ASTORIA, NY.- Building on their successful 2024 collaboration, Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) and the Tezos Foundation today announced an expanded partnership to present a new cycle of commissions on the Museum’s Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall. From November 2025 through January 2027, the initiative will feature a series of artist projects exploring blockchain as a creative material, with an accompanying FA2 Fellowship, a public workshop series inviting a broader community of artists to learn about and play with the FA2 contract, a standardized framework in the Tezos ecosystem that allows anyone to create and manage different digital assets. Alongside the installations, the program will also host live public events featuring performances and time-based works that expand the range of practices presented.
Over the course of the cycle, five artist pairs will present works on the 50-foot Media Wall. The opening commission, by contemporary artist James Bloom and the pioneer of generative photography, Gottfried Jäger, situates the program within a broader history of artists engaging with systems and conceptual frameworks. The commission builds on the historical generative photographs made by Jager in 1967, creating a series of networked digital images. The project provides a foundation in structural approaches to art-making, setting the stage for the subsequent commissions that extend this exploration through FA2 smart contracts.
Subsequent to the opening display, the cycle brings together the following powerhouse artist pairings:
• Canadian artist, researcher, and software developer Sarah Friend, whose work explores games, economics, and the self via engagement with emerging technology, paired with Yehwan Song, a South Korean-born, New York–based web artist whose practice visualizes and questions the limits of digital systems.
• Linda Dounia, a Senegalese-Lebanese artist and designer recognized on TIME’s 2023 AI 100 list for her work on speculative archiving, paired with Rhea Myers, an artist, hacker, and writer who has used blockchain as an artistic medium since 2014 and has exhibited at institutions including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, HEK (Basel) and ArtScience Museum (Singapore).
• Swedish conceptual artist Jonas Lund, whose work critically examines contemporary networked systems and technological innovation, paired with Yoshi Sodeoka, a Japanese-born artist and musician whose work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.
Tezos’s FA2 standard offers powerful capabilities for artists, enabling multi-asset structures, batch operations, and low-cost transactions that are ideal for complex, interactive works. This partnership presents a unique opportunity for artists to explore these features in depth with dedicated institutional and technical support. The FA2 Fellowship will provide a framework, pairing artists with developers from the Tezos ecosystem and creating the conditions for FA2 to be used as a truly creative material. The program culminates in two finalists being commissioned to present a collaborative project at the MoMI Schlosser Media Wall for a two-month exhibition period. By completing four sessions, Fellowship participants also qualify to apply for the Microgrants to receive further support in developing their projects.
The microgrants of US$500–1,000 will be offered towards supporting artists developing work following the Fellowship period. These grants will be designed to help artists move from workshop exploration to realized proposals that use the Tezos blockchain as an active material in their practice.
Over the course of the partnership, each participating artist will also release a “production artifact” from their process, such as source code, sketches, or generative tools. Eight artifacts will be published on Tezos across the cycle and available for the public to collect at no cost, offering a parallel record of experimentation and development.
“Since the days of hic et nunc, I’ve hoped to see more artists engage with the Tezos blockchain itself as a behavioral and performative component of their work. With this initiative, we’re grateful at MoMI to help foster that creative direction and provide a platform for artists to experiment with blockchain as a material,” said Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at MoMI.
“Artists have always been pioneers of new media. Through the partnership, we’re handing them a set of resources that allow the blockchain itself to become part of the artwork—interactive, experimental, and alive. Museum of the Moving Image is the perfect partner for this vision, bringing the curatorial context and institutional support,” said Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, Head of Arts at Trilitech (Tezos R&D Hub).
This initiative builds upon Museum Without Walls, the collaboration between MoMI and the Tezos Foundation launched in June 2024. That partnership introduced an annual series of exhibitions and an interactive station in the Museum lobby, enabling visitors to mint and take home ‘fragments’ from artists in the form of digital pieces, at no cost, democratizing art collection through blockchain technology. Most recently, Compositions in Code: The Art of Processing and p5.js paired Processing pioneers Marius Watz, LIA, and Robert Hodgin with p5.js artists Aleksandra Jovanić, Sarah Ridgley, and Melissa Wiederrecht in a series of diptychs celebrating code as a creative material. The new FA2-focused cycle represents a deepening of the institutions’ shared commitment to supporting blockchain’s role in contemporary art.
