damai

 ART then, surely, is just a necessity, a consequence, a corollary, a masquerade of the revolutionary. The lofty guffaws of self-congratulatory, self-referential self-satisfaction; the smug understanding of the ‘codes and conventions’ of the chess board is surely nothing but an erogeny of pawn. Surely, the superior glance and the ‘semi-colon of the head’ manoeuvre after ‘correctly and knowingly’ identifying some subtle visual cue oh so deftly quoted from another work is just a masturbatory act. The titillation of a spenny Femme à la Montre, touting around Sotherby's for a meagre hundred million, is a dalliance between expression and dirty cash that surely makes it vulgar. Is this why Picasso's faces don't ever quite know which way to look?

Andrew Lee, Oxford Art criticQuoted from DAMzine issue #17 – Analogue Nomad by @hersoid

As a “gamificated“ approach reshapes art distribution standards (see Ourzora, DRiP Haus, RARE protocol), there is a growing demand for more active engagement from the community. This trend is indicated by the merging of “Crypto Art“ with “web3“, which integrates the so-called “NFT space“ with the prevalent “content culture.“ Notably, the recent migration of even established artists from Ethereum Mainnet to more affordable networks signals a broader shift beyond mere financial benefits, catalyzing such phenomena as the “SPAM art“ movement.

On another front we have the burgeoning field of “AI Art“, often dismissed as “lazy“ and “worthless,“ and recently even accused of contributing to what's known as “engagement farming“ (as seen in the posting rules of Farcaster's /aiart channel, for instance). AI art's extreme output efficiency makes it appear well-suited to the enduring click-bait paradigm, where quantity often trumps quality.

Paradoxically, when the domains of blockchain and AI art intersect, the former—despite being touted as the “most advanced“ financial system, suggesting a possible natural affinity with other innovative expressions—shows limited curation effort that aims to dismantle the narrow-sighted myths plaguing the latter. DAMAI seeks to change this by promoting a more nuanced understanding of the potential for AI art in a landscape defined by the blockchain by featuring work conscious of the presented issues while giving the opportunity to anyone to express their take in a novel, data-driven and decentralized kind of Gesamtkunstwerk.

grebenshae

artists

Culturehacker, Evelyn, Ilya Bliznets, Ilya Shkipin, Kapstone, L’Bank, Lowbrow, Santiago Ney, Stephan Vasement, VonSoul, Yuma Sogo