Nick Cave "Wild God" Identity by OneTenEleven

Wild God is the eighteenth studio album by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, released on 30 August 2024 on PIAS.

Nick Cave’s marketing team approached OneTenEleven (lead by Antony Kitson you may remember from our Digital Decade events) in late 2023

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Forming Wild God

When Nick shared his vision for Wild God, it was clear the name carried a deep, almost spiritual weight — dark yet full of hope. We embraced that feeling by keeping the design bold and minimal, like a sacred sculpture. The cover isn’t just graphic — it’s real, made from hand-placed, heat-molded white plastic letters, giving the title physical presence.

The Wild God Tour

For The Wild God Tour, the team developed a bold visual identity featuring variations of the title design across posters, banners, and billboards. An infinite colour-phasing animation served as the tour's intro, with large-scale screens integrated into each venue. Digital assets were delivered in multiple resolutions, and in collaboration between “Thunderwing & Nick Cave” and OneTenEleven, animated lyric visuals — personally curated by Nick Cave — were created to accompany live performances, reflecting his input on motion and colour direction.

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Vinyl & CD Packaging

3D pack shots created for the Wild God campaign. Created from Thunderwing’s artwork, 3D modelling in Cinema4D, textures & lighting with Redshift.

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Lyrics Videos

Created for the Wild God Album Campaign throughout 2024/25.

Amy Hui Li

Born in the vibrant city of Guangzhou, China, Amy Hui Li pursued her passion for Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, a prestigious institution known for its creative approach to the arts. She then further honed her skills by completing a Masters in Painting from the renowned Royal College of Art. Since then, Li has exhibited her captivating works extensively across major art hubs, including London, New York, and Taiwan.

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Notably, her participation in two significant group shows, Unit: London Calling in 2023 and Worlds Beyond in 2024, has garnered attention and acclaim. Recently Li is set to present an exciting solo exhibition at the Unit London gallery, where she will showcase her innovative hybrid fabric artworks that skillfully interweave elements of sculpture, painting, and installation, inviting viewers into her unique artistic vision.

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The Blooming Soul

The Blooming Soul: An Artistic Act Through the Lens of Botanical Metaphors

From March 12 to 17, 2025, the Eight Squared Gallery in Folkestone hosted the art exhibition "The Blooming Soul: A Celebration of Spring and Nature’s Awakening." This exhibition brought together eight outstanding international artists, each creating their works in various mediums ranging from abstract and figurative art to interactive installations.

The group of artists—Igor Khlopotov, Irina Slepko (Gauk), Iryna Yauseyenka, Mariia Babina, Natalia Titova, Svetlana Sycheva, Victoria Dini, and Yulia Rotkina—explored the interpenetration of artistic methods of understanding reality and various botanical concepts, techniques, methods, and established expressions. This interplay between the artist's symbolic field and the semiotic field of the gardener (botanist, florist, forester, naturalist, etc.) is a key conceptual finding of the exhibition, seemingly aimed at overcoming the fundamental boundaries between spheres of human activity and perception in pursuit of a hypothetical sense of wholeness, interconnectedness, and inseparability.

This exhibition is not merely a statement within the frameworks of unreflected eco-positivism that accompanies us from supermarket to trash bin; it is a bold and successful assertion by young outstanding artists striving for a deeper level of reflection that complements social anxiety with rhetorical intuitions, activist slogans with a metaphysical superstructure, and humanity's longing for nature with a bitter existential poetic humility.

The wide palette of artistic means and techniques, vivid images, and sumptuous colours—depicting themes of germination, the birth of life, the sprouting of seeds, swelling buds, sticky leaves, budding, and vegetative reproduction—poses a complex challenge of creating a non-trivial lexicon of new, previously non-existent symbolic connections that precede future neural ones. This allows us, for example, to transcend superficial sexuality in the imagery of the pistil and stamen and perceive in them a mystical or even religious yearning.
Each of the eight participants in the exhibition developed their paradoxical artistic strategy, revealing and enriching the aforementioned theme. In this article, we would like to focus in more detail on the works of two participants.

Within the exhibition 'The Blooming Soul,' the digital collage works of artist Natalia Titova stand out distinctly. Unlike the other participants, she uses direct visual botanical metaphors less prominently; however, it is this visual elusiveness that renders her works resonant, piercing, and aesthetically sharpened to the maximum. The artist simultaneously constructs and deconstructs, manifests and mythologises, and creates and destroys. Her collage series titled "Tove" serves as a captivating visualisation of the modern artist's thought process as they grapple with themes of life, nature, memory, cultural interactions, and the dissolution of perception boundaries regarding various substances. For instance, in her works, a wired earphone may represent both a sperm cell and a rope for tying, as well as the contour of an unidentified object. A golf club can be interpreted as a grass-cutting scythe, a contour of a fractal universe, and a blade severing a character's legs from the solid ground beneath them.

The subtly botanical metaphorical nature of her works levels all objects of memory against one another, literally endowing each object with the properties of the plant world. A cloud can become the earth from which identical bodies or body parts grow, while air can transform into the ground from which clouds arise. The objects simultaneously serve as items from the real world (coloured) and artefacts of memory, documents of the past (black and white). A dress becomes the sea, an earphone turns into the moon, and suddenly, the late British queen and a naïve monocle appear. Nevertheless, at the top of Natalia Titova's collages, flowers are always positioned, adding a hint of sorrowful hierarchy to her dynamic pluralistic rhizomatic artistic world— "Flowers above all."
The most striking aspect of these digital works is the sensation of lightness and imaginative freedom, albeit this lightness is produced by an inquisitive and critically self-reflective artist. Upon closer inspection, one can recognise the immense labour and meticulous development invested in these works, which imbue the collage compositions with the potential to resemble a Hindu abode of demigods (loka).

