Dear fellow shitposters and NFT aficionados,
First of all, let me start by saying that at JPG we are in awe with the community’s response regarding the project launch. After the launch of Deep Time and SALT (make sure to check them out), the first exhibitions meant to bootstrap the gallery, gift shop and registry functionalities, now we’re working towards improving the UX, polishing the curator interface, and finally opening the protocol. While there’s no deadline for this, it will happen relatively soon so stay tuned and watch out for updates.
But this newsletter is less about JPG and more about curation - in this case, an attempt to curate the last week in the intersection between the metaverse and the “outside culture world”.
As this is the first newsletter, I’m going to go for a “commentary” style, which is the one I favor - but I’d love to know your preferences and adjust the voice of the upcoming editions accordingly. I hope you find this first installment interesting!
Community + interesting reads
Simon DLR, who at this point should just rebrand himself to CryptoTwitter’s Own Pythia/ Delphi Oracle, since he has seen or written about almost everything concerning our space and is constantly ahead of our time, wrote a new article on exploring NFT communities. Trigger warning, Simon DLR literature is known for sparking a plethora of protocol and business ideas. It happened to us, so buckle up.
A few weeks ago we voted for the curator Domenico Quaranta on Mirror, and discovered his work. This short article he wrote for NRW Künstlerinnenpreis “Code as Law. Contemporary Art and NFTs”, is one of the most balanced and fair short analyses of the space and its current state. This short article is really important as it happens to be published in an art publication for a German art prize initiative, and we need great educational resources like this one to help newcomers. If this article caught your eye, you might want to delve deeper into Domenico’s work and read his thorough timeline on “cryptoart” (or the lack thereof) published on Mirror.
Finally, to wrap up this newsletter section, JPG team member + Metaversal editor William Peaster’s Rhizomatic NFTs applies the theory of Deleuze & Guattari to the metaverse.
Generative art
Deafbeef’s stellar career has been making headlines and blissfully occupying our Twitter feeds for months now. Now he’s once again broken his own glass ceiling with his masterful Physical Release. Through it, the collectors of his oeuvre are able to submit their tokens to be considered for inclusion of their audiovisual content on physical releases that use VHS, cassette tapes, and vinyl. While there are many artists such as the brilliant Sarah Zucker using VHS, I believe these new works are first of their kind, seeking to prove storage can become part of conceptual art in a unique way.
Mitchell F. Chan, also a favorite of team JPG, released (and sold out, of course) his ArtBlock Factory series, LeWitt Generator Generator, inspired by Sol LeWitt’s work. But that’s not what I want to share with you, since you know where to find them within OpenSea, but his great essay on generative art.
On the ETHBlockArt front, after two years of being around, blockstyle #1 by Adrian LeBas sold out on Sunday.
Finally, Tyler Hobbs wrote a timeline on the topic I can see as a perfect continuation of the Domenico Quaranta Mirror article I mentioned above.
On the metaverse fringes
This weekend I was fortunate enough to enjoy some museums and galleries, and while visiting KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin I noticed the mention of the BlackSwan collective in the venue, where they will be organizing a hackathon. BlackSwan is an organization that’s been working on developing a DAO whose purpose is to create an open source toolkit for creatives. I first came across Black Swan when they presented their work at the last ETHBerlin hackathon + festival I co-organized, and have been following their progress ever since.
The Black Swan hackathon will give its participants many opportunities, including NFT minting and an NFT exhibition. This was quite great to stumble upon, as it’s one of the first, very tangible mentions of NFTs I’ve seen in such an institution as KW.
Also on KW, the online program Open Secret is now live, with essays, artworks and sound installations regarding the problems and dangers of current technologies and its adjacent culture. I was very pleased to see that Holly Herndon, who’s recently launched her Holly+ digital likeness on Mirror, is one of the narrators in the Joshua Citarella collection of works within the program.
Well, that’s it for now. I had many more links to share with you but I’ll save those for an upcoming installment.
As mentioned, hope you find this useful!
Cheers,
MP