Why are artists switching to Digital Art and NFT? An introduction to Physital & Murmuration.
What is Murmuration?
Murmuration is a series of digital paintings created by French artists Benoît Martinez and Pascal Lefort and it marks the first production of their recently renewed collaboration. The series comprises eleven pieces which vary in shape and size, and which explore a new creative process: AI generative art. With this series, the artists decided to explore 19th-century paintings while then mixing neoclassicism and surrealism.
What about their background and what’s all this about a renewed collaboration, you ask? Benoît Martinez and Pascal Lefort may have reunited to make art now, but they originally forged their experience in contemporary art as part of the French collective known as Kolkoz. Kolkoz were pioneers in early contemporary art; for example, in 1990 they were one of the first collectives of artists to embrace new technologies related to video games through hacking.
Their aura of digital avant-garde trendsetting, combined with a rowdy reputation, brought them to the attention of the French gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin, who shared their youthful age and spirit at the time, before he went on to impose his stature as an international art dealer.
Martinez and Lefort revisit this early energy of computer processing-meets-rebellious deconstruction of the old world in their Murmuration series. In addition, they are taking up the thread of their personal creations in the art world in parallel with their work as an artistic director and a technological supervisor for large companies in the gaming industry.
The Murmuration series uses GPU microprocessors and their capabilities in machine learning and neural networking to produce generative art that is completely autonomous and built on top of a “digital noise” of data. This digital noise gives name to the series itself, as murmuration is both an old literary word for murmuring sound/noise but also the name given to a flock of starlings and their startlingly mathematically modellable flight patterns.
Over thousands of iterations and occasional inputs from the artists, the processors “drift” and eventually settle on a final image, and one that is tightly bound to an aesthetic structure. This novel approach to art generation combines aesthetic homogeneity (the mix of images is under control, pixel by pixel) and artistic improbability, eliminating the idea of compromise or good taste that humans would be able to induce into the process.
The base material for each piece in this series is taken from 19th century paintings which undergo heavy digital mixtures and alterations, making them unrecognizable even to a trained lover of the arts. In the words of the duo: “We love this fusion of Neo-Classicism and Surrealism. The digitally distorted shapes result in a mesmerizing result. It is as if we had awakened old artists to subject them to psychedelic experiments.”
The pieces will be distributed as NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and they will be digitally displayed during an exhibition at the Physital gallery. Read on to learn about the Physital gallery and team.
Physital
Founded by Zoopsie, Physital is the first Digital and Physical art gallery in Latin America. Located in Panama City in the JW Marriot Tour (ex-Trump Tower), the gallery displays art and exposes audiences to digital art in the classical way, with physical supports such as Canvas, Infinite Objects, and Metal Plate that introduce digital displays of NFTs.
Thanks to the artistic background of Zoopsie and the Web3 technical expertise of DRENGR, the gallery will discover and promote new disruptive digital artists to put them and their creations in the spotlight.
In addition to exposing new art, Physital supports artists through the secondary sale process. Artists are remunerated each time their NFT is sold after the first mint (the first time an NFT is bought), up to a certain percentage of the sale price. This is one of the biggest strengths of NFTs: supporting artists and their creations throughout all their life.
Physital believes in the development of digital art and hosts events with the aim of creating opportunities for non-Web3 initiated people to discover this cutting-edge ecosystem while also allowing NFT and metaverse enthusiasts to meet up.
Physital has already launched its first collection, Psychedelic Flowers by the artist Marie OnHeart, on October 13th. Free to mint, the collection quickly sold out and is now available on OpenSea.
In the long run, and in order to reach as many people as possible, Physital’s aim is to open multiple new locations around the world and host Physital galleries and events regularly. The shared digital and artistic network will give its members access to the newest and most impressive digital art collections from all around the globe.
Digital art wouldn’t really be digital if it were not available virtually and in the metaverse. In this sense, Physital also offers the opportunity to live a new experience in a Web3 immersive art gallery accessible online on their own website at physital.art or through a digital headset at spatial.io.
Follow @physitalgallery on Twitter and @physitalpty on Instagram to not miss out on the next best digital art trends!
