Digital Horizons: The New State of Art is a group show featuring 20 NFTs selected in collaboration with international art collectors. The display aims at presenting the state of contemporary digital art by looking at the pivotal roles played by Collectibles and Fine Art NFTs in the understanding and popularization of collecting digital art.

"The broad adoption of NFTs has radically changed the conventional ways of making, enjoying and collecting art in the past 18 months. By proving to be a stable alternative to the traditional art trade platforms, NFTs and blockchain-based technologies have been met with enthusiasm and curiosity by artists, collectors and galleries. Alongside the expert artists who have been making works with digital tools long before the blockchain, a new exciting generation of creatives use NFTs to reach collectors, galleries and museums. The artworks made to be traded and collected on the blockchain provoke the contemporary art connoisseur by looking at digital culture and computer science as their prime source of inspiration. If Pindar Van Arman created a series generated by a GAN trained on 8-bit Pixel Art, Pak’s works propose a creative approach to math and numbers. Mario Klingemann and Sofia Crespo explore the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence with works delving deep into the wildest dreams of machines. Martin Lukas Ostachowski and Oficinas TK collaborated to examine the sculptural quality of the digital mediascape, the same that led Sarah Zucker to develop an art style inspired by the almost otherworldly omnipresent presence of screens in our life. Zucker’s interest in pop culture is shared with Beeple, whose works act as modern twists on the memento mori formula, imagining popular pop icons rotting in a not so distant future. AES+F look at the interactions and power play in contemporary society with hyper-realistic animations while Damien Hirst questions the connection between digital and physical artifacts with a collection of NFTs corresponding to unique physical artworks which are stored in a secure vault in the UK. Consisting of sculptor Hande Şekerciler and digital artist Arda Yalkın, The Turkish artist duo ha:ar combines a traditional approach to making art with new technologies, mixing physical sculpting and 3D modeling to make hybrid works that fall within the liminal space in between art definitions."

(Filippo Lorenzin, curator)

"The NFTs revolution in the art field could be not totally understood without considering the most innovative aspect introduced since its birth, a new typology of collecting. Some of the first NFTs ever made were in fact PFPs (Picture for Proofs) project, naively designed to be used as avatars for social media accounts. RarePepe were among the first pilot projects of this kind, a series of 1,774 collectible cards created by various artists in 2016 and released on Bitcoin blockchain. One year after the first-ever marketplace for rare digital assets was launched. Through the Ethereum blockchain, CryptoPunks were created as 10,000 unique cartoon characters that can be easily collected by owning an Ethereum wallet. Based on the ERC720 standard, the collectibles went sold in a short time creating a secondary market driven by the community willing to trade each token for increasing prices based on scarcity. Meebits are the second project from the same inventors at LarvaLabs. 20.000 three dimensional voxel characters, created by a custom generative algorithm to become the perfect 3D avatar for virtual worlds. Some very established artists had their say into this new art section too, Takashi Murakami is the co-creator with RTFKT of CloneX, a 20.000 avatar release associated with the future production of wearables for the metaverse. If previously collectibles only had a meaning into the digital environment, owning a Bored Ape Yacht Club changed this paradigm, allowing the collectors to enter an exclusive club made up of advantages for the community but above all of social prestige. Community is the key point shared among projects such as Cool Cats, Doodles in which holding rare artworks from the collection will allow one to reach a higher role inside the community. The same principle applies to World of Women with an additional mission, to make Web 3.0 a more inclusive and equitable ecosystem through the active support of female artists into the NFT space. Past and present meet again in one of the oldest and one of the latest projects. Crypto Kitties and Moonbirds shares their particularity of the time-related increase in value, summary of the PFP market success, in which holding for the longest the same NFT will actually mutate the artwork itself."

(Bruno Pitzalis, curator)

Pulse: Electric Mannerism is a solo show of ha:ar, the artist duo consisting of the sculptor Hande Şekerciler and the new media artist Arda Yalkın. The exhibition has been exhibited in three locations: at GAD - Giudecca Art District (19 June - 26 September 2021, Venice IT) and Scalo Lambrate (1 - 26 August 2021, Milan IT), online in Decentraland (19 June 2021 - 18 September 2022).

"How does reinterpreting the past through the lens of the present help us understand our own times? Faced with the postmodernist loss of reference points, we reconnect with our past to orientate ourselves, bridging our vision into a future that ushers everyday life into an increasingly pervasive technological dimension.

ha:ar explore the great masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods in relation to a physical and virtual environment wherein the artists create a number of compositions that reinterpret the past with a view on the future. Suggesting a Mannerist influence, every element of ha:ar’s work is characterised by a dramatic bodily tension, portrayed in mystical poses and surrounded by clouds that are reminiscent of a celestial Baroque painting. The technology adopted by the artists does not intend to stand in the way of the viewer or to become the focus of the aesthetic experience; rather, it aids in the discovery of new meanings.

Pulse: Electric Mannerism explores the mirroring of digital and tangible realities by placing the duo's works in dialogue with Hande’s sculptures, whose genesis remains linked to the virtual world of 3D modelling. Starting from a human figure that appears immersed in a Renaissance echo, the artist subverts the identity of the subjects, freeing them from characterising elements such as hair and clothing. This allows the viewer to see the bodies beyond any social construction as they are anonymously, projected into our contemporary dimension.

The physical exhibition experience is then taken to another level through Augmented Reality. Thanks to this technology and in partnership with Garage Atlas, the works and sculptures that could not be created in the real world will appear in the space virtually, in dialogue with the audience and the environment."

(Chiara Braidotti, Filippo Lorenzin, Serena Tabacchi, curators)