s work.

It’s been years since her mother was a stockbroker. Mostly, these days, Mrs. Steinkamp is obsessed with gardening and going to the public library. “Your art,” she had said, “it’s sort of like Georgia O’Keeffe, isn’t it?” Steinkamp laughs--ironic, sardonic, bitter, sad. Her mother, she continues, almost never gave the kids compliments.

The little red hand on the street sign is flashing Do Not Walk, but Steinkamp is already crossing. A car honks. “Oh well,” she sighs, “my mom’s trying. For someone who knows absolutely zero about art, it’s at least in the ballpark.”

in 2003, a curator of the Istanbul Biennial invited her to do a piece in the Yerebatan Sarnici, or Sunken Palace, an underground cistern the size of a cathedral buried beneath the historical center of Constantinople, built by 7,000 slaves of the Emperor Justinian at the height of the Byzantine Empire. There are crazy columns--Doric, Ionic, Corinthian--an endless, gloomy forest of them disappearing into the darkness, some carved with tears in memory of the slaves who died during the construction. There are also a couple of humongous Medusa heads on the floor, pedestals maybe--who knows how they got there. Envious of Medusa’s beauty and her lovely hair, one myth goes, the goddess Athena turned her into a monster with a crown of hissing serpents. Or Medusa started out as a fanged gorgon, another myth goes, one of a trio of sisters. Nurture or nature?

Steinkamp saw the columns. Saw the Medusa heads. Not sharks, but small fish swam back and forth between her galoshes as she prayed not to get electrocuted while adjusting a light. And she saw trees. Not just any trees, but three 25-foot trees, two living, one dead, with branches that writhed and squirmed like snakes. They looked slick in the water that was everywhere, seeping through ancient aqueducts.

Usually her art is about a “collision of circumstances.” But always it is about what the technology can do. The soul and mind rush forward and the computer, outpaced, struggles to keep up. Tonight Steinkamp’s PC is rendering yellow roses. She painstakingly “paints” each leaf, each petal, each stem, each textured bit of bark and twig in Photoshop. Give the computer the data points and it fills in the specified geometry, simulating atmosphere and shadow, tracing the movement of each delicate fold in a poppy flower as it twirls through space. A single wriggling tree can take six hours to render. “Jimmy Carter” took three days.

She’s wearing head-to-toe black again. Her works are famous for their gorgeous colors, but in person, always the black. She shows me a picture of Rubens’ “The Head of Medusa” on Google. “Isn’t that great?” she says. “The colors are actually bluer in person. She’s just so creepy and blue and dead. I’d love to have painted that.”

In Steinkamp’s 156a Design of Virtual Form class in the snazzy new Broad Art Center at UCLA, where she is a tenured professor in the Design¦Media Arts department, students make 3-D bubbles fall from a simulated roof. They fill up a virtual room with dark water, like an aquarium. For a long time, Steinkamp was the Young Turk, fighting her way through--and for a spell teaching at--Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the school for eye-candy-obsessed workaholics. She borrowed projectors from whoever would lend them, stuck girly-pink fleurs-de-lis all over Frank Gehry’s sleek minimalist architecture at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (“it was my bad-girl rebel phase”). Is creative evolution a smooth progression, or does it happen in fits and starts?

Steinkamp took a quantum leap forward one night while coming home from class: “I was driving and then I felt my head explode. It sounds crazy, but it was almost a Buddhist moment. I was just a student then, but knew I had to do this somehow, to make animation on a computer.” Her early works are abstract explorations--a rodeo rope of squiggly lines jiggling up a wall, a grid fluttering in a corner, pinpoints of light floating like a tide of alien plankton, a nebula projected onto an archway at Caltech that pulsates every time somebody walks under it.

Another quantum leap was making her viewers want to puke. Because she likes to put art where nobody else would put it (the stairs, the ceiling), she projected a river of undulating light across a gallery floor. For inspiration, she watched Disney cartoons. “Skip the story and the preachy morality and just watch the water,” she says. “It’s really beautiful.” The resulting piece, “Untitled,” is a gently undulating rectangle of jewel-toned light. The undulations match the rhythm of breathing. People become engaged with the pace. Some get dizzy, seasick. “It dematerialized the architecture,” she says. “It made the floor feel like it was moving. It gave me something to work toward.”

“What a can of worms, man!” Steinkamp squints at the specs of a new commission from the Getty. The as-yet-unimagined piece will be installed in the oculus of the Special Exhibition Hall. The Romans built the original oculus, “The Great Eye,” a circular window open to the sky that lets in the sun and rain, in the Pantheon, pushing construction techniques far beyond what they had been. But how do you project a seamless image onto the interior of a cone? What images do you present on the surface of an architectural representation of the eye of God? Where do you even put the projectors? These are questions for another day.

What is your ideal project? people like to ask. What would she want to work on in the future? To this, Steinkamp always shrugs. The ideal project is whatever she’s working on. There is only the moment. Tonight she stares at the monitor, hunching forward in her chair as usual, as if it were a race. “Ugh,” she groans, then runs her fingers through her hair, ready for sleep. She says she’s aiming not for reality or nature in her work, but rather the simulation of nature. A nature that doesn’t exist in the real world, but one that conforms to the rules in her head. The computer will render overnight, and when she wakes up at 7 the next morning, she will see what marvelous ocean, or tree, or cacophony of flowers she has wrought.

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Steinkamp’s work can be seen at:

“X-Ray Eyes,” permanent installation, Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles. Visible at night during events.

“Aria,” at the Fremont Street Experience, 425 Fremont St., Las Vegas. For schedule, see Viva Vision at www.vegasexperience.com.