Metamodern Spell Casting

The Blockchain as a Conceptual Medium for Contemporary Visual Artists

There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality. (Finn 2017)

Pretty chuffed that an essay I wrote for a double blind peer reviewed journal was published here: https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/2999 at M/C Journal in October

Abstract
Using a Metamodern framework this article considers a new genre called Digital Combines, proposed by the artist Claudia Hart, that joins a selection of physical, digital and virtual mediums glued together with a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The NFT is a Metamodern spell casting, a magical instruction that transforms an object/s or idea into something else. Written using “sourcery” the NFT is undetectable until the affects are made evident. NFTs are stored on a blockchain which is comparable to a chapter in the Akashic records–esoteric knowledge that is readily available to Techno-priests or the people who know how and where to look.

Keywords
Magic, Metamodernism, Interdisciplinary contemporary art, digital combines, Blockchain

Finn, Ed. 2017. What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. ePub Version 1.0. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.