Notes related to Digital Art

Locust Projects presents Herramientas (Levels & Bosses), a transmedia gaming prototype by multimedia artist Leo Castañeda with Otro Inventario. The immersive installation invites visitors to play the videogame and enjoy the artist’s oil paintings, virtual reality experiences, sculptural gaming furniture, immersive video and more.

A new NFT initiative connects artists represented by the renowned Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection with collectors. eDigital.ART launches an inaugural collection NFTarot with works from Glenda León and Gustavo Pérez Monzón.

Although traditional art collecting includes an investment component and a business perspective, it still invokes a sort of romanticism aura that builds around an artist. A classic collector tends to follow an artist's trajectory, supporting his work. The new wave of NFT collectors stand out for not belonging to traditional art environments. Most of them are young aged and have never set foot in a museum or gallery, and therefore prioritize the finance aspect to NFT collecting to the emotional one. Generally, they are folks whose field of expertise is related to fin tech – they come from and drive the crypto world. And yes, they are mainly men.

As a conceptual artist working in the crossroads of art, science, and technology, with a corporate past and a social communications baseline, I am deeply interested in the new digital ecosystem raised by blockchain technology, NFTs and the Metaverse, from a perspective that addresses this realm as a sociological phenomenon, as a new business field, and as another one of the many mediums I utilize to express my ideas.

Before machines took over, many issues were resolved following an algorithmic principle with some logic and a little math. The originator of the idea was a Persian mathematician in the eleventh century. Later, the procedure became essential for science, everyday life and art. Basically, the algorithmic methods are in the patterns of Islamic art (see tessellation notation), in the Andean chakana and quipus of the Inca period, in the Renaissance perspective and in other representational devices of the pre-digital era.

Collectors, investors and artists are fascinated by the promising profitability of NFTs. The phenomenon exploded with the succulent sale of a digital work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in 2021 and since then it has generated a chain reaction whose consequences are still not entirely clear.

A few decades ago, the art utopia consisted of incorporating the viewer into the work, either physically or sensorially. Frank Popper called these practices with the term "participation art".

Recently, Richard Garet, a multimedia artist based primarily in New York City, opened a solo exhibition titled “Frame Compositions” with 1stDibs NFT marketplace. The eponymous show exhibits 29 vibrant NFT works and explores the relationship between color, light, surface and form. Garet’s practice encompasses sound installations, performance, computer applications and other mediums. Adhering to strict parameters, he creates compositions by carefully selecting high-definition 1080x1080-pixel square frames one-by-one and then collating 60 per second using computer applications. Because each work contains 1800 frames squeezed into a 30 second time period, the eye can no longer identify individual frames, thus, creating moving images.