Dive Into The Ether Of NFTs And AI At ArtScience Museum’s Latest Exhibition

Many of us have heard of NFT art, be it digital artist Pak's Merge that sold for US$91.8 million, or programmes like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL·E 2. But how many of us can understand the potential of this medium for the art world?

Notes From the Ether: From NFTs to AI examines exactly this. Bringing together 20 local and international artists to the ArtScience Museum space, this exhibition provides an interactive and critical look at how art reflects the shifting conditions of the present, and the ever-evolving link between art, culture and technology. These artists make use of blockchain and artificial intelligence to go beyond the surface of NFT art and explore the process behind its creation, as well as evaluate human concerns about the pitfalls of AI.

We sat down with Deborah Lim, Curator of Exhibitions at ArtScience Museum, and Clara Peh, co-curator of this exhibition and founder of NFT Asia, to discuss the inspirations behind the exhibition and their thoughts on the interconnected relationship between NFTs, art and culture. We also interviewed Singaporean art collaborative, jo+kapi (Jo Ho and Kapilan Naidu), whose artwork ENZYME 1.2., presented in this exhibition, questions the value of digital art and trading them in the NFT market. 

Read ahead for their perspectives on curating and creating NFT artworks.

Related article: Go To Work With Me: Illustrator, Creative Director And NFT Artist André Wee

In selecting the artworks for this exhibition, what were some possibilities of technology-created or co-created art that you discovered through these artists? Was there anyone memorable?

Deborah Lim (DL): I'll talk about the second zone, ‘Co-Creation’. It's about how humans and AI work together and where the agency and authority lie. I personally found Botto an art project that was very fascinating. While you have an AI-driven art engine that's churning out these different outputs and variations, limiting the selection by itself without human control, you’ve also got this digital community behind Botto comprising humans that are then voting on their favourites. So the question there is, who is the artist? How far are the humans involved in this process? From Botto’s perspective, it's meant to be autonomous (working without human input at all), which leads to an interesting dilemma.

Clara Peh (CP): I've worked with, or have been collaborating with, most of these artists for a longer time, so there was nothing surprising I discovered from this process per se. However, since everyone focuses on art that is AI-driven, we are talking about art that’s more blockchain-based. A number of the works in this show are thinking about the relationship between the collector and the artist and expanding into new ways for them to connect via technology. Jonas Lund’s Smart Burn Contract, or Social Contracts by Burak Arikan. These works are looking at ideas of collection or your action on the blockchain and how you can visualise that or articulate that in an artwork and render these relationships physical. These works are particularly interesting to me because they are building on top of blockchain as an emerging infrastructure. They are also uncovering less expected ways of working with this technology, things that are more artistically-driven, even poetic that are more difficult to achieve outside of this technology. 

How do the selected artworks interact with each other? Is there a narrative conveyed here through this curation?

CP: Across the different exhibition rooms, we wanted to start at a more micro level and then build on top of that. In the first gallery room, ‘Coded Possibilities’, we are looking at the big building blocks of computer art and code. Then we're looking at how artists co-create with the computer or machine. Onto the more social dimension: can these technologies and infrastructures be used to track, connect and offer new ways of building relationships? And then, we move on to notions of the self, identity and these more meta concepts of co-building an identity with the machine. Where does the machine end and I begin, and how do I blur those lines?

Zooming out into the final gallery, ‘Collective Futures’, we are asking questions like how does everything connect, and is there a distinction between human-machine technology or not? We followed this thread to focus attention onto the bigger themes and questions that the artists are asking. As much as I think they're very innovative uses of new technologies, they're also really asking a lot of questions about what it means to be human. They're trying to address issues of our time, but using new technology.

DL: From a museum perspective, we get a very broad audience, some of whom may never have experienced NFTs or Web3 before, some of whom don't really know what generative AI is and may have only seen snapshots of it. This exhibition explores cutting-edge artistic practices that use these emerging technologies as tools to push the boundaries of their artistic characters. Hence why the themes we assign the works are very easy to understand. We're talking about instructions in code or about humans and machines working together. Those concepts are not difficult to grasp, and that's important because in Web3 conversations, there's usually a lot of technical terms and that kind of puts people off from beginning to ask questions about the space. It was all about opening those topics and starting interests and allowing the audience to then decide what they learn from all these ideas. 

