Semiotics of the Camwhore
“Semiotics of the Camwhore” by Ann Hirsch is a contemporary day riff of Martha Rosler’s canonical feminist video “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975). Just as Rosler used kitchenware to elucidate female domestic aggression, Hirsch updates this idea for women on the internet in the 2010s and uses “webware” to showcase a similar aggression. This video is part of Hirsch’s 2015 net art project, Horny Lil Feminist: a series of thirty desktop screen capture videos that explore the state of online feminism in 2015. In these videos, Hirsch backdrops her own pending nuptials against scenes of pornography (which began to proliferate widely in the 2010s), commodified haul videos, personal reveals, stabs at authenticity, and brings comedic levity to her own X rated nudity. Horny Lil Feminist was originally shown as part of the New Museum’s “First Look” online programming in 2015.
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Still Here
Still Here is a collage by Autumn Breon that promoted the debut of the artist’s 2023 performance Still Here. In front of a map of Inglewood, California, the artist poses in a handmade, braided crown with spectacles made of the Carina Nebula. The image captures Breon as Esoterica Supreme, a deity from Planet Esoterica that visits Earth after receiving distress signals. The performance of Still Here presented a ritual from Planet Esoterica in which citizens of Inglewood shared their prayers for what they hope is preserved as the city gentrifies. A portion of the proceeds of this NFT will support The Care-Van, a mobile social installation and Get Out The Vote campaign that cultivates spaces of care as antidotes to voter suppression while creating a framework for localized civic engagement.
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BODY AS MATERIAL
BODY AS MATERIAL represents a conversation between artists Nancy Baker Cahill and Lauren Lee McCarthy centered on body sovereignty, surveillance, and forensics of control. This image combines a still from McCarthy’s deeply intimate durational performance Surrogate, with Terrortory, a still from an immersive video by Baker Cahill. Abstracted data visualized as pixels connects and blends the two. Both artists provoke complex questions around personal rights and abuses of power. As body autonomy is increasingly stripped from certain citizens, the artists challenge complicity and collective responsibility around protecting others from state-sanctioned cruelties. Some themes to be covered include surveillance infrastructure, voting rights, the criminalization of reproductive medicine, religious fundamentalism, neoliberalism, and technology as a tool of subversion and oppression. A portion of the proceeds of this NFT will go to the reproductive justice organization Mayday.Health.
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Crash Kiss at El Cid
Crash Kiss by Rollin and Tad Leonard is a portrait project that shifts pixels row by row until they collide into a combined silhouette. The process of photographing the subjects becomes a part of the performance, as people gaze intimately into the eyes of friends and strangers. A playful, granular disassembly of the human subjects, Crash Kiss captures cross-screen affection as much as it explores the unsettling consequences of humans turned into data. This series of minted artworks are of participants who were photographed and "crashed" at NFTuesdayLA's season finale on June 27, 2023.
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Metalogue v01.02
Metalogue v01.02 is a digital image that was created by artist Victor Acevedo in the Spring of 1987. It was created with a software package called Artworks. This was a 2.5D Vector Graphics Software licensed by West End Film/Pansophic. 2.5D (Two and a half ‘D’, D=dimensions) means it supported mouse controlled, manipulation of on-picture-plane graphical objects within any implicate or explicate polygon domain toward convergent perspectival vanishing points. However, the software’s computer graphic capabilities would not be classed as that of a full 3D modeling system. The original DOS-based image file was saved to a 5.25” floppy disk; usually written to a ‘Pansophic’ flavor of the PIC format. However, this NFT linked JPG file was produced from a high-resolution scan of a 35mm slide that was output via a 2K Matrix digital film recorder directly from the original computer file in 1987.
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BLINDNESS
Violence and atrocities are occurring globally, often in relation to protests, with police and military forces sometimes using excessive force, such as non-lethal weapons like metal pellets and rubber bullets, that can cause serious injuries like blindness. Authorities may label nonviolent protests as ‘violence’ or ‘riots’ to legitimize their own violent actions. For instance, in Iran, hundreds of protesters were blinded by these weapons, while in the US during Black Lives Matter, at least 23 people were blinded or partially blinded, and in Chile, at least 230 lost their sight. This collection comments on the importance of nonviolent political expression and holding governments accountable for violent actions. The artwork features close-up recordings of eyes shedding black tears filmed in real life, expressing victim comments via reaction diffusion patterns, and is created with shader-based programming in C# and Unity in combination with filming actual black tears.
