News from Feral File

As we head toward the end of the year, it’s been a good time to reflect upon the year. Despite the volatility in the world, I’m thankful for the continued support from the wonderful curators and artists in the Feral File community. They have invested in our vision of making digital art more accessible to experience and collect.

But before we close out the year, we still have two more exhibitions coming up.

Opening on November 21 is Peer to Peer, minted on Ethereum, with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), curated by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan. I could fill this entire newsletter with thoughts about the show, but I’ll link to our announcement email instead. If you’re in Miami for Art Basel at the end of this month, join AKG and Feral File at the Peer to Peer Launch Party. Attendees will receive an exclusive digital souvenir that’s connected to the heritage of the Museum, which is reopening early next year. I can’t share what it is, but it’s worth your time to get to the party. The exhibition is a fundraiser for the museum — by collecting, you’re directly impacting the museum and its future support for the digital art we love.

Next week, we will also unveil a special gift for those who can’t join us in Miami and more details around collecting the exhibit.

Our second exhibition is a solo show with a Feral File alumnus curated by different Feral File alumnus, opening on December 8. We’ll have more on that soon — it’s worthy of its own email.

ICYMI, our work with MoMA, Refik Anadol, and AKG were discussed in this recent New York Times article. Last year, we were proud to present Anadol’s Unsupervised. This year, from November 19 (tomorrow) to March 05, 2023, Unsupervised will be viewable at MoMA’s Gund Lobby. As with the AKG party in Miami, visitors will receive an exclusive NFT gift from our digital art wallet Autonomy in this collaboration with MoMA.

Hint: you may want to visit the installation multiple times in the coming months….I’ll be there opening weekend to claim my gift.

We have delayed migration off the Bitmark Blockchain

You may remember that we’re in the process of moving all of our Bitmark blockchain NFTs to either Ethereum or Tezos. This was originally scheduled for this time now, but we’ve decided to delay things to the end of the year as we prioritize the work of executing the remainder of our exhibition schedule.

Native Web3 Support for Ethereum and Tezos Collectors

Starting with Auriea Harvey’s solo exhibition, Gray Matter, we now provide native web3 support for your wallet. This means when we run an Ethereum exhibition like Gray Matter, you can use your Ethereum wallet to collect just as you would on any other platform; the same is true for Tezos, which you can try out with exhibitions like Ecotone.

Now that we have native support, you’ll no longer need to deposit funds into our Wyre wallet. We’ll be discontinuing that shortly — please move forward with transferring any funds you have there into your web3 wallet.

As it’s been a while since I’ve written to everyone, I’d like to remind you of some of the excellent exhibitions we’ve had recently that are still open for collecting:

• Auriea Harvey: Gray Matter (Ethereum)

  • A solo show featuring interactive sculptures created from scans of physical sculptures, each of which was made from discarded material of previous works. The auction pieces also come with a physical sculpture. Just this week, Harvey was named in The Artsy Vanguard 2022.

• Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process (Tezos)

  • A group show curated by Jesse Damiani that looks into the “sketchbooks” of new media artists in order to explore our relationships with digital tools.

• Harbingers (Tezos)

  • A group show curated by Julia Kaganskiy that assembles visions of transhumanist desires and technogenic anxieties. Every time the works are sold and traded on-chain, a random glitching process progressively manipulates and mutates them.

• Ecotone (Tezos)

  • A group show with works from the Glitch community that explore the entanglements of digital and natural ecologies, curated by Primavera De Filippi, Stina Gustafsson, and Alex Estorick.

• Doppelganger (Tezos)

  • A group show that crosses and fuses notions of digital and physical self, curated by Chris Coleman. First collectors receive a corresponding 3D print from Shapeways.

• Wetware (Bitmark)

  • A group show of cyberfeminist works, curated by Mindy Seu, in support of Seu’s new book Cyberfeminism Index.

Feel free to send us feedback on how everything is working for you and how we can do better. In addition to Discord, we’re also on Instagram and Twitter.

As always, I appreciate your support. Message me anytime with your questions and thoughts.

Michael Nguyễn

Head of Operations, Bitmark

michael@bitmark.com