Digital patterns in architecture depicting the post-future
An interview with Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, originally published on MORROW collective medium page
Kevin McCoy, still from Quantum (2014). Courtesy of the artist.
by Anna Seaman
Kevin McCoy’s Quantum is widely credited as being the first NFT. It appears as an octagonal aura, floating on a black background with color pulsating from its core. Kevin McCoy has described the work as his interpretation of the moment of creation. Minted on the Namecoin blockchain in 2014, and later on Ethereum, after which it sold at Sotheby’s Natively Digital sale for $1.4 million, Quantum is now iconic, standing as it does at the first intersection of the blockchain and art.
As the 10-year anniversary of that first mint approached, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (a collaborative team since the late 1990s) launched their first NFT collection, Land Sea and Sky (on Artwrld), which fittingly uses AI engines to simulate landscape images of their native USA.
If this period, which witnessed the rapid technological adoptions of blockchain and AI, offers the essential backdrop to the {R(Evolutionaries);} project, which the McCoy’s will be part of at Art Dubai 2024, in collaboration with MORROW collective, then it’s worth noting how the UAE itself was equally essential to the formation of the artists’ thinking about art and technology.
In 2011, the McCoys spent approximately one year living and working in Abu Dhabi, where Kevin was one of the first art professors to teach at the newly opened New York University campus. Captivated by the visuals of the rapidly expanding urban environments, Kevin and Jennifer took hours of video footage, which they then processed in various ways. One output was a piece titled Cars, which became their second NFT in 2014. The looping video was shot from the 37th floor of their Abu Dhabi apartment block, and shows the motion of cars in rhythmic patterns that are governed by human behavior as much as systemic infrastructures.
Still from Jennifer & Kevin McCoy’s Cars (2024). Courtesy of the artists.
During this time, the McCoys had become fascinated by Bitcoin. The Satoshi Nakamoto white paper was released in 2008, and within a few years there were burgeoning crypto communities of interest gathering online. By 2013, Kevin recalls, “the crypto community gathered and discussed Bitcoin on a website called Bitcoin Talk Forum. It was a very intense time, with interesting conversations. I used this forum to suggest the idea of using blockchain technology as a method for assigning ownership of digital artworks.” After a period of experimentation, the McCoys discovered Namecoin and how to use coloured coins and metadata to prove ownership of a digital work. In 2014, Cars was transferred to Anil Dash on stage at the New Museum in New York as part of Rhizome’s fifth Seven on Seven conference, which paired artists with technologists to pitch new ventures. “We called the system ‘Monegraph’,” Kevin explains. “It was a system to allow digital art to be assigned ownership on a blockchain. Few people at this presentation understood what I was talking about at all.” Nevertheless, the key underlying functionality of what would become the ERC-721 token had been demonstrated. The NFT was born.
Cars was transferred to Anil Dash on stage at the New Museum in New York as part of Rhizome’s fifth Seven on Seven conference in 2014.
In 2023, the McCoys revisited their early footage from Abu Dhabi and decided to make a new work — Cars (2024). “It was a shock to see the [Abu Dhabi] footage again,” explains Jennifer. “The early loops were designed to evoke a simulated reality, and we used collage to create new patterns and new architectures, and that is something that is echoed in the newer works.” The Abu Dhabi footage includes not only shots of the car park taken from their apartment block but also clips of the industrial area of Mussafah, which was and still is the heart of manufacturing in the emirate, but whose dusty roads, heavy duty vehicles and majority population of sub-continental labor stands in contrast to the the gleaming streets of the metropolis. At the time, Jennifer recalls, “We were struck by these massive construction sites with huge billboards depicting ‘perfect families’ leading their dream lives, and we had this feeling we were living in an almost sci-fi depiction of what the future would be… We are excited to revisit that and to log another piece of important blockchain art history.”
That history begins in the UAE, with Cars, and an understanding of how, out of digital and physical infrastructures, we can begin to see the patterns and designs that shape our experience and our art, both of the recent past and whatever is to come in the post-future.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. Courtesy of the artists.
This editorial is part of a series of essays and interviews contextualizing MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} project, exhibition and sale commemorating a decade of blockchain art. Launched at Art Dubai Digital 2024 and brought to market in collaboration with SuperRare and Sotheby’s
For more info www.morrow-collective.com/revolutionaries