The proceeds generated by the sale of this art collection will be utilized to fund a public video installation by Behnaz Farahi aimed at raising awareness of this crucial issue.
NEXT LA
What happens when a city becomes a desert, ghost ecosystems come back to haunt a damaged planet, and an AI developer builds an alternative version of Los Angeles? Using custom stable diffusion models trained on historical and future images of Los Angeles, as well as the deserts, highways, and the gigantic water infrastructure projects framing the broader landscape of Southern California, Next LA is a hallucinatory glimpse into a speculative urban environment that’s yet to arrive. Oscillating between organic and artificial, abstract and hyper-real, near-future apocalypse and post-human sublime, these videos lay the conceptual groundwork for The Alluvials, a new video project and playable game environment by the artist Alice Bucknell.
His And Hers Computers
His And Hers Computers is a recurring asset in my work. This union of two local machines by a mass of cables between them symbolizes the digital bond between myself and my late husband, Tvordis.
This artifact is spun off from A Time Capsule Or A Grave: a hybrid performance project initially commissioned by the Tezos Foundation for Octobre Numérique Faire Monde in Arles, France in October 2022. It connects a series of IRL performances with a persistent virtual environment on New Art City, each of which evolve between every iteration. Audio recordings of each performance are broken into clips and installed in the virtual environment at each place where they were spoken, forming an ever expanding dialogue between versions of myself across time.
- Sammie Veeler
Suspended Pathways: Los Angeles
Suspended Pathways: Los Angeles is an algorithmic extension of Lisa Orth’s Suspended Pathways series. This special edition is released in conjunction with NFTuesdayLA's new logo designed by Orth and celebrates our digital art community.
Cold and silent, like a heart
"Cold and silent, like a heart" is a feminist reinterpretation of Antonín Dvořák's symphonic poem: "The Water Goblin" (1896), based on a poem of the same name by Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben from 1853. The poem is about a goblin who abducts a young maiden and forces her to bare his child. It ends with the girl reconnecting with her mother and refusing to return to her unhappy life with the goblin, which the goblin then punishes by murdering their child. In Marple's reimagining, told through animated images and select stanzas from Erben's poem, the goblin is removed from the narrative. The focus becomes the girl's mental state and what now reads as her decision to end the life of her own child—a la a kind of abortion. The story is still a heavy one, but it at least depicts the young girl with her unwanted pregnancy as a person of agency rather than an agent-less victim.
- Mieke Marple
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MEMORY OF FIRE
MEMORY OF FIRE is a glimpse into the conversation between AI and Connie Bakshi that created ANATOMY OF FIRE. Each image emerges from a recursive discourse of words and visuals around FIRE IN SILVERLAKE, a poem by AI poet VERSA. The final image is an interpretation of the last line of the poem (‘…and a long kiss I’ve never tasted.’) that embodies the memory of both the full text and every previous visual iteration of the discourse.
ANATOMY OF FIRE
The ANATOMY OF FIRE, the culmination of a visual conversation between AI and Connie Bakshi, is both an Exquisite Corpse and an homage to the Fluxus movement and its dialogue around indeterminacy. The artwork emerges out of a sequential and recursive line-by-line interpretation of FIRE IN SILVERLAKE, a poem by AI poet VERSA. The final image is an interpretation of the last line of the poem that embodies the memory of both the full text and every previous iteration of the visual discourse. Minted on October 18, 2022.
FIRE IN SILVERLAKE
VERSA is an emergent AI poet developed by theVERSEverse x Ross Goodwin, trained on the collective and ever-expanding poetry of the writers of theVERSEverse. This poem by VERSA was generated from ten LA-inspired prompts sourced by the NFTuesdayLA community and minted on August 23, 2022.
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