Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art's EXIT PLAN Exhibition 2.1.24 - 4.30.24
mowna asks artists think beyond Web 2.0 and reimagine Web3 using the blockchain in lieu of social media Feb 1 - Apr 30, 2024
New York, NY - Jan 30, 2024 - The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, mowna, in its fourth year launches its 10th show, EXIT PLAN, a cross-chain exhibition that asks creators to devise ways of using Web3 technologies such as blockchains, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, digital assets, artificial intelligence, metaverse, and DAOs to reimagine, replace, and restore the harmful practices of the Web 2.0 internet such as social media, advertisement, data sales, surveillance, addiction, user manipulation, and the exploitation of human behavior.
Through EXIT PLAN, mowna alongside its artists, enters into an experiment to re-imagine the internet, along with its applications in the field of art.
"With the move to Web3, we expect much of the infrastructure and concepts of the internet to change dramatically, with the future looking nothing like its Web 2.0 predecessor," says joey zaza, co-founder and curator for mowna.
EXIT PLAN was curated using a multi-faceted approach; an invitation to a select group of longtime mowna artists to create and mint work on either the Tezos or Ethereum blockchains, a free call for submissions and exhibition partnership with Joyn which works on Ethereum, a fine combing of objkt.com for work that addressed the EXIT PLAN agenda, and the purchasing of artist, organization, and meme tokens on the Tezos blockchain. In a newly formed partnership with Loop Art Critique mowna created a Loop mowna room and hosted the invited mowna artists to participate in a private conversation on Dec 15th, 2023 to discuss EXIT PLAN prompts and questions for the exhibition:
How can we use the blockchain as artists beyond art?
What is Web3 and how can we make better use of it?
How do we get collectors to discover us and buy our work?
How can we use Web3 to replace Web 2.0?
After the conversation mowna shared talking points with all of their invited artists to further inspire their work. cari ann shim sham*, co-founder and curator for mowna was humbled by these conversations.
"When you hear a prominent artist say, 'Most of us artists are poor and have to work shitty jobs to keep making art,' and you hear another established artist say 'We hate the current state of social media and how it takes time away from our art making,' it becomes very clear that the lack of support for artists from their countries, states, and communities along with the vampiric demands of social media need to be rectified. We must value, respect and support our artists, because they offer so much to humanity. We are here for that, to make that shift happen and we see blockchain and Web3 as the future for supporting artists and investing in the arts and the way out of harmful social media platforms."
As part of EXIT PLAN mowna is sunsetting its dependencies on Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, and Linkedin as a radical action to focus their efforts on building Web3 technologies that they see having lasting positive impact, including the continued use of their Loop mowna room, posting call for submissions via Joyn, and the launch of a mowna email newsletter.
In the process of building EXIT PLAN mowna witnessed many artists launching their own art tokens. This revolutionary concept allows one to invest into an artist without buying artwork, is not based on the production of a product, rather it supports the life of an artist and the blockchain(s) they are working on. mowna purchased many of these tokens for EXIT PLAN as a nod to this innovative way to invest in blockchains, artists, organizations, abstract concepts such memes, and will exhibit the art tokens $$Mek, $PEPE, $$POLE, $PUMPD, $TEIA, $TRASH, $TRRIA, $UCZ, $UGO, and $VEND as part of the EXIT PLAN exhibition.
As this all percolates perfectly with EXIT PLAN, mowna has chosen to launch their own $mowna token as a way to invest in the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, the artists of mowna, and to support the Tezos blockchain. This token can be acquired via the swap feature in the Temple wallet, and larger amounts of the $mowna token are available by contacting the museum. Liquidity for the token can be added via SpicySwap.
EXIT PLAN is mowna's 10th exhibition and is full of courageous work by a group of new and returning wild and newfangled artists. On his fourth return to mowna, Theodore Lee Jones's Product Scan - Tree criticizes capitalism through a digital GIF barcoding nature. The description of the work reads, "Everything in our lives is a commodity for capitalistic distribution: Nature, Creation, Attention. It's our humanistic universal code of productization."
Linda Loh works out of both New York City and Melbourne and returns to mowna for her second time with her video "Tenuous Ground," which orbits the viewer around a floating digital 3-D scanned piece of pastel colored earthscape, like an iceberg floating in space as bird-like objects soar through against a meditational soundscape. She describes the work with the poem: Fragments from the past, Shadows of former selves, Tenuous grounds, Decentering, Sending remains into orbit, Space, free.
