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“Nothing is fully on-chain: there are always many more layers of tech off-chain that you depend on that interpret and transform data to display your art, like your browser. And your eyes and your mind to perceive it are extremely mutable too.”
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
“In the end, we need to ask more of museums and we need to ask more of DAOs (and of emerging technologies more broadly). For either to earn our trust, they need to continually define their terms and defend their motives.”
Himmelsbach & Magrini (ed.)
Algorithmic Imaginary
“Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain” opens at Basel’s HEK (House of Electronic Arts), concluding the institution’s recent excursion into Web3. HEK’s Sabine Himmelbach and Boris Magrini gather some of crypto art’s finest including Simon Denny, Mario Klingemann & Botto, Sarah Friend, Chloé Michel, Rhea Myers, Operator, Lukas Truniger and others, to lay bare the politics and potentials of the metaverse. Of note: Kyle McDonald’s Amends (2022), a potent eco-critical work that’s on view for the very first time.
Burak Arikan Maps Power Structures, Financial Flows, and Networks of Influence
The New York-based artist discusses the collector ecosystem revealed by his ‘meta NFT’ Social Contracts (2023) and the evolution of peer-to-peer economies
Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition ”No Content: Contemplations on Software” opens at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, examining digital media through “the carrier and reality that holds it.” JPEG (2023), for example, is a series of algorithmic images that fully express the signature compression; Broken Images (2023) foregrounds the volatility of digital assets by minting broken links as NFTs, and Scrollbars (image)—a Leegte classic—presents obsolete interface elements as sculptural and cultural debris.
The public mint for Social Contracts, an Ethereum wallet network visualization by Turkish artist Burak Arikan closes. In all, 899 editions were minted by NFT collectors who were curious to see what their purchase history reveals about their nearest neighbours on the blockchain. Built by Arikan using his Graph Commons platform, the token visualizes connections between the owner and other collectors, predicts future NFT acquisitions, and evolves with each purchase and transfer of ownership.
“It’s a question of permanence. What will last the longest? What will give me the strongest sense of comfort that a work will exist well beyond my lifetime?”
“Value Flows,” a pop-up show curated by the decentralized JPG community opens as part of NFT Paris. Artists including 0xDEAFBEEF, Kim Asendorf, Dmitri Cherniak, Simon Denny & Guile Twardowski, and Sarah Friend contribute works revealing the “on-chain transactions and mechanisms, or off-chain interactions between humans, that live at the core of every blockchain system.” Rippling with DIY energy, it juxtaposes ad-hoc pyramids of analogue displays (image) with the backdrop of a bustling trade show.
Rhea Myers’ solo exhibition “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk in Berlin, offering blockchain-based “symbolic forms” that ponder property, representation, identity, and secrecy. In the titular piece (2023), for example, the British artist and hacker tokenizes her brain wave recordings while Type Opposite Images (2023, image) reverses colourful Vaporwave tropes. Also on view: new NFT editions of iconic Ethereum works that Myers created in 2014.
“No currency, no collectors, no cashing out. Just having fun swapping and chatting about work that we made and loved.”
Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s “A Slice of the Pie” platform launches as part of “DYOR,” a crypto art exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich curated by Nina Röhrs. For its duration, artists can purchase pie segments on a 16 m2 LED wall to show their work, effectively becoming part of the exhibition. The hustle is broadcast 24/7, inviting remote competition and/or collaboration. Once a day, the pie’s state is frozen and minted as an NFT, starting the cycle anew.
“The line between utility, saving one’s market, and wash trading seems to be blurred.”
Sarah Friend’s solo exhibition “Terraforming” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk, Berlin, with a series of new works that “turn to the protocol layer of blockchains and the physical reality of the internet as subject matter.” Using text, video, code, and waste from a local data center, the Canadian software artist foregrounds “internet infrastructure, its stories, shape, materials” and the false “dichotomy between competition and cooperation.”
“Blue chip galleries and institutions ‘groom’ mid-career artists but forget all the things that fed that career: the unpaid cultural workers, the project spaces. They skim off the top and I wanted to hold them accountable.”
“I grabbed an old Sol LeWitt certificate of authenticity, got some Wite-Out, whited out the details of his work and just quickly wrote in the details of mine and photocopied it a few times.”
“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta, the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin, Sarah Friend, Ben Grosser, Anna Ridler, and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance (2022, image) by Simon Denny and collaborators.
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