Surfing with Satoshi, a new blog on Mirror.xyz

Texts

After publishing Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT (Postmedia Books, Milan 2021), my new Italian book discussing the NFTs (non fungible tokens) phenomenon and its impact on contemporary media art, I started writing shorter pieces in English, and thinking about how to bring it to a more international audience. Thanks to a friendly advice, I discovered Mirror.xyz, a nice web3 platform focused on writing, that allows you to set-up a blog, mint your pieces of writing as collectively owned collectibles, and run crowdfunding campaigns in order to fund larger projects. In their own description: “Mirror is a community-owned and operated protocol and economy. The value of Mirror is the aggregate value of the community’s body of work, meaning existing members have both cultural and economic stakes in who’s contributing.” To join Mirror, you need to be voted in by the community. When it happened, I set up surfingwithsatoshi.mirror.xyz, which is now live and offers a few pieces of critical writing on art and blockchain. The first is a draft for an upcoming paper on the ambiguities of the “Crypto Art” definition, based in part on Chapter 4 of Surfing con Satoshi and open to comments and suggestions.

The second, titled “Code as Law. Contemporary Art and NFTs”, has been originally commissioned by the Künstlerinnenpreis website blog, an editorial platform connected to a prize for female artists. Instead of writing about women’s art, I set out to offer a critical, non-promotional introduction to what it means to put one’s art on the blockchain, as much of the NFT marketplaces propaganda insists on how friendy and open this space can be for groups and categories that are usually marginalized in the art world. The text is illustrated with works by some of my favorite female artists on the blockchain (Image above: LORNA MILLS, Door #7, 2020. Animated GIF, courtesy the artist and Roehrs & Boetsch, Zurich).

Present Continuous Pasts at Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare

Exhibitions

Participating Artists: Morehshin Allahyari (US), Kamilia Kard (IT), Oliver Laric (DE), Petros Moris (GR)
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
For: Apulia Center for Art and Technology
Venue: Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali
Via Parco del Lauro 119, Polignano a Mare (BA)
Opening: September 3, 2021, 7.30 p.m.
September 3 – 30, from Wednesday to Sunday, 4.00 – 8.00 p.m.
Press release (pdf, english) – Press Images (zip, 6,5 mb)
www.museopinopascali.it – www.lineafestival.it

We live in an era characterized by a stratified, intersecting and confused temporality. The future has disappeared from our horizon with the approach of the new millennium, depriving us of any possibility of imagining it as anything other than an apocalypse or an unchanging repetition of the present in which we are immersed. The shock caused by the speed with which the future arrives, catching us unprepared, has been transformed into the shock of a present that engages and distracts us at a relentless pace, preventing us from looking elsewhere. Immersed in the present and deprived of the future, we watch the past return again and again: in the form of farce, in the form of natural, historical or biological relics regurgitated from the earth or released from rapidly melting ice, of plastic islands, open-air dumps, seed banks and DNA strings, of cultural heritages digitized and put on the web to train artificial intelligence or distract us during a pandemic. But duration obsesses us, and if on the one hand we struggle to believe in the near future, on the other we continue to create time capsules for the distant future, wondering what sense the traces of the present and the past will have for the intelligences – human, alien or artificial – for which they are intended.

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Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs

Surfing with Satoshi

Domenico Quaranta, Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT, Postmedia Books, Milan 2021. 250 pp., 87 ill., 220 x 140 mm, isbn 9788874903030. Italian.

Abstract and Index: Italian / English

Introduction: Italian / English (Medium)

Full Bibliography and link

Buy on Amazon (22,80 €, paperback; 9,99, eBook, Italian Edition)

“A ten years old optimistic take on the internet may look childish in a post Snowden society.” Interview by Pina Gabrijan

Texts

Some days ago, Slovenian writer Pina Gabrijan sent me a few questions for an article about Aksioma‘s series of conferences and seminars Tactics & Practice, that have been taking place for ten years. It was a good chance to discuss about time and technologies, the recent history of digital culture and media art, automation and hyperemployment, and of course NFTs. The article is now online in Slovenian, and the English Q & A is available below.

Automate all the Things! at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana and Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, January 14–15, 2020. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
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Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT

Texts

(Italian below) I’m happy to announce that my latest book, Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT (Postmedia Books, 2021) is now available in Italian on Amazon with a pre-sale discount, and will be soon available in bookstores. Non-Italian readers may have to wait a bit for an English version, but hopefully they may enjoy a few materials I made available on this website: a short English abstract, a translated index of the book, and a complete bibliography with hyperlinks. Now, let’s switch to Italian…

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Studio Visit: all six works now available on 5e.centre.ch!

