How Live Minting Can Help Museums And Audiences Collect Generative Art
In our latest WAC Weekly we discussed opportunities and challenges around the exhibition of generative art in a physical gallery or museum space. Generative art in a physical setting offers a lot of creative potential, but if there’s an on-chain element to it brings in some of the issues of exhibiting NFT art in a physical space.
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Immersive experiences with generative art
We’ve discussed Refik Anadol’s new Unsupervised exhibition at MoMA in previous sessions this season, in the context of institutional interest in NFT art after the crypto market crash earlier this year.
Frequent WAC contributor Erika Knierim got a chance to visit the exhibition and described the “ethereal” experience. One of the screens in the exhibition listed the data that goes into the exhibition. The images were originally trained on artwork from the MoMA’s collection, but the exhibition is always changing based on data including the weather outside, the room’s internal temperature, and the movements of people in the exhibition.
This all feeds into the current state of the images but also the ambient music playing in the room, and the additional lighting and exhibition design are all designed to serve the enormous screen on which the images are evolving: the generative imagery itself is just one component of the larger experience.
Anadol’s Unsupervised pieces were originally NFTs sold in partnership with MoMA, but the exhibition’s NFT component was somewhat downplayed. Light Art Space’s generative art exhibition at Halle am Berghain, Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB, prominently features an interactive display near the end of the experience where visitors can mint an NFT as a souvenir.
The “TRUE NAME” NFT is minted when the visitor scans a QR code on the wristband given to them upon entry, with text procedurally generated by their name and date of birth. The minting is done for free on the Tezos chain, and NFT and wristband art are all rooted in the story world of Cheng’s film, which is turned into an immersive experience with lights and laser displays filling the foggy exhibition room. Life after BOB isn’t just a video with a light show attached, the computer-generated film is streamed “live” from the Unity game engine with many details being procedurally generated bespoke to each show. Aside from the generative film, an interactive display allows visitors to explore the scenes at their own pace using their phones. Watch here a video explaining the visitor journey.
Much like playrecordmint at Kunsthalle Zurich’s Do Your Own Research exhibition, these NFTs are supposed to capture a visitor’s “own” instance of the ever-shifting generative piece. Taking these still instances of the pieces is one obvious way museums, and individual collectors, are able to visibly collect and display generative art that’s always unique at one point in space and time: it’s not like a still video that can be repeated.
While generative art in some form is nothing new, going back to Sol LeWitt’s written instructions for drawing his work, this renewed interest in generative digital art from mainstream institutions is, and they need to be able to translate that work into a tangible experience that will draw in a casual audience. The “live minting” of NFT souvenirs offers one novel way to do that, but it introduces obstacles the group discussed in several breakout sessions.
The challenges of live minting and collecting generative art
One of our groups thought that the Life After BOB exhibition represented a lot of progress in this field. The whole piece meaningfully interacts with visitor data and gives them an objective to engage with the work by minting an NFT. In any case, the live minting of a generative artwork feels like a more interesting and meaningful way for the visitor to capture a moment than simply collecting a digital image, whether it’s a digital replica of a physical work or a “ready-made” procedural image.
But the challenge is integrating that NFT minting interface into the visitor journey. If the display is placed in a lobby, it’s not really a part of the “visitor road” that most of the audience will take. Perhaps mainstream institutions are still nervous about blockchain technology and don’t know how to answer technical questions about what’s really happening when a visitor “mints” a “non-fungible token” for their “web3 wallet”, all terms that might have to be explained on the spot to a curious visitor.
Another issue that was brought up was interoperability. These NFT experiences aren’t really aimed at web3 adopters who know about self-custody and hardware wallets and the like, they’re an easy-to-use web app that, in the case of Life after BOB, was totally custom to the exhibit, but using Kukai wallet as easy one-click onboarding process.
If this becomes the standard practice, audiences would find themselves with many NFTs scattered across separate wallets in different custodial setups. One of the selling points of web3 for brands and other institutions that could benefit from “user data” is that someone keeping all their tokens in one wallet gives you a publicly visible picture of their interests, which provides a much richer set of analytics than Web 2.0’s invasive cookie tracking can provide.
And while every transaction on Ethereum comes with a costly “gas fee”, which is set to come down within the next couple of years, exhibitors need to think about exactly which technology they’re using and how they’re going to cover those costs. Should the visitor pay for it as if they were purchasing something from the gift shop, with fees split between artists and museums, or is this still such a poorly understood novelty that museums should foot the bill while visitors are experiencing this for the first time?
Another group concluded that live minting can only be done well if it deeply involves the audience, if it creates a “triadic relationship where the experience could not come together in full without the corporeal/cognitive contributions of the audience, art, and artist”. This is all well and good for museums who want to create memorable experiences for audiences, but dslcollection’s Sylvain Levy points out the challenges that this presents for collectors.
How can a piece of generative art really be collected and preserved? Is a record of the algorithm all that’s needed? Are there graphical assets that need to be preserved? Is the source or “seed” data enough? Or is some on-site data — like the movement of visitors in the exhibition, a record of the weather outside during the show’s run — necessary for preserving the styles and forms the piece displayed while it was originally shown?
For Levy, the challenges that generative art presents for a collector are worth solving. Whether it becomes a popular format for exhibitions or remains somewhat marginal, generative art is specifically of our time: these generative artists are experimenting with the blockchain and AI systems which are going to play a rapidly growing role in media and our lives. As ever, it’s up to collectors and museums to select the best of that work and make it accessible to as wide an audience as it can get, whether that’s shown in a live, immersive exhibition today or preserved for a retrospective in the future.
WAC Weekly is part of WAC Lab, a new program unleashing the full potential of Web3 for the arts and culture produced by We Are Museums in collaboration with TZ Connect and Blockchain Art Directory, and powered by the Tezos ecosystem.
