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Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a Q&A session featuring curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi in conversation with artist Kevin Abosch. Sun Signals translates solar data like location, trajectory, and radiation levels into visual compilations. What role did your scientific background play into the conception of this work? And was there a dataset that was particularly compelling for you to translate into a visual language? I use the tools of science and technology in ways that suggest scientific methods, but the fact that my results are not repeatable reveals that my work is not scientific. I work ritualistically, back and forth with technology in a feedback loop. I come under the influence of machine-learning algorithms and data in order to witness truths that I might not otherwise. For Sun Signals, I worked with a tremendous amount of data, but perhaps it’s the data around solar radiation and local temperatures that feels most significant for its implications in climate change. That said, Sun Signals are not simple data visualisations. They are visual manifestations of the emotional distillation of the underlying data. The use of blockchain as an activist medium is a critical aspect of this work, especially when considering that the Sun Signals are generated on solar powered grids and the work feeds into the greater ‘green’ satellite project KOSMOS 1111. How do you see the role of blockchain within the greater activist narrative? I’ve always felt that the implicit promise of the blockchain was to move power from traditional power structures to the citizens. In this sense, it is an activist platform. In practice, however, this might be difficult to appreciate. Where there are deficiencies in the technology, perhaps exemplified by the discussion around blockchain’s energy consumption, we have seen efforts to make improvements. It’s a work in progress. To be clear, I’m not one who believes you can bolt the blockchain onto anything and it’s better. That’s naive in my view. You’ve described this work as an "intervention leveraging the very technology it endeavours to evolve". Would you expand on what that means to you? By harnessing solar energy to power my computers, I am in a very small way making a contribution towards mitigating the real problem of reckless energy consumption. The resultant artworks, the NFT’s, are not final. They are fixed as intermediaries between their preparatory state and the multitude of states they will be engaged by an audience. An intervention might seem fixed in time, but its legacy echoes indefinitely.

Have you ever felt truly ‘alone in a crowd’? I’ve rarely seen an artist capture that sense of desperate alienation so poignantly as Dave Strick managed with the titular piece. When he’s not wearing his hat as character technical director for beloved animation studio Pixar, Oakland based Strick experiments within his beloved medium by creating engrossing loops, mostly in the GIF format. Some common themes found in his oeuvre are the search for identity within the human experience and the exploration of the many facets of the passing of time. Not only can his works visually amaze and mesmerise while using a deceptively minimalistic approach, they often feel like short and darkly dreamy, philosophical parables. ‘Spotlight’ for instance, shows us an infinite succession of genderless human figures climbing to the illuminated ‘top’, only to discover that there’s only room for a select few. ‘AllFather’ visualises a sense of (dis)connection as an endless line of beings almost seem to grow upwards out of a darkly silhouetted creator. A haunting ‘Cellar Door’ becomes the centrepiece in a darkly mysterious play of light and shadow and the isolation of being stuck in one’s own head the focal point of ‘Work from home’. We come full circle with a complete cycle of life shown in ‘Resurrection’ and might be witness to the birth of inspiration in ‘Revelation’. I thoroughly enjoy the artist’s experimental approach within his toolsets like Maya and Houdini, lately also exploring the capabilities of Stable Diffusion to aid his creative endeavours. Dave’s work shows that an artist can use these generative tools while still maintaining his distinctive personal style, case in point the work that started this article. Paired with the sparse tones of Squarepusher’s ‘Tommib’, this emotional depiction of loneliness really struck a chord with me and has quickly become a personal favorite. I think as creative beings we always try to somehow capture either natural or emotional time in a bottle and as I leave you with Dave’s forever Sunset, I wish to underline how fulfilling it is to discover artists like him who succeed in doing just that. Featured Works Alone in a crowd Spotlight AllFather Cellar Door Work from home Resurrection Revelation Sunset Dave Strick Website Linktree Twitter Instagram

