DAVID HARTONO
MONOGRID is a Creative Innovation Studio. They craft elevated experiences for premium and luxury brands that drive future relevance and command consumer preference. Founded by David Hartono and co-founders, the studio works at the intersection of art, technology, and culture.
Visit mono-grid.com →For the SS26 season, Max Mara's campaign introduced a painted natural backdrop. The brief was to translate this static element into a moving image for global retail windows, turning a simple painted background into an immersive video experience designed for LED walls. Given the nature of AI video generation, the project was built around a precise pre-production phase. MONOGRID developed a detailed storyboard and a structured set of visual references, defining each scene, transition and animation cue in advance. This process allowed them to align on composition, rhythm and visual hierarchy before production, reducing uncertainty and ensuring consistency across all outputs.
See full case study at mono-grid.com →David Hartono is an Indonesian digital creative based in Florence, Italy. He is co-founder of MONOGRID, a creative innovation studio working for international luxury and premium brands. To keep his creative energy sharp he collaborates on personal projects from projection mapping on historical buildings to playing audio-reactive visuals in electronic music festivals. He also teaches at IED Florence.
He was 18 years old when he saw Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project installation at Tate Modern. That experience, of a single artwork completely transforming the identity of a space and everyone in it, set the direction for everything that followed. More than two decades later, he is doing the same thing for Max Mara's retail windows, for luxury brands across multiple continents, and for festival crowds under open skies.
David Hartono I was 18 years old when I saw the Weather installation by Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern. It had such a strong influence on me, on how installation art can completely change the identity of a space and its inhabitant. My other biggest inspiration is remediation, how all media inspired each other and made things trendy again in different cycles of time and space. Besides that, I feel it is important to surround myself with creative friends, colleagues and community.
David Hartono I love artistic collaboration and exchange. I started teaching last year at IED Florence and the students gave me lots of inspiration. It is interesting to see how other people apply the same knowledge differently. Also during lockdown I did a lot of virtual collaborations with artists who I had never met before and it was such an inspiring experience.
Being a technical nerd, I love sharing my technical knowledge and possibilities with other artists, just to see what they create with it. Universal is an important concept for me, in the sense that I try to remove the demographic and geographic boundaries in my projects, both for collaborators and for the user. I want my work to be enjoyable for all kinds of audiences.
As for what I am looking forward to this year, I am developing and experiencing mixed reality. I feel that virtual experience has seen a massive upgrade, and physical experience will catch up and integrate the latest virtual technology, creating a next-level mixed reality hybrid.
"Universal is an important concept for me, in the sense that I try to remove the demographic and geographic boundaries in my projects."
David Hartono The main activity for me this year was evaluation in every aspect of life. I started to analyse and question what is most important to me. Health, nature and efficiency are three topics that interest me as an artist. I have seen how our approach toward nature in art evolved. There is a tendency to convey nature in artwork, in form or colour, softer and natural earthy tones that reverberate calm and mindfulness to help reconnect us to nature, as most of us were confined at home.
David Hartono It is difficult to pick one, but as a digital art person I would pick Beeple. He represents a lot of values that I really like as an artist, which beside the obvious creativity and technical prowess also demonstrate consistency and resistance in creating your own identity and self-improvement over a long period of time, and that inspired productivity in other artists. If it is possible to answer with an item or product, I would say the mobile phone. Being born in the 80s I witnessed how mobile phones completely changed our lives.
David Hartono I always believe that art needs to shock and create conversation between artist and audience, which is increasingly difficult. We live in a hyperconnected and well-informed era, where almost anything created has been seen or made before. It is a constant remix and remake in the art world now and originality is rare. I believe as an artist it is important to sometimes look away from all these social channels and outside influence, and do more internal exploration and self-improvement to create something original.
