{"access_artwork_files":"With proof of purchase, access to complete artwork and supplemental material is granted through creating an account on feralfile.com or Feral File’s official web address at the time of purchase. Files are redundantly stored on IPFS. If the official Feral File domain is no longer accessible or active, contact the present-day custodian of Feral File’s archive, the artist studio, or artist estate.","animation_url":"https://cdn.feralfileassets.com/previews/d2bc4191-7730-45d8-9d1f-685d494f3e9e/1666842992/preview.mp4","artist":"Ix Shells","artwork_id":"ca9aff59a7bc556aee3048b9dbc2be294b78e853fa5d1f6a1128608c4bcb57f1","attributes":[{"trait_type":"Exhibition","value":"Feral File - Peer to Peer"},{"trait_type":"Series","value":"Bend"},{"trait_type":"Artwork of","value":"07, 2 AE, 1 PP"},{"trait_type":"Artist","value":"Ix Shells"}],"collection_name":"Bend by Ix Shells","collection_uuid":"d2bc4191-7730-45d8-9d1f-685d494f3e9e","creator":"0x452F438aAD8B675232C1fD7Ff8E940D72d8A9F45","description":"In Itzel Yard’s _Bend_, the appearance of the artist’s dancing body is an illusion generated by the bending of scrolling horizontal white lines towards or away from the viewer. That is, the volume of her body is neither “behind” nor “in front” of the lines, but _in them_, in the same way that the contours of a geological structure are represented by the lines on a topographical map. This unusual method of depicting a human figure makes it seem as if her body is less a solid presence than a kind of unstable artifact of geometry; one can imagine the lines all snapping taut and her body instantly disappearing.\n\nYard made this work by recording herself dancing and then processing the footage using Touch Designer, a node-based program that allows users to visually manipulate data in real time. The resulting images were then recorded off a screen, as evidenced by how the image slightly angles up and away from the viewer. In other words, _Bend_ is a digital self-portrait in which Yard—who has spoken openly about the importance of her online friendships—depicts herself as quite literally existing in lines of code on a screen. Like a stop-motion animation, the illusion of movement relies on the sequencing of still frames, which are compiled into a looping video. Unlike most animations, however, _Bend_’s lower frame rate ensures that her movements are not seamless. This causes a glitch effect, as if Yard’s already ghostly body is struggling to remain coherent within—or alternatively, is being brought to life by—technological circuits.\n\nOne of the first digital images of a real body similarly depicted a female figure. Although she was not shown dancing, the woman in Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s [_Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I)_, 1967](https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/p20142-computer-nude-studies-perception-i), was in fact the noted Minimalist dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay. Harmon and Knowlton were both engineers at Bell Labs, which was then pioneering techniques for digitizing photographs. They scanned a black-and-white print of Hay’s nude photo and algorithmically transformed it into a bitmapped image made of symbols approximating shades of grey. In addition to furthering Bell’s research into human pattern perception, their stated goals included developing “new computer languages which can easily manipulate graphic data” and exploring “new forms of computer produced art.” Yard’s _Bend_—which replaces Hay’s reclined, passive pose with her own vertical, active dancing—continues this experimental embrace of new languages and forms, suggesting new paths forward for the burgeoning movement of generative art, as well as for figuration in a digital age.","edition_index":3,"edition_number":"#1","exhibition_info":{"base_price":"USD8500","note":"One of the most-discussed cultural shifts of the past two years is the unprecedented surge of interest in digital art. Although galleries, museums, and festivals have been publicly exhibiting digital art for decades, its sudden popularity is tied to the relatively new phenomenon of trading digital assets (including artworks and also cryptocurrencies, collectibles, and memes) via blockchains, or distributed ledgers of digital records secured by cryptography. Formerly known as “computer art,” digital art first emerged in the 1960s, when artists and technologists began using computers to create novel aesthetic forms, such as algorithmically-generated abstract compositions. Today, it is a diverse field that includes not only digital images, videos, and 3D printed sculptures, but also networked, interactive experiences ranging from websites to virtual worlds, online games, and social media performances. Despite their technological novelty, many of these works explore the same themes that recur throughout modern and contemporary art, including the relationship between abstraction and figuration, the creativity of the unconscious mind, and the definition of art as a conceptual system. Inarguably, blockchains have helped create new markets and audiences for digital art; in rarer cases, blockchains have become a new medium, as some digital artists use blockchain-based tokens and smart contracts just as painters use canvas or sculptors use marble.\r\n\r\nSince its founding in 1862 as one of the world’s first museums devoted to the art of the present, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) has helped define artistic movements as they emerge. For example, the AKG presented the \u003ca href=\"https://buffaloakg.org/art/exhibitions/international-exhibition-pictorial-photography\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003efirst major museum survey of photography in 1910\u003c/a\u003e (organized by Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession), helping to legitimate these new images as examples of fine art that deserve to be displayed alongside paintings and sculptures. As digital technologies increasingly influence every aspect of our lives, the AKG has an important opportunity — and even responsibility, given its mandate to operate in the public trust — to help identify the artists who are creatively and critically exploring the aesthetic potentials and social consequences of these powerful new tools. Museums regularly organize group exhibitions to map the terrain at the cutting edge of art; singling out key digital artists from the broad field of those who have experimented with blockchains amplifies those approaches that are shaping the evolution of not only art markets, but also art history. Many of these artists are even shaping technology itself, whether by pioneering new applications or questioning its supposed “neutrality.”