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a Q&A session featuring curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi in conversation with artist Matt Kane. You conceived Gazers as a sort of conceptual self-portrait. Each work in the series is derived from an 'origin moon' that is linked to the date of a significant life event that happened under a particular moon. Could you expand on this aspect and how it informs each work's evolution over time? I've been dedicated to my particular track of art practice for over twenty years. As each Gazer speeds up its potential frame rate relative to an origin moon's date, I see the synthesis of my own progress as an artist over time - and also the chaos that's influenced the influence that each of these events has had on myself and perhaps others. But I also see the progress of technology as these frame rates challenge technology to keep up and fulfil my grand vision for the work decades and centuries into the future. I grew up watching us move from 8-bit games like Pac Man to simulation games like Grand Theft Auto that are almost indiscernible from real life. That march of technology happened within my lifetime. So in Gazers, I made a work that through each individual Gazer's own complexity and combination of traits, the collection becomes variably generational - pushing into the future while also recalling the past - but remaining responsive to the context of the time it's being viewed in. Each Gazer evolves throughout the day, changing colour saturation and value. Yet, the viewer's perception of colour is mostly determined by the interactions between each work's layers, as in a kinetic or optical work. Why did you create this element of interactivity within the work, and what does it say about the work’s and your relationship to colour and randomness? Colour assignment does not change throughout the day, but the tightness of the pattern, thickness of the line, and transparency of the glaze changes. And the rotation of each layer. Those are the elements which cause our perception of colour to change moment to moment in Gazers. Earlier in my career, even 20 years ago, I was working with depth of physical materials. Colour suspended within layers of resin, glass, plastic, or fabric. As I'd physically move around those dimensional works, my perception of colour changed. And how beautiful colour glazes became when they got offset and interacted differently from when I was head-on with the work. I had the thought back then: wouldn't it be great if these layers weren't static and trapped within resin? If they could all rotate and interact differently - and not depend on the spatial movement of a viewer, but move itself? Gazers are the fulfilment of these old ideas. But at the same time, still just the beginning. As it changes during its lifespan, each Gazer seems to encapsulate the tension between ephemerality and permanence present within both nature and the blockchain. How does this perpetual change question the idea of aesthetic value and its evolution over time? It's the unseen made seen. Aside from several more grey hairs in my beard, there's not much that has changed about my outward appearance since a year ago. Or even 5 years ago. But the changes within myself, within my psyche, within my identity - just over the last 6 months - these are staggering. Yet there are parts of me, inside and out, still recognizable from 20 years ago. Even 38 years ago. So how do we represent and make visible the unseen changes that happen within each of us? Art! Each Gazer will appeal differently depending on the viewer and perhaps where they are within their own evolution. The beauty of the colour theory algorithm I wrote around Gazers is that each Gazer can develop an identity. To one who gazes upon a Gazer over time, and doesn't merely glance, the Gazer becomes recognizable no matter what month, no matter what century. Patterns emerge. Choices make sense, and yet there is still unpredictable posterity. You ask about aesthetic value. People don't fall in love and stay in love if they merely fall in love with a singular snapshot of a person at one fixed moment in their life. To fall in love and remain in love is to fall in love anew each day. To fall in love with another's patterns and proclivity to evolve or not evolve - all while maintaining our own capacity to connect while evolving ourselves. We must remain through the Winter to enjoy the blush of Spring. Pushing painting into time like Gazers has, Gazers are more like a person than a painting. This is the unseen made seen in us all.

