“NFT Must Go” is a curated exhibition bridging the tech and art worlds. It highlights the expansive and expressive medium of the NFT. The NFT (Non-fungible token) essentially links a digital file to a smart contract on the blockchain, creating uniqueness, with functions like certification, authentication, data transparency, dynamic artworks, or an xcircle membership.

The title of the exhibition „NFT Must Go!” is a shrill quote from an art collector and presents xcircle with a welcome opportunity to break down the multiple fears and biases attached to NFTs. We seek to illuminate the creative possibilities behind these three magical letters!

Declaring “NFT must go!” is akin to calling for the banishment of the brush or the camera or the kiln. Like the brush or the camera, the NFT is simply a tool for artists working in the digital media space.

The exhibition features augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (XR) sculptures by Florian Adolph and Ugo Dossi, AI photographs by Max Haarich, satirical videos by Kenny Schachter, works by Tobias Rehberger, generative art by Holger Lippmann, paintings, soft toys, and historical NFTs from meme culture icon PEPE the Frog, analog-induced CHAOS in digital loops by artist Christof Babinsky, glitch GIFs by search engine artist Gretchen Andrew, PlastoCorals by Tamiko Thiel, animated cut-outs by street art creator Daniel Man, cyberspace animations by Virtual Human Ava Verce, flower power moss by artist collective Tinoss, erotic still lifes by Tondo Smiling, lenticular paintings by Tatjana Lee, and light prisms by Betty Mü.

LOCATION xcircle @LOVAAS Projects | Fürstenstraße 6, Munich | Opening: 28.11.2023, 6-10pm | 29.11.-22.12.2023

“Ode to Joy” by H.E. Max Haarich.

The Scherenschnitt 3.0 exhibition shows digital art. The basis for the works created in 2023 are silhouettes from a bygone era. In the Museum im Hüsy in Blankenburg (Switzerland), collector Hans-Jürgen Glatz is showing more than 400 historical silhouettes/cut-outs (Scherenschnitte) from Switzerland and various European countries. Already two centuries before the “invention” of the Bernese Oberland silhouette, artists and amateurs began to work with cut-outs. Convent women made filigree images of saints. In Geneva, members of the upper classes created landscapes with scissors; in many families, people had their portraits painted in the form of silhouettes. Digital artists take the silhouettes as inspiration or reinterpret specfic works from the collection of the Hüsy Gallery.

The created GIFs were presented in the Espace Vide Gallery in Thun in July 2023 together with original cut-outs.

H.E. Max Haarich had the honor to be invited by the legendary love propagandists Rainer Langhans and Christa Ritter for an evening at Munich’s Import/Export. In an open discussion with the whole audience, they raised the question of how we are feeling and how our view on life itself is changing in these times of growing conflicts, where hatred and violence is presented as the only rational “solution”.

A recording of the discussion will be published soon.

Ambassador H.E. Haarich had the honor to present the story of the Republic of Užupis at TEDxROMA on 21 JAN 2023. In his talk, he demonstrated how the spirit of Užupis might contribute to more ethical AI and more kisses on planet earth. 1,100 guests attended the event at Parco della Musica as well as 2,000 online viewers.

The talk will be published by the end of February on www.tedxroma.com.

H.E. Max Haarich’s public art installation “Good Buy, Reality” will be on view at Kunstinsel at Munich’s Lenbachplatz from today until 15 MAR. Against the background of increasing virtualisation and commercialisation of our lives, the cross-media installation “Good Buy, Reality!” invites us to appreciate shared reality. Two such small moments of reality are artificially created in order to threaten their sale at the same time.

The project has been realized thanks to the generous support by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich.

Further info about Good Buy, Reality.

“Smart Hans” won the main jury prize of Augsburg’s renowned media arts festival Lab30. The jury consisting of Julia Holzmann, Andreas Muxel, Stefanie Sixt, Martin Spengler, and Karin Zwack highlighted the scientific rigor and social relevance as well as the intuitive accessibility of the interactive artwork.

“Smart Hans” is the artificially intelligent reincarnation of Clever Hans, the “mind-reading” horse that lived 100 years ago. The interactive installation shows an animated horse that can guess any number on your mind in real-time via posture recognition. This installation is fun to play with, but it is also a warning about public surveillance and automated decision making. Furthermore, the artwork is a literal manifestation of the Clever-Hans-Effect, which describes the core flaw of any AI model – the general impossibility to fully determine, on which data its decision was based.