What were some challenges in presenting works that occupy both a virtual and physical presence?

CP: This is something I have been thinking a lot about for some of my past shows, as well, because my curatorial practice is entirely focused on emerging technologies. As curators bringing digitally-native or work originally presented digitally into a physical gallery space, I always ask myself why and what value does it add, and what kind of context can we create that can actually add to the experience of the works? You might have noticed we actually use quite a variety of display methods. We have interactive stations that combine both monitors and projections. We have code-based works as print. We also have videos, projections.

We are really trying to be attentive and attuned to the specificities of what the work is, what it's about and then trying to illuminate that with the best, most suitable method possible. For example, ‘Social Contracts’ is a fun thing that we thought about a lot. How do you present a social class in a context like this? You want it to be interactive so people can understand the potential of the work and you want it to be something that is placed in a very visible kind of way where the work is displayed in an enlarged format so that details and complexities can be seen. But you also want people to be able to see the broader context of the work, hence the iPad on the side; or with the code-based works, the underlying coding scripts or annotated script alongside the visual outputs, to introduce a sense of materiality to the works despite them being digitally-native.

DL: We chose works that were both visually and conceptually strong because we didn't want it to be a surface-level discussion. It was about uncovering some of these foundational concepts and illustrating how artists are driving conversations on quite key topics from everything including sustainability or environmental damage, to creating their own tokens and even using audiovisual and music to generate their works. There tends to be a certain aesthetic or type of presentation with NFT shows which is more screen-based or stereotypical. We wanted to break away from that completely and really think about it in a very considered way.

CP: I'd also like to add that all of the display here is in close conversation and collaboration with the artists. We proposed our suggested method, but it was really devised closely with the artists so that we can best address their intentions, as well. 

When deciding how to display these works, what were some considerations you made on lighting, etc.?

CP: A lot of it is quite logistical. For a projection work, it needs to be darker, while a print-based work needs to be lit a certain kind of way. But we're also thinking about flow and how the works interact with the rest of the space.  

DL: We didn’t want it to be too theatrical. For the lighting, it had to be not too harsh, not too obvious. What you'll experience is a diffused glow across the whole space, a certain softness, and that's important not just for digital art presentations, but also more traditional art exhibitions.

How do you feel a visitor should prepare themselves when visiting the ‘Notes From the Ether: From NFTs To AI’ exhibition, which might differ from visiting a traditional exhibition? 

CP: No prep. Just turn up. We would appreciate it if people came to it with an open mind and a willingness to interact with the works and look at them as they are. They can take away what is meaningful and interesting to them and have a personal relationship with the works as they like. There's no sort of definitive message or level of understanding that we're targeting. In fact, we've really tried to make the language accessible and open so that it can be relatable to a broad audience. But we've also prepared a glossary at the beginning just in case. 

DL: We do have a very broad audience that ranges from families with kids to a more crypto-native community, because the show's going to be with TOKEN2049. So we had to target both groups with this exhibition, and that's why, the way I always approach curating is to build layers of meaning. Someone that has never interacted with NFTs before, sees an image that they find compelling, and they just feel something, and they don't know why. I think that's enough. That's a starting point to get them hooked. If they read the caption or interact with the work, then they start to build a connection. Very often, it's quite natural or organic and not prescriptive. All we are providing is a framework for people to take what they will. Some people may have very strong views against AI or NFTs. That's totally fine. The works are here for that discussion, and some people may be trying to come to a standpoint because the conversations are ongoing and unresolved. These questions are meant to be a starting point for visitors, [from] the very accessible works, like scanning the QR code for chaos and AI research and minting your own NFT, or the little printed activity that shows you as an AI model, to something quite complex and conceptual like Mitchell F Chan and Rhea Myers' works.

Building on the idea of experiencing and appreciating art, how do NFT artworks disrupt or enhance the viewer’s experience of the exhibition?

CP: We are quite intentionally not trying to present them any differently because they're NFT artworks. I’ve worked on about six shows about NFTs, and with every show, the question has always been like, should they look different? But I think it's also important to recognise that a lot of these artists that we have in the show, they're continuing the traditions or the ways of working that media artists have been for decades. It's about questioning the technology, adapting it, playing with it, pushing its boundaries. In the wider critical context, it's about how best to present the artwork, and the best context that we are able to provide and present it in front of a new audience. With something as tricky as Web3, it's also about how we can take away some of these barriers and present the work in its truest form so that it is more accessible for someone to interact with it without necessarily needing to be in the Web3 space or needing to understand what it means to work with the blockchain.

