“The rise of NFTs as a means of tokenizing digital art is restructuring the cultural economy. It is also vastly expanding the field of art to encompass a wealth of transmedia practices that previously existed outside mainstream contemporary art. This paradigm shift in art and commerce is only just beginning, but the seeds of the phygital environment have been planted and demand new tools on the part of critical theorists and artists in order to shape the rules as they are rewritten. 

This course takes participants step-by-step through the new aesthetics of crypto art, situating current developments within a lineage of AI and generative art practices, while tracing a deep history of token economies. It also considers the politics of human-machine interaction and how artists are currently confronting knowledge regimes embedded in digital architecture. Of course, the blockchain offers a new way to distribute decision-making throughout its native communities, allowing us to reflect on how humans might better apportion value. Yet, it also reiterates forms of extraction and exploitation familiar from old hierarchical systems. This course examines the work of art after the NFT, and asks how artists might respond to the lure of cryptocurrency as they seek to shape a more equitable Web3.” (Text & photo by courtesy of Alex Estorick)

BENEFITS

• Identify how current innovations in AI and NFTs are changing the art world as a creative, curatorial, and market structure
• Situate AI and NFTs within deep historical lineages: From Byzantine token economies to the conceptual and computer art of the 1960s
• Analyze the responses of different art world stakeholders to the technological developments of Web3, which affords new possibilities for digital display, gamified collection, and distributed curation

Min. seats: 5 | Max. seats: 30 | Language: English