The Art world is not a success. It is not progressive, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous, it is not unbiased – and it frequently misses opportunities to perform better. The art world is a world we dislike, and, in the long term, despise. A machine of accelerated aesthetics, burnouts, precarious living, 24/7 availability and galvanised gossip that is motivated by survival, rather than a common good. I am partial to the thought that the art world has succumbed to something not entirely human, some- thing which in some circles is referred to as Capitalism. ...

Cultural savants Shumon Basar (The Extreme Self & The Age of Earthquakes) and Dean Kissick (NY editor of Spike Art Magazine) join the show during Berlin Art Week for a sprawling, late-night convo on communication and creative production in year 2022. Along the way, we note the accelerating pace of decades, revisit Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 mass-media glow-up, log a veritable dictionary of neologisms, consider whether the art market as we know is a historically bound concept, and ask if we’ve possibly reached the end of clear-cut, market-ready “generations.” Also: mid-ification, zentrism, eNFT portals, and adult drainers.

“Web3” is now part of our collective imaginaries, even if the specifics of what the buzzword entails remain murky and inaccessible to many. Originally coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, to describe “a decentralised internet ecosystem based on blockchain,” the term took off after the NFT boom of 2021, catalysed by the embrace of the crypto ecosystem by the likes of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Like other social technologies, the swirl of narrative, attention and capital around web3 are as much part of its utility as the tools themselves. Mainstream discourses around “the web3 ...

In this episode Vivian and Noah purchase David Young’s piece titled Winter Woods, a work produced using a GAN, leading to a larger discussion around art created using AI. Artist, researcher, and podcaster Mat Dryhurst helps explain how AI works, as well as how DALLE-2 , a new AI system from OpenAI is different from other GANs. We also hear from artist Super Metal Bosch, one of the artists behind the GAN art project Super Metal Mons. Vivian goes on to compare AI to photography and the art of being a clown, which goes over Noah’s head. Artist Carlos Sanchez ...

Since their previous episode about AI (episode 2), the conversation around AI has exploded and gone viral. Dall-e mini memes proliferated everywhere utilizing Dall-E mini now known as Craiyon, a text prompt AI image generator. An artist utilizing AI won first place in an art context, and the New York Times wrote about it. With that has also come skepticism, criticism, and fear regarding AI. William Wiebe is an artist and researcher whose work deals with machine perception, and created a project called SMPLverse which utilizes a synthetic data set created by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms to translate facial ...

The blockchain is Janus-faced. On one side its traits of transparency and decentralization promise much in terms of fairness and accountability, but on the other its monetary roots born as a financial payment system, albeit grounded in open-source software, mean its implementations are often stridently capitalistic. Furthermore, those involved in its development seem to oscillate between radical ethical standpoints and reductionist technological determinism. The blockchain engenders what has been called a “digital metalism” with the ability, like a modern philosopher’s stone, to transmutate life through a distributed ledger. That such a pecuniary minded technology is being touted as a new ...

For his lecture for the Center for Experimental Lectures (at Interstate Projects, 2017) Devin Kenny illustrated how the physical infrastructure of the network, supposedly developed in the 20th century, actually developed much earlier. Drawing from a variety of sources and traditions, Kenny’s alternative genealogy understands routes of the African diaspora and practices developed during and after the Middle Passage as the origin of network technologies. BailBloc, a computer application he also helped conceive, takes the seemingly apolitical and highly dubious culture of cryptocurrency and bends its networking potential towards an abolitionist politics. Developed by The New Inquiry’s “Dark Inquiry” lab, ...

Crypto collapse! Simply HODL and stay with us while we talk with Wassim Z. Alsindi: veteran of the timechain, founder and host of the 0x Salon, conducting experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. Wassim specialises in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems. Today he guides us through the speculative hellscape.

What is BitchCoin? BitchCoin is a digital currency backed by the photography of Sarah Meyohas at a fixed exchange rate of 1 BitchCoin to 25 square inches of photographic print. This rate of exchange will not change, even if the value of the photography increases. As her work changes in value over time, so will the relative value of BitchCoin. How did BitchCoin get started? BitchCoin is the focus of “Where 6,” an exhibition on prediction at Where, a gallery and publishing house headquartered in a shipping container in Brooklyn. Where invited Sarah Meyohas to “mine” her coins in the gallery and design ...

This week features legendary curator of digital art, Christiane Paul. It would be fair to say that digital art is having a moment these days, so who better to provide some context than the curator who quite literally wrote the book on it. From publishing a glossy quarterly magazine on digital art and hypertext in the 90s (Intelligent Agent), to her extensive curatorial work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as an independent curator, Christiane Paul has had a major influence on how the world collects, understands, and curates artistic practices that exist in, and evolve from the ...

In this episode, Noah and Vivian discuss their thoughts and feelings about web3 lingo. GM. WAGMI. Diamond Hands. Rekt. So many words, so little time, so many feelings. Noah recalls work from photographer Aaron Ferguson, who had a collection of photographs of GM spray painted around his city. Aaron discusses his thoughts behind the photographs, his general feelings about web3 lingo, toxic positivity, NFT community, and favorite web3 term. A few more voicemails come into the hotline, with the callers discussing terms they do not like, including GM, GN, Ser, and LFG. This leads to a rapid fire discussion with ...

Key learnings, summaries of presentations, quotes, photographs, visualisations, stories and links to videos, audio recordings from first two DAOWO events. DAOWO is “a blockchain laboratory and debate series for reinventing the arts.” The DAOWO lab series invites artists, engineers, thinkers and practitioners to reflect on how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture. To transcend the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation within crypto-economics. Intended as an iterative temporary laboratory for the eventual creation of a living laboratory and generative space for new knowledge production we take the following conditions as our starting position. This ...