Feral File  On Screen Presence

Performance and Auction: May 31st, 2022 20:00 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. 

Access Passes purchased before 20:00 UTC+0 on May 30th include access to control 10 pixels during the live stream and recorded video of the performance. Access Passes purchased after May 30th do not include interaction. Access Passes do not include a unique woodblock print on paper.

The auction for the artwork created during the performance begins May 31st, 2022 20:00 UTC+0. The auction winner will collect a unique woodblock print on paper, digital still image of final configuration, and recorded live streamed performance.

Since 1996, each iteration of John F. Simon Jr.s Every Icon series has been, at its core, a 32 x 32 grid on a digital screen, divided into 1024 squares, each representing a single pixel. But unlike prior versions, Every Icon: BlockPrint does not have the goal of moving through every computational variation, pixel by pixel, until the grid transforms into a black square. Instead, the artwork introduces variables related to chance and mediated human intervention that can only reflect a concentrated moment in space and time. 

Participants are each assigned ten of 1000 available pixels which they can turn either on or off in the span of 30 minutes. Once the clock stops, the grid will freeze. Whether the result is a distinguishable image or an abstract blotch, Simon will proceed to create a traditional woodblock print on fine art paper with oil-based matte black ink, mirroring the born-digital outcome.

Every Icon: BlockPrint #60

For Your Eyes Only aims to stimulate a conversation with contemporary artists about the future of human visual culture, and to investigate how they are working, in different ways, on the development of a visual language capable to resist machine vision and its implications, and to improve human visual communicationa post-AI, posthuman human vision. The exhibition includes images of diverse nature and origin, submitted as answers to questions of how humans will continue to see and understand images differently than machines do. The images in this exhibition can be used like answers, but they are rather proofs. They have been sent by a human to another human, each of them carrying much more than what I asked for. They are not delivering an answer, they are the answer. Try to read them, and youll soon find out that they have as many readings as readers. Enjoy, theyre for your eyes only. Domenico Quaranta

Feral File  For Your Eyes Only

Like the webcam videos Cortright has been working on since 2007, smoking-vase-1 was filmed with no post production, just live use of standard webcam software. Similar to Instagram or Snapchat videos, the effects are part of the original recording, but by contrast, smoking-vase-1 is not part of a networked system designed for data mining and facial recognition. The looping animation is slow, simple, and with a focus on beauty, which led Cortright to her choice of subject as well as the obsolete filter. To shoot smoking-vase-1, Cortright used an old 2014 Mac OS, which gives the image a vintage flavor. A favorite subject of her digital paintings, flowers are featured here as a fragile metaphor of time passing, of a relationship between the real and digital sphere that is ever evolving, never the same.

smoking-vase-1 #70

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

Joana Moll conceived &ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; as a critical reflection on the promises of the technological sector, with companies confidently asserting that all problems can be fixed with large amounts of data and software. While global emergencies such as climate change and the COVID pandemic (not to mention other social, political, and economic crises) cannot be solved with an app, corporations still rely on techno-solutionism, which contributes to the obfuscation of these realities. Blindly relying on technology also prevents users from questioning what lies behind the solutions that these companies are offering, and from questioning how efficient they really are.

The artwork collects a series of slogans, brand identities, and stock images used by the major companies in the IT sector to sell their products. These are endlessly combined and repeated, showing to what extent these sentences are vague, empty of meaning, interchangeable, and generic. However, they also reveal the companies&rsquo; underlying ambition to control and shape the world through information analysis and predictive algorithms, which is a disturbing prospect for a society in which everything has become a resource to extract data and labor from.

&ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; was originally commissioned by HeK (Haus der elektronischen K&uuml;nste Basel) as part of the Hek Net Works program.

Ultimate Solvers #21

A primordium is an organ at the earliest stages of development, a mass of cell tissue teeming with potentiality. For Sage Jenson, primordium is material at the precipice of desire, and their material of choice. Their work functions in the aesthetics of immanence; a place where machinic systems imbue each other with unending possibility, a world in motion, out of equilibrium, and pulsating with unstable flows. Each piece in Primordium, their solo exhibition, embodies this sense of becoming, an ever-unfolding actualization of the shadow future. Each piece has agents (particles) that can sense, navigate, and modify their environment. The environment acts as an arena and message board for the agents. All of the shapes and patterns are emergent behaviors within a rich parameter space. In one sense, the behavior of the agents can be viewed as a reaction to the current state of the environment; in another, the environment is a creation of the agents will upon it.  symbios.wiki

Feral File  Primordium

In the summer of 2020, Sage set out to synthesize their previous experiments into an emergent virtual organism. They developed new particle behaviors and an artisanal rendering engine. Particles imbued with homeotic potentiality shapeshift into various behavioral species, and give life to a plethora of embryonic stages. In one particular experiment, this amalgamation beget an uncanny offspring, whose particular genetic code has been unreproducible, creating an anomaly, and a treasure.