"On The Road" by Yulia Rotkina is an intricately organised piece of artwork. Upon encountering it, we may succumb to the charm of traditional mediums (canvas, oil), the cosy minimalism of the composition, and the soothing thickness of the brushstrokes; however, this should not obscure from us a whole range of the artist’s identities, which are masterfully concealed in the painting (like seeds in the ground) and reveal themselves, harbouring immense perceptual possibilities. It is this balance of the hidden and the manifest that structures or organises the complex attraction of engaging with the painting's message.

Firstly, one of the artist's identities is that of a critic of binary oppositions. All paired phenomena in this work undergo a process of critical reflection. It is particularly peculiar that the composition reads as a triptych: earth, sky, and the figure of a person. When we attempt to analyse the various elements of the painting in pairs, we find that there are no explicit pairs present. The artist transcends binary thinking through the active use of non-obvious trinaries. In the pair "human and nature," she adds another layer of nature. In the pair "blue and green," she introduces an ambivalent object that can be both blue and green, depending on the perspective.

Another identity of the artist is that of a synaesthetic experimenter. The minimalism of expressive means in Rotkina's work is complemented by a maximalism of perceptual approaches. For instance, the deliberate relief indicates a dynamic and emotional dimension, while the use of a limited palette of complex cool colours sets the tone for the blurring of boundaries and an asserted homogeneity of things. The third identity of the artist is that of a post-storyteller who has abandoned key elements of storytelling but preserved the essence of her narrative message through the vast possibilities of direct silence. Where she remains silent, kaleidoscopes of our viewer interpretation emerge. This work inspires and amazes with its complexity of conceptual development and unparalleled technical execution.

The Human as a Metaphor for the Photographer

The Human as a Metaphor for the Photographer

Contemporary photography undoubtedly inspires with its boundlessness. We believe in photography's limitless potential because it seems capable of permeating the world around us as part of our daily lives, as gallery luxury, and as a means for artistic self-discovery. It is this self-discovery through photography that I believe is the most subtle, fragile, promising, and enchanting aspect of the entire global artistic process of photography's evolution as a contemporary art form. This is a significant genre and conceptual branch that requires the photographer to demonstrate selflessness, a considerable degree of self-criticism, an absence of the desire to exoticise others, and immense personal empathetic energy capable of connecting people and infecting viewers with new meanings. In today’s article, I would like to discuss three contemporary photographers who compellingly explore the essence of humanity and are unique bearers of a personal philosophy of photography, creating new definitions of what it means to be human in the modern era.

The Human as a Sum and Reflection of All Natural Phenomena

Kseniia Chumakova, a photographer residing in Serbia, bases her artistic method on making non-obvious connections visible. These can be connections between nature and humanity, between humans and evolution, between humans and specific species, and between humans and non-human agents. The photographer seems occupied with naming those connections that exist somewhere between intuition and the wisdom of everyday life. According to her artistic aesthetic, a person (the model) is proportionate to the entire sum of the surrounding world. A human being is a relative and bearer of information about the entire knowable universe. However, this concept also reveals a striking duality in the human condition. On one hand, humans, according to Chumakova, are aware that they are made up of the same elements that surround them; on the other hand, the presence of this awareness in the non-human material world raises questions of curiosity, if not fear. Chumakova's photographs are filled with an enchanting yet minimalist energy, resembling a puzzle or riddle; her characters are ambivalent toward both the human world and the non-human world. This creates a remarkable effect, where the artwork simultaneously serves as a statement and a critique of that statement—a rare meta-narrative quality, particularly in contemporary photography.

The Human as a Super-NPC

In Oksana Bochina's photographic style, the human is inextricably linked to the urban environment. This urban setting is both a habitat and a backdrop, a battlefield, a stage, a showcase, and everything listed above simultaneously. Bochina, who lives and works in Montenegro, perceives the human being as an element of a more complex system; however, this human does not reduce to the system or their function within it. Bochina's human is simultaneously a guest, an outsider, and a native inhabitant of the circumstances presented by the photographer. Her anthropological exploration is a captivating and vital optimistic quest for ever-new contradictory and mutually exclusive human identities. The camera, gazing from above, seems to pluck an individual from the urban flow and, together with the photographer, initiates an interactive game of multiplying meanings and identities around the captured person. This fascinating aesthetic, which is not merely a banal conceptualist attraction, allows the viewer to train their awareness of their usual perception of urban landscapes. It presents a slightly naive yet superhuman message from an artist wishing to share their benevolent vision as a method with those around them. The photographer employs dizzying photographic perspectives, vibrant dynamic colours, and a nuanced gaze from the observer's standpoint while not becoming a judge of her characters. Her works are rich in detail, inviting prolonged contemplation; although her characters may be presented as NPCs in video games, they transcend this status, offering hope that we (ordinary people) too are more than just images of ourselves.

