ART NFT LINZ Teaser Image

ART NFT LINZ

08.09.22
25.09.22
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Art NFT Linz presents an exhibition and artist talks to explore the story of the past, present, and future of digital art and NFTs. NFTs are neither dead nor without history.

John Gerrard | Jonas Lund | Mitchell F Chan | Operator | Manuel Rossner | Anne Spalter | Mario Klingemann | Lynn Hershman Leeson | TeleNFT | Organic Material | Unsigned | Kevin Abosch | Harm van den Dorpel | UBERMORGEN | Erwin Wurm | CryptoWiener | Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau

Curated by Anika Meier

DAY TICKETS: € 6,50

PROGRAM

Thursday, September 8
The Past, Present and Future of Net Art and Generative Art 



5 pm CET
Keynote: John Gerrard
Worldmaking & NFT


6 pm CET
Keynote: UBERMORGEN
L’Origine du Pixel


7 pm CET
Opening: Jonas Lund.
Studio Visit. How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms


7 pm CET
Opening: Art NFT Linz
Performance: Operator
Acts of Devaluation


Friday, September 9
Blockchain as a Medium


6 pm CET
Artist Talk: Jonas Lund in conversation with Alfred Weidinger
How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms


7 pm CET
Artist Talk: Mitchell F Chan in conversation with Anika Meier
NFTs as Extension of Conceptualism and Dematerialization


8 pm CET
Keynote: Operator
Experiential Art and the Blockchain


GUIDED TOUR


5.30 pm CET
Pixels by CryptoWiener
OK Linz



Saturday, September 10
The Future of Art and Technology


2 pm CET
Keynote: Manuel Rossner
One Step at a Time: With Digital Art into the Metaverse


3 pm CET
Keynote: Anne Spalter
How Has AI Changed Art Making and Art Collecting?


4 pm CET
Artist Talk: Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier
Escape Normality. How not to Be an Artist


5 pm CET
Artist Talk: Lynn Hershman Leeson in conversation with Anika Meier
Dreams of a Cyborgian Future



GUIDED TOURS


1 pm CET
Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
OK Linz


5 pm CET
Meta.Space
Markus Reindl & Fabian Müller-Nittel
Francisco Carolinum


EXHIBITION

Lynn Hershman Leeson
TeleNFT
Organic Material
Unsigned
Works from the NFT Collection of Francisco Carolinum (Kevin Abosch, Harm van den Dorpel, UBERMORGEN, Erwin Wurm)


PROGRAM

 

Thursday, September 8
The Past, Present and Future of Net Art and Generative Art


5 pm CET
Keynote: John Gerrard
Worldmaking & NFT

Artist John Gerrard will overview the emergence of worldmaking within NFT using WebGl with specific reference to his spatial, temporal project titled Petro National on Art Blocks. The lecture leads from the artist's twenty year engagement with simulations as contemporary art with a specific reference to the art in the public domain and recent expansions into work available online to global non geographic audiences.

John Gerrard (b. Tipperary. Ireland 1974) is widely regarded as a key figure in the development of simulation within contemporary art. Deceptively looking like film or video, his works are virtual worlds, made using real-time computer graphics, a technology developed by the military and now used extensively in the gaming industry.

Recent exhibitions include Leaf Work at Sydney Biennial, Corn Work at Galway International Arts Festival, travelling to Gwangju Biennial.  X. laevis at Okayama Art Summit, Japan, Western Flag at Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Solar Reserve, LACMA, LA, USA, Western Flag, Somerset House with Channel 4, London, England, Power. Play, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, Infinite Freedom Exercise, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, Solar Reserve, Lincoln Center in Association with the Public Art Fund, New York NY, Exercise, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey, Pulp Press (Kistefos), Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway, Exercise (Djibouti), Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, England.

Gerrard's work is in the collections of Tate, London; MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Kistefos Collection, Norway; IMMA, Dublin; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, M+, Hong Kong.