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a Q&A session featuring curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi in conversation with 38‰. As a duo you started collaborating in early 2021, but your artistic relationship dates back to 2019. Why did you decide to combine your research and what lies behind the name 38‰, which you chose to use for your joint projects? We were just waiting for the right occasion to collaborate, and the opportunity was given to us by Twobadour for a collection of generative art on whalestreet.xyz. We decided to combine our strengths as they are complementary: mathematical and programming skills on the one hand and a somewhat methodical unruliness and unpredictability on the other. 38 per mille is the salinity of the Adriatic Sea, which is geographically close to both of us. While aware of its symbolic and cultural significance, the decision to represent it through scientific data speaks for our duo’s analytic attitude. As an ongoing series, ColorSeeds is set out to explore the relationship between the chromatic spectrum and the geometric. What is complementary about these two spectrums and how do you work to bring out these elements in your practice? There is a relationship between the colour spectrum and geometry because both have to do with numbers and are described by mathematical formulas. ColorSeeds combines the two in a creative way, from an insight into a piece by Mattia in which colour combinations are displayed in a geometric way, we developed an algorithm to follow this symmetry and break it. This exploration is a core element in our practice, as appears in ColorCuts too, our first series ever produced as a duo leveraging the intersection of colour and geometry, working between optical and generative art. In ColorSeeds the relation between the laws of nature and its most random aspects seems to reflect your analytical approach as well as your work's ties to glitches and coding bugs. What is the importance of embracing errors, or rather, of allowing your creative process to be informed by some unintentional developments in your artistic production? Evolution converges into geometric structures that optimise functions for increased survival. This process occurs by the selection of errors (mutations) in the genetic code. With ColorSeeds we are humbly replicating this process, in which chaos is introduced from a mathematical formula that can bring out unexpected and more interesting characteristics. The intervention of chance is a key aspect of our research and an interesting way to explore and embrace the infinite variety of outcomes an original idea can have.

If creatures could represent someone’s complicated inner world, what would they look like? Molding pixels to perfection, Japanese sculptor Yuuki Morita delves deep to offer us his layered and colorful interpretation. The building blocks of his surreal micro-universes are steeped in a love of nature and myth. From stunning Ryū (Dragons) to detailed forest spirits, Morita fully employs his Z-Brush mastery to bring the rich folklore of ‘the land of the rising sun’ to the modern world. As a lifelong anime admirer, I couldn’t help but be enamored by the stylistic imagery generated by Yuuki. A piece like ‘Taking Off’, where a seemingly porcelain tinted bird dissolves into glinting copies of itself, cleverly offers us an optical illusion where it feels like the winged ceramics might even gently float out of our screens. But what I found most intriguing is when the modeler’s poetic bestiary turns introspective. A common thread in works like ‘Fear’ and ‘Thinking Man’ is breathing life into our anxieties and demons. Blending intricate imagination with emotional context, these works feel like an ode to the complexity of the human spirit. Thoughts are anthropomorphised in fluid electronic clay, a whirling vat of tentacles, claws and teeth, where biting anger is briefly torn by joy only to be sucked down into a cauldron of calm despair. In ‘Depression’ on the other hand, the fiendishly grinning emotions have already escaped their faceless owner and float around him like mocking carnival balloons, weightlessly weighing him down. Something quite special about the artist is that he often produces these pieces in parallel as physical sculptures, case in point the astonishing transformation of ‘Thinking Man’ into resin and plaster. It’s inspirational to see the multi-faceted creations make the crossover without losing any of their impact (on the contrary). Lastly, I hope, like Morita, we may all be blessed by the giant jellyfish of inspiration as illustrated in his piece ‘Imagine’, although I do hope its creative sting isn’t quite as painful as its aquatic counterpart. Featured Works Taking Off Fear Thinking Man Depression Imagine Yuuki Morita Linktree Website Instagram Twitter