The Human is a Puzzle That Cannot Be Solved

The artistic concept of photographer Irina Slepko Gauk is the most radical, bold, and innovative. Through her photographs, she explores the impossibility of understanding the human being. The human is a constant impossibility of approach and awareness. This position is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic; the photographer seems to postulate a form of dark realism, where one of the axioms is that the human is an absolute unknown. Her models are majestic, often shrouded in shadows, dressed in black, and enveloped in dimness. They embody the traces of real people who mourn their own kind, unable to express that a person cannot be reduced to their traces, including photographs. This is a very significant statement for the photographer, altering the disproportions of the importance of reality and its representation in photography. There is no contempt for photography here, but a bitter realisation that a captured moment is an incredibly fragile and weightless thing, incapable of deciphering the mysteries of the total “multi-layer-edness” and poly-textured nature of humanity, like an informational bomb existing in the flow of time. To amplify the effect of her photographs, the artist adds elements of conditionality and absurdity, such as a whole lemon resting on the model's head or certain traits of the subcultural photo-aesthetics of the early 21st century. The photographs of Irina Slepko Gauk are provocatively rich in meaning and technically flawless; they seem to be created to endlessly raise questions about humanity, photographic art, and the impossibility of true understanding without losing oneself.

Paul Reid reviving mythology with art

Paul Reid, a Scottish figurative painter born in 1975, has garnered acclaim for his contemporary reinterpretations of ancient myths. A Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee graduate, Reid's work reflects the narrative depth and technical precision reminiscent of old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. His paintings breathe new life into Greek mythology, presenting timeless narratives through a modern lens that resonates with today's cultural context.

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Reid's dedication to classical themes has earned him significant recognition, including inclusion in the New Statesman's "Best of Young British" artists under 35 in 2002. His collaborations with His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales further underscore his prominence in art. Exhibitions such as "Mythos" (2019) and "Gods, Heroes and Beasts" (2017) at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh have showcased his ability to bridge the past and present, inviting viewers to engage with classical myths in a way that feels both evocative and thought-provoking.

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Fields of Morning by Laurence Fuller and Sedition

Sedition Art platform presents artist Laurence Fuller in collaboration with Kesja Tabaczuk.

Immerse yourself in 'Fields of Morning,' a captivating collection of five digital masterpieces by Laurence Fuller, created in collaboration with the talented Kesja Tabaczuk. This unique series, adapted from the acclaimed exhibition at Arcadia Contemporary (July 11 - July 31, 2024), seamlessly blends Tabaczuk's meticulous paintings with Fuller's evocative poetry. Fuller's journey into Tabaczuk's art began on social media, where he was drawn to the intricate balance between precision and whimsy in her work. Her striking images of roaming wild animals and incomplete birds boldly defy the ordinary, inviting viewers to explore a realm where the fantastical meets the familiar.

Fields of Morning captures the first steps taken into the fields each morning with the rising sun, symbolising a journey back to self-discovery. The Lyca character is inspired by a series of poems by William Blake. The collection explores our connection to the world around us, portraying us as creators and poets of each moment. It delves into the presence and beauty of being alive.

These masterful portraits provide an open space for poetic storytelling. In today's world, figurative painting has become rare and special, contrasting the reduction of all art to the instant. Certain moments in life linger in our memories with greater potency and contemplation. When sentiment is all that remains, imagination gains even greater significance than life itself. The world around us becomes an extension of our inner lives, and beauty reflects back to us, creating a paradise in this life. Fields of Morning evokes early memories of Mother Nature, highlighting our true potential.

Universal Everything 2024 Reel

Latest showreel from the leading future makers collective Universal Everything formed by Matt Pyke

Art by Karina Eibatova

Karina Eibatova is a visual artist who has previously published work on our website and has also appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, Wired, and The Verge. She has shown her artworks in Vienna, Berlin, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles. Karina, born in St. Petersburg during the USSR's twilight, has pursued her passion for art and established an international career and academic trajectory from a young age. At the moment Karina is based in Devon, UK. 

Karina's first collaboration with a UK company was with Atlantic Records in 2010. The artist created the cover artwork for the Versaemerge "Fixed At Zero" disc. The popularity of Karina's graphics in the early 2010s brought her many projects around the world at the very beginning of her artistic career.

Karina began her fine art studies in 2007 at a foundation school in Sweden. In 2014, Karina studied at Central Saint Martins in London on the Fine Arts 4D faculty. She later studied art in Tokyo and attained her first MA in fine art from the Art Academy in Vienna.

Solos show Project Space 1, AUP, Plymouth

Later in 2020, she did a cover for the fabulous British musician Tom Adams, which will only be released this year. After, Karina pursued her second Master's degree at the Art University Plymouth in the Southwest of the UK. There, she reached a new level of creativity, where her practice took on a more personal and profound approach: her paintings increased in size, and from watercolour and pencil graphics, she began to focus more on oil painting.

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Renowned artist Richard Kenton Webb, who is an award-winning artist and educator with over 30 years of extensive experience at institutions including The Slade School of Fine Art, admires Karina's work, and he has left a review of Karina's last exhibition.

“What am I considering when I encounter Eibatova’s visual poetry? A sublimity of mind and a genuine ambition for wonder. These thoughts have been my companion when I engage with this painter’s vision. A vision that is both compelling, fresh and unnerving. I am not necessarily comfortable or put at ease when I spent time with these accomplished paintings, I like that fact, they are enigmatic. What I find is I am compelled to look, digest and converse with them face to face, to behold and hear their voice asking me questions. They certainly ask why to any certainty I consider a fact of seeing.
I find I am writing the words, apocalyptical and visionary. We could discuss English qualities of the painter and printmaker John Martin or the writer and academic J.R.R.Tolkien, or the extraordinary Gray’s Anatomy as sources, if necessary, for inspiration. Yet we for all this referencing we are certainly in what painting is now, contemporary thinking and making, not in a past, but a forward thinking, inside cinema graphic questions of fiction that are rooted deep in nature.
We are in the language and use of colour. Where colour is used to carry a magnificent narrative, that speaks into the soul of the viewer from an exquisite detail to a soft velvetiness of flat colour. I witness the sensibilities of the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon, his eyes and inheritance of being in Devon and Cornwall. Where painting is made air-born. Her diptych that is so beautifully original and statically poised about this particular place and landscape. As a gull floats on the wing, looking, stationary high over hundreds of feet of cliff beside the ocean. It makes me understand being inside a thought.
Karina’s paintings are like a dial in slow motion materializing hope. Of being a witness inside a dream, and renewed because of it. Collectively the ten paintings in this exhibition organise a great sense of otherness that we have shared in a great calm, like witnessing a flower open into its glory, but it seems just for us alone.”

