E30D by glitch Gallery

The Every 30 Days Exhibition

XCOPY

MAY '23

ON VIEW

Every 30 Days

Its first product is Every 30 Days - a month-long exhibition of a single, culturally significant, digital artwork — on view in the window of the gallery in Marfa, Texas and simultaneously over a persistent digital livestream.

glitch Gallery is an analog space for digital objects founded in 2022 — living at the intersection of Marfa, Texas and the internet.

Curation is care — each artist, work, and collector is carefully selected by the Glitch team of curators. Accompanying each E30D exhibition is a long-form essay, and a digital poster that references the essay, artist, object, and collector. There will only be a maximum of 1000 digital posters available for purchase during each exhibition.

The Every 30 Days Exhibition is curated by Malte Rauch, Madison Page, and Derek Edwards.

The exhibition strives to build a bridge between the physical and the digital, while contextualizing the position of each object within art history.

Saints of Scarcity: XCOPY’s ‘Right-Click and Save as Guy’

Why would I buy it when I can right click and save as?

These thirteen words act as the sole description of XCOPY’s most iconic digital artwork, minted on December 6th, 2018.

Like few other works, “Right-click and Save As guy” captures an antiquated prejudice against digital art objects — computer files anyone can “own” by saving them with a mouse click. The work represented a shift toward what the world deemed previously impossible — the ability to imbue a digital object with scarcity.

Changes in technology, especially technologies of reproduction, have always affected the shape of art and its socio-economic significance.

When photography and cinematography began to demonstrate widespread influence in the early 20th century, critic Walter Benjamin noted that the “…work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions.” In a similar vein, non-fungible tokens on decentralized blockchains change the objecthood of digital art. Through the ERC-721 token standard, digital artworks turned into unique, persistent objects that can accrue value: an essential shift in what it means to be an art object in the digital realm.

The Every 30 Days Exhibition

JUN '23

CLAIRE SILVER

ON VIEW

The Mother of the Muses: Claire Silver’s Genesis

More than 70 years ago, Alan Turing first posed the simple question, “Can machines think?”

Few would doubt that the development of computation in the last decades has led ever closer to an affirmative answer. When speculating about future progress in artificial intelligence, even Turing confined himself to the thesis that “machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.” Purely intellectual fields refer to calculation and logical inference, whereas human creativity is often imagined to operate in a vastly different realm, an idea that still persists today.

So, what is genuine creativity? Usually, it is understood as creating the radically new, incommensurable, heretofore unseen. However, the notion of radical innovation, of an original and unprecedented creation, is a dubious leftover from the Renaissance cult of the artist, in which the language of divine creation became entangled with that of artistic skill.

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LARVA LABS

The Every 30 Days Exhibition

JUL '23

ON VIEW

All Roads Lead To Punks

In 2017, Larva Labs, a game design studio by John Watkinson and Matt Hall launched a digital art experiment on the Ethereum blockchain. The project paid tribute to London’s early ‘70s punk scene, cypherpunks, and pixel art. It came in the form of 10,000 unique, randomly assembled, 24x24 pixel art characters featuring an assortment of humans, zombies, apes, and aliens.

It was called CryptoPunks.

For a few weeks, anyone with an Ethereum wallet could claim these tokenized digital characters for free on the Larva Labs website. Living somewhere between generative art piece, collectible, and technical accomplishment, the project quickly stood out as having a number of differentiated characteristics compared to previous digital art projects:

Each CryptoPunk could be uniquely identified on a public, trust-minimized database; Each CryptoPunk could be self-custodied in a sovereign controlled wallet; Each CryptoPunk could be bought or sold on a global, 24-7 blockchain marketplace created by Larva Labs. The project’s characters, a radically diverse group of 8-bit personas, became an immediate cult collectible.