6 pm CET
Keynote: UBERMORGEN
L’Origine du Pixel

The artist duo UBERMORGEN is internationally known for media hacking and digital activism. They are pioneers of net.art, CNN has described them as “maverick Austrian business people”, the New York Times called them “simply brilliant”. Since 1999, UBERMORGEN has been Maria Haas (a.k.a. Liz or lizvlx) and Hans Bernhard (a.k.a. etoy.HANS, etoy.BRAINHARD, hans_extrem, e01, Luzius Bernhard), who live in Vienna and teach at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, Whitney Museum, Center Pompidou and the New Museum, among others. Their influences are Rammstein, Samantha Fox and Viennese Actionism.


UBERMORGEN, The D1ck #5822, 2022


7 pm CET
Opening: Jonas Lund.
Studio Visit. How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms


Swedish artist Jonas Lund has been exploring the creation of value and the distribution of power in the art market since 2012. He creates his works with the help of algorithms and the viewers. Studio Visit. How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms is Lund's first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The exhibition consists of six chapters that present modern problems based on modern solutions from Silicon Valley and the art world: Values of the Attention Economy, the Artist as Currency, Power of Networks and Networked Images.

Welcome to Jonas Lund's studio! The artist can be reached around the clock via the red telephone on his desk.


Jonas Lund, Red Telephone, 2022


7 pm CET
Opening: Art NFT Linz
Performance: Operator
Acts of Devaluation

A durational performance of signing by Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti – an appendage piece to their collection Unsigned, which challenges the negative value of women and non-binary artists’ signatures on their artworks. In Acts of Devaluation, the artists sign their names for two hours at Francisco Carolinum and question, how much devaluation can be inflicted onto one art object?


Operator & Anika Meier, Dejha Ti (Unsigned), 2022


Friday, September 9
Blockchain as a Medium


6 pm CET
Artist Talk: Jonas Lund in conversation with Alfred Weidinger
How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms

Swedish artist Jonas Lund has been exploring the creation of value and the distribution of power in the art market since 2012. He creates his works with the help of algorithms and the viewers. "Studio Visit. How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms" is Lund's first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. Lund and Alfred Weidinger will discuss value, algorithms and networks of power.

Jonas Lund (1984, Sweden) creates paintings, sculpture, photography, websites and performances that critically reflect on contemporary networked systems and power structures. His artistic practice involves creating systems and setting up parameters that oftentimes require engagement from the viewer. This results in performative artworks where tasks are executed according to algorithms or a set of rules. Through his works, Lund investigates the latest issues generated by the increasing digitalisation of contemporary society like authorship, participation and distribution of agency. At the same time, he questions the mechanisms of the art world; he challenges the production process, authoritative power and art market practices.

Lund earned an MA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery (2019), KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin (2021), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2016), Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016, 2015, 2014), Växjö Konsthall Sweden (2016), Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013), New Museum, New York (2012), and has had work included in numerous group exhibitions including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Vienna Biennale 2019, Witte De With, Rotterdam, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. His work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Kunstforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Metropolis M, Artslant, Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield, Wired and more.


7 pm CET
Artist Talk: Mitchell F Chan in conversation with Anika Meier
NFTs as Extension of Conceptualism and Dematerialization

Mitchell F Chan is best-known for creating one of the earliest non-fungible token artworks, 2017's Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. His diverse body of work is performed in both physical and digital public spaces, and includes code-based works such as his 2021 Art Blocks project LeWitt Generator Generator and large-scale public projects such as 2022's Monument to United Nations Peacekeeping Veterans.

As a critic and essayist, he has contributed to NFT-focused outlets such as Outland and hosts a regular interview show for FingerprintsDAO. His work has been covered and discussed in numerous media outlets including Artforum, Kunstforum, Art In America, VICE, Canadian Art, Slate, the Toronto Star, and Gizmodo.