— Richard Kenton Webb, 2024

From the author’s manifesto

“Currently, my personal creative practice is centered on oil on canvas. I explore imagery drawn from nature, dreams and imagination and strive to create an immersive and contemplative experience for the viewer through color and symbolism. My painting is at the crossroads, somewhere abstract, in some places not so much: a landscape or a body, a stone or a tree. In my recent works I try to reflect the value of the human body and of life itself, without resorting to depicting human figures, I try to depict our inner world, a secret landscape full of organs and light. Through a combination of neon, dark and pastel colours I want to express a sense of hope”.

This year, Karina was awarded the “Artist of the Month” prize in Zima magazine, one of the most recognised Russian-speaking media projects based in London. One of her works is on display in the city centre of London this summer.

“Karina Eibatova’s works combine tenderness, organicity, lightness of abstract forms, painted with special care, expression and force, a kind of rumbling, reminiscent of works about the terrible judgment of the English Romanticism artist John Martin. In her paintings there is a certain confidence, power and resilience of a soft, feminine flow of forms – not something corporeal, not something cloudy, not something earthy and tangible, not something airy and elusive. This remarkable balance of opposites allows the viewer to feel a profound visual comfort. The works envelope the beholder like a soft blanket and immerse him or her in other levels of this visual aesthetic, where he or she encounters an intense vitality, some even doom. One plunges into this painting like a cloud, which, while outwardly harmless, carries thunder and lightning. Karina has been shortlisted for the prize several times and we are delighted to finally present her with the award she deserves”

— Katya Granova, curator of the Artist of the Month project

Intriguingly, two individuals made a similar comparison with English painter, engraver, and illustrator John Martin, which prompts the audience to contemplate the relationship between the apocalyptic landscapes of the 19th century and Karina's dramatic works. We'll continue keenly observing this gifted artist's upcoming creative endeavours.

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About the author

Arseny Vesnin founded Designcollector, a platform established in 2003 in Russia. Designcollector is one of the pioneering digital magazines dedicated to covering and supporting the digital art scene and creative communities in Russia and beyond. The platform showcases a variety of content related to digital art, design, and visual culture, providing artists, designers, and creatives with exposure and inspiration. Over the years, it has expanded to include digital art events like the Digital Decade, an exhibition featuring emerging visual artists and designers. Designcollector has always covered the intersection of art, design, music and culture.

A Provocative Exploration of Dreams and Surveillance

Sofia Malemina’s video art piece Unknown Diary explores the theme of fantasies and illusions in our digital world. Drawing from Baudrillard’s concept of Simulacra and Simulation, the work explores the blurred line between online and offline, real and imagined, legal and illegal, reflecting on the contraries. The sound composition, filled with whispers, indistinct echoes, and the city noise, sharpens the feeling of unease and unknowingness, reinforced by the complex appearing and disappearing visual layer. The video’s continuous loop symbolises the endless, elusive quality of a dream, where start and finish often appear vague. Malemina, who directs and acts in the project, is looking inward, developing the amusement with oneself. She is examining surveillance through the prism of voyeurism by creating a replication and depicting the duality of this act through the lens of the camera. 

Unknown Diary was featured in the December exhibition Dreamscapes (London, UK, 2023), inviting viewers into the vast terrain of human emotion and imagination. Each artist in this exhibition offers a distinct perspective, allowing us to venture into the endless landscapes of the mind. Dreamscapes celebrates the influential role of dreams in reshaping how we perceive the world around us.

Despite launching her career only four years ago, Sofia Malemina approaches complex, provocative ideas with confidence and depth that many artists often avoid. Her themes and methods push against traditional limits, especially as she grapples with subjects like surveillance and voyeurism, using unconventional approaches—topics confronting the uneasy relationship between privacy and self-awareness in the digital age. Malemina’s work uses these topics to question the authenticity of human experience, intentions and connections in a time when digital and physical realities are deeply intertwined.

This unflinching engagement with unsettling subjects positions Unknown Diary as more than an observation. It becomes a commentary on the fragmented self in a world where technology increasingly shapes identity. By pushing these frames forward, Malemina invites viewers to confront unconscious, uncomfortable truths about how our inner and outer worlds are curated, edited, observed, and redefined in today’s hyper-connected society. This bold thematic ambition reveals her willingness to dissect and reinterpret contemporary experience, marking her as a vital voice with a unique perspective within modern video art.

Spin ceramics by Robert Dawson

Robert Dawson’s ceramic art blurs the lines between tradition and innovation, motion and permanence, and challenges conventional perceptions of craftsmanship.

Dawson's creation, Spin, beautifully encapsulates the essence of motion blur, reminiscent of the technique used in animated movies. Just as motion blur aids in creating fluidity in film sequences, Dawson's manipulation of glaze and design captures a fleeting moment, freezing it in time while alluding to movement. The Blue Willow pottery design combines fixedness and the illusion of movement, showcasing the artist’s skill.