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a Q&A session featuring curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi in conversation with artist Mathieu Merlet-Briand. For this exhibition, you created a new work, Purple Mineral, which exists purely in digital space. How did you select what elements were critical to preserve in this digital format? This artwork was inspired by my sculpture Eroded Mineral Sculpture created for the Thailand Biennale, Korat 2021. This new work Purple Mineral is also the continuation of my New Nature series of Mineral Sculpture. In the context of Decentraland, the graphic possibilities are limited. So the artwork has been designed to play with those constraints to be compressed and optimized in this particular digital space. What is the role of materiality in your practice, and given that this work is presented in a virtual exhibition, how do you feel that your New Nature series changes when presented in digital space? In terms of materiality and shape, I’m not convinced by the digital quality possible in Decentraland. In the end, the global rendering is rather low poly, so it flattens the global visual experience. Yet, working on my sculpture, I found it interesting to seek a good visual balance in this digital world; it reminded me of the Internet aesthetic described by Hito Steyerl in the text In Defense of the Poor Image (2009), where artworks circulated from screen to screen into the digital word, often through smartphones in "slow digital connections". Is it a critical initiative to preserve the world as we know it, or does digital archiving act merely as a stopgap measure for wider environmental issues? My New Nature series questions our contemporary organic relationship between Nature & Technologies, between climate crisis and digital worlds. But I don't think that the digital servers that run the Decentraland space here are a solution for wider environmental issues. For some it’s maybe the total opposite, regarding the numerous articles on the environmental impact of NFTs for example. But yes, in a way it helps to produce less or to make people travel less with an offer of new social experiences through these digital spaces. My goal is above all to increase awareness of these climate issues through my works, for my practice to be a social vector of conversation on these fundamental contemporary issues. But I have no claim to provide an answer here in this context. This digital sculpture recalling the Stonehenge site is an eroded stone lost in an ocean of information.

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a Q&A session featuring curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi in conversation with artist Sarah Meyohas about "Cloud of Petals". What surprised you most about the petals the men selected? Was there a typical ‘type’ of rose petal they liked most often? It was interesting to see how different men made their choices. Some opted for the most symmetrical petals with the least imperfections, reflecting a more traditional concept of beauty. Others were iconoclasts, selecting the strangest, most unique petals. The outsiders. Why was it important to film the project in Bell Labs and to have 16 men performing in it? I wanted to give the solemnity of a ritual to data collection, and Bell Labs provided a mythic setting. Masculine hands handling the delicate, feminine petals inverted the gender expectations typically associated with fine handiwork. May the use of the rose be interpreted as a direct commentary on things like dating apps which allow algorithms to select partners for us based on a set of mysterious computations and vague concepts? While it wasn't my initial intention, that interpretation is certainly valid. I saw the petals as individual identities, each with its own unique shape and color, similar to humans. Why did you feel it was important to put yourself in the work? The decision was frankly somewhat impulsive. I wanted to capture the triangulation of the gaze, with me observing the men as they examined the petals. Additionally, this wasn't a narrative film, but rather a documentary. The men weren’t pretending to photograph roses for the sake of the camera, they were genuinely engaged in the task, so there was an authenticity in me being there to orchestrate it. What was the most difficult part of the project? The most rewarding? The most difficult part was moving a lot of really heavy buckets filled with roses in and out of a fridge to keep them fresh for the next day. Which is to say, there was not too much difficulty. I had so much conviction in the project that the whole process was a pleasure. The most rewarding aspect, like any creative project, was seeing my vision come to life. How do you feel we should approach algorithms in our daily lives? Embrace them or try to minimise them? I currently view the world as if it is mostly all algorithms, but that the inputs are so complex, and there is so much randomness that it is too difficult to simulate. The data is too large. Do you feel machines are living things on their own or extensions of humanity? Today, machines are extensions of humanity, and they are certainly not alive. But if in some indeterminate future I were to meet someone, and was then told it was a humanoid robot, with GPT for a brain and a synthetic voice, I’m not sure I would really care about whether they are definitionally alive or not. They are there in front of me, and will interact with me. Consciousness is an emergent phenomena that is not well understood or defined. It might just be so hard to tell that it just ends up falling on a spectrum.

