Organic Material, a collection of digital works minted as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, includes artists whose works embrace the human response within the rushing speed of digital space. Despite the perception of the digital and technological being cold and disembodied, over the course of the last year, the crypto community has witnessed a bloom of bright organic growth. This growth is transforming not only the production of new artworks developed for and minted on the blockchain, but also the communities that compose, surround, and support them.
The included artists frame this organic growth within the history of art beyond the digital sphere through reflection and speculation on this new iteration of the digital landscape. Each artist presents deeply considered artworks that uncover new ways to think about the connections and tensions between the viewer's human experience and technology.
Included artists in this genesis release are A. L. Crego, Mark Dorf, Amir H. Fallah, Sara Ludy, Lorna Mills, Skye Nicolas, Collette Robbins, Kristen Roos, and Mark Schoening.
Weekly artists talks were held on Twitter during the week of February 7th in conjunciton with the release for each of the artists’ editions
The included artists frame this organic growth within the history of art beyond the digital sphere through reflection and speculation on this new iteration of the digital landscape. Each artist presents deeply considered artworks that uncover new ways to think about the connections and tensions between the viewer's human experience and technology.
Included artists in this genesis release are A. L. Crego, Mark Dorf, Amir H. Fallah, Sara Ludy, Lorna Mills, Skye Nicolas, Collette Robbins, Kristen Roos, and Mark Schoening.
Weekly artists talks were held on Twitter during the week of February 7th in conjunciton with the release for each of the artists’ editions
A. L. Crego
︎ ︎A.L. Crego’s hypnotic looped animations walk the line between stillness and motion subverting the mortality of linear works of moving image. As a self taught artist, Crego has developed a visual language steeped in science fiction that is uniquely his own. Utilizing black and white dither patterns, figural and abstract form, he explores the psychological mixture of a life augmented by technology in the 21st century.
A.L. Crego’s work has been exhibited internationally in collaboration with such artists as Emancipation, Marseille, FR; Creença at Void Projects, Barcelona, ES; Matiere Noire, Marseille, FR; Desordes Creativas, Ordes, ES; Urvanity 209, Madrid, ES; and Festival Asalto, Zaragoza, ES. Crego has worked with international brands and publications such as Vice, Nissan, Espolon, and Perrier and is a visiting lecturer of digital art, public digital space, animated GIFs as art, and the relationship to artists and the internet.
Input
Animated GIF1024 x 1024 px, 120 frames
Light, wave and matter. What brings life and what consumes it. As it happens with darkness, too much of them doesn’t allow us to see. The over-exposition to images and information usually leads us to some kind of blindness.
Edition of 1
Reserve 1000 ꜩ
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Output
Animated GIF1024 x 1024 pxm, 120 frames
Light, wave and matter. What brings life and what consumes it. As it happens with darkness, too much of them doesn’t allow us to see. The over-exposition to images and information usually leads us to some kind of blindness.
Edition of 15
Reserve 60 ꜩ
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Mark Dorf
︎ ︎ ︎Mark Dorf is a New York based artist whose practice utilizes photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. In his most recent work, Dorf is influenced by human’s perceptions of and interactions with what we call “Nature”, urbanism, design, and virtual environments. As opposed to seeing these subjects as categorically separate, Dorf reveals their entanglement and integration with one another as an inclusive and lively planetary ecology. Being both self-aware and critical of their own means of production, Dorf’s works craft a vision of a more inclusive future both ecologically and socially, helping to navigate away from environmental collapse in the Anthropocene and imagine a New Nature.
Dorf has exhibited widely both domestically and internationally at the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, 2020; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, FR, 2020; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, FR, 2019; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, DE, 2018; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, NL, 2020, 2017; Postmasters Gallery, New York, 2017, 2015; Division Gallery, Toronto, CA, 2015; The Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru, 2014; Mobile World Centre, Barcelona, ES, 2014; and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 2013 amongst many others. Dorf’s work is included in the Foam Photography Museum Permanent Collection, the Fidelity Investments Collection, and the Deutsche Bank Collection, amongst others. Dorf’s books are housed in libraries across the world such as The Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, and the Avery Library at Columbia University.
View VII
Animated GIF800 x 600 px, 24fps
128 Colors
2021
The works from Mark Dorf’s series The Way We’ve Always Seen uncover connections between technology, design, urbanism, and what is commonly considered “Nature”—connections that have always existed in symbiosis, but are rarely recognized as reality.
View VII gently pulls the viewer in and out of a mountainside steeped in blue and purple with a slow zoom. This zoom sits in contrast not only to the speed of global technological culture, but also to that of the bar at the bottom of the composition that strongly resembles a loading animation. The bar itself never resolves and is forever stuck in perpetual motion as though whatever it is signifying that it is loading is also forever unresolved.
This lack of resolve suggests the idea of forever being in a state of becoming—the constant flow of material, form, emotion, and knowledge between what is commonly called the “Natural World” and that of the Technological, is never in its final form: it is constantly in a state of transformation. The subtle and deceivingly simple relationships between the visual forms in View VII suggest a symbiosis that is essential to a paradigm shift in thought required to create a more fruitful future for the planet on which we live.
