a2p was an artist-to-artist exchange run on the Bitmark blockchain in two seasons, Fall 2019 and Spring 2020. Each invited artist issued one new work as an edition of ten plus one artist proof, and for a week the group traded editions with each other, so that every artist ended with a collection of their peers' work. Feral File grew out of a2p; the works are shown here as they were issued, season by season, with their artists and the curators who selected them.
What a stewarded collection is
A stewarded collection is work Feral File stewards for an initiative that no longer operates. a2p was not a Feral File exhibition: it predates the company, nothing was sold, and the artists chose their own works. The pages make no claim of authorship. Each season is listed as it ran, with the artists and the curators who invited them, and each work carries the artist's own description where the upload preserved one.
The record
The first season, Fall 2019, was selected by Casey Reas, Addie Wagenknecht, Rick Silva and exonemo: 76 works, uploaded in October 2019 and traded over the following week. The second, Spring 2020, was selected by Casey Reas, Iris Long and Carol Sabbadini: 68 works, uploaded in April and May 2020. The ownership of every edition was recorded on the Bitmark blockchain, which Bitmark retired in 2025 and preserved as a verifiable archive; the a2p site's own record of each edition's last owner is kept with the works. The files are served from the a2p site's own host and are held on Feral File's archival node.
The Bitmark chain was retired in 2025. Feral File re-minted 124 of the works on Ethereum that February, one token per edition on two contracts (a2p-v1, a2p-v2), and holds the tokens of editions whose owners never came for them. Nineteen other works had been re-released on Ethereum in 2023 as The Experiment, a Feral File exhibition with its own pages.
From Casey Reas's statement, Fall 2019
"We are running an experiment called a2p. It's a speculative exploration into new ways of distributing and sharing digital images, videos, and animations. We're a group of artists selected by four artist/curators: myself, Rick Silva, Addie Wagenknecht, and exonemo (SEMBO Kensuke and AKAIWA Yae). Each of us has created a new artwork and has released it as an edition of ten along with one artist proof. We're across many time zones and continents, but for one week, we'll occupy a shared online space where we'll trade work. It's a performance, but also a way of sharing our work with fellow artists and a way to think about what happens to the work after it's made. It's an artist-to-artist system to build and curate a collection of work."
"We place this project in the tradition of artists working outside of the market. We take direct inspiration from early net.art and with a longer view, from Fluxus. Many of us don't have a gallery that represents our work and for those of us that do, we often can't afford to collect that work. This experiment is a way for us to trade works to create a collection."
The full statement, the FAQ and the chat log of each trading week are kept with the record.