The plates symbolise clay’s history and transformation. Dawson cleverly incorporates circularity, a fundamental principle in pottery, by showcasing the spinning process as a visible final stage in decoration. This extends the traditional concept of pottery time, inviting viewers to contemplate the craft’s evolution.

His plates honour and represent ceramic heritage while pushing boundaries..

Nick Sheehy: A Journey of Imagination and Expression

Let’s discover the captivating world of Nick Sheehy, an Australian-born artist and illustrator currently residing in the artistic hub of London.

Nick started his artistic career in the wild landscapes of Tasmania, where he sculpted with bronze. But fate took him away from art for some time. However, life brings us back to our true passions, and that's what happened to Nick. Living in London, he rediscovered his love for drawing, inspired by the city's lively low-brow art, illustration, street art, and graffiti scenes.

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He uses his unique artwork to explore the world of dreams, creating mysterious and sometimes semi-autobiographical scenes. His canvas serves as a platform for the eccentric characters that resonate from his childhood imagination, infusing his creations with nostalgia and amazement.

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Nick's art showcases an array of subjects that depict a wide range of emotions. His portfolio reflects his limitless creativity, featuring everything from fanciful creatures to dreamy landscapes, and some find a hommage to Bosch’s bestiaries. He enjoys drawing unique fauna objects, an exploration of his imagination showcased in exhibitions, publications, and even some client projects.

Simulation Hypothesis by Maxim Zhestkov at Unit London

20 June - 22 July 2023
Unit London

Unit London proudly presents Maxim Zhestkov’s debut solo exhibit, Simulation Hypothesis - a profound and immersive delve into the interconnection between artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and our human roots. Inspired by Noam Chomsky's thought-provoking literature, Zhestkov seeks to surpass the limitations of language by painting and creating art that explores originality and storytelling in novel ways.

Inspired by pre-historic cultures of cave art and ancient bas-reliefs, artist Zhestkov uses programming and software to create simulations that explore the visuality of a time before written language. By fusing machines and algorithms with Artificial Intelligence, he hopes to reshape the perception of AI from adversary to descendent of human consciousness. His current exhibit takes viewers on a conceptual journey through Clouds of Creation—a large-scale projection reenacting the Big Bang—and Dimensional Dreamscapes, which suggests that humanity’s desire to create, build, and alter the world is in harmony with primary cosmic energy.

Heterosis

Snark.art and OG.Art announces Heterosis, a groundbreaking art collection and immersive metaverse experience brought to life by established contemporary artist Mat Collishaw and renowned digital artist Danil Krivoruchko, in partnership with metaverse architects EL-GABAL

Mat Collishaw

Danil Krivoruchko

Heterosis - the increase in such characteristics as size, growth rate and yield of a hybrid organism over those of its parents.

Snark.art, the innovation laboratory supporting artists creating at the cutting edge of art and technology, announces Heterosis, a new series of digital artworks and an immersive metaverse experience by Mat Collishaw. Created in collaboration with digital artist Danil Krivoruchko and metaverse architect EL-GABAL, Heterosis is a project produced for the OG.Art platform which combines blockchain technology and art to create a unique experience for collectors.

Heterosis will see participants cultivating and breeding virtual flowers that grow in a hyperrealistic metaverse ‘greenhouse’ – a digital recreation of a grandly decorated wing of London’s National Gallery, abandoned and reclaimed by nature. Each flower will be a one-of-a-kind, unduplicable digital artwork, but the works, both individually and collectively, become meaningful via the community that is created. Based on innovative technology, Heterosis invites collectors to participate in an art ‘game’ where their interaction determines the outcome of the works. The participatory nature of Heterosis means the artwork could not exist in any context other than on the blockchain.

Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art

Collector’s control the creative outcome

Upon minting, each collector receives a Heterosis flower with unique DNA code and the combination of a few basic traits. Through hybridisation, collectors can discover advanced characteristics or mutations, and unlock new species, colours, patterns and forms. Their actions and engagement with one another will determine how the creation of new species and increasingly exotic and elaborate blooms unfolds. They become the agents of digital evolution and digital art collaborators.

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Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art

Ground-breaking technology

The digital flowers have been developed using SideFX’s Houdini – a powerful 3D animation and visual effects tool used in blockbuster films, commercials and video games – and are rendered on Redshift. Uniquely, the hyperrealistic flowers are created via a process of hybridization that is not predetermined, requiring advanced technology to generate the dynamic content. The metaverse ‘greenhouse’ was developed using Unreal Engine, the state-of-the-art gaming technology to allow collectors to interact with one another and freely explore the environment no matter where they are in the world. The technology means they can have an interactive, collective experience on any device with exceptionally high-quality visualisation.

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Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art

Flower market

To hybridize, collectors must pay the flower’s owner a breeding fee. Collectors themselves set the prices for hybridization which can reflect if significant resources have been spent to create a new rare and exciting combination of genes. These dynamics create two separate markets – one for the purchase digital flowers and another for selling the opportunity to hybridize your flower.

