Phases of the Signal
Conversations around art are always very personal, or at least start out that way, right up until some brave soul announces their like or dislike for a particular item. Art, as a concept, exists to polarize, to express publicly, to open itself to criticism, in all of its myriad forms. Painting, drawing, and sculpture have been accepted as art since, well, forever, but new currents of technological intrusion always meet with skepticism. Photography emerged into the art space at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, its adherents extolling the democratic truth of the images, while opponents were horrified by the democratic truth of the images. Claude Shannon’s landmark paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948) introduced bits as the building blocks of information theory, setting the scene for the next revolution in artistic creation, that of digital art. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto dropped “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which led to Vitalik Buterin’s publication of the Ethereum white paper in 2013, and the Smart Contract, from which LarvaLabs CryptoPunks emerged in 2017.
Today, Mandala Club presents Mandala Labs, a permanent digital gallery that is the new home for the Club’s Web3 community. Already at the leading edge of a revolution with their unique NFT Membership, this venture is exemplified in the Mandala Labs logo, The Phases of the Signal , a visual linking digital art in a physical space. This first exhibition, “From Pixels to Dust” encodes three broad themes:
- Permanence and impermanence
- Identity in a digital world
- Creation freed from boundaries and biases
Central to each is the changing nature of “the marketplace,” each informing each other, but also growing together in a symbiosis that is creating an entirely new model of financial interaction and ownership. Under that banner, the art on display examines the roles of the emerging technologies of Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Non-Fungible Tokens in art creation, provenance, and consumption.
NFTs are the New Shock of the New
No conversation of Non-Fungible Tokens is complete without an examination of the commercial changes that blockchains are unleashing. It is no exaggeration to say that banking business models based on processing payments are already obsolete. Just as there are few opportunities these days for chimney sweeps, how long will people continue to use the might-as-well-be-barter world of the wire transfer for transactions like remittances? Already, HSBC and Wells Fargo settle foreign exchange in certain currency pairs on blockchains, facilitating settlement, and importantly, ensuring transparency. Nobody can alter the blockchain, and every transaction is available for anyone to see. Applied to the nebulous (at best) art world, this perfection of provenance frees artist, consumer, patron, and critic from the guesswork and opacity that has otherwise been a hallmark of the space. For the creator in particular, the ability to code royalties into the token ensures they will be paid, on time, every time…in fact, in continuous time. We would be remiss not to mention the extraordinary valuations for this new new new thing. More on this later, but one of these collections is worth around $1.5mm.
The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain
How then do themes of impermanence inform this exhibit? The two Daniel Arsham pieces explore structural impermanence, but question whether you are witnessing erosion or growth. In the digital world, time is completely fluid: Arsham provides clues that time is passing, but questions whether you are looking at the past or into the future. There is also the uniqueness of the form to consider: unlike Ozymandias, these creations are essentially immortal. The CryptoPunks cryptographic (SHA 256) hash of the image is on-chain, and does not live in a server somewhere. Art has always asked questions as to the nature of time. The Impressionists felt that there was no way to “know” the world, that all we had were impressions, and so painted the same image at different times. The digital landscape is infinite. Nobody knows what it will look like tomorrow. Each of these works exists today, but will be the same in 1,000 years, and serve as a reminder that we are impermanent.
Any conception of a digital metaverse is wrapped with ideas of identity. To dox or not to dox, that is the question. Of the art presented here today, the CryptoPunks are the obvious place to start, as the most highly-sought-after digital Picture For Proof (PFP). It may surprise some of you to know that the least expensive of these NFTs is currently 63.95 ETH, or $105,000, and Punks as a whole has a traded value of over $410mm. They were the original, and have spawned an entire subculture of choosing what image you present to the digital world, where you can be anyone or anything that you want. Of course, identity is also expressed by the artist. Ayla El-Moussa casts her own form as the subject and object of her work. Presented here, she becomes the land, bathed by the oceans, a tidal force that both is the landscape and dominates the landscape. She has been an image for many photographers, choosing now to subvert traditional ideas of gaze by turning her own lens upon herself. Choice then, is firmly encoded into the fabric of the digital world. The computer acts as construct and the code doesn’t judge, it simply provides the ability to exercise ownership over all aspects of your digital life.
Action figures sold separately
Each of these works present specific examples of journeys into the digital world, and while they may appear wildly different, it is that difference, or perhaps that non-fungibility that brings them together. Digital art is completely unbound by convention, material, or technique. There are no rules and no boundaries. This is what pure artistic freedom looks like. Arsham recently stated that the potential for NFTs in art is so expansive that we can’t even see what that potential looks like. He is correct. After all, nobody believes anything is possible until it has already happened.
The NFT contract that governs ownership is a standard ERC-721 that works with any compatible service or exchange
Damien Hirst’s “The Currency” immerses itself in each of these themes. The 10,000 pieces were painted as physical and minted as NFT, with a catch: before a certain date, the HODLer had to choose between taking a physical copy of the work, or receiving the NFT in their digital wallet. Hirst being Hirst, that’s not enough: if you chose the physical, the NFT was “burned;” if you chose the NFT, the painting was burned. “The Currency” embodies the new marketplace, with digital assets as money; evidences identity, asking if you are digital or analog; the pieces forever and gone forever; a project that could only exist within this technology.
Damien Hirst destroys 1,000 physical artworks of ‘the currency’ in front of NFT buyers
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” famously evokes themes of geological time, past glories scarcely remembered, and the remains of days long passed, ideas that are explored by the artists in this collection. Someday, two travelers from an antique land may well stumble across these works in some digital world, with their ideas of creation woven together with destruction; growth with decay; formation with erosion. The immutability of Blockchains lends a permanence to these creations which opponents of the medium might argue will far outlast any interest in the creations themselves. Indeed, all of these creations will outlast their creators, regardless of whether they should, or should not. We invite you to explore the revolutions taking place in the convergences of analog and digital spaces. Our aim is not to convince, but rather to remind us that both belief and non-belief require the same act of faith. For those who believe in the medium, we hope these pieces will resonate; for those non-believers in NFTs, we ask you to consider the strength of your faith.
From Pixels to Dust
Curators MetasNomadic & KoroMonjya
04 March 2023 - 30 June 2023
Essays by Converging Currents
Mandala Club, The Library/ Labs, SG
Contents
Mandala Genesis - panel #1
The Currency - panel #2
CryptoPunks - panel #3
Eroding and Reforming - panel #4
The Lonely God - panel #5
Typography - panel #6
Window Still Life - panel #7
Ayla El-Moussa - panel #8