Have you ever felt disenchanted by a growing disconnect between your physical and electronic life? In his first ever digital work, renowned poet and installation artist Robert Montgomery ironically uses the medium to explore the aversion he feels for our algorithmically tailored virtual realities. His talent at the juxtaposition of thought-provoking phrases within urban spaces has been one I’ve admired for a long time, so I was quite intrigued to see how his verse creations would translate in the realm of bits and bytes. ‘You Are An Agent Of Free Sunlight’ offers us a 3 minutes and 33 seconds long lament on the broken promises of new technology. Created in collaboration with multimedia artist Sir Gulliver, we are shown a darkly lit cyber arena where Montgomery’s voice echoes his projected words, replicating the neon tones of the artist’s real life light poems. A mostly faceless 3D sculpture hovers in the background, softly crumbling as the phrases of the video manifesto reflect on our crippling bondage to devices. These ‘tablets of illuminated memories, where in all the pictures the famous people have already begun to look lost and lonely’ seem to sever our connection with the natural for ‘little boxes of ghosts exactly tailored to ourselves’. As the piece progresses, it urges us to embrace real sunlight instead of shunning it for preventing us from experiencing our reflective screens and warns us of the dangers of being sucked too deep in our entertaining prisons. For we might start feeling ‘artificial amongst the bird songs’ as the intimacy of advertised fakeness heightens our insecurities to a point where we forget the beauty around us in favor of the mirages trademarked by tech billionaires. Robert’s unsettling narrative is beautifully worded and succinctly presented. Originally created as part of New Pavillion’s inaugural project within the NFT space and supported by Danysz Gallery, it gives presence to fears a lot of us secretly struggle with and cleverly uses the medium for a certain form of self-criticism. I hope we can take lessons from Montgomery’s ballad and above all never forget that we are all ‘carbon miracles’. Full Work You Are An Agent Of Free Sunlight Robert Montgomery Website Instagram #1 Instagram #2 Sir Gulliver Linktree Instagram Twitter

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is a critical text by curators Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi. Sarah Meyohas is a conceptual artist who investigates relationships between nature and technology, illuminating the often submerged rules that govern our lives. On display in the Not Only RGB exhibition, Meyohas’s Generated Petals Interpolation features AI generated rose petals which endlessly evolve, trapped in an infinite cycle of production and erasure. The algorithm for this work was trained on a dataset captured as part of another work, Cloud of Petals, which MoCDA had the privilege of screening on April 18, 2023 as part of the exhibition’s programming. Staged in the former Bell Labs, Cloud of Petals captures Meyohas’s project to dissect over 10,000 roses into their individual petals. The film opens with a close-up on some digital images' RGB components, taken from a screen. The focus then shifts to the act of photographing and capturing such images. Rose petals. Another cut and a bright blue sky appears, then the roof of the building, crowded with antennas and satellite dishes. The artist is also present in this deserted context, adding a human element to the main protagonists so far: technology and nature. Suddenly we find ourselves inside the building, hovering over sixteen desks carefully arranged in a big empty hall. Sixteen figures approach them, their arms full of roses. Roses: a symbol for love, youth; a great business as well. There's almost a ritualism to the scene, to the exact position of the working stations as to the men's movements - are we inside an abandoned tech hub or a cathedral? Even if not in a religious sense, the former Bell Labs can be regarded as consecrated space as some of the greatest technological breakthroughs in telecommunications took place here over the last century. Here, where the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor was invented, the artist stages the creation of a new Big Data archive. Nothing is portrayed by chance. Details are strengthened throughout the film by frequent close-ups. For instance, we see the artist's fingers delicately balancing dead flies on some wires, perhaps referencing computer bugs, once caused by actual insects hiding in the bulky tangles of cables or circuits of the first computing machines. She will repeat this activity on hair tangles - can we humans be considered as some sort of algorithmic machine too? The dichotomy between the abandoned stillness of the facility