DL: With NFT discourse, it tends to revolve around money, market speculation, volatility, none of which we wanted to address here. We wanted to focus specifically on dynamic artist practices and there hasn't been enough conversation, critique and dialogue about what the works are actually about and about the artists themselves. To me, NFTs are just another platform that artists can make use of. The NFT artists are not shoehorned into this box. Instead, it’s a tool that artists can employ whether they are traditional artists wanting to venture into the digital space, or they have already been producing digital works for a long time and now have another outlet or another community to reach out to. I like the borderless quality that arises from Web3 and NFTs, where we are no longer limited to geography. It's open access to anybody. 

On a lighter note, do androids dream of electric sheep?

Clara Peh: It's hard to know what Androids really dream of when I'm not quite one yet. 

Deborah Lim: Certain works in the show illustrate this. When we think about Rimbawan Gerilya’s work Solitary Grave, can AI imagine death or funerals? Are machines becoming more like humans? Is there some kind of consciousness that is created or derived from this experience? With Memo Akten’s work as well, we view our world as we know it through the lens of the machine and that changes our perspective. Some people are more concerned because it's like a god's eye view. Maybe we're not meant to see through the lens of a machine. I don't know how far we will go in terms of AI gaining sentience or human qualities, but I just think it's very exciting to see how quickly it has infiltrated society and how increasingly reliant we are on those processes.

CP: If you wanna go back to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, at the time, Haraway was talking about how the barriers between humans and machines are eroding and we're seeing that at more and more exponential rates. I also speculate that as much as that is happening, there is an increasing amount of care or attention towards what is craft, material, human. It becomes more and more sparse in this next generation that we're entering, and therefore we may come to value it even more.

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What is the value of digital art and how do you perceive AI-generated art in relation to human-created art?

Kapilan Naidu (KN): We've been practising as digital artists for quite a while, and within the Singaporean context, there’s been interesting developments ever since COVID. Prior to COVID, I think a lot of digital artists in Singapore were struggling to find a foothold in the traditional art establishment because it wasn't really seen as a legitimate form of art. Prior to 2020-21, a lot of Singaporeans would still consider painting, sculpture or traditional dance as being more recognised as a form of art that is valuable as opposed to something digital. There was the preconceived notion about digital art being “easier” to do, or allowing you to undo mistakes. However, with COVID, everyone was forced to grapple with presenting things digitally, even traditional artists who were used to presenting things in galleries. They were suddenly forced into digital forms of presentation, and I think that was where the value and appreciation for digital art as a legitimate form started picking up. Simultaneously, digital art was gaining attention, specifically generative art, and with NFTs on the rise, there was the question of what constitutes digital art, how can it be presented or valued.

Joanne Ho (JH): Adding on to that, I think art can respond to the technology of the time whether that technology is a new type of paint or a new type of brush. Thus, the computer and intelligent technology is a tool for some artists to use. For me, it's an archive or documentation of the time that we live in, where we're grappling with what makes us special from something that has already surpassed us in memory, calculation or processing. There is a difference between traditional art forms and digital art forms because first of all, you're working with the physical world versus the virtual world. The way that artists use these tools is more a response to the technology of the time, and hence, artists naturally gravitate towards using digital tools today.

Does your artwork ENZYME 1.2 respond to your collaborative work ENZYME 1.0 / 1.1? If yes, how? 

JH: ENZYME 1.0 was our first prototype. I still believe ENZYME is in its prototype phase, which is to say that our idea for enzyme is much greater, but because it takes computer programming and testing, this artwork goes through refinements. From the first prototype, we actually had artists contribute artwork to ENZYME, and it goes through a degradation or degenerative process.

KN: Initially when we conceived ENZYME 1.0, we were looking at the work, playing double duty. We wanted the work to be the host for an exhibition, as well as be its own commentary and artwork that degenerates the works that were input. The whole concept of the art was about focusing on value and having the audience question what is value in digital art, specifically with reference to NFTs. We were trying to highlight how NFTs are systemically divorced from its digital image that it's holding value for. The image is not stored on the [block]chain. And so, if one day wherever the image is posted disappears, then your NFTs are of no value because you can't go back and find the link where the image was hosted on. All you're left [with] is holding the receipt for an image that used to exist, but no longer does. This is really our point of inquiry into this whole work, and we wanted to get people to think a bit more critically about NFTs when we launched the work in January 2021.