The only remaining record of this creature is a 4,749 frame video detailing the poignant gaze of its emergent eye. Embryogenesis represents a sort of <a href="https://www.marykellyartist.com/post-partum-document-1973-79">post-partum document</a> to the extinct resonances within the code. Forever trapped in a loop, lost to the symbolic order of memory. It is with a heavy heart that Sage releases their spawn into the wild, but it is the inevitable eventuality of parenthood that children escape the petri dish.

Embryogenesis #100

Feral File  Material Wonderland

This dynamic image of the Material World Knight was featured on the cover of Frieze magazine, Issue 201, in March 2019.

Material World Knight: Poster #27

Wisdoms For Neknel Passes, The Life Game (Video Posters) 

Dream Time Life Simulation (Video Poster) forms part of an allowlist quest for Wisdoms for Neknel, an extensive Web3 native project by artist collective Keiken. 

Dream Time Life Simulation, the third episode of The Life Game, explores emancipatory imagined technologies, structures and worlds that could exist in the metaverse. Following Keiken"s recent works, Viral Energy and Battle of Reality, Dream Time Life Simulation is the third episode that follows a protagonist called ME. In Dream Time Life Simulation, ME activates ALL, a decentralised reflection technology that allows you to subvert your reality. In this new reality ME"s avatars are MA and MX. Using MA"s metathinking they decide to create a technology called Dream Time Life Simulation that allows them to portal into their memories and dreams. Here they explore their multiple consciousness, ancestral wisdom and diasporic memories and dreams of their motherland, Veracruz, Mexico.

Explore: https://twitter.com/neknelworld + https://neknel.world

Dream Time Life Simulation (Video Poster) WFN Pass #4

Feral File  Chain Reaction

Jennifer and Kevin McCoys Public View / Private View opens up the artistic process of creation  usually driven by artists concepts and aesthetic choices  to a community of donors and art supporters connected to the McCoys. Collectors receive an animated composite of a series of images that are based on pictures submitted to the McCoys by a group of donors of the artists work who thereby participated in the NFTs creation process. Public View / Private View is based on the McCoys 2018 project Public Key / Private Key for which they produced a short 16mm film, donated it to the Whitney Museums Special Collection, then issued 50 Ethereum ERC-721 tokens to represent the right to be named as one of the donors of record for the film and selected 50 donors from an open call for applications. The tokens were allowed to freely circulate for a period of six months. For Public View / Private View, the McCoys asked these 50 donors of record to submit an image personally meaningful to them and created a coded interpretation of it. The interpretations of the donors 50 images were then combined into the animation that collectors can purchase as NFT. The 50 donors receive an ink-on-paper version of the image. While Public Key / Private Key made the donation process accessible to a wider public, Public View / Private View involves the donors in the creation process itself. Using the blockchain as authentication and distribution mechanism, the two projects form a creative chain that not only binds the artists as makers to an expanding community of interested supporters, but makes the nodes along the way a formal part of the work itself. In Public View / Private View the blockchain anchors the creation, distribution, and archiving process of the artwork.

Public View / Private View #15

Sedition

As you move through the world you leave traces of your path. Your presence produces a wake of activity that is most often slight and barely significant, but sometimes you do something and it causes a stir, and the world around you shifts and realigns to adapt, even as you yourself  intertwined as you are with the world  adapt to what is changing around you. 

This short film encodes both the dynamic stability of calm, and the sudden injections of growth that ground and realign the calm, as a play of sharply organic forms. The colours represent the passions, the darknesses, and the lights of ourselves as we move through the world. - text by Damian Stewart

This exclusive artwork by LIA is a complimentary work offered to all those who buy a book by Alisha Fernandez Miranda called My What If Year, available globally via Amazon . In addition, it has also been gifted to every owner of LIA"s previous artworks on Sedition. 

Biding My Time by LIA #12

Exhibition

Soft Waking is a curated generative series exploring textural softness and the voices of color.

