Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as weve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tuftes concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance.  Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File  Field Guide

Hypothetically Micro confronts us with a dozen bold ribbon-like entities placed against flat backgrounds of solid color. Familiar on the surface, they become increasingly difficult to place, particularly in terms of scale. Velitchkovas lyrical specimens are artfully cropped in a way that suggests we may be looking at the tail, wing, fin, or frond of a much larger organism. Yet something about the color palette also recalls the dyes used in microscopy: These forms could just as easily be microorganisms as much larger birdlike or fishlike creatures. Her work shines next to other generative artists for its elegant biomorphic forms and subtle exploration of color. Velitchkova is a magnificent biological architect, painstakingly crafting visual systems while bringing delicate new creatures to life.

Hypothetically Micro #29

The Bardo: Unpacking the Real is an exhibition that quantifies the ephemeral as it relates to the liminal landscape of sculptural art in the digital age. The exhibition examines the real and (un)real in digital sculpture; questions what it means to view and collect digital sculptures; and investigates the role of NFTs in the creation of the featured artists' work. Named after an afterlife concept in the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Bardo explores the possibilities of what sculpture can be, and how it can be viewed. The exhibition takes the idea of a sculpture to the next level by reinventing how sculpture can be seen and collected, and featuring different innovations around the notion of ownership. The Bardo: Unpacking the Real exemplifies the creativity, enthusiasm, and energy (both human and electromagnetic) that reflects this historic time in art history. Julie Walsh

Feral File  The Bardo: Unpacking the Real

Nancy Baker Cahill"s mutant artwork &ldquo;Stipstream 001&rdquo; takes inspiration from the literary genre known as slipstream fiction, which deals with &ldquo;the familiar strange or the strange familiar.&rdquo; The digital sculpture is based on an IRL sculpture made of torn graphite drawings that were recombined and translated into a 3D object that resembles a simulated botanical form. This process of making and destroying-or of altering the translation of the representational state of the artwork-is a multi-layered, ongoing part of Baker Cahill"s artistic practice. The work contains additional layers of reality that are only revealed once the work is collected.

Slipstream 001 #49

Martina Menegon"s &ldquo;it"s a matter of perspective&rdquo; was inspired by simulation theory-the idea that we are living in a computer simulation-and Zhuang Zhi&rsquo;s concept of transformation in &ldquo;Butterfly Dream.&rdquo; In this story, Zhuang Zhi wakes up and recalls he had a dream of a butterfly. He then wonders whether he is a human dreaming of a butterfly, or perhaps a butterfly, dreaming he was human. Combining these ideas led Menegon to create an artwork that reflects the fluidity of self by presenting a continuously moving 3D scan of her body. On the screen, dozens of bodies flow in a dynamic state of motion, with a new one generated each second as an old one is deleted. In this way, the avatar&rsquo;s sculptural form and movement are predetermined by a set of codes and constraints written into the program. The 3D clones exist in a liminal state, at once mysteriously attached and repelled by each other as they search for meaning. As Menegon says, &ldquo;I"m in the perspective of me, but there are multiple me"s.&rdquo;

it"s a matter of perspective #49

This exhibition borrows its name from Willliam Gibsons first published short story, Fragments of a Hologram Rose. As the story notes, when a hologram is cut into pieces, even the smallest section still contains the whole of the image. In a similar way, plant cuttings and an edition of digital works can both hold these mirroring elements of origin and multiplicity. The artists featured in the exhibition were asked to imagine and create their own sci-fi plants. Like botanists from a parallel future, these artists cultivated their fictions into existence. They sub-scattered seed pods, pruned polygon cuttings, gave their models plenty of volumetric lighting, and soaked them in fluid simulations. The 3D objects in this exhibition have secret pathways and telepathic tendrils. They bloom on neon skins and disperse nano mold spores through LCD screens. Like an ikebana of poisonous flowers in zero gravity, they hover in the expanse as a collection of fragmented flora files. Rick Silva

Feral File  Fragments of a Hologram Rose

What remains when everything else is gone?

&ldquo;Forest Transmission&rdquo; is an animated painting that explores the intersection of collectibles, faded memories, and the future of our planet.

This painting contains elements created in collaboration with kytGan, a generative adversarial network (styleGAN 2) trained on a database of the first six years of kyttenjanae&rsquo;s art. The kytGan outputs are cross-trained on various datasets to produce the desired results, generating a final stylized latent walk cycle.