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Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art

Heterosis builds on Collishaw’s practice and cross-disciplinary approach which sees him engage with developments in technology and unafraid to venture into unfamiliar terrain. He says of the collaboration:

“I wanted to create an artwork that could not exist in any context other than the metaverse. The digital network that forms the basis of Heterosis allows all the participants and components to come together, bringing the artwork to fruition. The fact that the work can evolve through time, depending on what the owner will or won’t do, was something very interesting for us. Danil managed to encode all the different traits into DNA and designed an evolution process. These mechanics, are essential to the Heterosis project and are especially valuable to us as something that’s possible only in a decentralized space”

— Mat Collishaw

Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko, Heterosis, 2023 © Snark.art

“This is the most complicated digital art collection I have ever worked on. Mat wanted Heterosis NFTs to be real flower species. A real life reference, which is super complex on the one hand and so familiar to everyone on the other, meant that even the goal of achieving a photorealistic visual was technologically very complex”

— Danil Krivoruchko

Life in Our Minds

Pace Verso and Snark.art Detail Collaborative NFT Project by Random International and Danil Krivoruchko

Titled Life in Our Minds, the project will be released on Snark.art’s dynamic NFT platform OG.Art on October 25.

Life in Our Minds incorporates boundary-pushing technology that enables buyers to actively participate in the formal evolution of the NFTs to make them rarer. Together, the individual NFTs make up a large-scale virtual sculpture titled Mother Flock, which transforms in tandem with its constituent parts.

Pace Verso, Pace Gallery’s web3 hub, and Snark.art’s OG.Art NFT platform is pleased to announce a new generative NFT project by Random International—the experimental art collective known for its large-scale, interactive installations, including the widely exhibited, immersive Rain Room (2012)—in collaboration with multidisciplinary digital artist Danil Krivoruchko, co-creator of the OG: Crystals NFT project. Titled Life in Our Minds, the two-part project comprises an animated NFT collection and a related interactive video sculpture — titled Mother Flock and made up of the individual NFTs — that will be unveiled later this year.

Life in Our Minds NFTs will be available for purchase on Snark.art’s OG.Art NFT platform on October 25. Ahead of the release, collectors can sign up for the project’s waitlist

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Upon minting, each Life in Our Minds NFT features a small group of Boids, 3D bird-like origami objects. The visual traits of any given Life in Our Minds NFT are initially generated and evolve according to the content of its owner’s wallet, among other factors. The longer a Life in Our Minds NFT remains in a single collector’s wallet, the rarer and more elaborate its formal characteristics become: the number of Boids may increase, and their formations and decorative patterns may change. These interactive, 3D video NFTs are distinguished by their continuous development, which is achieved through the highly complex and inventive technological processes of the Life in Our Minds collection.

In this way, the evolution mechanics of the project offer collectors the opportunity to actively participate in the creation of the artwork as it shapeshifts, incentivizing long-term retention of the NFTs. By encouraging purchasers to retain their Life in Our Minds NFTs for extended periods, the artists and project partners aim to upend typical behaviours in the crypto market—including speculation and flipping—and, in the process, introduce a new generation of crypto collectors to the space.

Life in Our Minds has collaborated with Flamingo DAO, Pleasr DAO, Fingerprints DAO, PROOF Collective, Tom Sachs Rocket Factory, Moonbirds, Outland, Pace Verso, OG:Crystals, Ksoids, and 89 Seconds Atomized to offer custom evolutionary traits that are only available to people who hold NFTs associated with these partners. Additional custom patterns that holders of other NFT collections can achieve will be announced at og.art/collections/liom.

The Life in Our Minds NFTs are part of a constantly evolving Mother Flock virtual sculpture, which reflects the formal transformations of the individual NFTs. The Mother Flock’s visual traits are informed by the behavior of its constituent Boids, bringing ideas about the power of both collective and individual action to the fore of the project. A special web version of the Mother Flock will live permanently on the OG.Art platform, freely accessible to viewers around the world. Deeply engaged with scientific research surrounding the psychology and behaviors of both humans and birds, Life in Our Minds is one of the most collaborative, technologically innovative NFT projects to date.

In an artists’ statement, Random International says: “Life in our Minds continues our exploration of the human tendency to ascribe character, intent, and narrative to the complex behaviors of simple moving forms, as well as the subconscious instincts and emotional triggers that cause us to do so.” To mark the launch of the project, Pace will host AMA discussions with the artists on Twitter Spaces and OG.Art’s Discord in October. Further details about these programs will be released in the coming weeks. Life in Our Minds is realized as part of a collaboration between major forces in the contemporary art and crypto worlds.

The art collective Random International, which was founded in 2005 by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, has shown its large-scale multimedia works at major art institutions around the world. Krivoruchko is an award-winning artist and creative director involved in the production of multiple upcoming OG.Art collections. Snark.art has been producing acclaimed web3 projects since 2018, including OG: Crystals, a collection of more than 10,000 unique NFTs; it launched the new NFT platform OG.Art this year. Pace, which launched Pace Verso in 2021, is a leading international art gallery with nine locations worldwide. Founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace represents influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century.

Random International is a post-digital art group exploring the impact of technological development on the human condition. Best known for its large-scale interactive installations, the group works across an array of media, including sculpture, light, kinetics, video, print, and sound. Established in 2005 and led by founders Hannes Koch (b.1975, Germany) and Florian Ortkrass (b.1975, Germany), the group has a studio in London and comprises a global team of complementary talent. Random International’s work has been shown worldwide and can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Yuz Foundation in Shanghai; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and other international institutions.

Snark.art has experimented with the blockchain as a revolutionary medium since 2018, producing various NFT projects and working with established artists from both the contemporary art and crypto worlds, including Mat Collishaw, Eve Sussman, Michael Joo, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Nancy Baker Cahill, Kendell Geers, Tommy Hartung, Duke Riley, Cassils, and many others. Snark.art’s OG.Art platform, launched in 2022, is a space not only for carefully curated collections of generative, dynamic NFT art, but for new approaches to creative collaboration. OG.Art invites groundbreaking artists to develop projects based on dynamic NFT technology and community interaction. This technology allows artworks to respond to online and in-person events, enabling collectors to interact with and develop NFT projects in new ways.

