ArtGee x SuperRare Spaces Exhibition | Randomness: The Drunkard’s Walk into the truth
“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb
From September 1st to December 1st, 2022, ArtGee will launch the first group exhibition after landing on SuperRare: “Randomness: The Drunkard’s Walk into the Truth”. The exhibition explores the uncertainty in everyday life as well as the fields of blockchain technology and crypto art under the theme ‘’Randomness’’. The three chapters “Acceptance”, “Innovation” and “Creation” respectively echo the concepts of three different stages that people would go through when facing random events, which are “accepting the randomness of the world”, “breaking through cognitive boundaries” and “creating unknowable future”. With this kind of gradual worldview, the unpredictability and non-routines involved in the creative process, narrative design and visual expression of the participating crypto artists are going to be presented. By revealing and discussing randomness and uncontrollability, this exhibition aims to inspire audiences to reflect on all the unknowns in the present and the future with an open attitude and non-deterministic vision.
From the objective aspects of life itself, to the outcome behind every subjective choice made by people, randomness exists everywhere we live. Random events lack patterns to follow and are difficult to predict, while this unpredictability gives us a glimpse into the essence of life.
People have always been embarking on the definition and study of randomness. In the fields of physics and statistics, the term “the Drunkard’s Walk” is created to describe an irregular trajectory. When in action each step would change randomly, just the same as that no one could tell where a drunken man’s next haphazard step will lead. As Leonard Mlodinow mentioned in the book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, intuition is not reliable, What we often take as accidental could actually be inevitable. The reason why subjective judgements and predictions will be inaccurate is because they are often based on one-sided information. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has pointed out in The Black Swan that, it is impossible to predict events which are beyond our self-awareness with limited life experience, and more valuable to know the unknown. As people expand their self-cognitive boundaries, the more accurately they project the probability of random events, and this is a process of overcoming self-cognitive bias as well.
When this process is applied in the context of arts, the approaches and concept of creation would become the carrier of it. More specifically, the randomness of each work comes from the decisions made by the artist in the process of creating it. When an artwork is presented to the audience with an unexpected expression, the work’s charm is more clearly appreciated. During the process of the evolution of art, various new genres have emerged.
As art continues to evolve with new genres emerging one after another, this fascination has reached an unprecedented peak, and the rise of digital art has added a strong touch to this process by expanding people’s perception of contemporary art, as well as changing the ecosystem of the art market. Under a system combined with both technology and aesthetics, artworks meet the opportunity of taking on a richer form of articulation.
In recent years, blockchain technology has been used to develop a more unique digital asset — crypto art. Non-fungible tokens represent the uniqueness of ownership, a new form of verification of authenticity that has pushed digital art onto the mainstream again. Digital art has finally found the most suitable stage for itself in the crypto era, while the diversity of forms of digital works gives crypto art more possibilities. The volume of crypto art collecting is steadily increasing today, coupled with institutions reviewing and building the field seriously, which has contributed to an iteration of collectors’ awareness. The phenomenal auctions in which crypto art has been written into history have paved the way for the transformation of the global art market. All of the above indicate that the public is breaking through cognitive boundaries to embrace an unknown future.
This is a world that is full of opportunity and risk, and non-fixed parameter means the possibilities are infinite. There are no answers in our life as well, everyone’s trajectory of life is different and people do not need the experiences of others’ lives to live. When people realise that their knowledge and experience are limited, they are ready to accept innovation. In this radical change era, conservatism only stagnates the development of civilization; embracing the uncertainty that leads to a new world. The fear of the unknown is inborn, but gaming with the random event that will happen is the strategy for facing the changeable. Welcoming the world as it is, the most perfect life is to be part of the random algorithm in the world, And no one knows where it will lead us when the next step is taken.
Participating Artists: Damonxart, Francisco Rossi, Jeffrey Xiyang Su, Johana Kroft, Nix Liu Xin, Roxie Ren.
Damonxart
Damon is a visual artist from Taiwan who has been dedicated to illustration and graphic art. He never stops developing art styles with personal aesthetic characteristics, and has worked with clients or collaborators such as Adobe, LinkedIn, Xiaomi, Sunglass Hut and Tomorrowland. He is mainly talented at creating works with geometric shapes and unique gradients. Exploring more possibilities between colours and shapes, he is committed to creating a world with only gradients.
Francisco Rossi
Francisco Rossi is an Art Director and 3d designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. After studying Product Design at the University of Buenos Aires, he decided to explore 3D art mixing photography with digital environments, and has been conducting various experiments & creations in this field . Currently, he is mainly focused on designing abstract compositions and products with a keen eye on textures and photography for advertising, animation studios as well as cooperating with art galleries.
Jeffrey Xiyang Su
Jeffrey Xiyang Su is a digital Artist and motion designer originally from Chengdu, China and now based in California after studying Graphic design at ArtCenter college of design. He mainly focuses on the fragmentary glimpses of “accidents” during art creations. For him, creating digital art is like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It is a constant pressure against time, computation power, and software parameters. His working concepts can be interpreted with the metaphor of kids playing in the woods — they would pick up a stick and wave it around mid-air to feel the weight. He does the same thing by clicking the mouse around and seeing what comes up on the screen.
Johana Kroft
Johana Kroft is a New York based 3d artist from the Czech Republic .She started to create minimalistic 3D spaces with storytelling thanks to her beloved dog. She wishes to show deep emotions and keep her dog character alive forever through her artwork based on digital media . She loves to combine different shapes, colours, and surreal spaces into one frame where she tells a story in 3d worlds. Her works have been presented in China, NFT NYC, Decentral Art Pavilion Venice Biennale Women and NFT, Empowered By Paris — Sevens Foundation, Czech Design Week 2021 exposition, and New York Times.
Nix Liu Xin
Nix Liu Xin is a director, designer, and new media artist based in Boston and Shanghai. He works on various mediums ranging from architecture, installations, motion visual arts, mixed-realities, and 3d scans. His practice centres around the digital and physical influence on shifting the boundaries of the design of spaces, objects, and perception experiences. As the founder of the global creative collective Play. Work (aka. playdotwork), Liu’s collaborators include Burberry, Polestar Cars, Wallpaper Magazine, NYLON, WhatWorld Club, London Fashion Week, Bosie, Victor Ma, Chris Lee, SCI-Arc Robot Lab, etc.
Roxie Ren
Roxie Ren is a new media artist. After studying in Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Arts London, she currently lives and works in Shanghai. Her works use digital painting, 3D, and AI machine learning as the medium to express the theme of science and technology symbiotic with nature for good. Her works often use digital and physical media to discuss social topics from a perceptual and poetic perspective, thinking about the relationship between the Anthropocene, science and technology, and the origin of natural materials.
