ESSAYS, BOOKS, REVIEWS, CATALOGUE TEXTS, INTERVIEWS
I wrote a short history of the Italian presence in the metaverse, from Active Worlds to Roblox, for the fourth issue of the magazine Quaderni della Quadriennale. The magazine is available in print, but the featured articles are also made available online, in Italian and English. Enjoy!
Domenico Quaranta, “Identità come performance. L’arte nel metaverso”, in Quaderni d’arte italiana, Issue 4 (Identity), Treccani – La Quadriennale di Roma, 2023 (English version)
Domenico Quaranta, “History in your hands”, in Outland, January 12, 2023
A while ago, I wrote an essay on Theo Triantafyllidis‘ live simulation works, commissioned by Zabludowicz Collection and Fabbula for the catalogue of the amazing exhibition Among the Machines, curated by Paul Luckraft and Julia Greenway. The book – featuring a great array of artists and essays – is now available in print, but my text can be also freely accessed in digital form on Fabbula’s website. Check it out!
Domenico Quaranta, “Theo Triantafyllidis: Live Simulation”, in Paul Luckraft (Ed.), Among the Machines, exhibition catalogue, Zabludowicz Collection, London 2023, ISBN 978-1-907921-40-7.
The academic journal VCS – Visual Cultural Studies, published by Mimesis, just came out with a special double issue on Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media, edited by Sean Cubitt and Valentino Catricalà. It features a gorgeous selection of essays by great authors, including my essay “Crypto Art Does Not Exist. Coming to Terms with an Unfortunate Art Label”. You can find and buy the journal on Mimesis’ website. Don’t be mislead by the deep time of academic journals: it is a text written in January 2022, adapting a chapter of my book Surfing with Satoshi, at the time still unpublished in English. The plus value, here, is reading it in a different context and company, with essays on related topics by Sean Cubitt, Delinda Collier, Andrea Pinotti, Ashley Lee Wong, Roger Malina among others. A short abstract is available after the break.
Domenico Quaranta, “Crypto Art Does Not Exist. Coming to Terms with an Unfortunate Art Label”, in VCS – Visual Cultural Studies, Issue 03/04, June 2022, ISSN 724-2307
Brian Droitcour, one of my favorite art writers ever, honored me with a review of my book Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs (a few copies are still available here). It’s criticism, so don’t expect only kind words, but some of them really make me proud as they confirm the value and durability of all the work I put in this book (with the priceless support of my publishers, Postmedia Books and Aksioma). A few quotes:
“Quaranta’s account, which addresses the rise of NFTs and the connections between artists’ recent use of blockchains and historical interventions into art markets, sets a high bar for others that will follow.
So far Surfing with Satoshi is the only book of its kind: an attempt by a single author to weave a motley array of histories—of art movements, markets, technologies, and critiques—into a coherent narrative.”
“His book’s greatest strength is the persuasiveness of his links between blockchain-based art and twentieth-century conceptualism. The historical orientation of Surfing with Satoshi is what makes it durable, despite being written in response to—and during—a specific moment.”
Of course, I publicly apologize with artist and theorist Rhea Myers if I inadvertedly misgendered her. Her work, ethos and life embody so much of what this book is taking stance for. A new run of print will come out soon, and these and other mistakes that readers helped me to detect will be amended.
Brian Droitcour, “History in the Present Progressive”, in Outland, July 19, 2022,
https://outland.art/domenico-quaranta-surfing-with-satoshi/
The Book of X. 10 Years of Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, an anthology of texts and images celebrating the 10th anniversary of the international conference xCoAx, is now available for free download and in printed form (free – you pay only the postage. Among many relevant contributions by authors and artists I admire (Philip Galanter, Andreas Broeckmann, Frieder Nake, Amy Alexander, Alessandro Ludovico, Olia Lialina just to name a few), the book includes a short essay in which I try to address how can art exist on a distributed ledger without simply using it as a system for blowing up prices and documenting ownership and provenance. Included are examples of projects focused on artists and art workers rights, on-chain generative works, and artists turning DAOs into an art form. The effort is to “show how art and blockchain should “X”: at the crossroads between these two fields, art shouldn’t just peruse the blockchain as a given, an immutable, existing substrate, but actively, creatively implement, criticize or correct its infrastructure, nurture and manipulate this substrate to make it evolve in ways not yet envisioned.” Have a nice reading!
Domenico Quaranta, “How Can Art Exist on a Distributed Ledger?”, pp. 207 – 219. Published in Miguel Carvalhais, André Rangel, Luísa Ribas, Mario Verdicchio (Eds.), The Book of X. 10 Years of Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, i2ADS: Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, Porto 2022. ISBN: 978-989-9049-25-3 (Paperback), DOI: https://doi.org/10.24840/978-989-9049-26-0.
Quayola has his first monograph, monumental and baroque as it should be. Edited by Valentino Catricalà and Nadim Samman, and published by Skira, the publication includes a number of essays, among them an as yet unpublished text I wrote a few years ago about his Laocoön series. A pdf of the original text (2017) is available here.
Domenico Quaranta, “Images in and beyond time: on Quayola’s Laocoöns”, in Valentino Catricalà, Nadim Samman (Eds), Quayola, Skira, Milano 2021, ISBN: 885724620, pp. 134 – 139.
ll video rende felici. Videoarte in Italia is a major publication on Italian video art, published in conjunction with an extensive exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni and Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and edited by Cosetta Saba and Valentina Valentini. Hopefully at some point it will be translated into English, in order to offer to an international audience and scholarship a wide overview of the Italian contribution to the histories of Video Art from the Sixties. I had the pleasure to contribute with an essay on video in the age of platform capitalism, focused on practices of appropriation and re-use. A pdf version of my essay is available here.
Domenico Quaranta, “Il video nell’era del platform capitalism: social media, big data e cinema database”, in Cosetta Saba, Valentina Valentini (a cura di), Videoarte in Italia. Il video rende felici, Treccani, Roma 2022, pp. 553 – 561.
I wrote a short essay for the exhibition Better Call Mark, on view since June 9 at Galeria Fran Reus, Palma de Mallorca. Featuring works by Albrecht / Wilke, Arno Beck, Johannes Bendzulla, Pierre Clement, Olga Fedorova, Marian Garrido, Joan Heemskerk, Eva & Franco Mattes, Mario Santamaria, Bartomeu Sastre, Mathew Zefeldt, Better Call Mark focuses on the dissolution between the purely physical and online. My take on it is available online as pdf, and in this post, right after the break.
Mark is, of course, Zuch. The image above is a screenshot from Joan Heemskerk’s contribution to the show: the website and installation Aquay (2022)
Elena Giulia Rossi asked me a few questions about the topics of my book Surfing with Satoshi, one year after the first Italian edition, and in the days when cryptocurrencies are falling free and the new English edition of the book is coming out. The interview is now available on Arshake, in Italian and English (translated by the magazine). We discuss about the countercultural aspects of net-based art, the new challenges to the preservation of digital media, the blockchains environmental impact, speculative bubbles and utopian promises. Check it out!