PIONEER GRAILS: 72-HOUR OPEN NFT EDITIONS

EMI KUSANO

Emi Kusano, born in Tokyo in 1990, began her artistic journey as a street photographer on the streets of Harajuku in her teens, leading to an exhibit at the V&A Museum.

As a multidisciplinary artist, she explores the intersections of retro-futurism and modern technological acceleration. Her unique AI-infused art has graced the cover of WWD Japan and been featured in Christie's and Gucci auctions. Internationally recognized, her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Saatchi Gallery and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and has been collected in more than a dozen countries around the world.

In addition to her visual arts career, Emi is the lead singer and self-producer for Satellite Young, a band that creatively reinterprets 80s J-POP styles through a modern, technologically-driven sci-fi lens. This innovative approach has garnered international recognition, including an appearance at SXSW 2017, and extends their creativity to installations.

UBERMORGEN

UBERMORGEN (Engl.: the day after tomorrow, CH/AT/US, *1995) is an artist duo with a steady ascending worldwide presence, a synthesis of autistic actionist lizvlx (Liz Katlein, she) and pragmatic visionary Luzius Bernhard (they). The net.art pioneers, master deducers, and media hackers are widely recognized for their online activism, haute couture NFTs and websites, polarising social experiments, radical research and empathy, dark AI, nonbinary primitivism, and conceptualism.

CNN called them "Maverick Austrian Business People" during their VOTE-AUCTION online project. They reached a global audience of 500 million while challenging the FBI, CIA, and NSA during the U.S. presidential election. In 2005, they launched their acclaimed EKMRZ TRILOGY, a series of conceptual hacks: GOOGLE WILL EAT ITSELF, AMAZON NOIR, and THE SOUND OF EBAY. UBERMORGEN occupies 175 domains.

In 2021, THE NEXT BIENNIAL SHOULD BE CURATED BY A MACHINE (Whitney Museum of American Art) used AI and TikTok to catapult visitors into 64 twisted parallel universes. In 2021, they have started to challenge crypto art by creating, among others, deeply nostalgic pixel art such as THE D1CKS, hand-pixelated 1 of 1 haute couture NFTs.

ANNE SPALTER

Anne Spalter is a leading digital artist, creating dystopian landscapes with AI and other technological tools. She has been actively working in digital art for decades; she established the first digital fine arts courses at Brown University and RISD during the 1990s and wrote THE COMPUTER IN THE VISUAL ARTS, which is used internationally. Together with Michael Spalter, she oversees Spalter Digital, one of the largest private collections of early computer art.

In 2022, Spalter was part of MASS MoCA's alumni residency, named one of the 50 most important crypto artists by Rizzoli, participated in the SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC and the CADAF Art Fair; and released RABBIT TAKEOVER, an NFT project that sold out in five minutes. Her 20-minute NFT video piece, THE BELL MACHINE, was acquired by the Buffalo AKG Museum in December 2022.

GEOFF DAVIS

Geoff Davis is a generative artist who founded the Micro Arts Group in 1984 with the goal of supporting artists and making computer art accessible to the public, as inspired by the London experimental film and video scene.

Geoff Davis is an artificial intelligence researcher in the ethical use of generated text at the University of the Arts London (UAL). He has worked for the UK’s innovation trust Nesta, developed ‘eco’ buildings, and was a founding member of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). His fiction has been published by PEN International.

With Micro Arts, Geoff Davis released a series of computer-generated conceptual art pieces and story text generators on data cassettes and Prestel TV Teletext. Davis also provided a forum for computer artists and musicians with a print magazine, articles, and downloadable software on Micronet 800 on Prestel.

Micro Arts was revived in 2019 by the Computer Arts Archive (part of the Computer Arts Society CAS and BCS) and has had exhibitions in Leicester and London, UK.

OONA

OONA is an anonymous conceptual artist whose practice explores the intersections of technology, finance, gender, and identity. Through moving images and performance art, OONA exposes the collision between progressive technologies and socially regressive ideas, offering a critical perspective on the contemporary cultural landscape.

Born on November 1, 2021, in Vatican City, OONA has performed and exhibited internationally at venues including Art Basel Miami, The Metropolitan Museum of New York, Proof of People London, Proof of People New York, Vellum Los Angeles, and Avalanche Summit Barcelona.

OONA's performances and exhibitions have garnered critical acclaim and attention from collectors and curators. She has been featured in numerous publications, and her work is held in private and public collections.

VICTOR ACEVEDO

Victor Acevedo is considered a desktop computer art pioneer, as he was an early adopter of personal computer software to create fine art in the early 1980s. Originally from Los Angeles, Acevedo studied Studio art (painting and drawing) and Art history at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (1977–1988), and then attended Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (1979–1981). He later taught at the School of Visual Art in New York (BFA and MFA Computer Art Departments, 1997–2008). He has shown his work in over 140 group and solo art exhibitions in the U.S. and Internationally since 1982.

Starting in 2007, considering the phenomenology of synesthesia and integrating real-time video-mix workflows into his audio-visual studio practice, Acevedo initially positioned himself inside the genre called visual Music. He later coined the term Electronic Visual Music (EVM) in 2013. This was to identify his motion graphic work more accurately in the digital domain. In recent years, participating in the NFT/Blockchain marketplace has been an integral part of his practice.

His work has been acquired (among others) by the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as part of the Patric Prince Digital Art Collection; the Museum der Stadt Gladbeck; and the Golden Plotter archives: Computer Kunst 1994 and 2006.

HANS DEHLINGER

Hans Dehlinger (*1939, Germany) began working with programming languages and computers in the early 1960s during his studies in architecture at the University of Stuttgart (Dipl.Ing.). He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley (M.Arch., Ph.D.), where he also worked as an environmental planner and architect. In 1980, he became Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Kassel, Germany, where he taught until his retirement in 2004. He is a member of the informal group of Algorists.