Danil Krivoruchko is a Ukrainian-born, New York-based multidisciplinary digital artist and art director whose clients include names like Apple, Nike, Intel, and Boeing. Krivoruchko’s work has won a variety of festival awards. He was nominated for a 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design as part of the creative team for the television series Foundation. He is also the creator of the renowned One Thousand Ksoids NFT collection and co-creator of the OG:Crystals project. Krivoruchko is actively involved in the creation and production of the first several upcoming collections at OG.Art.

Pace Verso is Pace Gallery’s hub for web3 projects, launched in 2021 under the leadership of Pace President and CEO Marc Glimcher. Pace Verso works closely with artists within and beyond the gallery’s program to incubate, develop, and realize their web3 projects, operating an NFT platform on the Ethereum blockchain at www.pacegallery.com/paceverso.

In addition to releasing independent projects, Pace Verso frequently collaborates with leading web3 platforms to share artists’ work with wide audiences. In 2022, Pace Verso established a multifaceted partnership with Art Blocks, the leading generative art platform, encompassing boundary-pushing generative NFT releases by Pace’s artists as well as crypto-native artists, exhibitions, and community programming. In its first year, Pace Verso—which reflects the gallery’s longtime and ongoing support of innovative artists who have cultivated advanced studio practices engaged with boundary-pushing technologies—has presented NFT projects by Jeff Koons, Zhang Huan, Glenn Kaino, DRIFT, Lucas Samaras, and other artists. Pace Verso has also grown a robust following on its dedicated Discord server, directly engaging web3 communities through discussions with artists and leaders in the crypto space.

Maxim Zhestkov presents his first solo show WAVES at London’s W1 Curates

On August 18, 2022, the first solo exhibition of digital artist Maxim Zhestkov, titled Waves, will illuminate every surface of London’s W1 Curates exhibition space — inside and out. With new work displayed across the facade’s 3 floors of screens and on every wall of the interior, Maxim will make his London debut via an immersive digital art experience in the commercial heart of the city.

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Waves meditates on its titular phenomena as the fundamental elements of change in digital and physical systems; waves merge, waves disrupt, and, if synchronized enough, they acquire system-shifting force. Cultural shifts, spiritual breakthroughs, and wi-fi connections can all be better understood as products of the interactions of waves. As physical and digital systems become less and less distinct, the ability to acknowledge similarities between the two can make our everyday thoughts more creative.

Maxim’s broader oeuvre is built on conceptual investigations of the building blocks of physical and digital worlds. Each work is an effort to transform a fundamental principle of creation into a rousing spectacle.

“It is fascinating how structures could be assembled by themselves,
following the basic underlying rules of our world. Any material, including living matter, forms using the
same set of rules, and I think that this is something that we take for granted, but it is truly astonishing
when you think about it.”

— Maxim Zhestkov

““[W1 Curates is] a public art platform dedicated to bridging the gap between digital art and the traditional art world. Maxim’s artwork lends itself so well to our space, and it’s an honour to share new work from a true pioneer of digital art who remains so passionate about
the potential of virtual worlds.”

— Mark Dale, founder of W1 Curates

Artist Statement

A wave— a disturbance of the established order — encompasses dynamics as an inherent part of our world. Waves bring the change, oscillations, and fluctuations, which spread across objects and connect them to entangled networks of all interrelated and continuous events. Inseparable from distortions, they are themselves messages that indicate transformations and shifts.
Waves are primary signals permeating the world and a universal language of nature that underlies both our biological and technological systems. By covering the world with webs of electromagnetic signals, we have expanded our neural systems and can now connect with others able to decipher the coded messages. Interfering and merging, waves change their nature and — when synchronized — grow and transform into a greater entity with the potential to generate a transformative flux.

Connecting particles into mighty flows, Waves is an examination of shifts of energy in complicated systems that lead to the inevitable transformation of those systems. Simulated by an algorithm, the world of this digital artwork is intentionally simplistic and therefore inextricably predictable. However, the rules and principles of this visual complexity are hidden from the viewer, much like the incomprehensible quantum phenomena that define the physical world.
The only thing certain about our world is that it is changing constantly. Nevertheless, eternal movement includes repetition, and transformation is cyclical. Between extremes of peaks, no path is linear, and every shift echoes across time.

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About the Artist

Maxim Zhestkov (b. 1985) is a digital artist based in London. He merges his studies in architecture, sculpture, motion graphics, color, and sound, to dramatize the intersection of the digital and the physical as a critical site for imagining the aesthetic possibilities and psychological implications of a “phygital” reality. Working as an independent designer, Maxim has worked with clients like Adidas, IKEA, BMW, Google, Playstation and Adobe and has been awarded with many industry awards: a Red Dot Award, D&AD, iF Design Award and the ADC Award.
Maxim Zhestkov’s work has been presented internationally in shows at major institutions, including Decentral Art Pavilion Venice (2022), Unit London (2021), Contemporary Istanbul (2021), MIT (2019), Modern Art Museum, Shanghai (2019), and the Hermitage Museum (2019). Maxim’s work has also shown at contemporary art festivals, such as Cosmoscow (2021), ART021 (2020), ArtBasel Miami (2019), and Ars Electronica Festival (2018).

