NEW YORK, NY.- SuperRare is presenting Invisible Cities, a groundbreaking exhibition of NFT art presented in a virtual gallery, curated by An Rong and Elisabeth Johs. Inspired by the pioneering text by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities presents a digital exploration of the relationship between the visible and the invisible of our real and imagined cities from a distance and under close observation. The exhibition features unique NFT artworks by Fabio Giampietro, JENISU, Elise Swopes, Karisman, Dangiuz, KLDPXL, Gutty Kreum, Mari K, Annibale Siconolfi and Nate Mohler whose work together presents a multivalent global response to Calvino’s prompt to imagine a realm of cities that never existed. Invisible Cities will be live to collectors worldwide April 2-30, 2021 as buy now or auctioned works via SuperRare, a platform built on the Ethereum Blockchain. The exhibition will also be on view via Hook Art and Decentraland where a virtual event will take place on April 8, 2021 where guests can visit the exhibition in real time and interact as avatars.
“Calvino’s seminal text is a perfect framework for today’s NFT art market, remaining a tour de force of the imagination,” state curators Rong and Johs. “Most likely, we will never be able to fathom the origin of such visions. Are they part of the universal archetypal imagery? The mystery behind the future of NFT’s and their place in the world needs a response with imagination. The mystery behind imagination is a forever conundrum.”
Invisible Cities features unique artworks that range from utopian cityscapes to sci-fi urban environments in worlds of possibilities. As we drift in a dream like state between these spaces we drift between reality and imagination. Amsterdam and Paris by Nate Mohler belong to the “Painted Cities” series which explore the memory and dream state of a city through the fusion of motion and ink. The digital paintings are created using a unique technique Mohler’s been researching, which includes multiple forms of AI especially neural style transfer to fuse videos with ink, texture, and photographs. It often takes weeks of testing and research before discovering perfect synergy between motion and texture. Mari.K’s Diomira gives her take on "Diomira" the first city being described in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, by "Polo" to the emperor "Kublai Khan." Finally Gutty Kreum’s nostalgia induced dreams of Japan leaves a gentle impression. As the viewer tours the exhibition of Invisible Cities they are invited to be residents of these universal anonymous cities in cyberspace.
With cities, Calvino believed, “it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” The crypto world is building their web of decentralized invisible cities: of images, invisible economies, exchanges, communities, systems and processes. Removing our central viewing point of perspective is essential. Regarding NFTs in this context begs the question how much our distance from an object under observation affects the subject under view and in turn produces a level of abstraction. As we move away from the object, we begin to develop referential relationships, constellations of meaning, dependent identities. Invisible Cities aims to frame observational objects into expanded relational spaces several levels of abstraction away.
