Translated from French:

Robert Alice presents BABEL from June 30 to October 22, 2023, at the Monnaie de Paris. The exhibition, both physical and online, is created in close collaboration with the monetary institution and the NFT platform LaCollection. It engages in a dialogue between Web3 and NFTs with the oldest institution in France. In this innovative project, enriched by in-depth discussions with the curators of the Monnaie de Paris museum and utilizing a wide variety of cutting-edge technologies, from smart contracts to LiDAR scans, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, the artworks explore conceptual and philosophical topics central to the blockchain.

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Taking its title from the 1941 short story by José Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, this new presentation by Robert Alice explores blockchains through the prism of Borges's infinite library: a space made up of hexagonal rooms, all identical and interconnected, featuring the same number of shelves with the same number of books, possessing the same number of pages, lines, and characters. This structure encompasses all possible variations, written and yet to be written, of books with no readable content.

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A dialogue between a Web3 artist and a centuries-old institution, Robert Alice is an artist with a background in art history, curator, author, crypto art pioneer, and NFT specialist. In 2021, he organized the first NFT auction at a major auction house: Natively Digital with Sotheby's.

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The artworks in the BABEL project are all hybrid, both digital and physical. This emphasizes the importance of materiality and history in Robert Alice's artistic approach, drawing attention to the connections between blockchain technologies and the past. The project comprises around twenty works, primarily in the form of NFTs. The lightboxes and prints presented in the museum's exhibition are the physical counterparts of the digital works. A QR code on the label allows access to the digital artwork on the LaCollection platform.

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The artist was invited to visit the Parisian site, its historic salons, museum, and medal cabinet, as well as the exhibition "Money in Art." From this visit and discussions with the conservation team, particularly with Dominique Antérion, curator of numismatic collections, two series of unpublished works were born. These were directly inspired by the architecture, history, and heritage collections of the Monnaie, and they are presented for the first time in this exhibition: "The Blueprints" and "Ornament and Crisis."

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