In yesterday's post we looked at the optical illusions created by a costume. Let's continue the thread by exploring another type of illusion, the one created by Beeple's kinetic video sculpture "Human One", currently on display at Hong Kong's M+, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world.
Looking like a magician's box, "Human One" is the artist's first ever physical work of art. South Carolina-based graphic designer and motion and digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, became instantly famous for his monumental digital art collage that sold online in 2021 at Christie's for $69,346,250, setting the record for the most expensive work sold online and the third highest price for a living artist at auction.
Sold at another Christie's auction last year for $28.9 million USD, "Human One" is instead a hybrid, suspended between the physical and the digital realm. The new sculpture is a generative work of art, a dynamically changing piece, which the artist intends to develop over the course of his lifetime.
The work consists in a life-size spinning polished aluminium box with four interconnected LED screens as walls. Powered by computers integrated in the base, the screens show a dynamically changing NFT of an astronaut continuously walking surrounded by landscapes that are perpetually updated remotely by the artist and are programmed to adapt to the viewer's current experience, changing over 24 hours according to the time of the day.
The NFT video files are stored on Beeple's private server and the sculpture's digital assets are stored directly in the embedded media servers within the sculpture. When the work was auctioned last year at Christie's, there were clues to unlock additional NFTs hidden in the images.
The journey of the astronaut is a metaphor for human progress and a way to think about the erosion of boundaries between our digital and physical existences.
"Human One" looks undeniably visually striking and uncanny as well, especially when you see it in a museum as you get the impression of standing in front of a real human trapped in a perpetually rotating box (Download Beeple_HumanOne).
Yet there are pros and cons about it: the artist can interact with viewers remotely and change the landscapes in which the astronaut is moving seamlessly, and that's awesome as it allows to give a dynamic layer to the static concept of "statue" or "sculpture", works that are traditionally frozen in time. This engages visitors in different ways as it feels like an ongoing conversation with the artist that evolves over time.
The fact that the sculpture changes makes sure this is an eternally contemporary work of art that may even be updated integrating in the background hints about current events in the news (imagine if the astronaut could walk among crowds striking, protesting or in a landscapes ravaged by a war).
In a nutshell, this format takes digital art to another level, unlocking its potential and allowing to transform something flat and digital into a three-dimensional piece that can be enjoyed outside a computer screen by many people at the same time.
The cons? Well, obviously the fact that, at some point, it won't be updated anymore as the artist may decide to stop doing so or it may become obsolete like all our electronic devices. Besides, such a work makes you ponder what the archaeologists of the future will make of our obsession with digital art.
A month ago, archaeologists made an exceptional discovery, finding in a Tuscan spa 24 bronze statues preserved for 2,300 years. Some represented the likenesses of Asclepius' daughter Hygeia, Apollo and other Greco-Roman gods; others bore Latin and Etruscan inscriptions with the names of prominent Etruscan families and there were also bejeweled statues with very detailed necklaces and earrings that perfectly showed the attire of the women of the time.
Many rejoiced at the discovery in San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy, as it shed light on the period of transition from Etruscan to Roman rule. But who knows what will happen to digital relics from our times in thousands of years. Who will rejoice about them? Will excavating them shed any light on us or will the archeologists of the future just find piles of screens and mysterious empty boxes?
Time will tell, so we'd better enjoy digital art for the time being while trying to find also the hilarious angle in digital art stories: alongside the bronze statues recovered from mud in Italy, archaeologists also found thousands of coins (visitors would throw coins into the baths as a gesture for good luck for their health).
In the case of digital art the archaeologists of the future will not even find coins as NFTs are bought with intangible cryptocurrencies. Yet, they may find something about them in the history books, after all Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was charged today with fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the US and violate campaign finance laws, in what Damian Williams, US attorney for the southern district of New York, defined as "one of the biggest financial frauds in American history". Looks like archaelogists of the future may not find real coins then, but they will have plenty of stories to tell linked with our addiction to intangible art.
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