I’m in this big expensive book with a short text about an artist I love and I’m happy to share it with you! “Encompassing the entire NFTs ecosystem — from algorithmic art to avatars — the first major art history survey of this field includes 10 academic essays and richly illustrated profiles of 101 key artists. Connecting the disruptive contemporary medium to its art historical context, this volume offers a deep dive into the sphere of non-fungible tokens and is also available for purchase in crypto.”
“Domenico Quaranta On Casey Reas”, in Robert Alice (Ed.), On NFTs. Collector’s Edition, Taschen, Koln 2024, pp. 144-145
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.
Dmitri Cherniak, A slight lack of symmetry can cause so much pain, 2020
The Italian magazine Civiltà delle macchine, published by Fondazione Leonardo, asked me to write an essay about NFT aesthetics. I accepted the challenge. The piece is now available in Italian and English on the paper version of the magazine, which is also available as a free download pdf (pdf download). With some minor changes, the English version of the article has been also minted on my Mirror blog.
Domenico Quaranta, ”L’estetica dei Non-Fungible Token”, in Civiltà delle macchine, n. 4, Dicembre 2021, pp. 66 – 71. Versione inglese “The Aesthetics of Non-Fungible Tokens”, pp. 89 – 91.
