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Thailand bans Non-Fungible Tokens

*Live by the blockchain, suffer with the blockchain. If you lie down with Dogecoins, you get up with their fleas. https://www.engadget.com/thailand-bans-meme-coins-nft-113518980.html Thailand is the latest country to impose curbs on cryptocurrency trading. The southeast Asian nation’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has implemented a ban on meme coins like Dogecoin. Last week, exchanges […]

Rhizome welcomes the Metaverse

If there is anything left of metaverses after ten years, probably they’ll be preserved at Rhizome. https://rhizome.org/about/ Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation. Founded by artist Mark Tribe as a listserve including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role […]

25 years of Virtual Reality at Ars Electronica

*Virtual Reality is by no means a new idea. Whenever it revives, it tends to use some new language to re-legimate itself. *Any “metaverse” built today will age very much like this avant-garde hardware from the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

Transforming industries with NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise

*It’s hype and vaporware. Virtual Reality has been promising to “transform” this and that for forty years. *On the other hand, look at the fidelity of those images and the sophistication of that simulated physics. This is not a mere visual toy for games and consumers.

“Navigation Basics in Omniverse Create”

*This is NVIDIA’s idea of a good time doing some metaverse construction. *I’ve noticed that the process of building metaverses is generally more interesting that being in one. Look at the complexity of those tools, and the vast kits of objects already created. *Fewer than 300 people have seen this video. The users are […]

The NVIDIA Omniverse

*It’s a “metaverse for engineers,” according to them. *This is a metaverse much like the others, but NVIDIA is a hardware company, so the strategy here is to maximize the purchase and use of expensive processing chips.

UbuWeb

One can trust e-flux to have plenty of interesting news on arcane topics of this sort. “UbuWeb. All avant-garde, all the time!” June 12, 2021 Château de Montsoreau Kenneth Goldsmith 1996 May 22–July 1, 2021 Château de Montsoreau—Museum of Contemporary Art Passage du Marquis de Geoffre 49730 Montsoreau France Hours: Monday–Sunday 10am–7pm T +33 […]

Showtime: an NFT gallery for creators and curators

https://tryshowtime.com/ Showtime, also known as tryshowtime, is yet another NFT display platform with yet another design scheme. Showtime is not a 3D metaverse or a wunderkammer, but rather a set of flat, connected webpages where NFT collections from many different NFT auction platforms are arranged in clickable panes. The scheme behind showtime is to […]

“Featured by Binance:” an NFT gallery directly owned by a cryptocurrency exchange

*Why shouldn’t the banker also be the gallerists, if it’s “blockchain art” anyway? *This gallery is still vaporware; it doesn’t exist. It’s interesting to hear the cryptocoin traders describing why they want it to exist and why it would serve their commercial interests. https://featured.market/blog/introducing-featured-by-binance.html https://featured.market/blog/introducing-featured-by-binance.html Teck CEO of Featured by Binance 10 June 2021 Introducing Featured by […]

NFT gallery display spaces: oncyber.io

*The entrepreneurs at oncyber.io have seen the difficulties with NFT display galleries. They’ve tried to invent a simple technical solution. *The user can pick among four standard “gallery spaces” that oncyber already designed. *Then the oncyber system reads the user’s “wallet” and picks out any NFT properties it can recognize. *The user is then […]

Il mercato degli NFT è già morto?

*Well, no. Il mercato degli NFT è già morto?

Decorate your metaverse parcel with your NFT art

*Instead of making a cyberspace into an art gallery, maybe it’s more commercially sensible to use NFTs to decorate a virtual space that you already own as part of a game. https://www.playtoearn.online/2021/06/12/megacryptopolis-partners-with-rarible-to-decorate-world/ City building game MegaCryptoPolis has partnered with NFT marketplace Rarible to allow players to decorate their custom building interiors and storefronts with NFTs in […]

Spatial-dot-io

*The NFT wunderkammers are multiplying as fast as we can blog them. Some are new; others were already doing similar work and see the chance to pivot.

