LIVE: Art Unchained (Art x Technology)
Today marks the kick-off of a project of 18 months’ gestation, Art Unchained, a concept I hit upon after becoming discouraged and frustrated by the ghettoization of digital art, aka “media art”, for decades. Conceived as a conference about art and technology, with an emphasis on blockchain, the project originally included an exhibition of several artworks intended to illustrate the mind-bending possibilities of Art x Technology. The co-founder of Art Unchained is Lisa Botos, with whom I originally founded Ooi Botos Gallery more than ten years ago.
Last summer, Swire Properties decided to sponsor and host Art Unchained in their art and culture space, ArtisTree. But immediately, we discovered that it was impossible to import one of the main artworks, a large holographic “flying machine,” into Hong Kong. The loaning institution, a university based in New Zealand, had recently imposed a blanket policy against sending personnel, equipment or artwork into the territory. We quickly understood that the entire undertaking was going to be very challenging. We scrambled to source alternative artworks in time for May 2020, the original date of the event.
Then, of course, COVID-19 hit and the world went into a tailspin. Rather than cancel the project, Swire said, “To hell with it, we’re going ahead,” and rescheduled Art Unchained for November. BRAVO!
To make a long story short, we drastically reconfigured the project in order to keep it on the rails.
That’s why I’m so happy to report that we launched Art Unchained just a few minutes ago….literally.
At 3:30 pm, Hong Kong time, the robots in media art installation Human Study #1, 5NRP by French artist Patrick Tresset were switched on. The installation comprises 5 robots perched on desks, sketching human sitters, in individual sessions of 20 minutes each, one session after another. Each robot is programmed to sketch in a different style in order to provoke questions about the nature of art and artists. What constitutes art? Is it the fact that it is meaningful in the eyes and mind of the viewer -- or that it was originally created by a human being?
Every day, the robots will be switched on at 11:30 am, HK time, in order to sketch a new set of portraits. Some examples from previous installations by Tresset are below. Human Study #1, 5RNP premiered at the Merge Festival in association with the Tate Modern in London in 2012, and has toured art galleries and museums throughout Europe and Asia. The installation was last exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo right before COVID-19. Consequently, the output of these robots numbers thousands of drawings, all of which guide Tresset’s continuous modification of the algorithms determining each robot’s “subjective” style.
You can view the livestream every day through November 22nd HERE from 11:30 am - 7:30 pm, Hong Kong time.
Part and parcel of Art Unchained are two online forums taking place on November 13th, THIS FRIDAY, and next Friday, November 20th. Full details can be found here. These webinars will take place at lunch hour in Hong Kong, so those of you NOT in Asia are unlikely to watch or participate in them live. But the forums will be posted on the Facebook page of ArtisTree afterwards and I will share links to them later.
"Technology, Art & Beyond"
Friday, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, November 13, Hong Kong time
How AI and blockchain are giving rise to new business models and modes of appreciating, collecting and investing in art.
Panelists will be Anna Lowe, co-founder of Smartify, Andy Alekhin, co-founder of Snark.art, Massimo Sterpi, partner at Gianni, Origoni, Grippo, Cappelli & Partners and Joanne Ooi, co-founder of Art Unchained
"Blockchain: A Brave New World of Consumerism"
Friday, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, November 20, Hong Kong time
What are the latest applications of blockchain to the different phases of the supply chain and the ramifications on everyday consumers in terms of transparency, sustainability and accountability.
Panelists will be Jim Duffy, CEO of Tracr, Dominic Edmondson of Baker McKenzie, Ashok Venkateswaran, VP & APAC Blockchain & Digital Assets Lead at Mastercard and Jean-Luc Gustave, co-founder of Art Unchained.
The first panel features the founders of Smartify and Snark.art. Smartify is the world’s biggest art app (2M installs), utilizing AI to enable instant identification of an artwork logged within its system. Think of it as Shazam, the app, for art. (The Shazam app identifies music after “listening” to a few bars of it.) It enriches the museum-going process by giving users instant, convenient access to lots of information about the artworks they’re looking at. Among the many collections logged within its system are The Met’s, the National Gallery’s and the Louvre’s, to name just a few. Download it the next time you visit a major museum. Snark.art is one of the only platforms to have successfully tokenized and distributed “serious” art via blockchain. By “serious,” I mean art that is considered worthy by the institutions and galleries which dominate art discourse and commerce, namely, everyone within the self-serving universe of Art Basel. (That includes many supposedly independent museums, something I explained in an earlier newsletter.) Blockchain x Art is a big subject that deserves a 5000 word essay, so I won’t get into it here. But suffice it to say that many fascinating questions will come up during the discussion. For example, what happens when art ownership is completely disconnected from private, controlled access to the art object purchased? What does that mean for art as an investment or cultural object? Visit this link to read about the tokenization of Eve Sussman’s well-known video artwork, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, and how Snark.art successfully sold it to 1500 buyers in tokenized “atom” units. Massimo Sterpi, one of the most erudite art lawyers on the planet, and yours truly will bring up the rear of this conversation. I won’t say much about Massimo, except that he is so insightful, knowledgeable and charming that he deserves his own TV show.
“Blockchain: A Brave New World of Consumerism,” taking place one week from Friday, is equally fascinating and brings the topic of blockchain down to earth with a nuts and bolts explanation of how the technology is going to affect the average consumer. For that panel, I invited Jim Duffy, the CEO of Tracr, DeBeers’ blockchain platform, to explain how rough diamonds will be scanned directly from the mine, then tracked and registered at every phase of the supply chain in order to afford industry stakeholders and consumers unprecedented access to information about what they are buying.
Following on from Jim, AsiaPac blockchain lead for MasterCard, Ashok Venkateswaran, is privy to blockchain transformation across many different consumer categories and will describe the size and importance of the provenance industry (estimated to be $1.8T by PWC), as well as what MasterCard has up its sleeve in coming months.