Long time mowna artist BĂ©atrice Coron and New Yorker, who's exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the MoMA, presents us with a diptych "Time Master & Cultivator of Minds" that digitizes her paper cut characters surrounded by gears, clocks and tiny people, covered with symbols, and carrying encyclopedias on their heads.
"Surfin' Towards Cyberiana 🍄" by Renata Janiszewska, who based in Lion's Head, Canada, brings together a contradictory group of animations, made in reaction to the tyranny of advertising, corporate ubiquity, and art made for the sake of commerce. It is a sample reel, or a pastiche, of all the many styles of animation Renata is developing. This work is her effort to express the contradictions inherent in the concept of Web3, and what we go through as we launch ourselves into a new paradigm. The title refers to a Techspressionist art project currently being developed on Mozilla Hubs. This is Renata's third exhibition with mowna.
In their second exhibit with mowna, the Lyon, France based treeskulltown exhibits the work "procrastination," which is self described as "through the line and the shape we define the coherence of the entire visual representation, the line gives the limits, underlines the movement or fills the shape."
Dr Kim Hamilton returns for a fourth time to mowna with "The Great Artificial Wave" from The Abstract Intelligence series which imagines a world from the perspective of future artificial intelligence.
Feixue Mei also in her fourth exhibition with mowna references the flooding world of climate change, as air balloon and boats navigate a city with giant bodies submerged and floating severed heads in "Escape2."
Introducing a new mowna artist is Dabeatnik, who's "Sensory Check" is a 3 part project about pop art, performance art, nude art, current trends, and self portraiture that captures the Twitter check marking of a black man's genitalia as he runs towards and away from the camera while glitching out.
"Wioulet" fully embraces the mission of the EXIT PLAN exhibition by using the blockchain in lieu of social media to authenticate her identity. She states "She tried so hard in life to always be able to smile, to always be able to stand firm .... many unkind people broke her heart ... they broke her .... but she still smiles ...." We stand by Wioulet and her work as authentically of her own making. The work is a call to the importance of decentralization and building censorship-resistant blockchains, platforms, and artworks, and points to the power that the platforms and blockchain developers hold over the artist. By supporting her we ask our community what artists and artworks are allowed in Web3? And which are not? And why?
Another artist debuting with mowna is Legogio7, who is exhibiting "rainfall estimates," which conjures climate change through the interface of a digitized GIF of old graphic design software in a data visualization of rainfall. Legogio7 exemplifies the power of collecting in the Web3 space, where their 21 creations are heavily supported by the generous 2,633 artworks that they have collected.
Woman submits "Exodus," a work minted on July 5th, 2023 that caught our eye in the early days of the Twitter takeover by capturing the feeling that we share as we run for our lives on and from social media. Her description of the work reads "There's another viable option. Finally. Maybe."
Also new to mowna is Nite Owl, who has created The Crypto Times collection with 31 tokens that highlight the current happenings of our Web3 space. "All the news that's fit to rug! A collectible edition of the front page of the Crypto Times to immortalize all the outlandish happenings of the Crypto and NFT spaces. Come for the rugs, stay for the beef! Scams a plenty! Please connect your wallet."
Also joining mowna for their first exhibition is imfinenft (Helene & Sylvia) from Singapore. Their powerful work "Coping Mechanism #4 - Social Media" is part of a mental health NFT project that raises funds and awareness around mental health via blockchain documenting real people through interviews and animates them with AI technology. The profile for this work reads "Venessa, 21, is a university student in Singapore. She started using her parents' computer when she was eight. She played online games, watched anime and youtube on it. Growing up as an only child, the internet was her source of entertainment during her childhood. 'Now I use it to distract myself from stress that comes from dealing with my family, school work, and managing my relationships with people,' she said. Venessa spends approximately four hours on social media every day for the last five years. 'My eyesight has gotten worse over the years because I look at my phone in the dark before I sleep.'
Heavy hitters in the Web3 space Sabato Visconti, based in Western Massachusetts, and Sky Goodman from Chicago, join together on artwork "69. Nautilus" as a means of using the blockchain to criticize the blockchain. The meta work documents the #tezpole exhibit via Sabato's drawing and Sky's AI-generated sneakers with "pixel documentation of the famous Tezos Art Pillar and surrounding scene during the Tezos@South Beach event at Nautilus during Miami Art Week, December 6, 2023. Based on a photograph by Nicholas Dimes."