\r\n\r\nBuilding on its history and mission, the AKG has organized \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e, an exhibition of new artworks made by 13 of the leading artists who are exploring the impact of blockchains on the production and distribution of digital art and the future of the internet. Mirroring the global networks of digital art since the 1990s and blockchains since the 2010s, these artists are from not only North America and Europe, but also Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Their works similarly exemplify the rich diversity of digital art: they were produced with a variety of technologies and applications, from Artificial Intelligence to 3D modeling and Microsoft Word to Processing. The resulting works exist in a range of formats, from PDFs and PNGs to GIFs, MOVs, software applications, and smart contracts. Importantly, the artists in this show approach their respective tools and mediums as productive constraints, thereby drawing our attention to their capabilities.\r\n\r\nAt the same time as they contribute to a larger conversation about technology, the works in \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e also update or expand our notion of different artistic genres and aesthetic strategies. For example, one might classify roughly a third of the works as figurative (Mitchell Chan, Amir Fallah, Auriea Harvey, Osinachi, Sarah Zucker); another third as generative (Entangled Others, Casey Reas, Itzel Yard/Ix Shells, Anne Spalter); and a final third as conceptual works dealing with blockchains and the metaverse (LaTurbo Avedon, Simon Denny, Sarah Friend, Rhea Myers). But they also prompt a reevaluation of those art-historical paradigms: what does it mean to make “figurative” art after processes like photogrammetry have transformed how we model volumes in space, “generative” art after algorithms have infiltrated every moment of our lives, or “conceptual” art after the dematerializations of the information economy?\r\n\r\nTo foreground these questions, \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e stages an exchange between these artists and their historical “peers,” pairing each new work with an existing work in the AKG’s renowned collection of modern and contemporary art. The new works are less digital recreations of their analog antecedents than responses that speak in more or less direct ways to their concepts or composition. Of course, the practice of citing other artists is itself a time-honored tradition in art, as each generation works through (and defines itself against) the achievements of its peers and predecessors. The collection artworks selected by the artists in \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e are as varied as their homages, including a genre painting by Winslow Homer; neo-classical caryatids by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; a Surrealist landscape by René Magritte; an abstract composition by Mark Rothko; and a language-based work by Joseph Kosuth. The exhibition thereby celebrates both the continued relevance of the historical “peers” to our contemporary moment and the contributions of the new “peers” to art’s ever-expanding network of ideas. The exhibition also highlights the important role of the museum as a facilitator of encounters between artists over generations, thanks to its commitment to conserving cultural heritage. \r\n\r\n\u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e is an online exhibition presented in partnership with \u003ca href=\"http://www.feralfile.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eFeral File\u003c/a\u003e, which has emerged as a leading platform for curated exhibitions of file-based artworks. Although it has an end date, it will in fact remain viewable on the Feral File website — a new model for making museum exhibitions more accessible. After the first week, the works in the show will be offered for purchase as limited editions sustainably registered on the Ethereum blockchain. Half the proceeds from the sales will benefit the museum, which reopens in 2023 with a state-of-the-art gallery dedicated to media art and a hands-on digital technology lab. As the Buffalo AKG’s first fully-online exhibition and fundraiser, \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e is an experiment in how the museum might adopt (or adapt) new technologies to continue supporting those artists whose practices expand the practice of art, as well as art’s audiences. \r\n\r\nIn computing, “peer to peer” networks decentralize file-sharing, allowing users to send and receive files directly between computers, without relying on a centralized database that is controlled by a single authority. The exhibition’s title is thus also a provocation about the future of museums: how might our institutions change if we imagine them not only as centralized repositories, but also as a kind of cultural protocol facilitating the open exchange of ideas between artists and their contemporary peers, historical predecessors, cultural workers, and public audiences? We may then also want to ask the inverse about the future of technology: how might blockchains change if we imagine them not simply as autonomous agents of decentralization that will make existing institutions obsolete, but also as public infrastructures embedded within — and accountable to — the larger social sphere?\r\n\r\n\u003cp class=\"font-12\"\u003e1. \u003cem\u003ePeer to Peer\u003c/em\u003e itself pays homage to \u003ca href=\"https://a2p.bitmark.com/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"link\"\u003eA2P\u003c/a\u003e, or “Artist to Peer,” a project initiated by Feral File founder Casey Reas, in which artists were invited to swap free editions of their work with each other via the Bitmark blockchain. The first edition (V1) was curated by Reas with Addie Wagenknecht, Rick Silva, and exonemo, and transpired in Fall 2019; the second edition (V2) was curated by Reas with Iris Long and Carol Sabbadini, and transpired in Spring 2020.","note_title":"On the Museum as Cultural Protocol"},"external_url":"https://feralfile.com/artworks/ix-shells-am9","id":"91641052224213995292130106305607107853658918792519691461793480796244015798260","image":"https://cdn.feralfileassets.com/thumbnails/d2bc4191-7730-45d8-9d1f-685d494f3e9e/1666842966","medium":"video","metadata_version":"v1","name":"Bend #1","royalties":{"decimals":4,"shares":{"0x2033606bE146405870F92Ea3144ef5057b9DEA48":500,"0x452F438aAD8B675232C1fD7Ff8E940D72d8A9F45":1000,"0x9f4Acbe8CBA2381458c69AEF9490439D178949A4":500}},"symbols":"","timestamp":"2022-11-26 09:00:42.785464532 +0000 UTC m=+4293.253282704"}