and life harboured by natural living things proves illusory. Besides dead insects, we see snake moults, severed roses, their petals: all elements that are somehow transformed and bound to come to life again. The petals are not only photographed and stored eternally in digital format; they are also used as inputs for an artificial neural network to create new ones. Some flies land on these digital petals, perhaps mistaking the screen for an actual flower. A yellow python slithers on roses of matching colour and tangles of cables, mirroring the impulses that once travelled through the wires. Other animals seem to claim the space throughout the film, the boundary between life and death gets blurred as the building itself, with its bulky cable bowels half exposed, with its cracks and wide glass windows, is repopulated by the protagonists of the performance. The sixteen workers dart in the space carrying all varieties of roses. They are busy collecting images of the flowers, petal after petal, in a repetitive, somewhat ritualistic manner. Each man has a precise computational task: to capture each petal's image for the digital archive and select the most beautiful one from each flower for it to be preserved in a physical archive. The sense of touch seems a key component of their acts, as their contact with the flowers is either delicate or almost visceral. One man goes so far as to caress the petals and smell them. However they are treated, the 100,000 petals portrayed are used to digitally generate infinite new ones through AI. The acts of the men and the neural networks seem to mirror each other. The building itself is enhanced again, reminding us how the data we store in a seemingly intangible cloud actually occupies a physical space too. The digital sublime, this hyper object of Big Data, does not lack a physical dimension. Calm, suspended moments are juxtaposed with frenetic ones. Some roses get destroyed while still in bloom, consumed by fire; others are abandoned; others get thrown from the upper floors down to the huge hall, now covered in petals. Unintelligible words are murmured like a spell. There is decay in the sacred halls of Bell Labs as there is life. Nature and technology, physical and digital realities, blend more and more in a climax that finally unveils the Generated Petals, an algorithmically-produced presentation of new petals generated using the dataset that has just been created. The roses are now pixels, bits of colour. We are once again left with the RGB founding element of the digital image.

Is there a word in the human language that describes the ghostly aftermath of an emotional event? If there is, it would perhaps be fitting to describe Andro Pang’s haunting slices of often post-life. Armed with a remarkable grasp of the soulful power of light and color, the photographic qualities of the Indonesian artist’s 3D renders use minimal elements to evoke a maximum of feeling. His frames are regularly devoid of human characters, leaving objects like chairs and sometimes celestial bodies to take the place of terrestrial ones. This enhances a feeling of entering these crafted instants as a solitary witness, as if gently peeking behind the curtain of reality itself. And even when, like in his work ‘Isolation’, people are still there to ‘tell the tale’, they do so without showing their faces. No, his affective imagery manages to convey their sense of loss, loneliness, hope and despair (sometimes all combined in the same work) without relying on tearful gazes or tortured facial expressions. These fragments of his dreamy universe allow the viewer to bring their own subtext, filling our heads with questions without forcing a clear answer. When we see a phone receiver hanging off the hook in a flooded hallway or a mounted rose greeting us among the debris of previous failed attempts, we are stimulated to mentally recreate events that might have led up those ‘after’ images. Pang finds inspiration from many sources and sometimes wears them on his sleeve, like with his clever wink to ‘The Truman Show’ in ‘Ordinary World’. ‘I Love You In Every Universe’ made me think of a time when I myself creatively chased bodiless shadows and I was eager to set sail up into the clouds on the floating dingy moored in ‘Perfect Things’. But as ‘Are You Happy’ rightfully questions, perhaps up above is not really any different than down below. Tinged with sadness and longing, Andro’s symbolic musings almost seem to echo with unspoken words and whispered thoughts. And when exploring his sunlit deserts, abandoned corridors and fields of flowers long enough, you might just hear what’s being said. Andro Pang Linktree Instagram Twitter Featured Works I Love You In Every Universe Hope Relax Isolation Anybody? Frame Ordinary World Perfect Things Are You Happy?

