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A New Alchemy
An artist reflects on Bitcoin's status as digital gold and a substrate for her work.
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Where did NFTs Come From?
Revisiting the earliest blockchain art projects helps explain the connection between contemporaneous developments in finance, aesthetics, and technology.
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Keeping Time
What can a pair of artworks made using clocks teach artists working with blockchains today?
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Age of Anxiety
Held concurrently with Art Basel, the Digital Art Mile fair provoked conversations about the art world’s anxiety toward new media.
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Bitcoin Graffiti
Messages and ASCII art inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain highlight the human impulse to leave a lasting mark—and to adapt technology for creative purposes.
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Dressing for Venice
Fashion signals social affiliation at the Venice Biennale preview week for curators and NFT collectors alike, but Christoph Büchel’s project at Fondazione Prada dresses everyone down.
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Performing Lectures
When public speaking becomes art, the digital and physical apparatus of the performance are made visible.
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The Artist is Online
The history of digital performance shows how the obligation to maintain a personal brand online can offer space for experimentation.
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Tactical Homebrewing
The movement to queer and decolonize fantasy roleplaying games has found inspiration in familiar methods of vernacular game design.
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Artists on Games
Mitchell F. Chan interviews artists to understand how games have influenced their work.
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Almost Normal
The latest edition of Art Dubai Digital looks more like a regular art fair than its predecessors, but still has subversive and experimental work.
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Games in the Expanded Field
What exactly is a game? For Sarah Friend, leaving this question unanswered may yield more insights than a clear set of criteria
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Financialized Play on the Blockchain
More and more, video games look like capitalism simulators and digital financial products look like games. Can art offer an alternative?
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Life in the Ludic Century
In 2013, Eric Zimmerman predicted that the systemic logic of games would transform contemporary society. He was right—even if the effects were more nefarious than he’d imagined.
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The Shape of the Market
In 2023 the NFT space moved toward assimilation into the art world. But some projects highlight the NFT market’s special properties, suggesting alternative directions for development.
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Glitch, Body, Anti-Body
Legacy Russell’s feminist theory of the glitch yields insights into how social and technological systems of control can be disrupted by the art and lives of queer and trans people of color.
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Metaverse as Dark Forest
The prototypes of the CripTech Metaverse Lab suggest that virtual worlds can appeal to users by offering multiple ways of being online.
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Re-wilding the Algorithm
The hacker folk art of esoteric programming languages yields insights into glitch as a practice that hijacks existing algorithms to emphasize plurality and freedom.
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How to Glitch AI
Prompt-based image generators seem unhackable. But a committed glitch artist can still instigate interventions.
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Lenses on Glitch, Part 1
Four artists share the tools and approaches they have developed for working with glitch.
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Sincere Appeals to Artists and Collectors
How can the generative art community foster innovation and creativity, and a better ecosystem?
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A New Realism
Increasingly, painters are using digital tools and computer-generated images to capture the tone and texture of reality.
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The Treachery of Images
Images have always tempted people to produce more of them. Generative AI ushers in the ultimate freedom of the image from human agency.
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Prompt Response
Is prompt engineering with generative AI a valid artistic practice? Mark Amerika’s Artificial Creative Intelligence debates critic Kevin Buist.
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Deconstruction to the Rescue
Critiques of large language models like ChatGPT rely on a logocentric metaphysics of presence—a worldview already debunked by poststructuralist theories of language.
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Fictional Devices
Science fiction has been anticipating (and imagining) the death of the author for quite some time.
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The Digital NonMonument
Unobstrusive, ephemeral, embedded in rhythms of everyday life—digital art is finding felicitous ways to migrate from personal screens to public space that bypass the museum.
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Six Perspectives on Decentralized Curation
How is the web3 principle of decentralization changing the way art is funded, produced, collected, and displayed?
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Holographic Media
Media is no longer linear. Legacy outlets fade into noise, and communities have become filters through which all platforms are accessed.
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Fork Your Society, I want Out
Silicon Valley thought leader Balaji Srinivasan has proposed a revolutionary new form of statecraft, but it’s limited by metaphors of software development.
