A variety of landscapes set the scene for Barry Underwood’s vivid sculptures (previously), illuminating sites of human interference and destruction. Utilizing LED lights and reflective materials, he challenges perceptions of flatness and depth and invites us to consider the significance of our surroundings. “Our understanding of landscape is a construct based upon what we want from the land and what we have experienced,” he says.

Underwood’s latest series Linear Construction—to which many of these images belong—“focuses on visual illusions that reflect the land conservation paradoxes created by humans’ deep augmentation of the natural world,” he tells Colossal. While some images contain clear signs of intervention, such as a mown field or a stone wall, others require a closer look at a treeless river bank or a cleared meadow. The artist explores civilization’s impact on nature by superimposing geometric shapes onto landscapes, nodding to the precise angles of built structures and bright lights we might associate with warning flares or neon signs.

To achieve the images, Underwood experiments with what he calls “a catalog of visual devices. I try to find locations that I’m either shooting downhill or uphill to make the space look like it’s torqued,” playing with perception and taking multiple frames that are later stitched together in Photoshop to create what he describes as a “disruptive mood.”

Find more of Underwood’s work on his website, and learn more about his process on Instagram.

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Emerging Web3 technologies are emboldening old school artists to experiment with creative media in unique ways and distribute digital art through global, decentralized networks.

The creative economy represented 4.4 % of GDP, according to data published in 2021 by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, just over $1 trillion. And now the creative economy is also a fundamental cornerstone of the crypto economy. Countless Ethereum
ETH
-friendly art collectives, in particular, are still growing their communities despite the bear market.

The CryptoArt Footprint Of Female Founders

One such community is DADA, an ecosystem of over 175,000 participants that was created by two female founders, Beatriz Ramos and Judy Mam. Far from being a crypto fad, DADA is an old school art community that will commemorate its ten year anniversary next year. The jubilee kicks off this May in Milan with a special exhibit – The “DADA Perspective” – curated by Web3 artist Eleonora Brizi at the iconic MEET Digital Culture Center in Italy.

The exhibit will draw from the collective’s rich history of work and add new dimensions. For example, DADA collaborated with roboticist Alex Reben to program an Artificial Intelligence bot back in 2019, using DADA’s 115,000 portfolio of works. DADAGAN, is being rebooted as an autonomous artist-in-residence just in time for the Italian exhibit, and will have its own unique social media presence.

Artists Ramos and Mam first launched the DADA digital platform in 2014, then infused blockchain technology into their work starting in 2017. The New York based entity was one of the first art projects to code royalties into Ethereum smart contracts, enabling creators to profit from secondary market sales. Long before the NFT craze attracted mainstream attention with CryptoKitties, DADA’s “Creeps & Weirdos” collection was issued on Ethereum for Halloween 2017.

DADA is fashioned in the style of the Dadaism artistic movement of the early 20th century, which sought to disrupt the bourgeois, capitalist art society that profited an elite few. In an interview with me, Mam describes the platform as an “giant open canvas” where artists speak through drawings. Adding Web3 technology to the mix can only enhance the open collaborations between artists exploring this genre.

The Invisible Economy

As early crypto adopters, the DADA founders were determined not to create a space that “replicated the dynamics of the traditional art market,” says Mam. She added that today’s centralized art business is a rat race that picks winners and losers based on trends, competition and access. Instead, the DADA Collective aims to use Web3 tools to venture “beyond the prospect of simply transacting in digital assets.” The art itself should subvert or question power dynamics in the creative economy.

These founders are seasoned Latina artists who have worked with Fortune 500 companies, Ramos as a commercial illustrator and Mam as a published writer. Yet they wanted DADA to be anything but commercial. Instead, Mam says they are exploring an “invisible economy” that uses non-business models for promoting art in ways that minimize inequity while fostering audience participation. That’s where Web3 tools come in.

The DADA collective aims to launch a token later this year that may help quantify “intangible value, that is beyond simple economic value,” Ramos said during a Blockchain Small Business Week Forum in May 2021. Rather than focusing mainly on the token price, Mam told me the token will enable community governance for an unconventional digital art marketplace. However, the DADA Collective is not a decentralized autonomous organization. They’ll experiment with voting structures that allow for optimal participation.

Fusing New Technologies

This experiment is already influencing the art world. The newly published book, “The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy,” by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams, pays homage to DADA’s impact and documents their early journey to harness Blockchain technology to empower and build community. Still, Mam and Ramos are certainly not alone in their innovative approach to fusing artistic experiences with new technologies.

There’s also Spatial Labs, where CEO Iddris Sandu is designing infrastructure to power Web3, melding physical products with digital utility. Their state of the art technology enables creatives to tap digital assets to curate immersive user interfaces to maximize revenue generation.

And Lady PheOnix, a new media and culture artist, blazed new trails in 2021 when she unveiled “PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY” for Christie’s Auction House. In addition to smart contracts, she blended metadata, storage, and legal standards to architect the crypto art and NFT extravaganza. In describing the Christie’s event in a press release, Lady PheOnix said, “PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY places the sovereignty and legacy of the artist at the center of the conversation—and has established a new standard for artists, collectors, and institutions…These practices rarely get implemented outside of museums and academia, but are essential for the long-term preservation and storage of digital art.”