Ever wonder what the inner mechanics of the human mind really look like? Offering a uniquely comical interpretation is the work of Serbian cut and paste virtuoso Miloš Rajković, better known as Sholim. His ingeniously constructed symphonies of absurdity push the gif format almost beyond its creative limit. Within these cleverly choreographed, animated collages, a sense of perpetual motion becomes key. Exploring his distinct creations, I was filled with a sense of nostalgia for the days when solving the intricate puzzles of ‘the incredible machine’ game filled my days. For there is always method to the madness, a dreamlike way of thinking that binds his universe to a surreal sense of logic. The funhouse mirror that Milos at times puts in front of us, like with his ‘Join The Army’ series, reveals hidden hypocrisies. Our human behaviour is often put under a loop, for instance when literally compared to the famous Skinner Bird Box experiment. That’s what I find so beautiful about Sholim’s creations, they aren’t just clever gags, but quite insightful explorations of our psyche if one dares to look closer. A personal favourite is his take on Yasujirõ Ozu’s confessional family drama ‘Tokyo Story’, made for the Nagoya City Art Museum. The artist’s sensibility as a dissector of imagery enables him to beautifully capture some of the essential symbols of the film classic. Under the ticking weight of time, a character reluctantly ‘opens’ her inner world, showing us a fragmented collection of memory and moment. Another of his works, Dream #32, offers a similar puzzle box of the mind, where a ‘Magritte’ like woman, head firmly in the clouds, quietly unfolds like a Russian doll filled with rose petal perfumed tiger fantasies. Or as a last example, the vision of an inner world defined by vanity, cats and shopping in Selfie #1. Expertly employing all instruments within Adobe's toolbox, Sholim’s work features a constant sense of pushing boundaries in a cheeky study of what makes mankind truly (mal)function. Miloš Rajković aka Sholim Website Twitter Instagram Mentioned Works Join The Army series Skinner Box Head Tokyo Story Dream #32 Selfie #1

Not Only RGB (Decentraland, October 2022-June 2023) is a MoCDA group show supported by Decentraland DAO featuring works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand. This is the curatorial introduction by Chiara Braidotti and Anastasia Pineschi. Life began to evolve the ability to perceive and differentiate colours 90 million years ago. In some ways, it is one of life’s oldest defining characteristics, perhaps rivalled only by a capacity for movement and a sense of time. It enables the ability to differentiate unique presentations of our environment, to categorise, to know when food is fresh or rotten. We ascribe meaning to our environment based on the harrowing red dawn of a sky before a storm at sea, the laden grey of clustering rain clouds, the peace felt by the glow of a golden evening. A fascination with the meaning of colour has led to endless explorations of colour’s mechanical origins. Although the physics of colour has long been a fascination of scientific circles, Isaac Newton was one of the first to codify its relationships. Building on light-focused investigations from Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham, and Descartes among others, Newton isolated independent wavelengths through the use of a prism and mapped the relationship between these wavelengths in a proto-colour wheel in his book Opticks (1704). By ‘[separating] from one another the heterogenous Rays of compound Light’, Newton developed a foundational theory for the construction of colour, by which the combination of two differently hued lights could produce a third hue, culminating in the combination of all colours to produce white. Indeed, although many of light’s properties have been refined since Newton’s initial investigations by other experiments such as those by James Clerk Maxwell, a fascination with the ability to isolate and combine colour emerged in critical artistic movements around the turn of the 20th century. This fascination followed Goethe's psychology of colour, which was significant in the artistic context of the time as it emphasised the emotional and aesthetic qualities of colour and its effect on human perception, challenging the prevailing scientific approach of Newton dominant in physics and optics, and encouraging artists to explore the expressive potential of colour in their work. Most notably, pointillistic works employ a subtractive colour mixing theory as a branch of a wider divisionist movement, where the focus in artistic representation during this neo-impressionist period pivoted towards constructing optical interactions between colours. