Beeple - MAY THE FOURTH

Beeple's body of work includes short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, everydays and VR / AR work. A pioneer of the 'Everyday movement' in digital art, since 2007 Beeple has, without fail, produced daily digital artworks for his 'Everydays' series (2007–ongoing). Beeple catapulted to international prominence in 2021 with the record-breaking US $69 million sale of his NFT artwork, Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021). Beeple is a leading figure in the NFT art scene and collaborates with celebrities and international brands. Beeple’s work often reflects the theme of "The Sublime," echoing the 19th-century Romanticism that showcased humanity's awe of nature’s vastness. Similar to Friedrich’s landscapes, Beeple’s digital art invokes a sense of wonder in the face of the vast digital realm. In MAY THE FOURTH, Beeple adds a comedic, cyberpunk twist to this theme with a stormtrooper observing a dramatic scene. While technology can make us feel insignificant, it also highlights the irreplaceable nature of human creativity and self-expression. MAY THE FOURTH was originally released on "Star Wars Day" in 2021, as a part of his prolific Everydays series.

Carlos Marcial - The Work of Art as an Algorithmic Aesthetic System

Carlos Marcial is a digital artist who has been involved in crypto art since 2019. Marcial's art examines the intersection of technology, crypto, and art history through a Latin American and Caribbean perspective. He established a Toronto studio focused on design for blockchain projects, leading to his involvement in NFTs as one of the early digital artists in the space. The Work of Art as an Algorithmic Aesthetic System aims to discuss and expand on the potential of coding as the basis for creating algorithmic systems for artmaking. Instead of putting out there this algorithmic artwork as a series of generative editions, Marcial decided to maintain the unity of the algorithm and showcase how a 1/1 piece can hold all these almost infinite artistic variations. Just click on the animation to get a new variation. You can also refresh your web browser to get even more variations. What happens when a 1/1 is infinite? And when the odds of someone else showcasing the same variation of the piece as you are very slim?

Moxarra González - Ruinam fatuis

Carlos González, known as Moxarra González, is a digital artist known for vibrant digital collages of socio-cultural critique, infused with humor and irreverence, and a bold visual vocabulary. Ruinam Fatuis (The Downfall of Fools) presents an Andy Warhol-like figure holding a can labeled "Conceptual Condensed Influencer Soup." This piece explores the superficiality of digital fame, drawing parallels between Warhol's consumer culture and today's influencer phenomenon. Typical Pop elements of bright colors and bold outlines enhance the visual impact, and the title underscores the fleeting nature of digital approval.

David Salle - A Well-Leafed Tree

A Well-Leafed Tree invokes a Garden of Eden populated by characters adapted from Peter Arno’s iconic cartoons of New York City’s decadent café society from the 1930s and 40s. In Salle’s rendition, these actors perform their roles on a painterly stage bisected by the archetypal tree of knowledge, which in biblical lore sprouted the consummate object of temptation, the apple that insured mankind’s expulsion from a mythical place of true knowledge or pure psychic integration. In other cultural traditions the Tree of Life is a generative symbol, connecting the subterranean realm to the heavens. Both connotative possibilities are activated here since the roots of the central tree reach into a lower panel suffused with gestural abstraction and floating objects culled from Salle’s paintings. This panel suggests the unformed and the unconscious—a subjective past informed by cascading images locked into distant memories.

Sam Spratt - Hadassah

Hadassah was created as a character study for Spratt's larger series The Monument Game and Luci.

Grant Yun - Overpass

Overpass is part of the recently completed Midwest collection - a romanticism of life in the Midwest of the United States. With heavy influence from 20th-century artists, this series is a digital exploration of the 1930s art movement of American Regionalism.

Omentejovem - My Desires Take Me Places My Eclipse Can't

Omentejovem, born Thales Machado, is a Brazilian artist who found his passion for art as a child. His early experiments of repurposing broken toys into new creations, laid the foundation for his abstract, free-flowing style. His journey from creating $10 cover art to becoming a global digital artist illustrates the beautiful, transformative power of art and technology.

Shin Oh - A Bowl of Comfort

Shin Oh is a Volumetric Pixel (Voxel) artist known for her 3D voxel-based digital artwork. Her NFT creations feature Lego-like rooms on plain backgrounds and short videos exploring themes of loneliness, isolation, and nostalgia. Her work often reflects on issues like work-life imbalance, pandemic experiences, memories of lost love, and the shared human experience of enjoying food together. Inspired by a YouTube video of a late-night ramen cart in Japan, A Bowl of Comfort reflects on how such vendors provide essential comfort and warmth to people working late. While ramen carts are rare in Malaysia, the concept is similar to the local wonton noodle carts, which serve as late-night food options. The repetitive animation of a vendor tossing noodles and a customer slurping them up in the glow of the cart's light evokes feelings of security and nostalgia.

Joshua Brockett - Death of a Salesman

Josh Brockett is a 3D artist who has created daily artworks for 4+ years. Brockett mainly focuses on surreal and dystopian environments with an emphasis on scale and atmosphere. Inspired by the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, this piece explores the American Dream and the disconnect between the idea and the reality of it. One of his original inspirations was Beeple, and he follows in his footsteps by making a digital artwork everyday (such as in Beeple’s Everydays series). Death of a Salesman is Brockett’s “Genesis” piece, meaning it was his first work of digital art.

Manoloide - ccnwwys_g

Eduardo Kac - Cyborg (1985)

Cyborg is Eduardo Kac’s first digital artwork in color. In the image we see an anthropomorphic creature, half-human, half-robot, arms bent with clenched fists, shouting the neologism that expresses its uniqueness. The symbolism of clenched fists is well established as a form of civil rights activism; here, a hybrid lifeform proudly affirms its right to exist. The portmanteau cyborg appears in a comic book balloon, a nod to the artist’s passion for the medium. In a world where identity was traditionally imposed along predetermined lines, the self-affirming act featured in this image stood as a beacon of freedom.

Eduardo Kac - Insect-Desperto (1995)

The digital poem Insect.Desperto is a runtime animation in which the visual and sound tracks function independently and complementarily in two languages (English and Portuguese), one not being the translation of the other. Desperto means awaken in Portuguese. Insect.Desperto was first published online in 1994 through ftp (file transfer protocol).

Eduardo Kac - Letter (1996)

Letter is a navigational poem that presents the viewer with the image of a three-dimensional spiral jetting off the center of a two-dimensional spiral. Both spirals are made exclusively of text. Thus, reading becomes a process of probing the virtual object from all possible angles. The reader is also able to fly through and around the object, thus expanding reading possibilities. In Letter a spiraling cone made of words can be interpreted as both converging to or diverging from the flat one. Together they may evoke the creation or destruction of a star. All texts are created as if they were fragments of letters written to the same person. However, in order to convey a particular emotional sphere, the author conflated the subject positions of grandmother, mother, and daughter into one addressee. It is not possible to distinguish to whom each fragment is addressed. The poem makes reference to moments of death and birth in the artist's family.