Violet Bond, the forever wild artist from Australia, created a diptych for EXIT PLAN, using the blockchain as an interface, with one of the works being listed for sale and the collector of it getting the other piece of the diptych airdropped to them.
One of our favorite leaders in the Web3 space is the Brazilian Bárbara Bezina, founder of Women's Museum, who screams into the void as an eclipsing sun rises overhead in her work "Luzar" which we find to activate the magickal.
Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano (Wen New Atelier) join us together for the first time with their profound work, "Visibility: hidden," showing an X timeline stripped of all textual and visual content. The hacked Web 2.0 social feed, produced by setting the "visibility" property in CSS to "hidden," voids algorithmically distributed content and mutes the writers' social visibility. Devoid of all but the icons, symbols, and structural elements inherent to the platform, the bare timeline reveals a semiotics of X; scrollers are left to read what remains -- the unadulterated language of social media."
Lineadeluz returns to mowna for their third exhibit to launch their new project, the SISS initiative which invites everyone to join their Self(ie) Institute for Selfie Studies. "A collaborative network where you shape the growing multidisciplinary field of selfie studies. At SISS your selfies are vessels, research artifacts that spark meaningful dialogues."
Marzipan Physics, fellow New Yorker and a second timer, refers to Web1 with the work "MarzipanWiki Under Construction." a gif that pays tribute to the early days of web 1.0 (inspired by the mowna conversation!) and functions as sort of an announcement of Marzipan's Wiki project, which will compile and expand upon existing Marzipan lore in a retro-futuristic way.
LUREX in their third exhibition with mowna brings us "WEB2 JR" an interactive GLB wiggly falling apart silver baby with blue hair that you can mouse around with.
Newcomer and creator of Loop Art Critique, Miami based Ariel Baron-Robbins' "cycles" is an AI self portrait that reminds us of our AI dancing body in our EXIT PLAN call for submissions GIF. She states, "In my video work, I engage with the echoes of my artistic past, where my body's movements before the camera blur the lines between creator and creation, exhibiting a dialogue about the elusive nature of the creative process. This piece is an introspective journey through the impossibilities of artistic expression, challenging viewers to find meaning in the intangible. It is a visual metaphor for the artist's internal quest, materializing in a perpetual dance of becoming that defies the constraints of the visible world."
Kuchill-0 from Mexico is an artist who critiques AI using a plethora of grotesque dancing bodies with their work "UGLY."
And finally our queen Empress Trash submits "Parallelogram" a GIF using Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Photomosh which is minted on the Ethereum blockchain for EXIT PLAN. We also are proudly exhibiting her new token coin $PUMPD.
EXIT PLAN marks mowna's 10th exhibition and fourth year and we're elated with the outcome of this exhibition and where we find ourselves in this moment. Artists have reached beyond their comfort zones, experimented and forged new ways for us all as we venture into our future with Web3. We are happy to share the EXIT PLAN exhibition, the new Loop mowna room, and the launch of $mowna. #MeetMeOnTheBlockchain
Artists:
Ariel Baron-Robbins, Barbara Bezina, BĂ©atrice Coron, Dabeatnik, Dr Kim Hamilton, Empress Trash, Feixue Mei, imfinenft (Helene & Sylvia), Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano (Wen New Atelier), Kuchill-0, Legogio7, Linda Loh, Lineadeluz, LUREX, Marzipan Physics, Nite Owl, Renata Janiszewska, Rodell Warner, Sabato Visconti & Sky Goodman, Theodore Lee Jones, treeskulltown, Violet Bond, Wioulet, Woman
$$Mek, $mowna, $PEPE, $$POLE, $PUMPD, $TEIA, $TRASH, $TRRIA, $UCZ, $UGO, $VEND
mowna seeks to create an ever changing, fun, thoughtful, beautifully designed space to encourage awareness and mindfulness through the exhibition and experience of art and serves the public's need for art for the highest good of all. By addressing the current needs of not only the artist but also museums, collectors, and galleries, mowna is breaking barriers within the global art community.
mowna offers the preservation of artworks through an online collection that is an educational resource and archive for its members and its artists, and aims to find, display, and support wild and newfangled art through the incorporation of innovative new technologies and ways.
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