Mitchell F Chan, Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, 2017


8 pm CET
Keynote: Operator
Experiential Art and the Blockchain

Artist duo Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti of Operator give an overview of their collaborative experiential practice which merges immersive environments, technology and performance art. They contextualize their use of NFTs into their wider history of integrating technology conceptually – and often invisibly – into their work.

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice, known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine) and “LGBT power couple” (Flaunt), their expertise collide in large-scale conceptual works recognizable for their signature poetic approach to technology. Rooted in the understanding that immersion is not only a physical state but also an emotional one, their approach employs nuance in scale, producing a feeling instead of a spectacle. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as an established choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium-fluent output–bringing together environments, technology and the body.

Operator has been awarded The Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve spoken and appeared in BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, SCAD Museum of Art, MIT Open Doc Lab, Ars Electronica, Art Basel, CADAF, and MoCDA. Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin.


GUIDED TOUR

5.30 pm CET
Pixels by CryptoWiener
OK Linz

The CryptoWiener bring Viennese flair to Linz and conquer the Metaverse in the OK. The six artists of the CryptoWiener collective, which has been active in the Crypto Art space and the Cryptovoxels metaverse since 2018, push the boundaries between analog and digital in their multidimensional exhibition PIXELS.

In their exhibition PIXELS, the dimensions of digital coffee house, sausage stand and soccer field are now expanded, with one's own cell phone becoming a portal: via a QR code, one can enter the mirrored rooms of the Metaverse, while at the same time the physical rooms are transmitted live into the virtual world via webcam. All of this, in turn, is projected onto the walls as a live stream from Cryptovoxels – with the exciting effect that visitors can move and see themselves simultaneously in the analog and digital worlds.

In the exhibition, visitors become part of the digital world, learn how to move and communicate in the metaverse, and contribute to the multiverse of the CryptoWiener.


Saturday, September 10
The Future of Art and Technology


2 pm CET
Keynote: Manuel Rossner
One Step at a Time: With Digital Art into the Metaverse

The development of spatial virtual worlds will be explored by artist Manuel Rossner from an artistic standpoint. He will highlight how blockchain, virtual reality, and gaming could influence how the internet evolves in the future. He will paint a concise picture of art in the metaverse using examples from his own work and significant pieces of art from recent decades.

Manuel Rossner (born 1989) is a German artist who has been creating digital spaces and virtual worlds since 2012. In his work, he explores how society and art are impacted by technological advancements. He employs "the digital" as a material, much like a sculptor, to outline the key parallels and contrasts between the physical and digital worlds. His work has been exhibited throughout the world, including the Grand Palais Éphémère (Paris), NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.


Manuel Rossner, Spatial Painting, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 2022


3 pm CET
Keynote: Anne Spalter
How Has AI Changed Art Making and Art Collecting?

What new frontiers is AI opening up for artists? Anne Spalter will showcase several systems that she used to create a number of NFT projects and will discuss theis pros and cons.  Anne and Michael Spalter have also begun to add Crypto Art to their digital art collection. Spalter will highlight some of these acquisitions and how they fit into the history of generative art.

Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

Her artistic process explores imagery of the modern landscape. Spalter has drawn on the writings of Carl Jung as well as various science fiction novels and movies to develop a consistent set of personal symbols using a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. She is currently creating crypto art, with works auctioned by Sotheby’s and Phillips, and featured in the New York Times. She recently completed a successful 501-piece drop entitled AI Spaceships.

Spalter’s work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); The Museum of CryptoArt, and others. Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory and has been invited to participate in an alumni residency at MASS MoCA in 2022.


4 pm CET
Artist Talk: Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier
Escape Normality. How not to Be an Artist

Mario Klingemann is an artist and a skeptic with a curious mind. His preferred tools are neural networks, code and algorithms. His interests are manifold and in constant evolution, involving artificial intelligence, deep learning, generative and evolutionary art, glitch art, data classification and visualization or robotic installations. If there is one common denominator it’s his desire to understand, question and subvert the inner workings of systems of any kind. He also has a deep interest in human perception and aesthetic theory. In conversation with Anika Meier, he will discuss how to escape normality and how not to be an artist.

