I started my journey into web3 with nonfungible tokens (NFTs), both as a creator and collector. I experimented with generative AI before it was something everyone could do themselves. I love art, music and creative expression. And I believe that NFTs empower artists. As a community builder, I also love the way NFTs incorporate utility to connect brands with their fans, users and communities. 

Three NFT art installations during TOKEN2049 week in Singapore captured my attention.

Notes From the Ether: From NFTs To AI

Generative AI Art and NFTs were showcased in a gallery worthy of them with a public exhibition titled Notes from the Ether: From NFTs to AI, a month long retrospective at Singapore’s iconic ArtScience Museum on Marina Bay. 

This exhibition is overseen by ArtScience Museum curator Deborah Lim and guest curator Clara Che Wei Peh, founder of NFT Asia and co-curator of the Generating/Iterating exhibition I visited during Singapore Art Week earlier this year. The exhibition featured seminal works from 20 pioneering artists and creative technologists who have pushed digital and AI generative art into the mainstream. 

I fan-girled over an installation by AI music masters Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst. I stood in awe before Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin, the first tokenized art on the blockchain. In fact, it predated the launch of Ethereum by five months. Oh, to have been at the Where Gallery in Brooklyn in 2015, where Meyohas mined 100,000 Bitchcoins during a month-long crypto art installation. The Bitchcoin project has continued to evolve and morph over the years, rising in value and meaning as a tokenized artwork. For collectors, they own a treasured piece of crypto art history. 

“To buy a Bitchcoin is to speculate that the Venn diagram in which technology, feminism, art and finance overlap will only continue to expand in cultural importance and value” - Sarah Meyohas. 

I then had my mind blown by Botto, a crypto art project and DAO. Botto is an AI that generates works of art based on prompts from the community. The community votes on images generated to determine which are aesthetically worthy of minting and auctioning each week. Once sold, revenue is returned to the DAO. The community guides Botto, a decentralized autonomous artist, to develop its career as an artist. Human and machine co-creating. An experiment in AI governance. Incredible.

GASHO 2.0 Japan: Beyond The Dimension 

Selection of artworks displayed in Singapore

I’m a sucker for anime, so I was very excited to visit GASHO 2.0’s first exhibition in Singapore. This Japanese art brand is known for creating metal canvas art, using a proprietary technique to print in multiple layers, transforming digital artworks into visually compelling 2.5D artworks. The gallery even provided gloves to give visitors a sensory experience by engaging with the raised surfaces of each work. 

The exhibition showcased highly sought-after Japanese NFT artists, selling works as a package of an animated NFT with its corresponding physical artwork. I was also happy to see artists from Singapore, Malaysia, India and Thailand exhibiting their work. Gasho 2.0 is currently helping traditional artists from disciplines as diverse as Chinese calligraphy and landscape to onboard into web3 with NFTs and 2.5D artworks and will be curating further exhibitions in the future.

Music for Blockchains #1 by Radarboy3000. Owned by Rorka

I feel privileged to have been at The Ordinals Summit Asia to see a masterfully curated exhibition featuring 12 crypto artists who have minted their digital art on Bitcoin. I learned that the Bitcoin community prefers to use the term ‘digital artifact’ to describe an NFT. These digital artifacts are inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain using Ordinals. 

The exhibition's curation was undertaken by Radarboy3000, a renowned digital artist hailing from South Africa and the visionary behind Crypto Art Week Asia.

His creative endeavors draw inspiration from the realm of computational art and the captivating aesthetics inherent in the dance music culture. His artistic philosophy gravitates towards minimalism, predominantly employing monochromatic palettes, and seeks to explore the profound intersections of human-machine collaboration to unearth meaning and beauty.

At the heart of this exhibition was "Music for Blockchains," a dynamic NFT creation that perpetually evolves as a generative artwork and soundscape. This innovative piece visualizes and audibly interprets data extracted from each freshly mined Bitcoin block. It stands as one of the pioneering fully on-chain generative audio projects, offering a dynamic and evolving audio crypto artwork experience intricately intertwined with the blockchain's own evolution. Much like the nature of Bitcoin itself, this artwork defies a static or final form, growing and adapting in harmony with the ever-evolving blockchain it mirrors.

Lead image: Deep Meditation: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes. 2018. Artist Memo Akten.