During the four days of the Lab30 festival, “Smart Hans” was allowed to guess the number on the visitors’ minds more than 700 times. With a total amount of almost 200 correct guesses, our current AI model is performing significantly above chance. We are looking for partners to further train our models to hopefully reach an accuracy of 70 – 80 % like the original Clever Hans.

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Team: Anja Borowicz Richardson (UK), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Akshita Gupta (IND), Max Haarich (Artistic Lead / DE), Martina Huynh (NL), Asad Imtiaz (PAK), Muhammad Qasim Khan (PAK), Adrian Ludwig (DE), Pekka Ollikainen (FI), Raphael Pickl (DE)

Project Smart Hans was incubated during the Deepfake Masterclass at Baltan Laboratories  in Eindhoven (NL) under guidance of Ellen Pearlman (US) and Julien Deswaef (NL) from ThoughtWorks Art  as well as Leif Czakai (NL) from Baltan Laboratories. The project won the “Super Artistic AI Award” in the category “Interaction” and the jury’s main prize at Lab30 festival 2022.

Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.

It was all about money, trying to make money for the next show. We, the Munich embassy of the republic of Užupis, made some research on the problem of money. We found out that all nations are in debt. All nations without exception. So the question is, if everyone is in debt, whom do they owe this money? Who has all the money?

As Užupis was not even listed on the debts chart, maybe we have all the money and just did not notice? So to end this misery, we created emergency money in our local Už-EUR currency. During the offshore exhibition, we paid the debts of the world. Ambassador in colors H.E. Mykolas Kimtis and me provided each visitor emergency money in an amount equal do the visitor’s statistical debt per capita. In total we paid out more than 500K Už-EUR which equals 500K beers in our little republic. As such an liquidity flood would kill our little economy, we urged visitors not to spend the money in Užupis, but to immediately buy Užupis treasury bills instead. Problem solved.

More info: https://www.hausderkunst.de/ausstellungen/zu-gast-offshore-money-for-the-show

Art NFT Linz presents an exhibition and artist talks to explore the story of the past, present, and future of digital art and NFTs. NFTs are neither dead nor without history.

John Gerrard | Jonas Lund | Mitchell F Chan | Operator | Manuel Rossner | Anne Spalter | Mario Klingemann | Lynn Hershman Leeson | TeleNFT | Organic Material | Unsigned | Kevin Abosch | Harm van den Dorpel | UBERMORGEN | Erwin Wurm | CryptoWiener | Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau

Curated by Anika Meier

More info: www.ooekultur.at/event-detail/art-nft-linz

“Teletext is Art” is a multimodal exhibition experience dedicated to 7 bit teletext art. The artworks are presented on air in ORF TELETEXT and ARD text, online at the Museum of Teletext Art, on chain as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, and in real life at the Ars Electronica Festival 2022.

Watch the Austrian National News’ report about our exhibition.

The digital artworks will been contributed by the 15 international artists presented by TeleNFT, which, for the first time brought cryptoart into the teletext and teletext art onto the blockchain. The contributed works stand out for their deliberate use of medium and context. Teletext raises expectations: on the one hand, it raises aesthetic expectations of technically possible colors and resolutions. Some works play with this ironically by producing even lower levels of detail, sometimes at great expense. On the other hand, the teletext medium raises service expectations of information, news and entertainment. But instead of neutral information, a clear position is taken here; against nation-state wars, against the abortion policy of the USA, against the lies of the classical financial system. Instead of repeating the daily news, it specifically highlights the blind spots, such as mechanisms of monetary policy, which are usually hardly discussed on TV. And instead of illustrating sex hotlines, one prefers to offer entertainment in the form of eerie short stories.

Max Haarich & Gleb Divov

In cooperation with ORF, ARD, and Museum of Teletext Art

More info here: https://ars.electronica.art/planetb/de/teletext-is-art/

Online teletext viewer: https://teletext.orf.at/channel/orf1/page/560/1

During 1E9’s Festival der Zukunft at Deutsches Museum we exhibited our new 7bit movements NFT collection.“7bit movements” is an artistic investigation into the boundaries of visual perception. 13 international artists created short 7bit GIF animations to challenge our perception of movement.

At the festival we organized a workshop on how to create teletext art based on the Tius software by code artist and teletext OG Matthias Waldorf and boradcasted the results live on SAT.1 teletext.

More infos on 7bit movements: www.uzupis.de/7bit