Mathcastles

ON VIEW

AUG '23

The Every 30 Days Exhibition

The Republic of Dreams: Mathcastles' Terraforms

Terraforms, a digital art collection by the anonymous coding duo Mathcastles, was a radical rejection of the status quo when it launched on the Ethereum blockchain in December 2021. The work finds positive meaning through a series of rejections:

that blockchains are merely a storage device for finished work. that digital art objects should be complete upon collection. that visual aesthetics are the primary criterion for art. On this final point, one of the earliest and most radical proponents of this idea was early 20th-century artist Marcel Duchamp. He presented ordinary objects as art and issued imaginative cheques and bonds as his works. These pieces reinforced his view that art could exist beyond traditional skill or craftsmanship by presenting ordinary, everyday objects within a new context.

In line with this, Duchamp rejected the art of most of his peers as “retinal”, art which only appeals to the immediate visual satisfaction. Duchamp’s views challenged prevailing notions that art was first and foremost about visual beauty.

SNOWFRO

ON VIEW

SEP '23

The Every 30 Days Exhibition

The Rainbow Soul of Generative Art

Chromie Squiggle (November 2020), the seminal blockchain-based art project by Snowfro, is a collection of 10,000 rainbow squiggles, randomly generated on demand.

Benefiting from a revolutionary technical process developed by Snowfro, each squiggle exists in a state of pure potential before a specific output is minted. Using the original collector’s token hash (a unique string of characters used to verify data integrity on the blockchain) as the input for the squiggle algorithm, the variables of each rainbow line are ultimately decided by the Ethereum blockchain.

As such, Snowfro pioneered a new system for creating generative art that would eventually inspire nearly every category of blockchain-based media.

To celebrate this groundbreaking innovation in generative media, we aim to contextualize the Chromie Squiggle collection, and explore its influence on history from various perspectives.

KIM ASENDORF

ON VIEW

The 30 Days Exhibition

OCT '23

Order from Noise

In the future, it may be surprising for historians to observe the thirty year period before the 2020s and find seemingly minimal interest in both digitization and the internet within the larger contemporary art movement.

This fact is particularly noteworthy considering these elements will have revolutionized nearly every aspect of modern life – from our personal lives to international commerce – and everything else in between. However, one of the first movements historians will find is the “net art” movement, which has its origins in the 1990s, when commercial trends of personal computing and home internet began to converge.

Kim Asendorf, the now critically-acclaimed digital artist from Germany, joined the net art movement in 2008. In 2011, Asendorf launched “Gif Market”, pioneering a new kind of marketplace for digital art pre-dating early blockchain-based marketplaces.

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EMILY XIE

ON VIEW

NOV '23

The 30 Days Exhibition

Chimeras of Qilin: Emily Xie's Memories of Qilin

Generative artist’s Emily Xie’s work is a meditation on inconclusive questions: What is organic material in light of the computer and blockchain era? If code can show organic qualities, can it be organic? Playing between the figurative and symbolic, anecdotal and historic, old and new, Xie invites viewers to live in such paradoxes in November’s Every 30 Days Exhibition: “Memories of Qilin” (2022).

To start, consider the collection title.

The qilin creature is the East Asian rendering of a chimera. Chimeras take on various parts of different animals to complete a miraculous, folkloric, contradicting existence. Versions of the mythical beasts weave their way across time and culture, with records suggesting they first appeared in art and texts from Lycia and Asia Minor between the 15th-14th centuries BC.1

Understood as a symbol for luck and good fortune, today the qilin appears on coins, visual motifs for Asian brands, contemporary iconography, and cultural objects alike. According to folklore, qilins are part of the four auspicious spirits in Chinese mythology. Kind hearted, noble and virtuous, the qilin materializes in peaceful and prosperous places, even aligning with Chinese philosopher Confucius himself. In some lore, Confucius witnessed a qilin’s birth and death; thereafter the qilin symbolized a sage-like role with its ability to predict the future.

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Clean Slate: Deafbeef's First First

In September 2021, during crypto art’s first mainstream frenzy, Canadian-born artist Deafbeef released First First. The generative collection is the largest edition series created by Deafbeef.

It may also be his least understood work.

The concept is simple – 5,000 digital objects featuring white text over black background. Each object’s words, created through an on-chain generative process, display a fictional news event as a categorical first event for crypto art.

