SOURCE

SOURCE is an alliance between Operator (Ania Catherine, Dejha Ti), 0xDEAFBEEF, and Casey REAS. An exhibition of artworks that all use software as a medium, our reason for naming it SOURCE was two-fold: as both a reference to “source code” and also the “source” of something that’s rapidly emerging and evolving. For this exhibition — the third non-commercial exhibition in Feral File’s history — we’re presenting a selection of artists and artworks created with code. This isn’t an attempt at a survey exhibition or defining a new canon, this is simply a selection of work that the four of us are thinking about right now. For those of us in the middle of art, code, and blockchains for the last few years, there’s been little to no time to pause and reflect on what has happened. SOURCE is our attempt to do that, collaboratively. The work in SOURCE is clustered around different themes and media. There’s visual art, poetry, sound, conceptual art, and installation. The work is made with source code, machine learning algorithms, and in some cases, by hand. It is created by individuals, collectives, and through collaboration. Some of the work was released independently, some through emerging online exhibitions spaces, and others through pioneering crypto-art platforms. Abstraction, transformation, color, language, texture, space, time, and movement — the use of which we've seen throughout the history of art — continue in this exhibition. While code, automation, blockchain, and smart contracts expand the forms that art can take, these artworks make evident something that has not changed: art remains a bridge between an artist and the world, a space outside the self to touch without contact, a powerful vehicle for communication, reflection, and intimacy. In choosing what to include in SOURCE, we discussed hundreds of artworks. In the end, we narrowed our selection down to two dozen that we feel are iconic and representative of wider communities, and also expand people’s understanding of what generative art can be. In that way, the work presented in SOURCE forms the edge of something so much larger. Unlike every other Feral File show to date, the artworks in SOURCE were previously released somewhere else, through a range of galleries, platforms, and systems. We’ve assembled them here to reflect on the artworks in relation to each other and to highlight what these artists have been thinking about and making recently. We are grateful to have the artists’ permission to share their work here, and for their collaboration in how to present their work and ideas. From our perspective, blockchains have forever changed generative and digital art over the last few years. While the history of art made with computers goes back over 60 years, the amount of energy and attention has amplified since artists started to release digital work online in relation to blockchains at a large scale, and new collectors have come forward to support it. Artists are now using blockchains to keep track of provenance (who created the work and who owns it) in addition to exploring custom smart contracts as essential elements of artworks. These artworks created with code are being collected with another form of code (cryptocurrencies), and the opportunities for artists to exhibit and distribute this kind of work has exploded. Remarkably, nearly every artwork in SOURCE was created using technologies that didn’t exist until recently. The galleries, platforms, and institutions that released them have only been around for a few years. Some of the artists in the exhibition have been working for over a decade, but found an audience for the first time in 2021 as people started to collect online digital art with unprecedented energy. This is another way to say the artwork and artists assembled here for SOURCE could not have happened before now. This work is contemporary and only time will tell how things change from here. SOURCE is a moment in time. Operator (Ania Catherine, Dejha Ti), 0xDEAFBEEF, Casey REAS 29 August 2023