Exploring the programmable potential of on-chain media, 0xDEAFBEEF’s Entropy is a series of eight tokens whose audiovisual content degrades with every transfer. Since the model that generates the work is stored entirely on-chain, anyone can compile the code, using the initial transaction hash as a seed, and recreate the work’s original state. This is the first token in the series and has been transferred once, from the artist to the current owner.
This intricate, AI-generated work by Helena Sarin is reminiscent of both ancient graven murals and the late, cellular abstractions of the French painter Jean Dubuffet. Faces, limbs, and organic forms interlock in ornate geometries that appear carefully carved by hand.
Spanning a vast spectrum of media, Sara Ludy’s practice inhabits the interface between the physical and the virtual, the real and the imaginary, the quotidian and the sublime. Her paintings submerge the viewer in a primeval landscape of prismatic colors and drifting forms. Part simulation, part dream.
In Rock, Boulder, Cobble, Pebble, Clement Valla split a 3D scan of a rock that he found into nine parts, which he then minted as nine separate NFTs. Anyone who owns all of the parts is entitled to collect the physical rock from Valla’s studio. The light-hearted game serves as a wry comment on the fractionalization of art.
Minted as part of her Satellites From the Future series, this work showcases Anne Spalter’s mastery of AI as an artistic medium. The piece is particularly remarkable for its textural transformations, with small creases in the image recalling the cracks of varnished oil paintings.
Merging cryptography with concrete poetry, 1111 by Kevin Abosch is a series of 1111 images composed of hexadecimal characters in different colors and formations. Owners of works in the series are granted membership to a DAO and made stakeholders in certain future projects by Abosch. One of these involves launching 1111 Kosmos, a satellite that will orbit the Earth and collect climate change data. Abosch will use this data to create new artworks that will be airdropped to 1111 holders.
The photocopier in REPLICATOR is an emblem of digital image technologies and the prominent role played by mass-produced images in the history of modern art. Developed in collaboration with Manifold, REPLICATOR’s underlying smart contract causes the artwork to auto-generate new NFTs repeatedly over the course of a year. However, these descendent pieces can ‘jam’, removing that generation’s future ability to replicate.
Tywen Kelly’s Worlding series considers how the world has been blanketed by a mesh of images that circulate, proliferate and recombine via digital technologies. This overabundance is expressed here through a montage of overgrown natural forms, whose lush colors and glitchy textures evoke both fertility and decay. “Will we be able to tell images and the surface of the earth apart?” the artist asks.
Mutant Garden Seeder is a series of 513 works by Harm van den Dorpel that mutate over varying periods of block time. When each ‘mutant’ is minted, the transaction hash of the birth block is used to generate a ‘chromosome’ that determines both the initial form of the work and how often it will change. The work’s appearance is also responsive to the software and the shape of the window used to view it. Marndi mutates daily.
ˈsä-v(ə-)rən-tē is the first work created by Micah Johnson on the Async Art platform. Jacque and Rayden are two real boys who have faced adversity from a young age. Every year, on the boys’ respective birthdays, certain layers of the work change to show what each boy wants to be when they grow up, offering a bitcoin wallet where people can contribute funds towards their future. The door in the center of the image opens a little bit more each year.
In this witty and beautiful work, the artist known as Artnome finds cosmic wonder in the most prosaic of places. The image is a montage of a NASA photograph depicting a cluster of stars 22,000 light years away with a photograph by the artist of a parking space covered in rock salt outside a local Starbucks.
Autoglyphs were the first artworks to be generated and stored entirely on Ethereum, meaning that they will exist for as long as the blockchain does. Referencing the aesthetic of 1960s computer art, their elaborate ASCII patterns are relics for a future as yet untold.
The plumes of color in Ezra Miller’s Solvency series drift and bleed without end. In response to the uncertain permanence of the media associated with many NFTs, Miller strove to minimize the work’s dependencies. Generated on-chain using the minting transaction hash as a seed, each work is rendered within the browser via the WebGL API. A rendered copy of each work is stored on the Arweave blockchain.
Sarah Zucker is known for her unique manner of combining digital image technologies with the obsolete medium of VHS. Her looping, low-fidelity aesthetic transports the viewer to a timeless world behind a TV screen. This ancient portal with prophetic powers embodies the spirit of Zucker’s work, which explores how the past can be a gateway to the future.
The very first works minted on SuperRare, Robbie Barrat’s AI Generated Nude Portraits were generated by a GAN trained on thousands of painted nudes from art history. In this work, a nude figure has become a desiccated landscape broken up by pools of iridescence, the primordial dream of a post-human intelligence. It is one of three hundred portraits that were minted and given to guests at the first Christie’s Tech Summit in 2018. Only a handful were ever redeemed.
Elena Dorfman’s series Empire Falling is a photographic meditation on the rock quarries of the Midwest. Each image is collaged from hundreds of photographs taken over several years. This layering of moments of time echoes the richly veined strata of rock that the photographs depict, which formed over many millennia.
720 Minutes by Alexis André is an experiment in generative time-keeping. 720 unique real-time clocks were minted on the Art Blocks platform, using the transaction hash as the seed to generate each work. This hexagonal piece pulses in and out of different crystalline formations. At a certain minute twice a day, the work is activated and a special display takes place.
We are proud to present Deep Time, the first ever exhibition on JPG.
Deep time refers to an expansive sense of time that dwarfs human history, stretching far into the past and forwards to the distant future. It is most commonly associated with cosmic and geological processes: the inching crawl of a glacier; the slow formation of a star; the gradual transformation of the Earth due to forces both natural and man-made.
The defining quality of deep time is its evasion of a human frame of reference. It is too vast and obscure to be grasped. As the American writer John McPhee described it, if the Earth’s history is the length of an arm, human history is but a single scratch of a nail file on its middle finger. The scale of deep time can be troubling, casting a shadow of insignificance over human existence. And yet by virtue of this fact, deep time has long been an alluring subject for artists, writers, and others alike, who have been enchanted by its mystery and have embraced it in their work.
Looking beyond culture, blockchain and its promise of persistence embody a different kind of deep time. Each block in a blockchain is an autonomous unit within the automated system of ‘block time’. Since the data stored on a blockchain has permanence for as long as there are active, decentralized nodes, its blocks are a potential fossil record of transactions many years or even centuries old.
The following exhibition will explore these ideas through a wide-ranging selection of artworks. Some refer to deep time directly, depicting geological matter and scenes from outer space. Others have been chosen because they incorporate duration and change in imaginative ways. There are works that mutate and degrade, works that breed other works, and works that are meant to last forever. There are works that express the potential of new technologies by returning to those of the past. And there are works that invite us to reflect on time as the medium through which each of our lives is lived.
We encourage you to take your time and hope you enjoy the show.Elena Dorfman’s series Empire Falling is a photographic meditation on the rock quarries of the Midwest. Each image is collaged from hundreds of photographs taken over several years. This layering of moments of time echoes the richly veined strata of rock that the photographs depict, which formed over many millennia.