Friday, July 16 | 12—1:30 PM EST
Online via YouTube Live
FREE (no registration required) 

A panel exploring the recent NFT (non-fungible token) craze and the merits of the blockchain as an artistic and activist medium. Sharing their experience as artists, curators, software developers, and critics in the crypto space, Sarah Friend, Mitchell F. Chan, and Martin Zeilinger will involve the audience in a critical dialogue on a wide range of topics, including: recent blockchain art projects, the critical potential of smart contracts, new digital divides resulting from the platformization of crypto art, and the emergence of new forms of community empowerment based on decentralized collaboration on the blockchain.

This event was presented as part of Vector Festival 2021. A recording of the event can be viewed here.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of Recurse Centre, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web.

Mitchell F. Chan is a new media artist who uses sophisticated electronics to explore notions of presence and absence, movement and stillness. In his latest series of kinetic sculptures, Chan continues his use of the motorized string as a point of departure. In Studies In Movement, Absentia, rapidly spinning coloured elastic strings appear as transparent helixes, volumetric yet intangible. Belying their actual nature by moving faster than the human eye can perceive, the spinning strings exists in a quantum state: a hyperkinetic one-dimensional line in no fixed location, producing an apparently static three-dimensional space. Mitchell has been covered by The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star and Eye Weekly. 

Martin Zeilinger is an Austrian researcher and curator currently based in Dundee, Scotland, where he works as Senior Lecturer in Computational Arts and Technology at Abertay University. Zeilinger's work focuses on artistic and activist experimentation with emerging technologies (primarily blockchain and AI), intellectual property issues in contemporary art, and aspects of experimental videogame culture. The most recent outcome of this work is a monograph on AI art, creative agency, and the limits of intellectual property (meson press 2021). He has co-curated Vector Festival (Toronto) since 2014, and organised the 2019 MoneyLab symposium (London). Zeilinger's research has been published in books including Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain and the MoneyLab Reader 2, and journals including Philosophy & Technology, Culture Machine, and Media Theory.


ABOUT VECTOR FESTIVAL

Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, kris kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.