Source [On NFTs]
- Edition of 400
- Generative Algorithm, Natural Language Processing, Processing
- Glyphs
- Minting at Christie's, 12 March 2024
On the occasion of the launch of On NFTs, the first major full scale art historical study on NFTs published by Taschen, Robert Alice is releasing a generative text art series named SOURCE (On NFTS). The 400 works poetically distill the pre-history of NFTs into large contemporary digital colour fields. Born from On NFTs conceptually, the project also physically and aesthetically is tied to the book. The works form the endpapers of the book, marking the first and last NFTs that one will discover when they open On NFTs. The font used in the project is the same font used as the body text within the book, and the land- scape ratio is the exact size of a double page spread in On NFTs.
Endpapers from Robert Alice and TASCHEN's On NFTs
Influenced by their work writing and editing On NFTs, SOURCE [On NFTS] is about history, how it is formed, the chaotic and many-threaded nature of it. The philosophical basis of the work centers around the idea of collision, both poetically and aesthetically. Poetically, language is collided together from disparate strands of history: politics, art, science fiction and technology. Sometimes separated by thousands of years, each of the 30 texts has been selected by Robert Alice as it reveals something specific about the cultural ecology of where NFTs came out of.
Works of science fiction are collided with seminal digital art history manifestos, cryptography white papers are collided with 7th century Chinese philosophical texts, interweaving these disparate histories together to create new meaning influenced by concrete poetry. Using NLP trained on each text to create a kind of etymological fingerprint; adjectives, nouns and proper nouns are chaotically collided together to create phrases that celebrate juxtaposition. Released at a time where AI’s hallucinate, and the nature of truth has become a political battleground, the works more broadly speak to the nature of language and history in our contemporary moment.
Frontcovers for the 30 texts trained using NLP for the text strings in SOURCE [On NFTs]
Aesthetically, each work is the collision between two outputs, spliced together in a way that echoes the NLP text phrases. Built entirely out of NLP phrases, the text works used only glyphs and characters as their medium, echoing the opening lines of On NFTs (see above) and drawing to the fore the reality that blockchains and NFTs are fundamentally a text-based medium. Resulting from this collision of two images, the final works veer from order to chaos and back again, at times the source phrases are highly eligible, at other times encrypted, abstracted and enveloped into further areas of text, lost to the whims of history. Influenced by the aesthetics of DNA sequencing, data and blueprints, texts are compressed and expanded to suggest the passage of time and the idea of a source or common identity that runs through these disparate histories. A work that fundamentally deals with the nature of art history, the works draw from many aesthetic historical standards within the history of text art, from the abstraction of Twombly, to the erasure of Ligon and Bradford, the works also draw on line making of artists such as Julie Mehretu. The works also explore the history of digital and programmatic arts, allusions to both Autoglyphs and Chromie Squiggles are complemented with references to works such as Ferdinand Kriwet’s poetic-programmatic discs from the 1960s.
TEAM
Robert Alice
Cosmo Lindsay, Head of Research
Digital Practice, NFT Development