From 2016 to 2018 Klingemann was artist in residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab. He also has been helping institutions like the British Library, the Cardiff University or the New York Public Library with the processing and classification of their vast digital archives since he believes that future creative agents will require a solid foundation of human knowledge to build upon. He received an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2020 for his work Appropriate Response, the Artistic Award 2016 by the British Library Labs and won the Lumen Prize Gold 2018 for The Butcher’s Son.

He has been speaking on conferences around the world starting in 2003. His works have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival, the Mediacity Biennale Seoul, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Photographer’s Gallery London, the Centre Pompidou Paris and the British Library.


5 pm CET
Artist Talk: Lynn Hershman Leeson in conversation with Anika Meier
Dreams of a Cyborgian Future

Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last fifty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, artificial intelligence, bio art, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art. ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work titled Civic Radar. A substantial publication, which Holland Cotter named in The New York Times “one of the indispensable art books of 2016.”

Lynn Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 she received a USA Artist Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society’s Persistence of Vision Award and will receive the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her six feature films – Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada, !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History, Tania Libre, and The Electronic Diaries are all in worldwide distribution and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for writing and directing Teknolust. !Women Art Revolution received the Grand Prize Festival of Films on Art.

Artwork by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections.


Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lorna, Interactive Installation, 1979


GUIDED TOURS


1 pm CET
Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
OK Linz

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are two of the most innovative and internationally renowned media artists and researchers. They have been working in the field of interactive art since the 1990s and their broad artistic oeuvre deals with natural and artificial life, human and electronic communication, and the involvement of the audience in an "open" work.

Sommerer/Mignonneau have done pioneering work in this field, creating impressive interactive computer installations, but also laying a foundation in theory and teaching for the next generations of artists. The retrospective at OK Linz is a tribute to their life's work as internationally active media artists, pioneers, researchers and teachers of interactive art and shows works from 1992 to 2021.

The exhibition is a co-production of ZKM | Karlsruhe, OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, Linz and iMal, Brussels.

 

5 pm CET
Meta.Space
Markus Reindl & Fabian Müller-Nittel, Francisco Carolinum

What is currently in vogue as an escape from reality between the conquest of space and the virtualization of everyday life has spurred and inspired artists for centuries: The creation and design of worlds and the artistic examination of social, real and imaginary spaces. Time and again, social developments have been anticipated and influenced in a lasting way. And so current trends such as the various metaverse fantasies are by no means as revolutionary as they like to sell themselves. Concepts and ideas for the metaverse have always emerged as utopian-dystopian answers to human escapism, which manifests itself in a mixture of enthusiasm for science, technological progress and artistic creation.

Meta.Space – Raumvisionen presents a selection of interdisciplinary and intermedial positions that are negotiated as a dialogue between 'old' art and contemporary creativity. The framework of content ranges from the thematization of early painterly solutions to pictorial spatial problems from the 15th century onward and the spatiality of sculptural works to the sensory, scientific, and technical development of spaces and the recording and penetration of social spaces. It finally culminates in the examination of a wide variety of world concepts and not only questions their artistic and social implications, but also critically questions the dystopian as well as utopian potential of current metaspace concepts.

Participating artists: Anna Lucia, Aya – Artist from Creative Aya, Willem Janssonius Bleau, Eduard Schulz-Briesen, Nancy Baker Cahill, depart (Leonhard Lass, Gregor Ladenhauf), Herbert W. Franke, Franz Gebel, Alexander Grasser & Alexandra Parger, Robert F. Hammerstiel, Augustin Hirschvogel, Candida Höfer, Hans Hueber, The Institute of Queer Ecology, Ludwig Kasper, Johann Ev. Lamprecht, Lawrence Lek, Christian Lemmerz, Gerard de Leraisse, Lichterloh, Anton Lutz, Martina Menegon, Armin Mitterbauer, Julie Monaco, Bernd Oppl, Henriette Pausinger, r0zk0, Anne Spalter, Volatile Moods, Eduard Schuzl-Briesen, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Gerhard Valk, Georg Matthäus Vischer

