Originally Posted on Medium.com
NFT is hot.
2021 will witness the highlight moment of blockchain programmers. The pretentious elites of the art world are bluffed by those guys in plaid shirts who speak in strange words. Virtual Reality is replaced by the term Metaverse which was coined 30 years ago, back to become another savior of the Internet.
Will the art world be cashing in NFT and Metaverse？
The conversation started from above while we met with David Chi and Tan Yi, the initiators of APES Crypto Art. It’s unnecessary to say that the crypto market has produced too many “non-art” works refreshing NFTs top sales record from Beeples to Crypto Punks. Meantime, Artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, both brilliant and historically positioned, are currently being recruited by two of the world’s four largest galleries. Thus marked the peak of the Age of the Image era of those artist-centered great galleries in the 20th Century, and accompanied by the rise of a new generation that serves buyers and collectors whom we can also recognize as users. No matter who will be the ones with what kind of art. Digital media has become a new carrier of art in social networks and the game world. I am fully convinced that NFT will eventually become a necessary part of all art transactions. At least, it can ensure a more reliable collection system between artists and buyers from the technical level. Galleries, art dealers, and auction houses can continue to benefit from it.
I’m not a crypto man, neither a gamer. When I was asked to recommend NFT artists, my mind returned to the art world from the digital world.
№1, CryptoZR: COOKIE COOKIE, Liu Jiaying, and ArtExb VR360
https://www.artexb.com/portfolio/exb110/
Derek Longping Zhao, the founder director of Artexb.com, understands well in NFT and crypto currency. ‘I am already an artist on the blockchain and can issue my own crypto coin. Search ArtExb on the chain, the exclusive coin is AEB, which also includes the digital contract. But I haven’t issued any NFT yet, I’m waiting. It is eternal once you connect to the blockchain.’, said Derek.
Meantime, the exhibition of Liu Jiaying CryptoZR: COOKIE COOKIE was recorded in VR360 by ArtExb.com. It seems that there is no need to say more about how artists are attempting blockchain and crypto art. The curator Li Zhenhua’s description is very accurate, quoted as follows:
Liu Jiaying (CryptoZR), by her practice in the field of blockchain, ends up forming an interesting whole by virtue of artistic representation.
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As Duchamp’s work challenges the art system, aesthetics and inherent notions of what art might be? Does Liu Jiaying’s work also continue to suggest the operation of art and the contemporary society, what is possible for art to be! For example, in her works such as ‘More is Better’, ‘Small Goal’, ‘100,000 Billboards’ and ‘TopBidder’, The interaction of multiple people involved in the financial system and virtual currencies built with the help of different blockchain contracts. Never before have ideas been so involved in the workings of far-reaching societies. Understanding how Duchamp’s creations, for example, changed one’s understanding of aesthetics and materiality is now over a century since the rise of Dada. Liu Jiaying’s work is a much tighter synthesis of emerging media, artistic ideas and social operations, directly acting in the present.
It is also because of the involvement of financial activities and social media in everyday life that art is able to live in the minds of people with a more immaterial character, and to intervene in life in a concrete way.
Does Liu Jiaying inject humanity into the blockchain idea, for example? In addition to the sense of play, the anonymous majority of the population involved, there is the portrayal and provocation of the human mentality, reminding once again how the human being, in the concept of economic activity, is shaped and, following this concept, calculates all aspects of life. Are the values of what is valid, valuable, transformable, everything being calculated according to this logic, also provoked and subverted in her art? When greed becomes the driving force behind the workings of society, and thus introduces the idea of the ‘wealth of nations’ or ‘evolutionary biology’, human, psychological activity is also within the scope of her work. The expansion of art has accompanied the evolutionary human understanding of the self.
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In September 2019, the artist releases 100 gradient color blocks from red to blue through Ethereum and a year-long bidding auction. Participants can bid on the color blocks they like, without being informed of the meaning of the blocks, and instead, observe the distribution of the values presented by these blocks after one year. Could the inevitable and imaginative link between geo-culture, knowledge, economic activity, and the operation of time-based transactions bring a greater sense of community participation dimension to the initial intention of this project?
On 18 October 2020, at 10 P.M., the year-long bidding for Red and Blue ended, with collector Geoffrey X collecting both the red and blue encrypted blocks, representing Chinese and American ideologies, in the final minutes, stating “I hope that technological advances and artistic transmutations will once again help to reunite human society. ”
№2, Life series, Creative Coding, Sikai Dada
https://dadabit.github.io/
Coding is the native language of Generation Alpha.
Despite the strong opinions between age groups, there’s often quite a lot of confusion regarding which generational classification everyone technically falls into. Given birth by the end of 2010, Sikai Dada grows up using smartphones and tablets as part of his childhood entertainment. He would rather recognize himself as an Alpha. McCrindle predicted that Generation Alpha will be “the most formally educated generation ever, the most technology-supplied generation ever, and globally the wealthiest generation ever.”