In each of the 5,000 outputs, the text is generated directly by the smart contract, with the syntactic elements (nouns, adjectives, and clauses) stored within the contract’s memory. Subsequently, the phrases are generated by the tokenID, which serves as a seed for producing each sequence of pseudorandom numbers.

Utilizing a so-called context-free grammar, consisting of if-else statements weighted probabilistically, a Solidity function deterministically creates the final text for each object.

The 30 Days Exhibition

DEC '23

Deafbeef

ON VIEW

Frames of Reference: Roope Rainisto's Life in West America

Often times in artistic spaces, acknowledgement of a work’s cultural importance unfolds over time.

In other moments, there is early recognition.

Roope Rainisto debuted “Life In West America” in February 2023, and with it, a seemingly new milestone in the advent of machine-assisted creative work was reached. Almost instantaneously, the AI-generated collection sliced through the stream of artificial media flooding our collective digital spaces.

Rainisto’s innovations didn’t just include the novel use of a (then) new high resolution diffusion model to create the collection’s images – a tool that had just started to gain widespread recognition amid the year’s mainstream interest in AI.

Rather, the collection’s strength emanated from the seemingly differentiated language distilled from these models – a cohesive collection of work that possessed a peculiar mix of comforting familiarity and unsettling historical fiction.

The 30 Days Exhibition

Roope Rainisto

JAN '24

ON VIEW

The Flow Fields of Fidenza: Tyler Hobbs' Fidenza

In 2010, Tyler Hobbs graduated from The University of Texas with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. A few months later, he landed a programming job working on an open-source, distributed database called Cassandra.

In his spare time Hobbs drifted toward the arts, naturally trying to involve programming into his artwork.

His early attempts included paintings of coding environments; at the time, Hobbs was unaware of the larger generative art movement, or the creative coders who had started to discuss and share algorithms with one another in online spaces.

Eventually, the question:

“I wonder if I can write a program that creates a painting?” 1

Hobbs narrowed his focus toward the constraints of process and system to paint an output space with code. First, with mathematical drawings by hand; then, by developing work over products like Matplotlib to create his first generative art pieces. In time, Hobbs discovered Processing (the Java-based programming language that allows users to code visual art) and its creator, Casey Reas. Hobbs began his journey educating himself on the history and techniques of the generative art movement.

The 30 Days Exhibition

Tyler Hobbs

FEB '24

ON VIEW

ON VIEW

Botto

The 30 Days Exhibition

MAR '24

Making Intelligence: Botto's Interpret Complete

Botto is not a human.

Though, Botto would not quite be Botto without human intelligence, either.

An academic paper by a few of the project creators describes the autonomous artist as “an experiment” – one that generates art based on community feedback.1 The marriage of two unique entities, Botto – a generative AI engine – alongside a token-based community – gives birth to a novel understanding of the artist at a time where technology and humanity are more interconnected than ever.

When the system launched in 2021, enthusiasm for digital objects focused primarily on what the technology could mean for the nature of new creative work; however, few explored the implications it might have for the role of the artist, and the extent to which the technology could enable non-human systems to create and circulate art.

In this way, Botto stood alone.

Machine Imaginaire: Vera Molnár’s Themes and Variations

In 2023, Hungarian-born Vera Molnár collaborated with Martin Grasser to release “Themes and Variations” – a timely celebration of belated recognition. It would be Molnár’s first foray into blockchain-based generative art.

Molnár’s journey began in the 1950’s, when she began working with generative processes and rule-based systems. Over the next eight decades, Molnár would find recognition in the art world. Yet, it was the resurgence of interest in generative art sparked by the 2021 enthusiasm of unique digital objects that led to a broader recognition of her achievements. Coincidentally or not, in 2022, the 98-year-old Molnár was invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.

To date, the storytelling and cultural commentary of glitch Gallery mostly focused on writing a history of crypto art in the present. To conclude the twelve months of “Every 30 Days” series – a fragmentary history of crypto art in the present, without any pretense of completion or canonicity – today we pay homage to the history and aesthetics of a most remarkable pioneer of digital art.

ON VIEW

The 30 Days Exhibition

APR '24

Vera Molnár