Daata
Daataverse Dates
In Summer 2022, I hosted a weekly interview series on Twitter. Inspired by ‘Love Island fever’ gripping the nation, the series was conceived as a season of informal ‘dates’ with the artists, curators and writers pushing boundaries and sparking debates in digital art. Half-way through we had a re-brand, but the format remained constant. Guests included Nato Thompson, Monica Bello (CERN) and Stephanie Dinkins amongst others.
1: Nato Thompson is a curator, writer and cultural infrastructure building from Philadelphia. Former Curator at Mass MoCA, former Chief Curator at the New York arts producing organisation, Creative Time. Author of two seminal books on disruptive curatorial models. Current founder of The Alternative Art School - an online educational institution. Co-Director of Artwrld - an NFT commissioning platform where profits are donated to art non-profits.
2: Ana Drucker, Curator of Barcelona’s most innovative digital arts festival, Mira, since 2015. MIRA is a digital arts festival based on three interconnected areas: exhibition, dissemination and education, and is held annually in Barcelona (since 2011).
3: María Paula Fernández is a writer, researcher and Web3 founder from Argentina, now based in Berlin. Founder of grassroots organisation Department of Decentralization, hosting web3 hackathons, and researching and publishing on art and technology. Her organisation's latest collaboration was a year-long project with Hito Steyerl, StrikeDAO, for which they built a quadratic voting app and presented a governance proposal for a German institution.
4: Anika Meier is a leading author and curator specializing in digital art. She writes a column for the German art magazine Kunstforum titled STATUS UPDATE about the developments around the topic of NFTs in the field of art. Right now she‘s working on among others a book titled “discussing Art NFTs“ with Micol Ap and Jesse Damiani, exhibitions and art NFT Linz for Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the UNESCO City of Media Arts.
5: Alex Estorick is a media theorist who seeks to develop socially progressive approaches to new technologies. Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save, he drives critical conversation about NFTs, blockchain, and Web3. Contributing Editor for Art and Technology at Flash Art and regular contributor to Frieze and the Financial Times.
6: Ann Marie Utratel, founder of DisCo, a Decentralised Co-operative Organisation offering a Commons, cooperative and Feminist Economic alternative to Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (or DAOs).
7: Omsk Social Club is a radical Berlin-based artist collective that creates living installations to examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena.
8: Kyle McDonald is an artist whose works with code to create immersive installations, that help you see the world in a new light.
9: Casey Reas is a generative artist, academic and gallery founder. Casey’s practice exhibits a passion for collaborating and exploring code’s expressive potential.
10: Monica Bello is Head of Arts at CERN, Curator of 2022 Venice Biennale’s Icelandic Pavillion. She has previously held senior positions and judged prestigious awards at art fairs and institutions across Europe (such as Art Basel, Fundación Telefónica in Madrid & Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijón).
11: Stephanie Dinkins Stephanie is transmedia artist who experiments with AI to create experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, ageing, and our future histories. When she’s not making and exhibiting art, Dinkins publicly advocates for inclusive AI and teaches at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art.