Edition of 10
Reserve 50 ꜩ
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Resolution
Animated GIF800 x 600 px, 24fps
128 Colors
2022
The works from Mark Dorf’s series The Way We’ve Always Seen uncover connections between technology, design, urbanism, and what is commonly considered “Nature”—connections that have always existed in symbiosis, but are rarely recognized as reality.
In Resolution, the viewer is met with a black and white mountainous scene whose contours drip with color aberrations. This disruption lays bare the false dichotomy of black and white, and by extension, the false dichotomy of technology and what is considered the “Natural World”. Within the digital space, even images of black and white are built by pixels of red, green, and blue. In Resolution, this acts as a metaphor for the multitude contained within individuals and the complex spectrum of knowledge and experience that we all exist within.
Complicating this notion of the spectrum is the graphic form—a resolution target used to calibrate camera sensors and scanners—that consistently appears and disappears in varying scales throughout the duration of the animation. It flickers as though it cannot lock onto its target; In this moment, technology is failing; It cannot quantify the image that it finds itself within. This failure however means not to perpetuate and create hierarchies, but rather to reveal that some vocabularies are not translatable; that some vocabularies are perhaps not meant to be decoded, but rather, trusted.
Edition of 1
Reserve 900 ꜩ
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Amir H. Fallah
︎ ︎ ︎Amir H. Fallah received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.
In 2009, the artist was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. In 2015, Fallah received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. In 2020, Fallah was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant. In addition, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, accompanied by a catalogue, and a year-long installation at the ICA San Jose.
The artist is in the permanent collection of the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Xiao Museum Of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum, Massachusetts; The Microsoft Collection, Washington; Plattsburg State Art Museum, NY; Cerritos College Public Art Collection, CA; Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, CA; and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE
Geo Portal
GIF3840 x 2160 px
72 ppi
2021
Geo Portal uses gathered archival source material as its foundation. Originally used as reference points for paintings, these archives are now used directly as the new work itself. Rooted in graphic design, Geo Portal uses the language of computer graphics to form completely digital artworks speaking to immigration, identity, displacement, Eastern and Western art history, and pop culture. Low resolution images, sketches, and other ephemera are crafted as new compositions.
Geo Portal’s composition is based on the rules of photoshop wherein grids are utilized as style-guides for the user. The grids themselves are not shown in the final works, but help create the overall composition and show the hierarchy of bitmapped and half-toned images. At times, these structural rules are broken to foster an added tension by layering and overlapping brightly colored textures and patterns with various iconographies of high and low culture. This imagery references contemporary painting, 60's abstraction, Islamic art, vintage illustration, early computer graphics, skateboard illustration and Persian miniatures. Geo Portal uses raw material as the finished product, but with painterly sensibilities filtered through the dithering patterns of GIFs.
Edition of 3
Reserve 1000 ꜩ
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In Search of the Absolute
GIF4000 x 4000 px
72 ppi
2021
For the past two years, I have created intricate and autobiographical paintings by mining the archives of universities, libraries, museums, and public collections. The resulting paintings perform as active documents of my lived experience. As I enter this new phase of my practice, I turn to my own archive of paintings to produce works that exist solely in the digital realm. These new works function as archeological surveys, where new works cannibalize the old and uncover new perspectives within my own practice. The paintings appropriate children’s book illustrations, advertising, art history and popular culture with a focus on themes of immigration, assimilation, climate change, xenophobia and social justice.
The new digital images that I have produced are a logical extension of my long standing painting practice but exist independently in both material and concept. The images are flattened, layered, and stacked, calling attention to the psychological space of borders, identities, and histories while utilizing my personal history as an entry point to discuss race, representation, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind.
In Search Of The Absolute combines the imagery of praying religious statuaries, soviet space propaganda, 18th-century drawings of beggars by Goya, commercial illustrations, and surreal Persian miniatures effectively uncovering a multitude of shared themes and symbols of faith, life, and ideas of an afterlife. These varied symbols point inwards and outwards, questioning and revealing the primal search for meaning and logic in life.
Edition of 1
Reserve 3000 ꜩ
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Sara Ludy
︎ ︎ ︎Sara Ludy is an American artist based in Northern New Mexico. Through an interdisciplinary practice, hybrid forms emerge from the confluence of nature and simulation. Previous exhibitions of Ludy's work include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Vancouver Art Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Berkeley Art Museum, bitforms gallery, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Her work has been featured in Modern Painters, The New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, and Cultured Magazine.
201901291757
Single-Channel Video, Sound1280x720, 00:28
2019
201901291757 is a phone capture of Ludy’s virtual aviary, an ongoing build of an offline VR world. The video was processed to bring forth textures that reveal its material form, a flying bird tapestry woven with and through time. This work is a continuation of Ludy’s interest in the qualities of material temporality and spatial collapse.
Edition of 10
200ꜩ