Club Zero By LaTurbo Avedon
Exhibition at arebyte Gallery in London
Club Zero is the new online art project by LaTurbo Avedon, a renowned avatar artist and curator whose body of work focuses on the dynamics between audiences and virtual environments. Commissioned by arebyte, a London-based gallery that is leading an innovative program that sits at the intersection of social sciences and emerging technologies, the work is part of the arebyte on Screen’s 2022 program.
Launched in July, the exhibition will end on 5 September 2022 and is divided into phases that run in parallel with the conception and creation of three different NFP (Non-Fungible People). These avatars oppose and criticize the current crypto art market and are the result of a co-participation and co-creation with the public through special online sessions designed by LaTurbo Avedon.
The NFP live in Club Zero, which is a space within LaTurbo Avedon’s work Materia (2022), the latter described as “a collection of unique blockchain-integrated virtual artefacts that are capable of influencing the aesthetics, forms, and future of the work’s overarching system.”
To pre-develop these NFPs, which are non-binary avatars, the artist leveraged Daz 3D’s character generation technology. Through live stream sessions hosted on Twitch, LaTurbo Avedon allows the audience to co-edit the avatars by giving them a shape, a name and an appearance and slowly developing their identity through a series of questions (and answers that come from the audience) that influence the output.
With Club Zero the artist not only questions the possible development of the blockchain applied to the art field, but also offers new insights into a technology that is increasingly permeating different domains. The slow construction of the NFP, which cannot take place without some disagreement due to the active participation of the public in the process, collides with the (almost) exasperated speed of NFTs production that occurs daily in the crypto sector.
The avatar itself is perceived as a non-static entity whose personality takes shape through thoughtful and responsible choices of the users, in contrast to the less flexible and fluid forms of the avatars that currently swarm the various Metaverses. The public co-creates and is co-responsible not only for shaping the avatars’ identities, but also for the storytelling that comes to life. This makes the representation of the self in the virtual space not a self-referential act, but a community choice that somehow seems to be more faithful to the promises of Web3.
All these aspects, which are well underlined in the page of the project (where it is possible to see the co-creation sessions along with the NFPs that were created), make Club Zero an innovative and critical work of art. By harnessing the creativity and engagement of the public, it leads us to consider alternative visions of the Metaverse and how a digital identity could develop in virtual worlds.
Art, with its ability to create deep emotional states in the public, once again proves to be an effective means of bringing to light the problems and the logic behind new technologies. Not only that, it also becomes an effective way of suggesting alternatives of paths and visions useful both to the general public and to technology researchers and developers.
The next event NFP Audience Co-Creation #3 will take place on
Thur 11th of Aug, 7pm UK time. Online, Live-stream via Twitch.