As traditional creative industries continue to be disrupted, the upcoming DADA exhibit in Italy, which opens on May 10, is a timely retrospective celebrating the crypto art culture the two female founders have built over almost a decade. Artists like Beatriz Ramos and Judy Mam, as well as female founders like Lady PheOnix and other crypto-savvy art collectives, are showing how digital models can transform the creative economy.

Travelers at O’Hare Airport’s Multi-Modal Facility in Chicago—an expansive parking structure that connects all of the airport’s ground transportation—are now treated to a large-scale, collaborative artwork by Hank Willis Thomas (previously) and Coby Kennedy as they move through a lofty atrium. Emerging from the walls of an escalator hall and measuring approximately 27 and 31 feet long, enormous arms extend across the space as if just about to clasp hands. Titled “REACH,” the piece takes cues from its site in a busy transportation hub, reframing a transitory space into a reminder of togetherness and connectivity.

“‘REACH’ is a connection point and large-scale gesture that inspires us to come together,” says Thomas, whose sculptures have often incorporated hands and arms in symbolic positons such as embraces, the Black Power fist, or hands-up defensive signals that evoke historical events and activism. The work is the newest of O’Hare’s major public art installations, which among many others includes “Palimpsest,” Nick Cave’s multi-story beaded tapestry installed in 2019 in another part of the same building.

See more of Thomas’ work on his website, and follow on Instagram for updates.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Hank Willis Thomas and Coby Kennedy Extend a Monumental Welcome to Travelers Transiting Through O’Hare appeared first on Colossal.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS changing the way we think about authorship, art, and white collar work. It may be changing how we think, full stop.

As artificial intelligence, or machine learning, becomes more integrated into people’s everyday lives, it runs the risk of “replacing moral judgments, or by replacing practical judgments, or replacing everyday judgments,” Nir Eisikovits, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said this week on The Codcast. 

Decisions as minor as what to watch on a streaming service or as major as whether to approve someone for a mortgage are being gently, or not so gently, automated. 

“The basic point is making a judgment like, ‘Should somebody get a promotion? Should somebody get a mortgage?’ used to be something that a human being decided by weighing all kinds of particulars using their spidey sense or whatever,” Eisikovits said. “Increasingly, they’re made by machines, and if using your judgment is a little bit like going to the gym – it’s like a muscle … use it or lose it – then more and more we’re, in more and more contexts, not using it.”

Eisikovits founded the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. Since the center opened in 2017, Eisikovits and his colleagues have been thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence on moral decision-making and its unique relationship to work and creativity. 

Flashy fears about artificial intelligence are probably not the best targets for human hypervigilance, Eisikovits notes. “One important misconception is that we’re moving closer and closer to a sentient kind of Skynet AI that’s capable of generating its own intentions and finally becoming a robot overlord,” he said. “I think that’s not in the cards for the near future.”

A risk of increased reliance on artificial intelligence is, instead, about short-cutting many of the basic moral and creative decisions that people make. If a machine can suggest possible song samples for aspiring musicians, or go further and create a music video from a popular artist nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, the relationship between artist and artistic product can get confusing.

“We admire great performances, because they represent the kind of giftedness that awes us,” Eisikovits said. “And in the case of technologically generated performance, our admiration moves from the giftedness to an engineer or to a pharmacist or to a lab person. And it’s not clear what art can still do for you under those conditions.”

There are some upsides to better machine learning, in theory. A person’s “spidey sense” could boil down to personal bias that a more fair machine learning system could counteract. On the other hand, the bias of a programmer or the pools of data that machines are trained to sort through could fundamentally taint the outcome. 

Famously, Eisikovits recalled, facial recognition technologies were better at recognizing light-skinned faces than dark-skinned faces because the data used to train the programs used more White people. 

“Importantly, if there’s enough political will, and commercial pressure, and both, then those biases can be fixed, just like Microsoft fixed its facial recognition software in response to pressure,” he said. “So in some way, I think the extension-of-bias question is a big question. It’s important. But it can be addressed. What I think can’t be addressed, or is much harder to address, has to do with the loss of capacity from this replacing us in some basic functions.”

Every new technology is met with a level of agonized fretting about replacing human beings in some essential way, Eisikovits said. The invention of writing displaced oral storytelling traditions in much of the world. Industrial machinery could accomplish intense physical tasks beyond the human body’s potential. 

Artificial intelligence’s capacity to replace workers is similar to industrial machinery in that it can perform labor-intensive, low-skill work more efficiently – reviewing large amounts of documents in legal or medical fields, for instance. 

It ties into a broader conversation about the nature of work and fulfillment. Is there an inherent value to making a human being pore through tens of thousands of pages, or summarize stock briefings, or pull together a basic marketing deck? CommonWealth last month considered the rise of the four-day work week, which proponents assert gives employees more time for their personal lives while counterintuitively getting the same amount of work done as they might in a five-day work week.

“What seems to be happening is rather than jobs being replaced wholesale, parts of jobs are being replaced,” Eisikovits said. “So people’s job definitions are changing. I think there’s no way around that, meaning that sooner or later, you’ll need fewer people to generate the same kind of productivity.”