Refik Anadol’s Swirling Abstractions Will Soon Illuminate MoMA
Though digital art has been around for more than 60 years, major cultural institutions have only recently started embracing the medium thanks to the rapid rise of NFTs as a financial boon. Even as the market cooled this past year during “crypto winter,” museums are continuing to explore Web3 possibilities to attract younger, tech-savvy audiences and crypto millionaires interested in donating. The latest example comes from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which recently announced a partnership with Refik Anadol, whose immersive, swirling abstractions have won over viewers at Artechouse and Art Basel.
MoMA first teamed up with the Turkish-American digital artist this past year when curators Michelle Kuo and Paola Antonelli invited him to plug more than 138,000 images and text materials from two centuries of the museum’s archives into a machine-learning model to create hundreds of colorful abstractions called “machine hallucinations.” He sold them as NFTs and programmed smart contracts so he and the museum will get a cut whenever the blockchain artworks sell on the secondary market.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Surface Magazine website. Read more about Refik Anadol.
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