Edition of 25

Medium: Algorithmic Design - PNG output from code

Dimensions: 3500 x 5000 px

This original generative art was created with code utilizing the p5.js library.  2023 Lisa Orth - All Rights Reserved

Soft Waking #10

Patches of code hand stitched together; for loops, rectangles, if statements, and randomness.

The artist describes the work as "patches of code hand stitched together; for loops, rectangles, if statements, and randomness," referencing the recurring theme in Anna Lucia"s work that seeks the tension between computer science concepts and traditionally feminine crafts, such as textile work. It suggests that working with code has a material character for the artist and can be likened to craftsmanship. Using "hand stitched" may imply an element of following intuition in the construction of the work rather than following a systematic structure or technique. These ideas come together upon examination of the variety of outputs where rectangles overlap in a balancing act between following a strict grid and improvisational placement.

Patched Paradise #31

Discs is a generative curated project. It is an exploration of the generative medium and its intrinsic characteristics. It observes how abstract systems can evoke memories and life experiences.

Discs (the word for vinyl records in Catalan) relates to records visually and explores the idea of phonograph records being a medium having their own characteristics and their crackling sound.
Can we push the generative medium to find it"s particular and unique characteristics and reveal them visually?

Generative algorithms use a lot of randomness, as the ending of the lines and arcs in Discs; generative uses noise, as used in the background of the artwork, the visual crackling, we could say; a lot of loops, and algorithmic systems.

The system behind Discs places elements scattered on a grid. Each element then, looks for it"s neighbors. If it"s not isolated the visually links to them.
An allegory of our life, society and relations. Our need to build connections, to relate to our closest ones, our necessity to build paths, paths that constantly and sometimes randomly change, paths that diverge and grow, creating clusters and long trails.


Discs #73

PIONEER GRAILS TELL ME THE TRUTH

"TELL ME THE TRUTH was created in memory of my older brother, David Acevedo, an excellent artist in his own right. He tragically succumbed to cancer in 1986 at age 35.

The title originally came from the emotional tension of wanting to know the truth about the diagnosis of a terminal illness. But it can also apply to contemporary politics. How democratic societies are successfully sustained with agreements on scientific truths. However, with an acknowledgement that the facts (truth) can and should be updated as humans collectively learn more and evolve."

 Victor Acevedo

The final version of TELL ME THE TRUTH was created by combining two digitized photographs. One photo is of David Acevedo having a glass of wine, and the other photo is of a few friends sitting around a table in Hollywood, California, in front of Victor Acevedos 1981 oil painting called LE GRANDE PETIT DEJEUNER: VISCERAL ANALYTIC.

Dating from Acevedos PC Cubicomp and paint system days, TELL ME THE TRUTH includes computer graphic artifacts like "wire-frame debris" and "brush strokes" using the softwares rectangular fill feature. The artist has even kept the accidental data slur (seen at the bottom of the picture) as part of the final composition. This happened when saving the file to a hard drive that was too full to accommodate all the new data. "I suppose you can call it an early example of glitch art," Acevedo says.

EXPANDED.ART"S PIONEER GRAILS is a series of 72-HOUR OPEN NFT EDITIONS presenting paradigmatic artworks from key figures in the history of digital art.

Edition 22 / Open Edition

Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/d87122d6-cd83-4da3-ae00-0623ae728825

TELL ME THE TRUTH #22

Performance and Auction: June 2nd, 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 June 2nd, 2022 17:00 UTC+0. The auction winner will collect a unique work on paper, exhibition copy of recorded video of live streamed performance, and archival file of live streamed performance, sent within seven days after live performance.

Golan Levins The Interfered Microscopy Plot reimagines everyday objects as pareidolic landscapes, producing pen-and-ink drawings in a cybernetic process that melds micro vision, computer vision, and human interference. In Levins performance, the live feed of a digital microscope spurs the machine hallucinations of a semiautonomous drawing algorithm, whose interpretations are both coaxed and culled by the artist. Amid Levins interventions, the systems digital forms are returned to the macroscopic physical world through the raucous twittering of a relic plotting machine. Extending from his audiovisual performance Scribble (2000), The Interfered Microscopy Plot continues a thread of Levins software arts research that complicates gestural drawing through abstraction, computation, and real-time interaction.

