NFTs
Sigg Foundation, TAEX and Tezos team up to showcase NFTs at Digital Art Mile in Basel
The Sigg Art Foundation, Digital Art Mile, TAEX and Tezos are all in Basel this year to present NFTs in an effort to highlight the growing role of digital art in the global art ecosystem.
The Digital Art Mile, an innovative digital art market held alongside one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious art fairs, Art Basel, held its first edition this year marking the official coming-out party for NFT-minded artists, collectors and curators in the exclusive Swiss Enclave.
The event transformed Rebgasse, just a few steps from Messeplatz in Basel, into a vibrant showcase of contemporary and historic digital art. It included several galleries and NFT platforms and internationally renowned artists, all invited to come together to showcase their collections at various exhibition venues, creating a dynamic intersection of traditional and digital art forms throughout the week.
The first Digital Art Mile, which took place from June 10th to 16th, featured several renowned exhibitors such as Objkt, fx(hash), Fellowship, MakersPlace, Cinello, RCM Galerie, ArtXCode, Office Impart, TAEX, Danae, Sigg Art Foundation, GENAP and Blackdove collection.
There at the stand Sigg Art Foundationfounded in 2020 by longtime art collector Pierre Sigg, organized an exhibition featuring pioneering digital artists Grégory Chatonsky, Justin Aversano, Ben Elliot and Bernar Venet.
Venet’s work was presented in conjunction with Sotheby’s: EVENT, featuring a collection of 500 algorithmic artworks, a key theme that runs through many of the other digital offerings on display.
Chatonsky, a pioneer in incorporating AI into contemporary art, presented a new version of his installation, “Terre Seconde”. First exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in 2019, this installation is generated from millions of data points – images, text and sounds – sourced from the Internet, offering a dynamic, modular structure that reimagines our planet in a way that is familiar, but distinctly exclusive.
Complementing Chatonsky’s AI-driven approach, American artist Justin Aversano, fresh from a world tour that saw him scour the globe in search of human stories, brought to Basel some of his most unique work, including photographs of twins he compiled all over the world. .
Justin Aversano, “Twin Flames”, as part of the Sigg Foundation exhibition at the Digital Art Mile in Basel, Switzerland. June 12, 2024.
Further enriching the foundation’s showcase, Elliot presented a work called “Metaone”, an ambitious virtual reality project produced by VIVE Arts with the support of Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin. “Metaone” delves into a futuristic virtual paradise where history, nature, technology and science come together, offering a visionary perspective on the evolution of creative spaces.
Meanwhile, the Tezos Foundation introduced two main platforms in its ecosystem: Objkt and fx(hash), which explore physical representations of digital art, promoting dialogue and experiencing journeys through revolutionary curation in the generative art space.
@HOXID_ collaborated with digital art platform @tesserart_xyz to highlight a rotation of Tezos artists in ‘The Frame.”
The Swiss platform Objkt also hosted the “Matter & Data” exhibition, which presents works by 17 international artists. Additionally, Objkt showcased its collaboration with Analivia Cordeiro, Brazilian inventor of cybernetic choreography, to present an interactive exhibition in which visitors can transform their movement patterns into generative NFTs on the Tezos blockchain.
Regina, Silveira, Auriea Harvey, ThankYouX, Oona, Leander Herzog, Zancan and Qubibi are among the other artists represented at the booth, which was supported by Tezos’ newest head of arts in its Trilitech division, Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.
fx(hash), a generative art platform, curates code-based artworks that demonstrate cultural and technological connections between digital and physical formats and proposes rethinking them in light of contemporary and historical urgencies. In collaboration with OFFICE IMPART, the platform introduced ‘Bit Operations’, a visual examination of the computer’s foundations through bit-shifting operations, by Swedish artist Jonas Lund. Lund’s project included a long-form generative collection that collectors can access online through fx(hash), as well as curated, limited-edition tangible works combined with the generative production showcased during the fair.
Also among the exhibitors, the digital art platform and agency TAEX, presented a captivating digital Zen landscape from Krista Kim’s Continuum project. Created in response to the distractions of technology, Kim’s work transforms digital screens into spaces for mindfulness and contemplation.
The collection, comprised of 10 exclusive NFTs derived from all Continuum art, invites collectors to engage with meditative visuals that subtly evolve over time. These pieces reflect Kim’s inspiration from Kyoto’s serene Ryoanji Temple Garden, aiming to reconnect viewers with ease through digital interfaces.
Meanwhile, the Fellowship undertook what was perhaps its most ambitious work on the Digital Art Mile, a nearly 1,000-square-foot event space to provide pioneering research into the rise of AI in recent art history. The exhibition “Collaborations with the Artificial Self”. pays homage to Harold Cohen, the original father of artificial intelligence in art, and includes the only self-portrait ever created by his painting machine Aaron.
Early work inspired in 2015 by the AlignDraw algorithm by Elman Mansinov, the creator of text-to-image AI, was the precursor to DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
The works of other artists, including Botto, Mario Klingemann, Helena Sarin and Robbie Barrat, demonstrate how quickly this celebrated technology has revolutionized the digital art environment over the last decade. While TAEX also organized a conference where speakers such as Refik Anadol and Sasha Stiles presented their work.
In addition to the exhibitions at Rebgasse 25 and 31, Kult.Kino Camera also organized a variety of conferences daily during the art fair, where topics such as generative art, blockchain as an art medium and museums’ incorporation of Web3, gave rise to contemplative discussions around the role of digital art in the canon of art history.
The European premiere of the documentary “What the Punk!” It was one of the highlights of the week, featuring in a conference program organized by Yuga Labs and Rug Radio, while rounding out the digitally-focused events was a video exploring the extraordinary story of Matt Hall and John Watkinson, two Canadian software engineers who revolutionized the world with Cryptopunks and sparked a new cultural movement.