Whilst most artists connect with a need for creativity at a young age, Raphael says he was brought up as a child to be fluent in the language of art. “I quite literally grew up inside a piece of art,” he said. “My mother was a painter and when she would run out of canvas she would just turn to the walls, gluing on shards of mirror and painting around them. She was an abstract expressionist and my father was a musician fluent in Middle Eastern woodwinds. We lived in a very rural area in Northern California, surrounded by woods. We had no electricity, no TV; it was just art.”

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.

Architectural design in ‘real life’ can require 100s of iterations prior to deciding the final structure. The resulting architecture must make sense logistically, fit the allocated budget and is obviously bound by physics and gravity. However, when Kirk Finkel practised as an architect, he always felt the unrealised imaginings were the most exciting, where the most stakeholders were engaged and creativity flourished; tossing them aside was to sacrifice artistry for practicality.

Bryan Brinkman can always gauge someone’s engagement with his work by the happiness they associate with it. His pastel-coloured cheerful animations may seem frivolous, jolly and fun, but most of the time, they are much more nuanced.

Our 21st century society is drowning in images; a dizzying waterfall of visual data giving new meaning to the term ‘rapid eye movement’. What exactly compels our eyes to alight, to dwell, to focus? Branding agencies, UI designers and visual artists around the world seek the magic formula to answer that question and pause our continuous scrolling, competing over microseconds of attention, let alone minutes.

Not wanting to sound too morbid at the beginning of a new year but the words that I have chosen for the title of this piece, in literary terms, usually signify death and how the fall of the final curtain makes no distinction between rich or poor, status or insignificance. Death, indeed, is the greatest leveller of all. However, these words continually come to my mind when pondering the world of NFTs and how they are impacting the traditional art market.

For MORROW collective’s exhibition All-Seeing Eye, the following Q&A is part of a series of short artist interviews. The showcase was on September 28, 2023 at the exhibition’s partner space Seeing Things on Alserkal Avenue, paired with a drop on Foundation.