“GEN/GEN: Generative Generations,” a generative art survey linking practitioners past and present, opens at Gazelli Art House London. Artists including Sougwen Chung, Licia He, Tyler Hobbs, Rhea Myers, Piter Pasma, Melissa Wiederrecht, and Stephen Willats contribute prints, plots, screen-based works, and NFTs. Multi-generational, visitors can take in 1980s paintings by Harold Cohen’s prescient AARON program in one glance and Brendan Dawes’ sculpture You, Me And The Machine (2022), the next.

“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.

Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation, PunkVenturesDAO, Casey Reas, and thefunnyguys (Le Random). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths, 2021).

Showcasing work spanning video and print, Zach Lieberman’s solo exhibition “Studies in Color, Light and Geometry” opens at Cromwell Place in London. Organized by the Verse NFT platform alongside several digital editions, it presents a selection of the American artist’s polychromatic horizontal banding and reflection studies. Nodding to precedents László Moholy-Nagy and Abraham Palatnik, it encapsulates the “geometry, animation, gesture, and graphic forms” at play in Lieberman’s steady stream of daily code sketches.

In anticipation of a July platform refresh, “FF1” opens on Feral File. Founding curator Casey Reas selects a memorable piece from each of the 33 shows mounted on the marketplace since its (pre-NFT boom) origins as a 2019 social experiment. Featured are Morehshin Allahyari, Kim Asendorf, Claudia Hart, p1xelfool (image: 3 + 2 * 11, 2022), Rafaël Rozendaal, and many others. “This is the end of the beginning and we’re ready to keep it moving,” writes Reas.

Ringers #879 (The Goose), from Canadian artist Dmitri Cherniak’s 2021 Art Blocks NFT series, is sold at a Sotheby’s London auction for $6.2M. The sale to collector 6529 completes an ‘only in crypto’ journey, as the NFT was amongst the liquidated assets of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. ‘The Goose’ is perhaps Ringers most beloved output, for the avian neck, beak, and eye that serendipitously peeks out from an algorithmic exploration of the myriad ways to wrap pegs with string.

Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) opens “Collective Worldbuilding,” an international group exhibition of “Art in the Metaverse.” 16 artists including Ian Cheng, Simon Denny, Sarah Friend, Holly Herndon, LaTurbo Avedon, Jonas Lund, and Omsk Social Club explore how—or if—a decentralized internet advances self-determination. In her new video piece Untitled (2023, image), for example, Friend explores market edge cases and identity boundaries with NSFW (not safe for work) AI images fine-tuned on herself.

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.