NFT Aesthetics 

I joined Harm van den Dorpel, Katherine Frazer, Auriea Harvey, Sara Ludy, and Ezra Miller on Rhizome’s NFT Aesthetics panel moderated by Michael Connor.

Here’s the recording. As for my participation, I spoke twice during the event, once to demo a new File branch and once to complain about how NFTs simply uphold our reverence for the database transaction. Someone in the audience tried to correct me about the ERC-721 implementation not being built on a lie, but he was wrong.



Although the panel was aimed at artistic practices that meaningfully engage the NFT, I think the NFT itself is aesthetically interesting in the way that it programmatically expresses Western desire by erecting a scaffold around an absent grail: the token itself, which doesn’t exist. More on this in the video.

5.4.21