Mail artwork meets NFTs for all within the ‘MoMA Postcard’ programme

The Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York has invited the general public to take part in what the museum describes as “an experiment in collective creativity on blockchain” in a brand new digital initiative, MoMA Postcard. This programme comes quickly after the museum’s launch of free mementoes minted as non-fungible token (NFT) editions, launched through the current exhibition Refik Anadol: Unsupervised. These tokens continued MoMA’s exploration of and engagement with the applied sciences of web3, the newest iteration of the web, constructed on blockchain expertise and managed by its customers.

Whereas the marketplace for NFTs has slowed since its preliminary hype in 2021, museums and establishments are starting to step additional into web3 by way of exhibitions and programmes, with MoMA Postcard as one such instance. In current months, HEK (Home of Digital Arts) in Basel introduced Exploring the Decentralized Internet—Artwork on the Blockchain, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magrini. NFT-based artworks are additionally now within the collections of establishments corresponding to Kadist in Paris and San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Deji Artwork Museum in Nanjing.

MoMA itself not too long ago acquired two notable NFT artworks: Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA (2022), which was on show within the foyer till late October, and an version of Ian Cheng’s blockchain-based generative paintings 3FACE (2022).

MoMA Postcard takes its cues from mail artwork, a observe that first emerged within the Fifties when artists started to ship and trade artworks by way of the US postal service. Key figures corresponding to Ray Johnson despatched chain letters inviting recipients so as to add to what was enclosed and to go the up to date paintings on to somebody new, driving ahead this format of artistic correspondence that has continued to at the present time. Madeleine Pierpont, the web3 affiliate at MoMA, sees a “pure synergy” between mail artwork and blockchain expertise, as each “allow international transmission of data”, and for MoMA Postcard to be a possibility to discover the co-creation and neighborhood facet of web3.

To create with MoMA Postcard, folks obtain Bitmark’s Autonomy app and declare a clean card to begin. Customers can then create a stamp, or digital picture, inside a ten by 10 pixel grid utilizing MoMA’s color palette, earlier than signing it off in a signature field. As soon as a stamper confirms their stamp on the blockchain, their token of possession and contribution is robotically recorded within the postcard’s knowledge on the blockchain. The contributor is then invited to ship the postcard on to a different individual—till all 15 stamps have been stuffed.

Every postcard is co-created by all its stampers. It’s a residing and rising paintings that’s solely full when all 15 contributions have been submitted. Pierpont says that it is a key facet of the initiative because it encourages communities to kind round MoMA Postcard, with every postcard performing as a micro neighborhood of its personal, fostering collaboration and trade. Additional, every postcard is co-owned by its 15 contributors. No single individual is ready to personal a postcard on their very own or to make any shopping for and promoting choices with out involving all of its homeowners. This function makes it tough for monetary and market hypothesis to kind across the postcard, and drives consideration in direction of the collaborative course of and neighborhood as a substitute.

To introduce the venture and illustrate its prospects to a various viewers, MoMA launched First 15 as a delicate launch of the initiative on 3 October, inviting 15 artists to create postcards collectively. These artists come from numerous backgrounds and practices however are united by their shared engagement with and understanding of blockchain expertise. Every artist devised a verbal immediate for a postcard, which was then handed round all of the taking part artists to create a set of digital mail artwork. Sasha Stiles, a Kalmyk American poet and artist, designed her immediate to be: “utilizing solely black, darkish inexperienced, gentle inexperienced and white, please draw your letters: A,R,S,(design clean house),A,U,T,O,P,O,E,T,I,C,A”. “I knew instantly that I needed to do one thing poetic,” Stiles says, “to pay homage to the lengthy literary custom of the ‘beautiful corpse’, and so my first query was how you can make language work contained in the constraints of the pixel grid.”

In asking every artist to attract a letter and thus collectively create a font, Stiles’s immediate additionally strengthens the private and intimate contact that MoMA Postcard invitations contributors to share in using handwritten signatures as sign-offs on every stamp.

Operator, the Lumen Prize-winning duo of Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, whose work engages with privateness and expertise, really feel that “it’s an fascinating option to have artists signal their stamps as a result of sometimes, the artist’s ‘signature’ for a digital paintings shouldn’t be proven on this manner”. In rendering the person’s signature seen, it reinforces their hand and presence.

When collaborating in MoMA Postcard on the Autonomy app, customers obtain Ethereum and Tezos pockets addresses robotically generated within the app and have entry to a glossary of web3 terminology written by the MoMA crew, in addition to different digital artworks featured on the app’s house web page. Stiles sees MoMA Postcard as a “good idea” for the way it introduces blockchain expertise. “There are quite a few historic examples of co-created artist and literary initiatives,” Stiles says. “However this one uniquely leverages expertise as muse, medium and messenger.”

“The museum continues to be very a lot in an experimentation and exploration part,” Pierpont says, “and we wish to actually consider carefully about how we will interact with the house with intention and in a manner that gives worth”. MoMA Postcard marks the subsequent step in these efforts, and over the next few months the museum may also be launching a web-based exhibition in partnership with Feral File, a digital artwork platform based by Bitmark and artist Casey Reas, that includes artists together with Yoko Ono, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.

• Clara Che Wei Peh is a Singapore-based curator and artwork author specialising in rising applied sciences. Her curated initiatives embody Artwork Dubai Digital 2023