Chinese Martian augmented reality

*I may be mistaken, but I think these are the first augmented reality images from another planet. https://720yun.com/t/d9vktq8wprm?scene_id=73950360

RareRooms

*”RareRooms” is one among many new experiments to host NFT art in virtual spaces, semi-virtual spaces, game-like spaces, or physical spaces with screens, or with projectors, or, well, “wunderkammers” of pretty much every descripti0n. “One description is “metaverse parcel.” Why is it called a “parcel?” Because it’s unreal-estate of a defined dimension and it can […]

The latest commercial product from Electronic Arts

*If you’re not a gamer, you may not be aware of how cinematic immersive games are nowadays. This is the current state-of-the-art from Electronic Arts, “Battlefield 2042.” *To view this trailer, you may be required to state that you’re over 18, because this war-game is fantastically violent. *In the meanwhile, for Electronic Arts, “battlefield 2021” […]

Unfortunate people suffering injury with Virtual Reality

*These mishaps are considered so amusing that they’ve become a genre on YouTube. Obviously they’re hilarious, although there’s something truly pitiful about the spectacle of blindfolded, disoriented people who are bound with cables and tumbling helplessly into walls and floors. *Also, consider the cruel sensibility of someone who would film that intimate, humiliating moment and […]

Bandits attack Electronic Arts gaming company

*Oddly, this is not a ransomware attack, but these seem like some especially bold and loud criminals. *You’ll notice that they’re especially happy about seizing the company’s creative tools. They’re offering to sell the tools to commercial rivals or to other hackers. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-brea*Twench-gaming-giant-electronic-arts-steal-game-source-code/ (…) Stolen EA data worth $28 million The attackers claim to […]

Virtual reality construction tools, formerly from Google

*Google couldn’t find a mass user-base for these and decided to open-source them. *By the standards of tech-art, Tilt Brush is sophisticated while Google Poly was colossal, but they’re nowhere near the epic scale of YouTube. So now “Open Brush” and the “Icosa Gallery” have appeared. https://uploadvr.com/tilt-brush-open-free-pc-vr/ Open Brush, an open source version of […]

The Torino Urban Lab newsletter

*If you’re in Torino, this newsletter is a good way to keep up with some of the odder and more innovative local developments in architecture and urban planning. *Of course it’s all in Italian. 111 architetture – Torino Contemporanea: presentazione e visite guidate Urban Lab, con la collaborazione di Ordine degli Architetti PPC di […]

Why is an “Alien Crypto Punk” worth ten million dollars?

*Well, there are reasons. They may not be great reasons, but they do exist. https://www.christies.com/features/10-things-to-know-about-CryptoPunks-11569-1.aspx In 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, founders of New York-based software company Larva Labs, created a software program that would generate thousands of different, strange-looking characters. At first, they thought they might have had the makings of a smartphone […]

Meanwhile, in blockchain art land

June 10, 2021: *Every Crypto Punk ever generated:

A “Creator Economy” “Market Map”

*It has some “non-fungible token” markets in it, and those people will probably be happy to be noticed. *Markets never actually come in rectangular boxes like this. However, it can be interesting to ponder possible relationships between companies you’ve never heard of. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/creator-economy-market-map/

Inventions in camps and prisons

*No matter how difficult life may be as an “artmaker,” there’s always someone else who has it worse. *This meditation on “adversarial interoperability” is from Cory Doctorow’s “Pluralistic” list. Today’s links * Prisoners’ Inventions: The unmissable new edition of a maker classic for a carceral nation. * This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016, […]

The winners of the Golden Nicas from Ars Electronica

*These awards are important, validating events in the electronic art world, but these dreadful Zoom meetings can’t end soon enough. https://ars.electronica.art/press/en/ Prix Ars Electronica The Winners of the Golden Nicas 2021 Curtains up for the winners of the Prix Ars Electronica 2021! Emiko Ogawa (Head of Prix Ars Electronica), Martin Honzik (CCO […]

Nevada Museum of Art: Land Art Past, Present and Futures

*The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada. They are to land art what Ars Electronica in Linz are the electronic art. They’ve got the archives; they are the arbiters. https://www.nevadaart.org/conference2021/ Commemorating 50 years of Land Art, the Nevada Museum of Art convenes its triennial 2021 Art + Environment Season Land Art: Past, Present, […]

