I’ve spent much of my career finding and divulging secrets that are hidden in plain sight. In projects that involve tracking down covert CIA operations, analyzing NSA surveillance programs, or dissecting harmful AI systems, I’ve always been interested in the numerous methods humans have developed to hide secrets and the ingenious ways others have created to expose them.
 
For the PRELUDES works, I challenged myself to think about how one could hide secrets using the particularities of an entirely on-chain medium. While the blockchain’s underlying technology, of course, relies on the same types of cryptography used by intelligence agencies, secure banking systems, and other entities, the question of how to hide something in a medium where everything is visible poses a particular type of problem. I went back to my early training as a composer to find an answer.
 
The PRELUDES NFTs are musical compositions that hide secrets. On one hand, they’re inspired by the pioneers of algorithmically generated music such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis. On the other, they’re inspired by composers such as Michael Haydn, Johannes Brahms, and Olivier Messiaen, who developed systems for encoding messages into their music.
 
Lurking in each of the PRELUDES NFTs is a secret.
 
PRELUDES holders who solve the puzzle are entitled to a special edition of the next piece in a constellation of projects: a limited edition of the upcoming CYCLOPS “speculative reality” project and gelatin-silver print of a “numbers station” I photographed in a remote corner of Europe.*
 
Pm fvb hyl ylhkpun aopz, fvb ohcl ahrlu fvby mpyza zalw puav h shynly dvysk. Dolu fvb zvscl aol wbggsl jvuahpulk pu fvby hyadvyr, fvb dpss ahrl aol ulea zalw. Dl hyl nvpun vu h qvbyulf, huk aolyl pz tvyl, tbjo tvyl, av jvtl... rllw fvby dpaz hivba fvb.
 
01000111 01101111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 00101110
 
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*Complete terms and conditions will be available on Pace’s website before the project’s release.

PRELUDES

Loie Hollowell’s first-ever NFT project, titled Contractions, comprises 280 unique, generative works that center on the artist’s embodied experiences with childbirth. Based on Hollowell’s Split Orb sculptural paintings, which she began creating following the birth of her second child, the Contractions NFTs feature two bifurcated orbs situated one on top of the other, with the top orb representing the artist’s brain and the lower orb signifying her pregnant belly and cervix. This new series brings Hollowell’s explorations of bodily landscapes—with a particular focus on sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood—to the digital realm. Contractions will be presented on Pace Gallery’s booth at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai from November 10 to 13. As an extension of the project, Hollowell will create several new paintings of Contractions NFTs.

Hollowell, who has developed a distinctive iconography of geometric and organic forms as part of her painting and drawing practices, was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai in 2021, and her solo show Loie Hollowell: Tick Tock Belly Clock continues through May 8, 2023 at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis. Her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Long Museum, Shanghai; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and other international institutions. 

There will be 11 scenes in the Contractions NFT series: closed orbs signifying the final stage of pregnancy, just before childbirth, and orbs featuring one of ten set degrees of openings at their centers, representing each of the ten centimeters of cervix dilation required to begin the second “pushing” stage of labor. With variations in their hues, saturations, and textures, the orbs reflect, on a conceptual level, the artist’s shifting state of mind and body during childbirth, with each of the colors describing her ranging emotional states. 

The total NFTs in the Contractions series reflects the average number of days in a full-term pregnancy. The colors of these NFTs are drawn from a wide spectrum, from grayscale—which Hollowell has never previously incorporated in her work—to a vivid neon palette. The expansive possibilities of color in the NFTs situate Hollowell’s abstractions in a new light, influencing her approach to painting and drawing.

Contractions

The first component of a multidisciplinary project by A.A. Murakami, Floating World Genesis comprises 250 unique NFTs, each depicting one of three animated scenes chronicling the origins of life on Earth: a single microbial bubble that may split in two; clusters of self-organizing bubbles that represent the growth of multicellular life; and a single bubble situated on the horizon, signifying the formation of the Earth’s biosphere.

Inspired by the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953, which simulated conditions of the early Earth to explore how life first formed in the primordial oceans through self-organizing bubbles, the Floating World Genesis NFTs possess tranquil, meditative, hypnotic qualities often associated with minimalist painting and the Light and Space movement. Bubbles have been an enduring source of inspiration for A.A. Murakami, whose seminal work New Spring (2017) is an interactive, multi-sensory installation that produces mist-filled blossoms.

The formal dynamism of Floating World Genesis, which explores the kinetic possibilities of semi-abstracted bubbles, belies the project’s technical complexity and its wide range of generative effects. Opacities and diffusions of color vary among the NFTs, as do the shapes and positions of the bubbles. Clear bubbles depicted against gradation backgrounds feature refractions of light and color. Some of the NFTs are stereoscopic, allowing viewers to have a three-dimensional experience and immersing them in a world of buoyant, ethereal bubbles.