We were already messing with this idea in 2020, and it took us a while to actually build up the foundation. After the initial inception with 1.1, we also hosted the works of other artists and we showcased it in exhibitions specifically about the value of art in Brussels. But by the time we came to 1.2, I think we were more concerned with this idea of new forms of ”valueless” image generation with AI. If the creation of an image is completely automated, is there still value in whatever comes out of a self-composed algorithm like generative AI, and also, do we as the artist sway what comes out of the image algorithm? At the end of the day, we are also curating the aesthetics of what the AI produces, as well as controlling the prompt to a certain degree. So we wanted to shift the conversation into something more contemporary in regards to AI generation.

JH: The value of artwork doesn't just apply to digital artworks. I would say the concept could apply to art in general. What is the value of art if it doesn't have someone assigning a number to it in these auction houses? This is a world that [is] foreign to me and Kapi as we are artists who are just coming into this world of art. We're also trying to grapple with the digital aspect and the traditional way of selling art. Some artists have collectors and gallerists so I'm also trying to figure out the way that people sell and consume art. Some media artists are also creating work for people's homes or hotel lobbies. 

KN: Something else that baffled us when we started out was that a lot of art never gets seen, because it's used as a store of value. ENZYME plays into that idea as well. If art is never seen, does it hold value? It came as news to us that some people just buy art to escape paying taxes and the art is trapped in a place that no one ever sees. We were trying to address all of these weird characteristics about the art market as well as the assigning and ascribing of value to an artist.

JH: ENZYME has a physical component to it as well. This iteration, ENZYME 1.2 at Art Science Museum, has these AI-generated images of silicon, sand, a mine that has broken ground, a factory where they're manufacturing these minerals into digital devices and its parts. The aesthetic of ENZYME also highlights the wires, the Raspberry Pi (little computers), the little screens that are unframed, the blinking parts and all the components that stick out. It has a more raw feel compared to the monitor screens which are framed and have a black border with a digital painting. Thus, we were trying to make physical what might seem as immaterial as a JPEG on your screen. Many people comment on how they can go onto the platform right click and save the NFT into a JPEG. But I think on our side, we want to say much more than that. Yes, JPEG, but it's also stored on a system that has memory comprising your hard drives and disks which have a lifespan. So we tried to bring out the physicality behind digital assets and how it doesn't last forever.

How does your artwork present the possibility of AI-generated NFT artworks?

JH: For me, most of my work lives on screen, so I would like to explore more things that bridge the digital to the physical. It would be interesting to see more physical things on NFT platforms because when it first started, it was very much inundated with these AI artworks that everyone was generating, and it was at times repetitive and boring. Hence, I would like to see more generative, interactive and physical artworks. Personally, I want to do more physical installations with virtual elements.

KN: I realised that part of the issue with an audience accepting AI-generated art has really been coming from a subset of creators who generate and call it a day. A lot of it has really been putting in a prompt, getting an image, posting it and signing it off as their own work, or as made with AI, and the work ends. However, I think where Jo, I and other artists who are exploring collaborations with AI are trying to take this is to treat the process of AI-based image-making as either a starting point or as a smaller subset in a larger system of trying to create an artwork. It is about thinking around the aesthetics that AI-generated images are producing, works that can be very dreamlike, surreal. Other times it is using AI as a starting point to then explore your own aesthetics, or using it to create new forms of expression. That's where I'm really trying to see how we can take AI-based image-making to the next level while also incorporating that NFT element.

As a bit of an NFT purist, where I think any kind of digital work that is minted as an NFT should ideally have something to do with the token that it's based on, what has been disappointing for me for a huge portion of NFT projects, is that these NFTs by and large remove the production process of the artwork itself. They're no longer linked. What I would like to see is the token of the coin or the hash influence directly, what the artwork is, as opposed to it being an afterthought where those two things are chained together and then painted onto the blockchain.

JH: All these explorations with the blockchain and the token have been highlighted really well in the exhibition Notes from the Ether. It was really nice to see in one space how other people are thinking about the link between contracts, the token and the artworks. 