EXHIBITION

Lynn Hershman Leeson
TeleNFT
Organic Material
Unsigned
Works from the NFT Collection of Francisco Carolinum (Kevin Abosch, Harm van den Dorpel, UBERMORGEN, Erwin Wurm)

TeleNFT


TeleNFT questions technological progress in the context of economic and environmental crises. How much time is left? Is technology the salvation? Is art the threat? 15 internationally renowned digital artists address these questions with innovative teletext artworks. With 78 x 69 pixels, they present motifs ranging from hand-drawn animals to computer-generated patterns. These works immortalized on the blockchain document our zeitgeist, sometimes ironically resigned, sometimes uninhibitedly euphoric, but united in one conviction... Now it's up to us.

Bloom Jr. (DE), Buzzlightning (DE), Gleb Divov (LT/RU), Christoph Faulhaber (DE), Max Haarich (DE), Juha van Ingen (FI), Claudie Linke (DE), Kleintonno (DE), Nissla (AT), Numo (DE), Mario Klingemann (DE), Jarkko Räsänen (FI), Mamadou Sow (DE), sp4ce (DE), tius (DE)


Nissla, Too bored to right-click, 2022


Organic Material  – Event Horizon


Event Horizon, the latest NFT release from artist collective Organic Material, resists the restlessness of the internet with a contemplative slow-moving pace. Four works are unified under a shared gesture: to consider the horizon, knowing that it moves away from us at the same speed that we approach.

Event Horizon is a web-based work and the result of an exquisite corpse exercise comprising four digital images individually created by Mark Dorf, Skye Nicolas, Amir H. Fallah, and Colette Robbins, all members of the NFT-focused artist collective Organic Material. Using the prompt “event horizon” and agreeing on a compositional template, the artists used the creative constraints to guide the conclusion of Event Horizon toward an aesthetic assemblage connected by a conceptual through line. The work alludes to various uncertainties and slippages related to everyday experiences in a digital and globalized world: memory, geography, identity, perception, the natural environment, and the increasingly and often problematically blurred separation between the natural and technological. Moreover, the work’s overall visual and mechanical aesthetics and collaborative creative scheme are intentionally antithetical to today’s web culture driven by speed, stimulation, and popularity. The result of the artists’ combined efforts is a respite from the endless scroll of social media platforms like Twitter and a moving stillness that allows one to contemplate this timely and thoughtful work of collaboration and critique.

The four images in Event Horizon are arranged in a carousel display, slowly scrolling horizontally across the site. The pink and maroon hues of the individual, proscenium-like image borders glow in and out of saturation, creating a light hypnotic effect, which offers a rare instance of digital quietude that counters the stimulation of the internet’s restlessness. The group carefully considered an assortment of NFT purchase options also intended to deviate from the exhaustive pace and frenzy surrounding NFT networking and promotion efforts as well as the hyper individualism the internet is designed to foster. Organic Material is offering both editions of the artists’ individual pieces and a 1/1 mint of all four works unified in a single composition revealing the collective gesture of the horizon line.


These decisions highlight the ways in which Event Horizon centers fluidity and plurality, straddling the contradicting and complementary poles that make up the global art world and the internet. Embracing the sensibilities of a creatively, conceptually, and globally diverse collective, the work willingly resists simple categorization. Formally, it is situated between a surrealist creative game — exquisite corpse is derived from the French cadavre exquis — and the long tradition in the East of illustrated handscrolls, which are here adapted to the digital age of storytelling. However, the slowly moving scroll of Event Horizon offers more complexity than that. Though it’s technically accessible on the web, the work isn’t beholden to this format, being a file-based collection of images designed for other outputs. Building on ancient scroll panels, Event Horizon hints at the format of a graphic novel or the mechanics of a side-scrolling video game, but it isn’t interactive: users can’t advance or reverse the direction of the scroll. Further, its horizontal orientation resists the tired vertical positioning characteristic of the internet’s endless scroll. And finally, as an animation of animations, it manages both to augment and challenge the cinematic apparatus, offering enough movement to render the work a moving image but moving so subtly it lightly pulsates as it passes by.