A.A. Murakami is known for creating immersive, sensorial installations as part of a long-standing exploration of natural phenomena and systems. With these concerns at the center of the duo’s practice, A.A. Murakami has pioneered the development of “ephemeral tech,” or technology that is experienced not through standard interfaces like screens, but through ethereal and shifting matter, facilitating fleeting but deeply meaningful in-person experiences. With the multifaceted Floating World Genesis series, the duo aims to further explore this concept through what it has termed the “mataverse,” a space between the physical and digital worlds. Through future Floating World Genesis projects, A.A. Murakami will investigate the possibilities of art that lives on the blockchain and engages all the viewers’ senses in immersive and tactile physical environments.

Floating World Genesis

Tara Donovan’s first-ever NFT project, titled QWERTY, comprises 500 unique, generative works that meditate on the ways that type can function as a building block for creating pattern. Donovan, whose practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, often explores the talismanic qualities of everyday materials and objects. The artist’s new NFT series is deeply engaged with her screen drawings, in which she moves, pinches, and cuts the wires of woven aluminum insect screen to extract patterns from existing grids, using a mathematical methodology to draw out the phenomenological potential of the material.

Each NFT in Donovan’s QWERTY series depicts rhythmic, mesmeric arrangements of a single, repeating letter or symbol represented on computer keyboards. The 26 letters and 30 symbols that make up the layered, gridded compositions of the QWERTY NFTs are rendered in varying degrees of legibility, striking a balance between recognizability and obscurity. These screen-based images take on the qualities of woven textiles, and they are the result of the artist’s meticulous pattern development, organization, and refinement, which she executed through algorithmic processes.

The first 56 individuals to mint QWERTY NFTs will each receive an archival pigment print of their NFT from the artist and Pace Verso. These works will be signed by Donovan. Complete terms and conditions will be available on Pace’s website before the project’s release on October 10.

Donovan’s QWERTY NFT project can be understood as an extension of the eponymous book she published in 2018, which features patterns the artist forged using characters from a 1930s typewriter. Both the digital and physical iterations of QWERTY reflect Donovan’s interest in surface depth and perspectival mutability. Her QWERTY NFTs shapeshift and transform depending on viewers’ position relative to their screens, bringing ghostly shapes and figurative elements into relief in the compositions’ interstitial spaces. The wide range of patterns in the QWERTY NFTs includes subtle, minimalist grids; architectural forms; psychedelic motifs; and optical illusions.

QWERTY

Robert Whitman’s genesis NFT project, New Worlds, transports viewers to otherworldly, cosmic landscapes beyond the Earth. Each of the 500 generative, interactive, and unique New Worlds NFTs centers on an imagined celestial body in space. The planets—and, in some cases, black holes—feature distinctive colors, patterns, shadows, and topographies on their surfaces, and they are situated in vast skies rendered in varying hues, opacities, and gradients. Some planets in the series are surrounded by rings, and they may have up to three moons in their orbits. Viewers can navigate around the planets and explore their sublime environments by zooming in and out and dragging their cursors on the screen. New Worlds will be presented in Whitman’s upcoming solo show with Pace Gallery, on view at 508 West 25th Street in New York from January 18 to February 3.
 
The New Worlds NFTs are based on Whitman’s mesmeric projections of planets and moons, which he presented in his solo exhibition Turning at Pace in New York in 2007, as well as new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, which sent its first pictures back to Earth in 2022. A pioneer of performance and multimedia installation art, Whitman has been producing exploratory and collaborative work for more than 60 years. He was at the vanguard of scientifically and technologically engaged art making during this period, co-founding the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a collective that supported creative partnerships between artists and engineers, in 1967. Whitman was also major figure in the ephemeral Happenings—a hybrid art form spanning installation, performance, and other mediums—presented in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a group of artists that also included Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms.

Whitman’s web3 debut reflects the limber and timeless nature of his influential and rigorous practice, which left an indelible mark on 20th century art history. As part of the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at Pace in New York, Pace Live, the gallery’s interdisciplinary platform for commissioning and presenting new live art performances, will stage live renditions of his seminal 1960 performance work American Moon. Whitman’s first NFT project can be understood in conversation with this disorienting, madcap performance, which premiered nearly a decade before the first moon landing. New Worlds, Whitman’s most technologically ambitious artwork to date, forges new through lines across the artist’s storied and experimental career, traversing his digital and physical investigations of universes beyond our own.

New Worlds are interactive and can be explored in 360 degrees and from varying vantage points by using a mouse or trackpad.

Art Blocks × Pace

New Worlds #419

Robert Whitman

More in Art Blocks × Pace

PRELUDES

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Contractions

Loie Hollowell

Floating World Genesis

A.A. Murakami

QWERTY

Tara Donovan

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