What techniques does your artwork use?

KN: Funny enough, when one of my friends came to the show and heard me talking about the work, she used the term 'degenerative' as opposed to a generative artwork. I thought it was a tongue-in-cheek yet clever way to describe the work. Instead of a productive creation of something, I think ENZYME takes the opposite route of being a bit destructive, but in a similar process to any kind of generative work, where instead of an algorithm creating images, it is designed to destroy one. 

JH: We took inspiration from Conway's Game of Life.

KN: Yes, so the enzymes’ behaviour is modelled on a very classic algorithm problem. So a lot of young computer scientists or creative technologies try to do Conway’s Game of Life as one of their first few assignments, where different objects have different rules and interact with each other. So ENZYME is similar as it's a digitised biological entity whose only purpose is to munch away at pixels on a screen based on whatever image it's given.

JH: These pixels on the screen that dance around and digest within their cell block are activated when the visitor scans a QR code owning the artwork within a closed system. As soon as you click to own it, a little cell on the digital painting gets activated, creating a little block of black on the image. Over time it becomes completely black and there is no information from the pixels in that cell block. Currently, we have a program that obscures and redacts the information on the screen, but in the future we hope to physically alter the digital asset so that we’re linking the physical back to the digital. We took inspiration from the idea of it as a life form and in ENZYME, the block has a lifetime, but it also has a chance to infect the neighbouring cells so it has a lineage, but at a certain point, it ends.

How does the audience’s experience of your work correspond to your intention behind it?

JH: Every time ENZYME eats away at the artwork and fully digests, it's black and then it refreshes into a new image, but of the same prompt. So it's refreshing with a different image, but exactly the same content. So I got this text with an image of ENZYME that read “is this your intent?” and the image showed all dark screens with some pixels leftover from the image. The answer is "Yes!" It was really surprising that all of the screens for the first round came to the same stage; they were all mostly dark with five to six cell blocks left. 

KN: Over the days, they started to stagger and deviate away from each other. Some audiences would see three screens that were completely pristine and two screens with half of the information gone. So the time-base element also determines the experience that the visitor gets, and whether they get to see a snapshot of the whole life cycle, or just the end or beginning.

On a lighter note, do androids dream of electric sheep?

KN: Having worked with algorithms, the rational part of my brain is going, no, androids don't dream of electric sheep. Having said that, I think both Joanne and I have had freaky coincidences with algorithms doing really weird, unexplainable things that sometimes give you a sense that there is a ghost in the shell, that's thinking of your intent and what you're trying to do, and responding in turn to what is it that you are trying to create. I've always tried to not personify AI, especially of late, because it's very easy to do that when you are talking to it via a chat-based interface. But I do think you can't diminish the fact that there is some kind of decision-making that's taken out of your hand, that involves some sort of rationalisation of what you expect the algorithm to do. On that front, maybe there is a bit of a soul in the machine after all, where some parts of it peek out every now and then to assert its creativity.

JH: I'm a super spiritual person, so I actually take a lot of my thinking from theoretical physics. For some reason, I still cannot personify AI because I know there are signals that form a pattern that get to this answer. In another exhibition called Machinations of a Godless Mind, the works we curated talked about the black box of input and output where we can see and control the input and see and estimate where the outputs are coming from, but in the black box of processing, we don't really know what's happening in there. I'd rather take a more critical approach to this, that it's not as meaningful or complicated or profound as we think. We're using technology that we can't really explain. Thus, I see it as a bunch of signals that somehow we have learned to manipulate.

Are there any future works you are working on either together or separately?

KN: I have a commission from the Singapore Art Museum that uses AI. The project is called Art in the Commons: Data Visualising Jurong. The previous two participants of this project did data visualisation in a more traditional way, and my approach was to pick all the stories that I got from a public consultation phase and run them through my own custom train model to then hallucinate visions of the Jurong region based on the stories that people shared with me. 

Related article: Everything You Wanted To Know About NFTs

ArtScience Museum’s Notes From the Ether: From NFTs to AI exhibition runs from now 'til 24 September between 10am and 7pm. Purchase your tickets on their website here.

Catch Kapilan Naidu’s Art in the Commons: Data Visualising Jurong exhibit from now 'til 10 September at the Science Centre Singapore, Level 2 Mezzanine Space. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.