How do we envision the future of art?
This past year has seen some interesting art developments, projects, and new platforms in the digital realm. We’re taking a look at some of the ways current technologies have been making an impact on the art ecosystem and how they’re transforming the way art is produced and experienced.
Photography by Note Thanun
The increasingly digital nature of our lives has opened up discussions around the future of creativity, as well as art production, collecting and exhibiting. Here’s a look at some of the current discourse and debates, recent developments, trends, shifts and possibilities.
Art in the Metaverse
Writing for the New York Times at the beginning of December, critic Dean Kissick posed the question “What will Art Look Like in the Metaverse?”. In the context of Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and the focus the company has placed on experiencing art in the metaverse in its marketing campaign, the article considered what it means for art when these ideas are driven by tech corporations and engineers. As Kissick points out, such visions for producing or experiencing art through technology, as conceived and marketed by Meta, among others, have often focused on reproducing masterpieces of the past. But the article ends with the idea that, in spite of this and given these new technologies, “Today it feels possible, perhaps for the first time this century, to invent completely new aesthetics”.
Experiencing art in the Metaverse is already becoming a reality — think Decentraland at Sotheby’s, which opened this summer and replicates the auction house’s London galleries in virtual reality. A Meta Biennale was also launched this year by Toronto-based virtual reality platform Art Gate VR, where participating artists and galleries were presented within an interconnected space, which could be visited in virtual reality via computer or VR headset. Here, visitors took the form of avatars — appearing as floating sets of hands and multifaceted heads in a variety of colors — as they navigated the exhibitions and interacted with artworks and each other. The format seeks to allow for a biennial model that is always free to visit, open 24/7, and can be visited without geographical constraints. For Art Gate VR, it also presented an opportunity to meld physical and virtual worlds — on a practical level, by cutting down on costs associated with producing an exhibition, for example — while enabling experimentation with cutting-edge technologies in the creation and presentation of artworks.
During the Meta Biennale’s run, talks and panel discussions further engaged with the metaverse from a critical perspective, addressing topics like mental health, as well as equity and social justice in the metaverse. These discussions are essential, as when we talk about the potentials of digital spaces and technologies, which are often put in utopic, dream-like terms, it begs the question: whose dream is it?
Beyond Human Creators
Artist Hidéo Snes uses artificial intelligence to explore the potential and limitations of the painting medium, and artistic production processes more broadly, by training an AI to paint — referred to as “expanded painting”. In the process, Snes examines the relationship between humans, art and machines, both historically and today. For the artist, a central question becomes how the work of an AI could be seen as something independent, rather than a reproduction — suggesting a new gaze is needed.
Discussions around AI art have touched on what the use of this technology means for human creators — is AI simply another tool or will it ultimately be a replacement? According to a recent study by Max Planck Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the more we humanize AI, the more credit we tend to give it as a creator, and, as a result, the less credit we tend to give to the artists behind it. And yet others recognize it as a collective effort — as we all, as internet users, produce the data that is often used to feed the algorithm.
Considering whether AI-generated artwork can really be the future of contemporary art in an article on Art Basel’s website, Chloe Stead highlights the importance of artists working with AI to engage critically with the technology and its cultural implications, its possibilities and limitations, rather than just demonstrate what it can do.
Here, we might also think of the work of Hito Steyerl, which takes a critical approach to the use of algorithms, predictive technologies, and our increasingly digital society more broadly, in SocialSim (2020). In the multi-channel installation, live simulations drawn from data on police brutality inform the movements of dancing, computer-generated police officers — commenting on our relationship to algorithms and the ways machine learning upholds the systems of power and control that already pervade. Meanwhile, Agnieszka Kurant imagines the potential future of artistic production and human-machine collaboration in her work. For Kurant, this line of inquiry stems from the idea that creativity and production require collective labor and intelligence — an idea that is highlighted in the current digital economy. The artist explores this through different forms of hybridity and collectivity, incorporating human and nonhuman, living and nonliving actors — what she has described as “a polyphony of agencies”. Her seriesThe End of Signature, for example, which uses an algorithm to generate communal signatures based on hundreds of individual signatures and takes the form of large-scale animated LED sculptures, has been commissioned by MIT LIST Art Center and will be installed at Kendall Square in Cambridge in spring 2022.
NFTs
Everyone is probably tired of hearing about NFTs by now, given the steady stream of headlines, the outsized sales, the emergence of new platforms, and ongoing debates. But NFTs have already made quite a substantial impact on the art ecosystem. ERC-721 — the specification for ‘non-fungible tokens’ on the Ethereum-based blockchain — even took the top spot on the ArtReview Power 100 list of the art world’s most influential people of 2021.
Of course, major galleries and auction houses have been quick to launch their own platforms to draw in crypto-collectors and present and sell NFTs — e.g., Pace Gallery’s new dedicated NFT platform and their acceptance of Ethereum on all transactions — with many proponents emphasizing the decentralized nature of the blockchain, seeing it as a path that bypasses traditional gatekeepers. However, persisting structural inequalities within the cryptoart market and the larger tech industry have been widely noted. As Tina Rivers Ryan writes in ArtReview, “decentralization is not inherently democratic, in the sense that it doesn’t automatically deliver mechanisms to carefully negotiate conflict and build consensus while protecting minority voices.”
While there are certainly many potential downsides to the rise of NFTs, some remain optimistic that continued critical engagement from the cultural sector could lead to some valuable developments. Some artists, like computational artist Memo Akten, are already working with ways to make NFTs more eco-friendly. Akten, who researched and made public his findings on the environmental impact of NFTs, also exclusively creates NFTs with blockchain that uses a ‘proof-of-stake’ algorithm (as opposed to ‘proof-of-work’, like Ethereum), and has compiled and published comprehensive resources on creating eco-friendly cryptoart. And others, like technologist, curator and collector Kelani Nichole, emphasize the importance of slowing down and taking care, in what is otherwise a fast-paced market characterized by rapid growth and speculation.
Digital Collecting & Ownership
It’s hard to talk about NFTs without mentioning the gamification of the art market, as art sales and collecting practices appear to take new forms — or perhaps reiterate the same old forms with a new look.
The Art Newspaper recently reported on an NFT sale that “highlighted the increased gamification of the art market”, while bringing in what is possibly the highest price paid for a work by a living artist. The sale of Pak’s The Merge unfolded on Nifty Gateway over the course of 48 hours, during which time tens of thousands of buyers purchased digital tokens and in turn received special designations for acquiring greater “mass” than others.
There are also other ways the potentials of the cryptoart market are being explored. Former Christie’s co-chair Loïc Gouzer, for example, has founded a company, called Particle, with the mission of democratizing the way major works of art are sold and accessed, while laying the foundation for a meta museum. The company plans to purchase physical artworks, which will then be digitized and divided into 10,000 NFTs – each a unique part of the work. The community-owned artwork, in its physical form, will be housed and maintained by Particle in a publicly accessible collection and will never be sold again. The company has already purchased its first piece, Love Is in the Air (2005) by Banksy, the particles of which went up for sale (at $1,500 each) this month.
Meanwhile, in traditional museums and institutions, digital art and technologies in general are still being more slowly addressed and integrated into collections and public programming. Anindya Sen asserts in Hyperallergic that when it comes to engaging with digital art, “[museums] also need to shed their bias for acquisition and ownership of objects and focus on what really makes them socially relevant — the act of exhibiting them,” urging for creative approaches from the institutional side. Doing so could perhaps spark a move away from an object-oriented, academic focus that makes such institutions inaccessible to a wider public and keeps them behind in the contemporary context.
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