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), arguably one of Georges Seurat’s most famous works, eschews the mixing of colours on an artist’s palette to instead present minute dots of paint on a canvas that blend within the viewer’s eye. Pigments are constructed in the initial selection of paint, but the selection, spacing, and vibrancy of these paint dots is what creates elements like the shimmering folds on a woman’s dress and rolling shadows on green grass. In the age of the digital, however, colour has become purely an optical exercise. The additive theory of colour has guided the construction of electronic images as pixels on a computer screen balance their red, green, and blue phosphors to provide a visual gateway into a constructed online world. The screen has become a futuristic form of divisionism as complex colours are constructed by optical illusion through dithering, an operation by which image processing algorithms produce illusionary shades through a combination of limited colours. And behind the electronics, colour has become a dataset, codified into binary strings that alert these phosphors when to illuminate or dim. The work of Nam June Paik is some of the most poignant to explore the semiotic meaning behind colour on the screen. In Video Flag (1996), 70 CRT monitors flash imagery of American politics and technological advancements, coordinating the footage across the screens to invoke a massive, volatile American flag. Each individual screen displays tinted, stuttering footage, but it is only when the screens are seen as a whole work can the final composite image be perceived. Although not depicting an aspect of the natural world, Video Flag encapsulates the ways in which colour can be isolated, modified, and recombined onscreen as a new iteration of the outside world. The semiotic meaning of the flag, when stripped to its component parts of red, white and blue and overlaid on panicked footage, becomes distorted by the world depicted on the screen, each monitor acting as an experimental chamber that can only be understood in aggregate. America, the true America, feels more real through these amalgamated stories. So what can the digital world offer in an understanding of the natural world? Housed in circuits and datapoints, is it too far removed from the blood and water of biological life? It is a bold question, but ultimately one in need of refinement. The dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘digital’ falsifies real experiences received from virtual worlds. Naturally we are not nourished by the water from a virtual lake or shaded by the leaves of a digital palm tree, but the physical mechanics of light’s interactions with our eyes, the emotions we receive from two-dimensional images, the status and purpose we gain from maintaining digital assets; these are all elements of biological life influenced by our time online. The computer must be seen not as a replacement for the natural world but as a tool for isolating and transforming its components. The teleology of art places digital tools at the rightmost edge, something altogether new yet with deep roots in historic art practice. The icons in Photoshop are still brushes despite the lack of paint. As a meditation on one of humanity’s most fundamental curiosities, the Not Only RGB exhibition explores the transposition of colour from the natural world into the multispectral realm of the digital. Each of the works in the exhibition explores different angles of investigation: emotional, mechanical, geological, algorithmic, astrological. Placed in conversation in the exhibition, Kevin Abosch’s Sun Signals and Matt Kane’s Gazers depict astrological bodies, but to different purposes. Where Abosch’s series constructs scenes from solar data with the express purpose of evoking the viewer’s emotional reactions, and hopefully action, Kane stacks each dataset to explore colour as autobiographical aggregate, continually moulded by the interplay between layers. Italian duo 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini & Luca Donno) offers a different interpretation of colour. Their work ColorSeeds, created in response to the exhibition, explores the geometric qualities of colour, using digital code (metaphorical ‘seeds’) to generate colour palettes that explore fundamental laws of nature like symmetry, order and randomness. Other works in the exhibition explore questions of Big Data and its role in the preservation and categorisation of our natural world. Mattheiu Merlet Briand, through a work that was created for the exhibition, recreates a purple amethyst-like mineral in a virtual sculpture, commentating on the play between geological and digital eternity. In a similar vein, Sarah Meyohas uses the dissection of roses to reduce rose petals to natural datapoints, which are then easily recombined and regenerated through an algorithm in the face of a new evolutionary selection tool: that of human preference. Digital and algorithmic tools have reduced colour to a new class of computer-stored information, one that can be categorised, stored, amplified or erased. The fundamental laws that govern our emotional and physical relationships to colour are often dissected and recombined through the digital lens. In fact, drawing on philosopher Luciano Floridi's concept of "onlife," which describes the interconnectedness of online and offline spaces, we could consider that the environment in which we live is substantially extended into the digital realm. As the newest platform in a longstanding artistic tradition fuelled by an obsession with colour, the digital world prompts us to question what purpose it serves in representing nature. Yet, when we consider the complex impact of colour both on and off the screen, it might be better to ask why we see them as separate entities in the first place.