Mozilla Hubs/Sketchfab Interdimensional Art Gallery

*Gives one a sense of what the 3D metaverse creatives are up to lately. When you’re putting on an interdimensional art show you need somewhere to host your party. Places, spaces, architecture, planes of existence – where will you take us!? •Create a 3D model of an imaginative and functional interdimensional art gallery […]

Carla Gannis interview

https://www.playform.io/editorial/peep-o-rama Digital artist and early adopter of Playform Carla Gannis debuts latest VR sculpture “peep-o-rama” in new exhibit from Feral File. According to the Curator’s note by Julie Walsh, “the exhibit examines, 1) the real and (un)real in digital sculpture; 2) questions about what it means to view and collect digital sculptures; and 3) […]

Announcement: Aksioma on nettime

At Share Festival we are quite the fans of the time-honored “nettime” email list. They help us learn what is going on in Ljubljana. Dear friends, I kindly invite you to follow the MemesteticA programme, which is running until 2 July 2021 in Ljubljana and online: Tactics & Practice #11 MEMESTETICA 19 MAY–2 JUL […]

A Museum of Other Realities

The pandemic has fertilized the eccentricities of the festival scene. ICYMI: Cannes XR, NewImages Festival, and Tribeca Festival will launch XR3 – a shared space for viewing XR projects from their respective festivals – at the Museum of Other Realities tomorrow, June 9. The launch coincides with the opening day of Tribeca and NewImages. The VR […]

A guide to virtual reality creation apps

*Get them before Google discontinues them! Google Blocks, Google Poly, Google Tiltbrush, etc https://www.museumor.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-vr-art-creation-apps “From sculpting to animating, there’s a range of software for creating in VR. However, with how fast the industry changes, figuring out where to start can be daunting, so we compiled this list. “Note that the type of […]

“Proof of Art” NFT show in Linz

https://www.ooelkg.at/en/exhibition/exibitions/detail/proof-of-art-eine-kurze-geschickte-der-nfts-von-den-anfaengen-der-digitalen-kunst-bis-zum-metaverse.html PROOF OF ART. A BRIEF HISTORY OF NFTS, FROM THE BEGINNINGS OF DIGITAL ART TO THE METAVERSE FRANCISCO CAROLINUM LINZ / 11. JUN. 2021 TILL 15. SEP. 2021 SONDERAUSSTELLUNG Duration of the exhibition: 10 June – 15 September 2021 Francisco Carolinum, Linz Francisco Carolinum presents PROOF OF ART, the world’s first museum exhibition on the […]

VR in the Turinese National Museum of Cinema

*The Museo Nazionale del Cinema, which abounds in historic media oddities, has decided to add some virtual reality to its attractions.

Touring the Wunderkammer

A “Wunderkammer” or “wonder chamber” was a closet full of wondrous oddities. They flourished four hundred years ago. When scientific disciplines matured, and taxonomies improved, then “wonder chambers” went out of intellectual style. But today “wonder chambers” make sense for displays of “emerging media” or “transmedia” or “new media,” when lines of definition don’t […]

Into the Wunderkammer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities https://agoradigital.art/blog-carla-gannis-cabinet-of-curiosities/ https://carlagannis.com

Announcement: PIXELACHE HELSINKI 2021: #BURN

*It’s a press-release via the SPECTRE list. Greetings! Latest edition of Pixelache Festival in Helsinki starts in a few days, welcome to follow week-long online radio stream & selected AV streams from afar. apologies in advance for x-posting. PIXELACHE HELSINKI 2021: #BURN____ Press release https://burn.pixelache.ac/press Soon 20-year-old Pixelache Helsinki, a transdisciplinary platform for emerging […]

News from Serpentine Galleries

*It’s a press release from the “Serpentine R&D Platform.” Dear Friends, Just like many, we have been following the fast-paced evolution of the NFT space, and so on Monday 7th of June at 8.30pm BST/3.30pm EDT, Serpentine’s Legal Lab is organising an event in partnership with Rhizome — From Black Boxes to Open Systems: NFTs and the Law to […]