So when Sikai Dada chooses platforms like Rarible or Opensea to upload his NFT works online, it is not surprising to see that he has already been using Ethereum Wallet even though he doesn’t have a bank account yet.
“May 23, 2021, The solar flares trigger a series of events. Virus vaccines come and go. Black and white aren’t opposed. Life is fleeting, the world is fragmented”
Generative life is the nature of coding and Math is the genetic factor.
№3, Xu Jingyu, Photography
Xu Jingyu doesn’t recognize herself as a media artist even though she has been using photos and videos to create artworks for years. The first collaboration with Xu Jingyu is the Exhibition: INFORMATION | TRANSFUSION, which was shown in 798 Artzone in 2010. We made various attempts from images to installations at that time. For me, to broaden the creative field of art and awareness of any discipline, all genres and forms are not and shouldn’t be limited to specific mediums, this includes electronic media, film, and technology (analog and digital; old and new) as an artistic medium or projects presented via film, television, radio, audio, video, the Internet, interactive and mobile technologies, video games, immersive and multi-platform storytelling, and satellite streaming.
In Metaverse, female artists must have a dualistic indivisible virtual role due to their ontological consciousness. Xu Jingyu chose to emigrate with her faith. She believes there will be a voice in another world：
№4, Tobias Zaft, Contemporary Art
www.tobiaszaft.com
Tobias Zaft is an academically educated artist who uses superb digital technology to create art. For him, digital technology is the best way to confront capitalism in art, including but not limited to CNC, 3D printing, digital imaging and lighting, programming, and electronic technology. The alternate landscape he constructed contrasts with the Society of the Spectacle where the contemporary art and the digital capitalism complementing each other, and it is not incompatible. Isn’t it the future of the Metaverse? Digital capitalism becomes the Society of the Spectacle itself.
Since the Tower of Babel, the hubris has been in mankind. Nowadays modern skyscrapers are already rising many hundred meters into the sky. They are an impressive and, on the other hand, a frightening symbol of human greed for endless growth. High-rise buildings are a mirror of society and illustrate the vertical structure and fragility of power in social systems. FlexiPolis gives the viewer as a “world model” the opportunity to playfully (without violence) empathize the possession of absolute power.
№5, Lihan, Conceptual and Virtual Architecture
www.d-a-s.cn
Architect Li Han has spent more than ten years creating his parallel world of the city in CAD, and the first of all is the 798 Art Zone in Beijing.
With the rapid development of the Internet and logistics, Chinese countryside is now tied into urban development. The transformation in the relationship between the city and the countryside is manifested in Taobao Village, a term put forward by AliResearch. Taobao Village functions as both a return to the countryside and a step out of the countryside. As a canonical agrarian utopia in the US, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City relates to the Chinese Taobao Village in various aspects despite their fundamental differences. “In the future, the city will disappear.” Such was Wright’s prophecy. Yet, the city and the countryside still exist as two poles of human settlements. However, in contemporary China, the city and the countryside are more than ever connected with each other thanks to the widespread of the Internet. From this perspective, Taobao Village · Smallacre City panorama is a realist critique and Chinese interpretation of Broadacre City.
Based on visual materials collected from Taobao Villages, the project presents a figurative Taobao Village and its related facilities based on Wright’s master plan, thus producing a clear connection to the Broadacre City. The road structure and infrastructure layout from the Broadacre City are kept the same and programs from Taobao Villages are added. While the gigantic Broadacre City is measured with the acre, Taobao Village · Smallacre City is planned according to the mu, a unit of land area used in China. The basic planning unit in Taobao Village · Smallacre City is half mu — about 300 square meters. As such, this is also where its name originates.
№6, Yu Xinqiao, Poetry
Finally, I plan to establish a decentralized hyperlink, a blockchain text file that transcends the existing political and cultural boundaries and adds the metadata to the signifier and the signified: NFT poetry.
Yu Xinqiao is the most suitable contemporary poet representative. Here I cite the poem LOCK by Yu Xinqiao, translated by Denis Mair:
LOCK
At any given time or place I only need one lock
Beauty is a lock
Kindness is a lock Loyalty is a lock
Happiness is a lock
I make a request to these four locks
To keep my whole life locked up
And you… you too are a lock
I request that you lock me up firmly
Why is pain also a lock?
Why does a cloud lock half of me to the sky
And a forest lock half of me to the earth?
Why do all locks get opened?
Why do all locks finally get locked to emptiness?
Art is eternal. Life is fleeting. Will human beings obtain digital immortality in the future? However, the real world has become increasingly cybernetic, with machines and artificial intelligence dominating the nation and society. This is not a sci-fiction. The dream of Metaverse is being constructed at an accelerated pace. Digital life not only exists in the virtual world but also exists in the fragmented real world. Art is a mirror that mirrors the Metaverse of the parallel world. A Transcendent Metaverse is the Sum of all Art.
“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality”, says Elon Musk.
By coincidence, We live in art.
During the week of this post writing, many important contemporary artists released their NFT works, including Damian Hirst, Anthony Fontana, and Cai Guoqiang.
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