Event Horizon’s content, unified by a few creative constraints, reflects the diversity of the collective as artists working across media, disciplines, creative impulses, and identities. Though its composition is fixed, tonally it shifts from one panel to the next, like an epic story told in four acts. Viewers are faced with optical confusion that feels transfixing rather than upsetting; next, an uncanny landscape playfully comes together through digital iconography and a feeling of nostalgia; then, cultural icons and symbols are neatly collaged in a vivid, jewel-toned palette; and last, a pair of textured, disembodied feet are positioned in perfect symmetry against a mountainous shape. These descriptions merely scratch the surface as each image contains multitudes and requires the time and space the slow scroll provides to unpack its contents, use of symbolism, and allegorical depth. Taken together, the work is thus imbued with a kind of spirituality – a moment of reflection and solace – necessary to engage in meaningful critique but doubtlessly absent from our usual interactions online.

Mark Dorf’s Refraction draws on his background in photography and interest in nature as a site of investigation to at once produce feelings of awe and anxiety as they relate to the alternation between clarity and interference of visual perceptibility. Here, the prismatic, refractive, light-bending surface of glass situated against a forest is a reminder of the always tethered connection between nature and technology. The image is intentionally wholly unresolvable, showing an isolated mechanism of the photographic apparatus, rendering it disruptive of technology’s utilitarian function. Viewers are reminded of the precarity of technology, our natural environment, and the ways in which environmental crises are sometimes visible and other times obscured from view.

Skye Nicolas creates a darkly playful Metamodernist landscape that offers the sociopolitical address of various urgent issues, such as environmental crises, technological overreach, and global financial greed in Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Skies Are Blue. Its title references a hopeful song from the film The Wizard of Oz, which counters the visual chaos imparted by its multilayered glitch aesthetic, meant to articulate our desire for respite in a world increasingly drowned by the undertow of interminable anxieties. The work appropriates the Windows XP default wallpaper Bliss, the 8-bit video game Pole Position, and uses variations on the smiling emoji in extreme multitudes to convey our satirical modes of communication, while encouraging the nostalgic effect of early memories of technology and its ability to elicit the feelings of a blissful childhood as a temporary means of escape.


Skye Nicolas, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Skies Are Blue, 2022


Amir H. Fallah’s preference for highly chromatic, saturated colors across analog painting and sculptural practice translates magnificently to the vibrancy of the digital medium. In Last Prayer, iconic symbols taken from high and low culture are harmoniously arranged by compositional symmetry and pattern but are disrupted by subtle contrasts in meaning, forms, and references. These elements come together to explore the collective impasse we face over various self-created crises and cultural narratives across the globe – immigration, diasporic identity, Eastern and Western art histories, nature, science, and popular culture — signaling a disconnect between human nature and resolution.

Visual perspectives appear to magically shift in Colette Robbins’ Home is the Edge of the World. Seemingly placed through and across frames of time, the work evokes an uncertain, ancient past. The central figures – two meticulously textured feet adorned with spiky sea urchin-like shapes – feel strangely human despite their stony, porous surfaces and detachment from the body. Using the language of sculpture, these digital feet occupy a weight, presence, and cultural significance, a certain monumentality imbuing an untold mythological narrative related to time and the traversal through geographic space that leads one home. Home remains unfixed, as polysemic as the reflective surfaces and repeated shapes in the image, and as elusive as the mythological place from which these feet originate.

Unsigned


Artworks signed by men increase in value, and decrease if signed by a woman. Unsigned by Operator and Anika Meier is a collection of 100 signatures from women and non-binary artists created to reverse the current negative value of the signatures through their transformation into artworks themselves.