About W1 Curates

W1 Curates is a public art platform located at the heart of London’s iconic Oxford Street. W1 Curates showcases works from some of the world’s most innovative visual artists. Using state-of-the-art technology, the exterior of the Flannels London Flagship store has been transformed into an extraordinary public exhibition of art with digital prowess and exceptional innovation. The venue consists of a three-story facade of screens and, as of August 2022, an all-new exhibition space consisting of a 400 square-metre immersive gallery space lined with 360 degrees of bespoke LED screens.
W1 Curates has displayed work from the likes of Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Kaws, Shepard Fairey, Tyler Mitchell, David LaChapelle, Whisbe, Katherine Bernhardt, MrStarCity, David Bailey, Vhils, and many others. It has also collaborated with the likes of Gagosian, Sotheby’s, Saatchi Yates, Tate Modern, and Artsy. W1 Curates has also hosted Ravensbourne University London, NFT UK, Amplifier Art, and Graduate Fashion Week.

Art of Seanen Middleton

Seanen Middleton is a fine art and portrait photographer from the Lake District, England. Seanen's work has been published across the globe online and we cannot stay away from his depth of visual storytelling

Hetaera Psappha - 10 Years of Blossoming Silence

Hetaera Psappha

Hetaera Psappha is a video artist born in Moscow in the waning years of the Soviet era. Working all around the world, Lisa Minaeva (the artist’s real name) creates her wordless portraits in various places. Having started her project in London in 2012, she gathered over 100 portraits of artists, poets, musicians, and other people of different professions and backgrounds. After ten years of filming portraits, she feels more interested in it than ever.

A French actress sitting topless in a bathtub in Moscow; a young Indonesian woman looking at the camera with eyes full of tears in a hot Belgrade apartment; a celebrated Russian rapper squinting in the sun on a famous Saint Petersburg rooftop after an acoustic gig; a British painter, frozen in his chair, looking as if he’s about to attack – the Blossom of Silence project counts endless faces and hours of quiet contemplation. Being able to stop and look into another person’s eyes is a rare gift in a time of rapid news and information, and the lo-fi image created with a MiniDV camera helps the artist clear it of the filters we got used to so easily thanks to fashion magazines and Instagram. At times, the picture shakes and interrupts, and zooms in and out: leaving the footage “rough” is the artist’s committed position.

Initial idea was to “create a collection of the most beautiful people’s portraits”, and, therefore, remake a famous Andy Warhol work. However, the goal changed fast as Hetaera Psappha realized “beautiful” does not always mean “interesting to silently communicate with”, and vice versa. According to the artist, the key to “interest” stays unclear after all these years: while some portraits are more loved by the audience than others, she never knows beforehand if a portrait is going to work out well or turn out to be boring and “soulless”. It depends on many factors, where the openness of the model often stays the most important one.

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Among many famous and unknown faces, one stands out – Alina happens to be the only person Hetaera Psappha filmed more than once. From the very first shooting, she became the artist’s muse, whom she decided to film every year. The colourful and unexpected evolution of a teenage girl through the troubles and transformations of her adolescence years is a curious experience, “a project within a project”. And it is not the only one – in 2016 Lisa created a special collection Silent Poets, especially for Poetronica festival of contemporary poetry, sound art and video art.

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As Hetaera Psappha says, filming portraits with no words doesn’t just help her rest after working with texts and words, which is the other big part of her life as a poet and scriptwriter. It helps her feel, build and share with her audience connections, which cannot be broken by borders, political systems, religions, classes and backgrounds. In such a way, when watching her portraits, everyone is free to build an imaginary connection with any of her models and try to read the mystery hidden in their eyes. After all, the eyes are the mirror of the soul, as long as one suggests it exists. And if it does, observing them is a useful and enriching practice.

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Art of Steven Dennant

London based digital artist Steven Dennant is focused on creating hyper-realistic drawings with a hint of surrealism. Everything you see is created by pencil no matter the medium

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The Last Confirmation

Established in 2019 the last confirmation collab series featuring crypto art OGs (Official Greates) Norman Harman x Robness v2, one of the longest cryptoart collaborations in the world

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About the artists

ROBNESS V2
LA's finest is a multi-faceted crypto artist who has taken part in almost every significant event this movement has made since it's earliest inception. Took part in the RarePepe trading collective which spawned the early proof of concept for the advent of what is now known as 'NFT.' Created the Controversial '64

Norman Harman
Harman is one of Scotland's leading digital artists specialising in painting - His work has been exhibited across the UK and Europe and he is a member of art collective Ltd Ink Corporation - Harman combines analogue, generative and digital painting processes, to achieve a Baconian grotesqueness in a POST-COVID, consumer driven world

Objects of Desire by Pleun Van Dijk

In her most recent work, Objects of Desire, van Dijk investigated the increasingly intimate relationship between humans and technology that may eventually lead to blurring of boundaries between the two.
To illustrate the concept, the designer, invented a three-step method.

In step one, the first dataset was curated containing both realistic (representing human genitals) and abstract sex toys. These toys are objects we by nature have a very close physical relationship with and could also be seen as an example of (sexual) objectification. 

In step two, a pre-trained machine learning (ML) model was used to generate a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes based on the initial dataset.

In step three, the generated images were curated and translated back into a three- dimensional physical reality. This resulted in a series of undefined, anthropomorphic, human-like sculptures. 

The Objects of Desire design project encourages us to critically evaluate the fundamental questions and ethical implications related to the rapidly evolving relationship between humans and technology. It ‘confronts the viewer with a speculative scenario and leaves them to decide whether they perceive the outcome as human, non-human or something that exists in between.’ (van Dijk, 2021)

Photo credits: Nahmlos