The Interfered Microscopy Plot #55

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

Carla Gannis&rsquo;s &ldquo;peep-o-rama&rdquo; playfully examines what it has meant to gaze at a sculpture throughout the canon of art history. Inspired by one of Gannis&rsquo; vivid dreams, the piece was further informed by the Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) peep box show at the National Gallery in London. To create the colors and forms in the peep box backgrounds, she trained an AI using images from Times Square pornographic peepshows (for the colors) and images from Dutch painting (for the forms). Once a collector purchases Gannis&rsquo; work, the mystery of the peep box&rsquo;s contents is revealed through a variety of unique experiences, including a view modeled after one of Hoogstraten&rsquo;s works, a single-person VR view (which allows you to visit the inside the peep box itself), and a social VR version where you can hang out with your friends in a space-age bachelorette pad. The peep box sculpture addresses such serious topics as gender and body politics in art history, the idea of public and private ownership of data, and how technology challenges the very notion of seeing.

peep-o-rama #105

Alix Desaubliaux is interested in building narratives inside the virtual environments of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), and in exploring the concept of the &ldquo;Magic Circle&rdquo; and its connection with both ancestral rituals, and the interaction between humans and their physical surroundings. Popularized by Johan Huizinga in his book &ldquo;Homo Ludens" (1938), the magic circle is a physical (or currently, virtual) space in which actions have a specific meaning because they are part of a game. Taken further, this idea leads to considering how every space in our society is subject to a set of explicit or implicit rules and codes, so that we are all, in a certain way, players behaving in accordance with the rules of a game.

In &ldquo;Sigils,&rdquo; the artist weaves the magic circle concept with the sigil, a symbol used in magic to summon a deity or spirit, and the physical space of an abandoned foundry of metallurgical alloys. The architectural plans of the factory inspire the artist to search for sigils that invoke an &ldquo;industrial genie,&rdquo; and she carries out a fictional ritual by burning the plans and creating rings of fire as a way to activate the sigil. The sound in the piece also creates an otherworldly effect that feels similar to the sounds generated by ghost hunters who use the feedback from electronic devices to search for the voices of spirits. In this way, the artwork suggests a paranormal experience through the lens of digital media by connecting the different types of code that have shaped human societies&mdash;from incantations, to laws, to programming scripts.

Sigils #74

&ldquo;Predictive Art Bot&rdquo; is an algorithm that automatically generates concepts for artworks by combining keywords from news and article headlines in real time. Conceived by DISNOVATION.ORG and programmed by J&eacute;r&ocirc;me Saint-Clair, the artwork is a constantly updated commentary on the media&rsquo;s influence on artistic trends and discourses, as well as on the widespread expectation of contemporary and new media art to address the social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural issues of our time. The artwork goes even further by suggesting future artworks that could be created from its one-liner descriptions, which are sometimes prophetic and sometimes plainly absurd. Each sentence is disseminated online on a dedicated Twitter account, and can be read as a critique of contemporary art, as some generative nonsense, or as the seed of an actual artistic project. Through algorithmic serendipity, the artwork opens up unlikely associations of ideas that could stimulate unconventional forms of creativity.

Since its original inception in 2015, &ldquo;Predictive Art Bot&rdquo; has taken on many different forms, including an LED sign, an installation, a video projection, and a website. On Feral File, the artwork can be collected as an archive of all the predictions published on Twitter since September 2015. In this iteration, the sentences are displayed randomly, with an indication of the date and time they were published, plus a link to the original tweet.

Predictive Art Bot #74

Fractura picks up on the modes of representation that image transformation enables. Just as Pop Art took over and somehow shifted the world of visual advertising, Gamma slightly dislocates technological images so that they reveal something other than what they are meant to. And similar to the way Pop artists were enthusiastic about the trivial world of signs, Gamma is taken with the unintentional beauty of machine art. Featuring a rotating cyborghian, genderless head, Fractura displays the classic elements of Gammas GIFs: line drawings, flat 3D objects, rotating models, body parts, an indexed color palette, all of which generate characters that somewhere on the internet have been defined transsexual Bellmeresque zombiedroids.

Fractura #78

According to the art critic Arthur C. Danto, To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decryan atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. Since 2014, Jonas Lund has been making abstract paintings using elements sampled from paintings by other emerging artists, optimized for market success. The morphing animations in Smart Cut are made out of images from this series that were not selected for production: works as part of the process, works as they were before they got good, left-over abstractions. Turned into animations, these discarded imagesnot art, according to Lund"s artistic theoryhave been selected by a smart cut algorithm as the best ones and automatically pieced together.