Operator, Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, are an award-winning LA and Berlin-based experiential artist duo. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine) and “LGBT power couple” (Flaunt), their expertise collide in large-scale conceptual works recognizable for their signature poetic approach to technology. Rooted in the understanding that immersion is not only a physical state but also an emotional one, their approach employs nuance in scale, producing a feeling instead of a spectacle. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as an established choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium-fluent output–seamlessly weaving together the expansive qualities of environments with the intimacy of the body.

In 2016 the duo founded their art house Operator which executes their multifaceted works. They speak internationally and have been presented in programmes such as BBC, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, SXSW, Ars Electronica, as well awarded by the Lumen Prize (Immersive), ADC Award (Gold Cube) S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention).

Works from the NFT Collection of Francisco Carolinum
Survival (2022) by Kevin Abosch

“SURVIVAL is an intervention that started by collecting vast amounts of historical data pertaining to humankind’s constant struggle to survive, with an emphasis on human rights abuses and atrocities committed across the globe since the 20th century. My process of working with data has evolved over time to something much more akin to ritual than science. I employ a battery of machine-learning algorithms to help surface insights that I might otherwise not glean if I tried to work through the mountain of data myself. I work with computers in a back and forth fashion, a feedback loop, until I am left with an emotional distillation of the original data as it pertains to a given theme, in this case, survival. After encryption in the form of hexadecimal alphanumerics, these “testimonies” undergo a process of obfuscation that entails overlaying the alphanumerics upon each other, and frequently truncating or deleting sections. What remains is not suitable for intellectual analysis. The truth of the work can only be accessed emotionally.

The process I’ve described is how I have made much of my work since 2019, particularly the work manifested as NFT’s. With SURVIVAL, however, the work leaves the virtual realm before returning to it. As an artist who spends a considerable time working with technology, I allow myself to come under the influence of technology. In this altered state, I learn how to see differently, even how to feel differently. I find it emotionally draining at times and need to come out from under the influence of machine. It doesn’t mean I have to stop in the middle of a work that was borne of bits; I simply finish a work in the physical realm.

The final stage of the work, the commitment and obfuscation of the encrypted alphanumerics, consisted of painting 500 works on paper, using acrylic paint, oil stick, India ink, and graphite. Then I photographed each work using the camera on an iPhone 13 Pro Max, because I wanted to degrade the fidelity of my paintings through the particular type of jpeg compression inherent to this type of device, exaggerated by throttling the intensity of the light allowed to reach the camera sensor. After returning to the computer each work gets a procedural polishing and a subtle homogenisation before being minted as an NFT.

I made a decision that these works would not be auctioned to the public nor would they have a sale price. In fact, they are officially “not for sale.” This is not to say that a collector cannot offer to purchase one, but there is no guarantee that the offer would be accepted. Survival itself is not guaranteed.“

– Kevin Abosch / Paris 3rd August 2022

Kevin Abosch (born 1969) is an Irish conceptual artist who works across traditional mediums as well as with generative methods including machine learning and blockchain technology. Abosch's work addresses the nature of identity and value by posing ontological questions and responding to sociological dilemmas. Abosch's work has been exhibited throughout the world, often in civic spaces, including The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, The National Museum of China, The National Gallery of Ireland, Jeu de Paume (Paris), The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, The Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, ZKM (Karlsruhe) and Dublin Airport.


Kevin Abosch, Survival #168, 2022


Breathe in, Breathe out (2021) out by Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm is internationally recognized for his unique way of having reinvented sculpture through performance, video, drawing and photography. With his FAT SCULPTURES – "fatty" middle-class status symbols like cars or single-family homes – Wurm delivers snappy and striking commentary on today’s consumer society. The NFT titled Breathe in, Breathe out brings his iconic Fat Sculptures via an animated version of a breathing Porsche to life.

