Since 2001, Steven Sacks, has been exhibiting works of the foremost new media artists, building an audience and collector base whilst prioritizing history, context and flawless presentation. His gallery, bitforms, in New York has an impressive roster including: Manfred Mohr, a German artist who has been working with algorithms in his art since the 1970s; Beryl Korot, a pioneer of video art; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who creates large-scale interactive installations in public spaces; and Refik Anadol, whom he exhibited before he reached international fame.

One day in early 2014, Edwin Rosero, a self-taught digital artist and graphic designer who had been tinkering about in Photoshop since a friend gave him an early Wacom tablet in high school, saw an online open call for a pop-up exhibition slated for later that year at London’s Tate Britain museum. The event Loud Tate: Code was a one-day event of art, music and performance exploring how code in language, fashion and technology shape culture. The work he created for that show was a digital derivative of English-born artist Peter Monamy’s 18th century painting Ships Distress in a Storm and was part of a wider series where he used a synthesis of 3D modeled geometry, digitally painted texture mapping, algorithmic pixel sorting and color-channel processing. His conceptual framework — an exploration of technological singularity, and the continuum of consciousness — is still topical today and speaks of the surprising prescience that Rosero also had about the way blockchain technology could impact the art market. In 2014, as he was learning and reading about Bitcoin, he had the idea to hide a public key in the color channels of his art, then send funds to that key, thus proving its provenance using blockchain’s immutable ledger.

Nili Lerner experienced an ‘aha’ moment in 2008, in the wake of the global financial crash when she realized that her artistic practice could delve into the subject of money. She was interested in the role of money in society and how one’s financial attributes represent the productive potential of each person. However, while she saw money as a superpower in the capitalist economy, she was also interested in the potential of technology to build a new kind of world.

Monaris didn’t plan to become an artist. It wasn’t her plan to embrace the photographic medium, nor to become one of the first NFT photographers. But her pursuit was instinctive and the results testify to a labour of dedication to an innate vision; her success came as a natural and deserved progression.

Colborn Bell is an intriguing sum of many parts. Perhaps best known in the crypto space for the Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA), which he founded in 2020 and to which he donated 150 of his personal collection of 1/1 NFT artworks, he is a former financier, self-declared outsider and an artist who values, above all, stories, connections and conversations.

MORROW collective is working with galleries and artists to bring together art from around the world in curated, themed exhibitions. One word in that sentence may stand out to cryptoart purists, who often prioritise frictionless, open and free access to making art available: curation. But is curation a bad thing in cryptoart?