Forest Transmission #25

Were used to following instructions. The pandemic has only increased our need to be told what to do: Everywhere, lines of security tape delimited the spaces we could go, or where we could sit. While we navigate a changing environment, looking for directions and adapting to circumstances, we try to improve, to learn something new, to keep calm, to do more exercise. Meanwhile, the platforms and apps we use apply the algorithms designed by their developers to cater to our needs, customize our experiences, and gently influence our behavior. Instructions follow: As we move into the future, there will continue to be more indications, regulations, and control placed over us. The artworks in this exhibition explore our relationships with digital devices and information systems from the perspectives of both humans and machines, as a way to reflect on how our present time is governed by codes, regulations, and defaults. Pau Waelder

Feral File  Instructions Follow

Antoine Schmitt has rewritten a computer game he initially created in the 1970s, using the programming language Logo. &ldquo;Minos&rdquo; is an interactive game based on the well-known Greek myth in which the player, in the role of Theseus, has to escape an invisible maze before getting caught by a Minotaur. Both characters are represented by circles inside a minimalistic maze that is only made visible as they continue to explore the labyrinth. The artwork offers an engaging gameplay and can also be contemplated as a generative visual composition reminiscent of kinetic and op art, in line with the aesthetics of the artist&rsquo;s other process-based works.

Conceptually, the game explores the unspoken rules and codes that we encounter in our daily lives, whether on the level of administrative regulations, social behavior, or software. From this perspective, the game&rsquo;s objective (constant escape from an endless labyrinth inhabited by a threatening character) can have multiple meanings. As one example, in Minos, the walls of the labyrinth aren&rsquo;t the only hidden component, as the rules of the game are also obscured at first. The player has to discover the rules by playing, and in that sense, it is a game with instructions that follow.

Minos #71

Hypothetically Macro, is a mysterious cluster of glowing semitransparent organic primitives. The artist leverages the Processing programming language to deeply explore several variations of a single visual theme. Exploring the creation of new worlds through generative algorithms, Velitchkova presents us with images that could just as easily be on the other side of a microscope as they could a telescope. One might seem like a nucleus with quasi-biological elements embedded into a transparent cytoplasm at one minute, and the next a celestial body with an orbital structure and a background of infinite darkness. The grid reads almost like an animatic or a storyboard propelling us through a single ecosystem frame by frame.

Hypothetically Macro #29

From the shredded side of a Hologram, one can peek into the 3D objects&rsquo; Delta Axis. From this perspective, one can see the Holograms render objects, which form a repository of layered information about the Holograms provenance, metadata, and other information that the unscathed Hologram itself would never prevail.

The Shredded Hologram Rose #29

Feral File  On Screen Presence

Performance and Auction: May 30th, 2022 17:00 UTC+0 

The live performance is open to the public. Collecting this Access Pass grants access to an editioned recorded video of the live streamed performance. 

The auction for the artwork created during the performance begins 30 May, 2022 17:00 UTC+0. The auction winner will receive a unique iron sculpture, unique digital output of render produced by software, codebase, and recorded video of live streamed performance, sent within seven days after live performance.

Since 2020, 0xDEAFBEEF has been known primarily for creating generative audiovisual works that explore the limits of blockchain both technically and conceptually. For the first time, Sketches in Iron combines the artists core interest in software with a lesser known facet of their background, metalworking. Pushing the boundary further between digital computation and a 6,000 year-old industrial practice that plays out through a choreographed live streamed performance, the artist introduces their own biological, mineral content as catalyst for the work.

The work was performed publicly for the first and only time on feralfile.com through an iframe pointed at a YouTube livestream on May 30th, 2022 at 17:05 UTC. 100 individuals purchased access passes, which allowed them to receive an edition of the recording, post-live performance. The unique iron sculpture created during the livestream performance was auctioned to one individual.

Sketches in Iron #56

When Claudia Hart was asked to join the Feral File &ldquo;sculpture show,&rdquo; she took a quantum leap, initiating a discussion with the artists and curator about NFTs, the real and (un)real, and questions of ownership and authenticity. Ultimately, her contribution to the show deconstructs that which is known by reconstructing the image of Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray&rsquo;s muse and a true Dada icon. Hart, always a rebel against the tech bros, takes Kiki and breaks her neck. When Kiki gazes at the viewer it is in a seductive defiance, haunting us in a visceral way. Hart&rsquo;s simulation will leave viewers stunned with its rich sensuality, the oddity of Kiki&rsquo;s gaze, and Hart&rsquo;s multi-layered use of technology-all of which combine to assure the collector that to gaze at Kiki is to catch a glimpse of the infinite possibilities of kindred spirits across the vast canon of art history.

Kiki.object #53

Embodiment of Community

Everything's nuking. But it's gonna be ok. Pigeons are resilient. Everything's coo.