Matt Kane: “Meules after Claude Monet” in an NFT metaverse

*This is a well-designed metaverse gallery. The artist built it himself, although it’s hosted in the Cryptovoxels metaverse, as indeed many NFT galleries are. *Along with a detailed story about his new NFT artwork (which is currently being auctioned in the “Natively Digital” show at Sotheby’s) Matt Kane takes the further trouble to display […]

“Natively Digital: a Curated NFT Sale” at Sotheby’s

“As Sotheby’s auction house remarks: ‘Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale’ is NOW open for bidding! And tomorrow the multi-venue global exhibition in partnership with Samsung and SamsungUS will open in our galleries in NYC, London, Hong Kong and across the metaverse.” *I recommend a look at these artworks, not because you ought to hasten to […]

Metaverse platforms: Roblox

It’s been a rough time for art galleries, since sharing infected air with one’s fellow art enthusiasts can be fatal. However, this situation has been a major boost to virtual 3D environments. Although online “metaverses” by no means new, they crash less nowadays, they’re better-designed and more entertaining, and they have some profitable business […]

The A16Z NFT Canon

*NFTs are an industry, and A16Z, which is Marc Andreesen’s venture capital outfit in Silicon Valley, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this space. *There are people who claim that blockchains aren’t an industry, and that non-fungible tokens must therefore be even less of an industry. The response from blockchainers would […]

New from NOME Gallery

Nome Gallery, based in Berlin, is one of Share Festival’s favorite galleries, since it’s run by a former Share staffer and has a lot of our favorite artists in it. We’ll be doing a lot of event announcements in the blog, especially for gallerists and events, who have really suffered. They’re of specialized interest, so […]

NFT platforms: where the action is

*Who wants to know about ten years of dry history of crypto art? “Show me the Lamborghinis!!” *Because blockchains and cryptocoins are involved, everybody in the NFT space talks like that. There’s quite a lot going on. There are various NFT platforms with radically different payment methods and various business models. Some are big […]

A blockchain art history timeline

Here’s a worthy effort at blockchain art history compiled by our esteemed colleagues at “Furtherfield.” It’s way too early for any definitive history, but they’re putting in some noble effort here, so we should profit by it. https://decal.furtherfield.org/2020/05/22/a-blockchain-art-history-timeline/ Most artworld engagements with blockchain technologies have focused on the business of art. Artworld […]

A history of “crypto art”

The Non-Fungible Token scene caught fire in 2021, but for a full ten years before that, technology artists were extensively experimenting with blockchains and other forms of cryptography. Here at Share Festival it’s been our experience that the pioneers rarely get their due; it’s quite common for innovations to bubble along in the […]

Lia at Christie’s

*Lia is yet another of our former Share Festival judges, and this is our first Artmaker blogposts which has topical news. *We plan to place a lot of news on this blog because, after the coma of the epidemic, there’s a lot going on among our favorite tech-art contingents; a kind of crescendo, even. […]

A recent aerial tour of Torino (by drone, of course)

*We didn’t make this aerial video, but Torino abounds in drones and, as a center of the Italian aerospace industry, Torino is particularly drone-friendly. There’s also quite a lot of technical manufacturing and artisanal electronics in Torino. *Torino looks somewhat calm and subdued in this video — because there was a pandemic going […]

More attractive Turinese amenities

*This is another of our Share Festival art jurors, Max Casacci. As you can see, he’s laying down a techno track inside a Turinese palace. *Here in Torino, we have an abundance of techno music and techno festivals, and just a plethora of palaces. This unique combo of the digital and the baroque is […]

Why you should read our new Share Festival technology art blog

*We are modest and well-mannered Turinese people at Share Festival. We never boast of our accomplishments and our extensive knowledge of the technological art scene. *However, since meeting us to participate in our researches, one of our festival’s art jurors has become a published author. Also, she will soon take command of the International Space […]

Artmaker testing post

*Torino! Always on the move, into the future of digital art!

Social Codes at Feral File

“Feral File” is a small and closely focussed NFT art market where the ten curated exhibits double as a gallery show. Everything sold out. It sold so rapidly that the site crashed. These are good times for the non-fungible token. You can’t be the first to “own” these works — but you can view them. […]