Developing a Curation Program
For the past twenty years, our curation team at Fellowship has been working in the field of photography and contemporary art. When the opportunity arose to develop a curatorial program for the NFT space, it was the joint experience of an artist, a gallerist, and a collector that led us to develop a program that acknowledges the importance of technology in reshaping art as we know it today. For the past three years, we have proposed a set of projects in the NFT space that are guiding our artists and collectors into an outline of what the future of art can be. This is being achieved by thinking and challenging how platforms tend to be mainly a space for commerce and how to go beyond this. With our mixed experiences as an artist, gallerist and a collector, we’ve been able to expand the basic mission of our organization.
With the development of Fellowship, we bring our experience from years of curating, managing, and selling limited edition prints, sculptures, and paintings, into developing an NFT program with the artists and estates that opened up their ideas to digital ownership. Something that has come with massive challenges, no doubt, but in terms of curation and artistic development, the most exciting thing to do for us today. When proposing a curatorial program, one is faced with many challenges that sometimes feel counter to what is seen as the obvious path. But we are here to build, think, develop, and challenge ourselves as curators and subsequently elevate the art and artists we see as instrumental today in understanding the relationship between art and technology. Project after project, we look to offer collectors an opportunity to build a conceptual throughline that unites each of the artists' ideas. Proposing a vision takes years of development and experiments, and we are in that moment where we feel we have something to say in terms of what is the art that we see as important conduits of aesthetic and conceptual propositions in contemporary art.
Our latest projects in AI which include the three Post Photographic Perspectives shows with thirty artists and our 2023-2024 Daily program collection with 100+ artists started with the urgency of looking at today and what is happening in the realm of still and moving AI images. Slowly, our curatorial program felt the need for deeper throughlines in order to better contextualize what it was that we were releasing. This was needed not only for us but for the artists and the collectors. As a “curated platform,” our mission is not just to sell work but to offer context to collectors to best make decisions as to what to collect and support. This is why we decided to take a deep dive into the last ten years of AI art and see what we could add to our program that would strengthen our new work release programs.
We believe that this makes our efforts to highlight new work more profound and helps create a backbone of critical thinking in terms of why work with these AI tools today and why create the images that are being done. Important questions that will help us clarify the importance of AI images today. With this curatorial timeline, we’ve been able to also incentivize artists, scientists, and other curators to participate in our program. We are building a solid ground on which past and present meet to build a future where innovation is backed by years of experiments and understanding of what art done with AI means.
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We are constantly thinking about how one project speaks to the other. This fortifies our decisions and pushes us forward. Each project builds more and more ground on which to build on. All these efforts done by artists and scientists in the past 10 years help us better understand the wide array of possibilities these tools offer artists. A project like alignDRAW by
@elmanmansimov helped us tackle and contextualize the emergence of text-to-image, a technique that is now one of the most used forms of AI image-making today. alignDRAW showed us a proof of concept of a technology that can be used by many wanting to explore artistic ideas, now through natural language.
With Book of the Sky by
@genekogan, we look to present the artistic possibilities generative AI offered artists in early 2015. This is one of the first large AI artistic bodies of work that showcases the fulfillment of an idea through the development of a model and subsequently an art project. Gene stands as one of the first artists working with these tools to explore artistic ideas. We can trace many of the gestures of how to think of making AI art to Gene’s work in 2015.
With Infinite Images by
@hollyherndon and
@matdryhurst, we presented the artistic exploration the artists did of DALLE, the program that would be the first commercial text-to-image model that would bring to life the proof of concept of alignDRAW’s premise and make text-to-image available to the widest range of people ever. In Holly and Mat’s experience with the tool prior to release, OpenAI saw the potential of what these generative tools could offer artists and creators. Their project stands as an interlocutor between the 2015-2021 projects we’ve released and plan to continue to release into the future, and the new projects we have been releasing since early 2023.
Lastly, expanding our programs from photography to AI, generative art, and video has been a natural transition for us. We see photography as the medium that made us think of the mechanical reproduction of images in a way we had not encountered before its invention. It was this medium that subsequently led us to many other technological ways of how to reproduce images. Photography went digital decades ago, and now many of those images are being used to create data to train AI models. An artist who has been at the forefront of the intersection of photography, machine learning, and AI is
@trevorpaglen. It is why we’ve partnered with him to release an ongoing project he started developing in 2017 around the idea of how machines see the world.
In "Evolved Hallucinations," we enter the realm of considering the power structures that can be developed via generative AI. Trevor approaches this project almost as evidence of how machines train machines how to see and how to represent the world via data. He challenges us to consider what it means for art, society, and the systems of power to have machines creating images without human sensibility and just through cold data.
Trevor’s work expands our curatorial mission at Fellowship. By retracing different projects from the early developments of generative AI, we are building a solid ground for AI art as a genre. In this effort, we unite and consolidate a history of AI art that is multifaceted, based on different technical, conceptual, and critical approaches to what it means to create images with these tools. We believe that the broader the curatorial approach, the stronger each one of the projects we release becomes.
🖼️MAGRITTESORBS, (2017-ongoing) by
@trevorpaglen