Erwin Wurm (born 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria) lives and works in Vienna and Limburg/Austria. Erwin Wurm's oeuvre mainly comprises sculptures, but also photography, video, performance and drawing. Many of his works are imbued with a whimsical humor that puts the everyday in a new perspective. One of his most influential groups of works are his One Minute Sculptures. There he has people pose with everyday objects to question the relationship between subject and object. Wurm's "Fat" sculptures, which show petty bourgeois status symbols such as cars or single-family homes in an obese, bloated state, are also widely known. His work has gained significance beyond the art world and found its way into pop culture, not least through the Red Hot Chili Peppers' music video for their song "Can't Stop," in which they adopt the idea of the One Minute Sculptures.

Erwin Wurm has had solo exhibitions at numerous international institutions including most recently MAK (Museum of Applied Arts), Geymüllerschlössel, Vienna, Austria (2021), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei City, Taiwan (2020), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Musée Cantini and Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille, France (2019) and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2018). At the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Wurm showed "Narrow House," a model of his childhood home, reduced to one-sixth its size along its longitudinal axis at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti as part of the collaborative event Glasstress. In 2017, he represented Austria at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2020, on occasion of Lent, Wurm installed an 80-square-meter Lenten veil in the shape of a purple knitted sweater in Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral as a symbolic sign of "warming charity." Wurm's work is represented in the permanent collections of major international institutions, including Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Albertina, Vienna; National Museum of Art, Osaka; and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

The D1cks (2021 – ongoing) by UBERMORGEN

The D1cks are hand-pixelated collectible D1cks with proof of ownership stored on the Tezos blockchain. These are the D1cks that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement. Selected press and appearances include well, everywhere. I mean have you ever seen anything relevant without a D1ck? The D1cks are one of the earliest examples of a Non-Fungible Token on Tezos, and were inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles. Every D1ck is hand-crafted by lizvlx's tender feminine hands. I guess everybody needs a d1ck, so go ahead, buy and be a D1ck.

The artist duo UBERMORGEN is internationally known for media hacking and digital activism. They are pioneers of net.art, CNN has described them as “maverick Austrian business people”, the New York Times called them “simply brilliant”. Since 1999, UBERMORGEN has been Maria Haas (a.k.a. Liz or lizvlx) and Hans Bernhard (a.k.a. etoy.HANS, etoy.BRAINHARD, hans_extrem, e01, Luzius Bernhard), who live in Vienna and teach at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their art has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, Whitney Museum, Center Pompidou and the New Museum, among others. Their influences are Rammstein, Samantha Fox and Viennese Actionism.

Indiscreet Unit by Harm van den Dorpel

Indiscreet Units consists of a selection of 266+ unique hue-rotating flags stored on the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS.

Harm van den Dorpel’s broad practice includes sculpture, installation, works on paper, computer generated graphics and software. Rooted in the conceptual heritage of net.art, Van den Dorpel’s works often simulate neural networks. The role of technology in his works is a means to an end: a tool to increase the understanding of our experience. “I seek to produce works that explore not only the technological hardware we use in our daily lives, but how we use it, the modalities of interface that are created, enabled, facilitated and restricted by the advance of technology.”

Where traditional artistic mediums require the artist to create the work with their own hand, Van den Dorpel prefers to program software and trains it by looping continuous feedback through its output in order to produce works with unpredictable aesthetic outcomes. As many people nowadays equate artificial intelligence with neural networks, the artist wants to highlight other moments in this recent history of computation, approaching it as algorithmic archaeology.

Van den Dorpel is also an early explorer of Web3 and is the co-founder of blockchain-based art marketplace left.gallery. In 2015, he was the first artist to sell NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to a museum.

Harm van den Dorpel (1981, the Netherlands) lives and works in Berlin. Selected (group) exhibitions include the New Museum in New York, MoMa PS1 in New York, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, ZKM Karlsruhe, and the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. In 2015, Van den Dorpel started Left Gallery, an online gallery that commissions, produces, and sells downloadable files.

 

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