As the first survey organized by an American museum of the leading artists engaged with blockchains, Peer to Peer is an online exhibition and fundraiser that stages an exchange between 13 artists and their historical peers in the Buffalo AKGs collection of modern and contemporary art. It presents works produced with a variety of technologies, from Artificial Intelligence to 3D modeling, and ranging in format from videos and GIFs to PDFs, websites, software applications, and smart contracts. While technologically experimental, the works also speak toand transformthemes explored by artists over the last two centuries. The exhibition therefore celebrates both the continued relevance of the historical peers and the contributions of the new peers to arts expanding network of ideas.  Tina Rivers Ryan 

Feral File  Peer to Peer

Winslow Homers Croquet Challenge is a digital game that can be played by anyone on the internet or by collectors as an application on their computer. Toronto-based artist Mitchell F. Chan not only coded the game art and mechanics, but also wrote the dialogue, recorded the sound effects, and even created the shaders that calculate the lighting levels on each texture in real time. The first in his new series of immersive fictions called Beggars Belief, this game transforms Homers painting <a href="https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/194111-croquet-players" target="_blank" class="link">The Croquet Players, 1865</a>, into a digital physics game (like Angry Birds), in which the player uses their cursor to aim and swing their mallet towards the ball. The characters are modeled after the figures in the painting; the action takes place on a lawn that is bounded by a recreation of the paintings gilded frame; and landscape scenery from Homers other paintings provide the backdrop.

Homer first became famous for his images of the Civil War, which were popularized in the press and helped the Unions cause. Painted shortly after the wars ending, his idyllic rendering of a friendly croquet competition may represent the desire for reconciliation after an intense period of social and political divisionor perhaps a skepticism that such a thing is possible, given the ambiguous relationships between the figures. Chan amplifies the paintings undercurrent of conflict by giving the characters dialogue that emphasizes the historical context of the Civil War, as well as by making Homers genre painting of privileged leisure into an actual game with winners and losers. Given that physics games are descended from ballistics research during World War II (which contributed to the invention of modern computing), the game play particularly highlights the military history haunting this scene.

Beyond contextualizing The Croquet Players as an antebellum painting, Chans game reminds us that artlike games or politics or wartakes place within a defined arena according to a set of rules, and that certain ideas, facts, or people must be included or excluded for this arena to be maintained. Using your cursor to lower the in-game camera reveals a chain gang of formerly enslaved African Americans laboring in the fields beyond the lawn, suggesting the Jim Crow laws then forming on the horizonas if the tenor of Homers painting depends on keeping knowledge of these events outside the frame. The game also touches on the sexual politics of this era, which saw the birth of the womens suffrage movement. Homers painting reflects that croquet was one of the first co-ed sports, which contributed to its surge in popularity in the 1850s. Chans game uses Homers same co-ed figures, but we can only play as the women, even though only the men are allowed to speakand to win.

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