Exhibitions

With the upload of Eva and Franco Mattes‘ contribution, Studio Visit – my curatorial project for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève online platform, the 5th Floor – is now complete. Following the link above, you can now enjoy 6 newly commissioned videos by Lu Yang, James Bridle, Petra Cortright, Oliver Laric, Aria Dean and Eva & Franco Mattes, sharing with us the intimacy of their desktop studio while they work. 
Studio Visit invites artists to allow us access to their desktop studio and their working process. In Studio Visit, the desktop studio is shown off as the real space where an artist’s practice manifests. The focus is both on its furniture – files, tabs, programs – and on the artist at work – their favorite tools, their rhythm, their automatism, the way they find a balance between focus and distraction, between managing and creating, between online life and work. Thanks to the generosity and openness of the participating artists, through the project viewers can silently enjoy how Lu Yang gives shape to his imaginary worlds and fictional characters, how Bridle make research for their future projects, how  Laric investigates the circulation and dispersion of his own iconography; they can attend the genesis of Cortright’s digital paintings as well as see how drawing, reading and collaborating with external producers intermingle in Dean’s practice. 

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Let Me Feel You Streaming

Exhibitions, Texts

Let Me Feel You Streaming

A cura di: Michela De Carlo, Domenico Quaranta

Location: online, parte della programmazione della Milano Digital Week

Quando: 17 – 21 marzo 2021

Artisti partecipanti: Cristina Angeloro, Martina Ferrario, Christina G. Hadley, Marco Ginex, Carla Rossi, Laura Tura (Accademia di Brera) e Lisa Buffagni, Noemi Capoccia, Maria Chiara Gagliardi, Ariele Giari, Fabio Ronchieri (Accademia di Carrara).

Nel corso dell’ultimo anno, la città è diventata soprattutto una città di case. In maniera crescente, percepiamo lo spazio pubblico come lo spazio in cui siamo costretti a indossare la mascherina, a fare la fila, a mantenere le distanze. Ci scambiamo sorrisi imbarazzati mentre ci diamo goffamente di gomito, ed è, a seconda dei casi, con imbarazzo, preoccupazione o astio che guardiamo l’altro quando si avvicina troppo, quando non porta la maschera, quando ci tocca. Lo spazio pubblico è diventato il luogo del non si può, sottolineato da opportuni indicatori visivi: percorsi tracciati al suolo, nastri attorno a fontane e panchine, cartelli “seduta non utilizzabile”, “non più di due persone alla volta”, ecc. La socialità è diventata assembramento, il tatto il più dileggiato dei sensi.

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Hyper-Employment, dalla rivoluzione delle nostre vite a una prospettiva post-capitalistica?

Texts

“Sono un critico e curatore di arte contemporanea, non un filosofo, uno storico, un sociologo, un economista né tanto meno un profeta. Se Hyper-employment ti ha suggerito che possa esprimere una opinione autorevole su questioni di questo tipo, è perché mi sono lasciato condurre per mano da alcuni artisti che amo, ho fatto mia la loro analisi del mondo contemporaneo, mi sono interrogato sulle loro visioni di futuro. Lo dico non tanto per deresponsabilizzarmi da quello che dico, quanto per sottolineare un fatto per me importante: il ruolo cruciale delle arti e degli artisti, mai come oggi “utili” a generare comprensione della complessità del presente e a concretizzare specifiche idee di futuro. ”

Federico Di Vita mi ha intervistato su Hyperemployment per Elle Decor. Qui l’intervista integrale, che affronta questioni come l’impatto delle tecnologie sulla nostra quotidianità, automazione e fine del lavoro, arte e cultura hacker, il rapporto con la casa, la fine del tempo libero…

Two new studio visits available at 5e.centre.ch!

Exhibitions

In this video, James Bridle carries out research into an upcoming expedition to Uzbekistan, reading papers, watching maps, writing emails and reviewing data about bird flights.
James Bridle is a writer and artist working across technologies and disciplines. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. New Dark Age, their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing for BBC Radio 4 in 2019.

Petra Cortright takes us along a half an hour session of digital painting, generating colorful still lifes out of two prepared .psd files with dozens of layers, running automated scripts and doing some manual editing.
Petra Cortright is a contemporary artist whose multifaceted artistic practice stems from creating and manipulating digital files. Cortright’s digitally-conceived artworks physically exist in many forms – printed onto archival surfaces, projected onto existing architecture, or mechanically carved from stone. A notable member of what became known as the ‘Post Internet’ art movement of the mid-to-late-2000s with her YouTube videos and online exhibitions, Cortright later began to laboriously craft digital paintings by creating layer upon layer of manipulated images in Photoshop which she then rendered onto materials such as aluminum, linen, paper, and acrylic sheets. Cortright’s role as an artist is a blend of painter, graphic designer, editor, and producer; culminating in a singular artistic reflection of contemporary visual culture.