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The Emperor’s New Clothes
Digital garments have been heralded as a revolution for sustainability in the fashion industry. But are they mainly just a cash grab for big-name brands?
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The Marketplace of Ideas
With startups and foundations exhibiting alongside galleries, Art Dubai Digital proposes another model for the art fair, and myriad possibilities for digital art’s place in culture.
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Five Views of the Metaverse
What is the metaverse and where is it headed? Five artists and builders share their perspectives.
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Land of the Free Market
Zaha Hadid Architects is building a libertarian metaverse whose vision of the future looks remarkably similar to our current reality.
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2022 in Review: NFTs and the Art World
How are attitudes toward NFTs changing in the art world? Seven professionals share their perspectives.
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For The Record
Arcual is the latest venture to promise that its blockchain technology will transform the art world, but thorny questions remain.
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Artist-Centered Cybersecurity
NFT artists have to be constantly alert to the threat of scams and hacks. How can cybersecurity approaches be adjusted to protect the most vulnerable?
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What’s in a Name?
Given the importance of privacy to the culture of crypto, pseudonyms abound on the NFT market. But value and identity are still inextricably tied together.
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Blockchain Vitalism
Artistic experiments with blockchain that treat code outputs as living things suggest a radical recalibration of agency, pointing the way toward alternative systems of social organization.
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NFTs in the Ivory Tower
A conference at Oxford brought together experts from art, business, and technology, attempting to define the field of NFTs in broad strokes.
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From Dark Matter
The emergence of crypto art demonstrates what an art world without institutions can look like—even if it’s not the utopia some hoped for.
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Meaningful Returns
For activists frustrated with the pace of change in the physical world, NFTs are opening up new ways of thinking about the digital repatriation of looted African artifacts.
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The Trouble with DALL-E
Five thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate the digital art market
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Bake Sale
When artists enter the NFT market from the world of museums and galleries, they often pledge big chunks of their proceeds to charity. Why?
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In Search of a Common Language
Participants at an NFT conference in Kassel had trouble communicating across disciplinary borders.
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One Small Step Backward for Man
Pace’s Discord gives eager crypto speculators a taste of the art world's harsh realities: they go to the moon, you stay here on Earth.
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Economic Provenance and the Audit Problem
How can expertise from time-based media art conservation help appraisers vet NFTs?
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Playing by Protocol
Nina is a web3 protocol that aims to change how independent music is sold.
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Digital Provenance and the Wallet Problem
The blockchain promises an immutable record of provenance, but the custodial wallets and shared contracts used by some marketplaces make it difficult to verify authorship, complicating the work of appraisers and historians.
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The Digital Combine
The metadata field of an NFT’s smart contract offers a new way for artists to suture elements of hybrid works.
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Behold the Rock
NFT projects depicting rocks remind us that, like rocks, NFTs could be helpful tools. Or they could be useless.
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Authentication in the Expanded Field
NFTs could be an improvement on the paper certificates used to authenticate reproducible artworks. But much work needs to be done to realize that potential.
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Timed Exposure
Two new initiatives are exploring the potential of NFTs not only to sell photography but also to build connections between its past and future.
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Perpetual Futures
The investment tools of decentralized finance are accelerating speculation’s spread to all aspects of life, irrevocably changing how we see the world and experience time.
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Punks and Sellouts
The sale of CryptoPunks to Yuga Labs reinforces a troubling notion that stewardship of an NFT project means maximizing profits.
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Apeing to the Right
Recent criticism of the Bored Ape Yacht Club asks if alt-right symbolism has infiltrated the NFT market.
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Curation under Constraint
Is it possible to develop a curation protocol for web3 that doesn't repeat the errors of Web 2.0 platforms?
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An Anti-Public Art
PFP NFTs imagine a shared space where only owners of digital property matter.
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What's Their Game?
The NFT market has spawned a new cultural form that has elements of games but not their rules.
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Token Allegiances
The claims made about DAOs echo hype cycles of decades past, without convincingly explaining why financialization is essential.
Essays produced in a writing workshop hosted by Outland and Art Blocks offer new perspectives on art, code, and web3. The Generative Art Issue