In the early 1980s, he began to explore computers artistically, with a focus on algorithmically generated line drawings. The majority of his generative artwork is based on procedures and computer code executed on pen plotters. It thus has aspects of both electronic and physical art. The lines can form delicate structures, dense textures, or even an "unsharp" impression from sharp lines.

His work has received worldwide recognition and was shown first in Europe, later in Canada, Russia, Australia, the USA, Armenia, and China.

The works of Dehlinger are in private collections such as Spalter Digital and in museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois.

LEE MULLICAN

Lee Mullican (1919-1998) was a modernist painter best known for his linear palette knife technique. In the mid-1980s at the age of 67, Mullican began working with UCLA's Program for Technology in the Arts to explore how this signature painting style might translate to the emerging digital imaging technology of the day. Mullican started working with the IBM 5170, equipped with the Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter (TARGA), and a Summagraphics Summasketch stylus to experiment with painting and drawing on a computer.

Replacing his brush and signature palette knife striations with a clickable mouse and pen-like stylus, Mullican was able to merge the late Surrealist method of automatism with the computer's instant and precise replication of marks.

He stated, “I found that beyond what one thought, the computer as being hard-lined, analytical, and predictable, it was indeed a medium fueled with the automatic, enabled by chance, and accident to discover new ways of making imagery.”

Mullican’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

CLAUDIA HART

Claudia Hart leverages simulation technologies to collapse the false binaries between human and avatar, artificial and real, mind and body. With a background in architecture and writing, Hart emerged in the 1990s as part of a generation of new media artists exploring issues of identity and representation. Drawing on computing, virtual imaging, and 3D animation technologies, Hart weaves together topics from art history, philosophy, and cultural studies to explore themes of feminism, embodiment, and temporality through symbolic poetics that stitch onto real-world politics.

Born and based in New York, Hart (b. 1955) earned her BA in Art History from New York University (1978) and her MS in architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture (1984). From 2018 to 2022, Hart taught the graduate seminar at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Her work is held in the collections of notable museums and institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Albertina, Vienna; and various private collections.

HEINRICH HEIDERSBERGER

Heinrich Heidersberger (1906–2006) was a photographer. Just like his medium of choice, which gradually changed from a medium of documentation into a medium of art during the course of the 20th century and was marked by introspection well into the 1970s, he continually called his work into question. Heidersberger transcended the technical restrictions with inventiveness and skill, and openly examined the conflict between free and artistic work.

He devoted himself to the claim of embracing a new, contemporary way of looking at things early on in his work. Some very early impulses undoubtedly date back to the time he spent in Paris. From 1928 to 1931, he studied painting there and experienced what he termed as a "sign of fate" when he purchased a used wooden camera at the Marché aux Puces, which later led him to discover the world of photography.

Heidersberger's efforts to convey contemporary expression are also testimony to the vision of the modern arts to unite function and aesthetics, economic, technical and social aspects. He decided in favor of a picture language and practice that utilized the new technical opportunities available and actively shaped them as well. Consequently, he has earned the title of master of the modern age par excellence.

HERBERT W. FRANKE

Herbert W. Franke (1927-2022) was a pivotal figure in bridging the gap between art and science. He was a scientist, author of science fiction, curator, mathematician, physicist, and speleologist. He was a co-founder of Ars Electronica in 1979. Franke has been called "the most prominent German science fiction writer" by Die Zeit, and a "great storyteller" by the FAZ. As a writer, he has been a pioneer of virtual worlds since 1960. In addition, he pioneered cave research with the dating of stalactites, with which he was also able to reveal significant information about climatology since the last ice age.

He began experimenting with generative photography in 1953, used an analog computer in 1954, and the first mainframe computers for his abstract algorithmic art in the 1960s and 1970s, before beginning programming himself in 1980 with one of the earliest Apple IIs.

Franke has consistently explored new territory with analytical methods and the assistance of machines for over 70 years, looking into the future of digital art until he arrived in the metaverse as an artist and curator in the early 2000s.

His first NFT Drop MATH ART was sold out within 30 seconds, he was the headliner at the Tezos Booth at Art Basel in 2023 with a work from 1979. In 1970, Franke was represented at the Venice Biennale and showed a screen print of the series SQUARES created with a computer. Herbert W. Franke died on July 16, 2022, at the age of 95, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre.

29 MARCH - 1 APRIL 2023

VOICE GEMS ASTROPOETICON (DESTINATION IN UNCERTAINTY)

In 2021, Herbert W. Franke and Harry Yeff started a conversation about the concept of VOICE GEMS and an audio-visual collaboration. Franke suggested using the lyrics of ASTROPOETICON because they are a minimalist and associative approach to language that could have been created by an AI. These lyrics were frozen as gemstones, the VOICE GEMS ASTROPOETICON, created by Herbert W. Franke, Harry Yeff, Trung Bao, and an AI. (The first three 1/1s have been minted and collected in 2021.)

The lyrics used for the VOICE GEMS ASTROPOETICON (DESTINATION IN UNCERTAINTY) belong to a cycle of 16 poems called ASTROPOETICON. Written by Franke in 1979 to be published in a book alongside artworks by German space artist Andreas Nottebohm, he voiced them on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2007.

Presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke and ELEMENTUM.ART on the occasion of Herbert W. Franke’s solo show CODED BEAUTY at EXPANDED.ART in Berlin. The art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke will use their portion of the sales for a designated purpose: translating significant texts by Herbert W. Franke to English and making them publicly available.

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