NFS NSFW NFT
We used New Art City’s gallery toolkit to veer from the white cube. Instead, we built four rooms that feel like community gardens each with a specific theme, landscape, and art critters from AI and livestream videos to invisible and textual sculptures. Each ecosystem is skinned with digital debris from the vectoralists (to borrow from McKenzie Wark). We’ve built on, under, and all-around their topology. Holding space. Getting lost. Keeping company.
︎Experience the show on New Art City
︎Read about the space in Art in America
Organizers
Christopher Clary
Pearlyn Lii
Mark Ramos
Design
Pearlyn Lii
Essays
Lindsay Howard
Zach Kaplan
Artists
Itziar Barrio
Christopher Clary
Johanna Flato
Nahee Kim
Pearlyn Lii
Lula Mebrahtu
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga
Mark Ramos
Bhavik Singh
Yeseul Song
Ziyang Wu
Excerpt From Art in America’s ‘From Blockchain To Browser: Exhibiting NFTs, Part One’ by Brian Droitcour—‘NFS NSFW NFT addresses topics that occupy many artists now: how the body is mediated by technology, how the market captures value, and how artists navigate these systems to survive. Several of the works in the show have been minted as NFTs, like co-curator Lii’s “Real Girlfriend” portraits of doe-eyed and pliable CGI women. Episodes of Ziyang Wu’s haunting sci-fi animation “A Woman with the technology” (2019) are being minted over the course of the show’s run. But works like Bhavik Singh’s spindly generative trees that renders on virtual screens in the NFS salon are, as the section header suggests, not for sale.’
For the opening we started on Zoom, then gathered on New Art City to walk through the exhibition guided by the organizers. Along the way we heard from the artists and essayists Lindsay Howard and Zach Kaplan on a variety of topics like how NFS, NSFW, and NFT relate.
Special thanks to
Lindsay Howard, Zach Kaplan, NEW INC, Foundation, Rhizome, and Don Hanson.
Show Poster by Pearlyn Lii
Main Gallery
The main garden illustrates this dissonance between community and big tech, where the landscape literally documents the making of NFS NSFW NFT: rivers flowing with our Slack threads, mountains skinned with our email, audio from our Zoom calls scattered everywhere, along with essays from Lindsay Howard and Zach Kaplan.
NFS
The NFS garden is skinned with cryptocurrency symbols and animations. Featuring work from Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Mark Ramos, and Bhavik Singh.
NSFW
The NSFW garden is skinned with community rules and blurred graphics that platforms use to police adult content. Featuring work from Itziar Barrio, Christopher Clary, Nahee Kim, and Pearlyn Lii.
Gengzi, Real Girlfriend & Fenlong,
Real Girlfriend
404 x 720px
.mp4
Zodiac Edition
Pearlyn Lii, “Real Girlfriend” 2021; New Art City, documented by Christopher Clary
NFT
The NFT garden is skinned with graphics that corporations use to illustrate the blockchain. Featuring work from Johanna Flato, Lula Mebrahtu, Yeseul Song, and Ziyang Wu.
For ‘Real Girlfriend,’ Special Thanks to
Moriah Rodriguez, Rad Mora, Leslie Chang, Alex Darby, Kyle Chang