“The artwork world at the moment,” in Cai Guo-Qiang’s estimation, “appears reasonably conservative.”
In between the intercultural battle on the world stage, and the development of expertise on the artistic entrance, the artwork and cultural fields, within the artist’s view, haven’t correctly mirrored the chaos of the up to date situation. And notably not “at a time when the world is strongly questioning the authenticity of time, actively pioneering within the digital area, and infinitely increasing our imaginative and prescient within the cosmos.”
For Cai, confronting these points requires calling on powers and realms past our grasp—what he phrases “the unseen world.”
“The extra confusion we face, the extra we have to leverage steering from the unseen world,” he instructed Artnet Information. “Such energy transcends people, localities, and totally different cultures. At this second, it’s notably essential to proceed the dialogue with the unseen world with a humble and inquiring mindset.”
Later this month, Cai will unveil one such bridge to the unknown along with his fifth NFT undertaking, EET, or Alternate with Extraterrestrials, realized in partnership with Web3 collective Kanon. The artist payments it as “an oracle that lives on the blockchain,” the chat platform welcomes all method of questions from customers the identical means a real-life fortune-teller would possibly, and spits out solutions in two distinct types of tokens.
An EET Fortune. Photograph courtesy of Kanon.
One in every of them, known as Gua, is a diagram randomly generated by EET based mostly on bodily inputs by customers who’re requested to faucet a button on a display screen as they look forward to the oracle’s solutions. The opposite is dubbed the EET Fortune, which serves as a “studying” containing a title and 6 verses. There are 64 base codecs of EET Fortunes, which will be elaborated into 4,096 combos, with random era guaranteeing that no two readings are alike.
In response to Cai, an EET Fortune is primarily meant to supply “a symbolic cue or steering.” But when it proves notably opaque, an A.I. assistant that’s been skilled on the textual content material of EET Fortunes is at hand to assist customers interpret its that means.
Each Gua and EET Fortunes may even be minted and encoded as animated GIFs, making EET the primary NFT undertaking to generate and on-chain the picture format. The mint worth is 0.065ETH (about $119), although collectors who already personal the artist’s NFTs may have entry to free mints.
An EET Fortune. Photograph courtesy of Kanon.
The whole course of concerned in EET takes cues and mirrors the divination tradition that Cai grew up with in his native Quanzhou, in southeastern China. He referred to the Chinese language fortune-telling follow of kau chim, whereby a seeker at a temple shakes a tube of bamboo sticks, every inscribed with a numeral, till one randomly falls out. The quantity on that stick will then be matched with a written fortune, which will be additional clarified by a monk or a priest.
EET, as Cai put it, “restores the behavioral and psychological strategy of kau chim in temples, solely this time, all of it occurs on the blockchain and the digital world.”
That is hardly Cai’s first try to achieve the unseen world. Nevertheless impenetrable, the unknown is threaded all through his follow—from his collection “Tasks for Extraterrestrials” (1989–), comprising some 30 works, together with his famed gunpowder drawings, that illustrate his fixation with the cosmos; to Sky Ladder (2015), his long-gestated explosion occasion to “join the Earth to the universe.”
Cai Guo-Qiang, Crop Circles (2012). Photograph: Wyatt Conlon, courtesy The Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles.
Of late, the brand new technological frontier represents as a lot an unseen world for Cai. Whether or not he’s rendering his firework spectacles in V.R. or most not too long ago, coaching an A.I. program on his physique of labor, the artist has sought to place his artwork in dialogue with expertise. “The long run,” he mentioned, “is heading towards the mixing of the digital and the bodily.”
“It’s all simply beginning, and I’m not in a rush to leap to a conclusion or pose a price judgment, as a result of everyone seems to be exploring,” he mentioned in regards to the new applied sciences. “However, at the least, because the previous Chinese language saying goes, ‘lose at dawn however achieve at sundown.’ Expertise and exploration on-line will result in modifications to my artwork within the bodily world.”
Cai Guo-Qiang, Sky Ladder (2015). Photograph: Wen-You Cai, courtesy Cai Studio.
NFTs and the blockchain have been particularly fascinating for Cai. Because the Kanon crew mirrored in an announcement: “As we developed EET, the questions Cai would pose to us and the course he offered made us understand that he understood the potential depth of the medium significantly better than even we did.”
Since 2021, Cai has launched into a gradual run of blockchain tasks—starting with Transient Eternity, commissioned by Shanghai’s Rockbund Artwork Museum—which have grown in ambition, leaning more and more into the distinctive qualities and utility of NFTs.
Take Your Daytime Fireworks (2022), created in collaboration with NFT platform TRLab. The undertaking supplied 7,000 firework packet tokens that collectors might “set off” at a day and time of their selecting to disclose considered one of 90 artworks, which assorted based on real-world environmental situations. Whereas doing so, collectors obtained to expertise Cai’s course of, from the planning concerned to the nervousness and anticipation that he feels earlier than setting off his personal firework shows. It made for what the artist known as a “reside expertise.”
This interactive and participatory facet additionally powers EET, proper right down to the artistic course of that birthed it. The undertaking, Cai recalled, was hashed out in Zoom conferences between his studio and the Kanon crew, working throughout time zones and geographic divides. It offered to the artist a wholly new means of working, he mentioned, “realizing tasks by means of on-line communication with a gaggle of buddies I’ve by no means met.”
“What’s fascinating is that we’re creating an interactive work that bridges the digital and the bodily worlds whereas our communication channel and artistic strategies, which defy the bodily boundaries and geographic distance between us, are in themselves a part of the work,” he continued. “This can be a new inventive methodology caused by new social kinds.”
However at the same time as Cai has embraced the shifts wrought by expertise on artwork, he continues to weigh these expanded potentialities. Will NFTs ever come into their very own as artwork kinds? May his religion in new applied sciences be “too formidable”—or “too minuscule”?
Requested how he sees his blockchain works enlarging his follow, he puzzled if such digital developments, “together with the so-called ‘metaverse,’” might ever “resolve the issue of artwork? Identical with the issue of creativity.”
However, as if pulling again, he added: “Creativity will not be changing oil paint with NFTs.”
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