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# Quayola Fractures a Roman Cathedral
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/quayola-roman-cathedral/
- Published: 2011-05-10T18:07:50.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:37:38.000Z
- Description: Quayola is a multimedia artist based in London whose hybrid projects blur the line between photography and animation, the digital and the real. In this video, the artist filmed a cathedral in extreme high resolution, then used custom-programmed algorithms to fracture the image.
- Author: Kyle Chayka
- Tags: Opinion, #image-position-hidden, Abstraction, Digital Art, New Media, Video, Videodrome, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-11-17 09:23 (2009-2011)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2011/05/quayola_still.jpg "quayola_still")

[Quayola](http://www.quayola.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) is a multimedia artist based in London whose hybrid projects blur the line between photography and animation, the digital and the real. In this video, the artist filmed a cathedral in extreme high resolution, then used custom-programmed algorithms to fracture the image.

This video, called “[Strata #1](http://www.quayola.com/index.php?/strata-1/&ref=hyperallergic.com)” (2007), takes a little while to heat up, but when it does, the gentle classicism of the cathedral vaults turns into a splintered symphony of geometric shapes, creating a dynamism that reminds me of Kazimir Malevich’s [Suprematism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism?ref=hyperallergic.com). Quayola takes his basic imagery, the pre-existing architecture, and abstracts from it, using a digital intervention to comment on the underlying geometry of the cathedral itself. With a stirring soundtrack by Autobam and photography by James Medcraft, the video is at heart a collaboration, a necessity when it comes to highly produced digital art.

I think Quayola’s “Strata #1” follows up on the thread of abstraction I’ve been following through the other videos I posted today, from [Takeshi Murata](https://hyperallergic.com/takeshi-murata-monster-movie/) and [Nam June Paik](https://hyperallergic.com/paik-space-opera/). Where Paik uses a goofy, early-digital abstraction to comment on his “counterculture” content, Murata appropriates source material and attacks it visually , decimating the original to create a wholly new thing. Quayola comes in somewhere in between, abstracting his source material without destroying it.

**Related:**

- Check out a **Creators Project** [interview with Quayola](http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/en-uk/creators/quayola?ref=hyperallergic.com) that goes into the artist’s working process and the team he collaborates with.