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alejandro cartagena

@halecar2 • 29,912 subscribers

Artist, curator, and co-founder of @fellowshiptrust @fellowshipai. GROUND RULES, mid-career retrospective: Nov 22nd at @sfmoma with a book from @aperturefnd.

Shorts

The Sabotaging Practice of Over Supply and Sameness in the NFT Space. The current zeitgeist of the NFT space is that the same artists are doing the same kind of work five times a year, with project after project leaving a trail of disappointment and discontent among collectors and all of us watching in disbelief as huge resources are extracted from the space over work that feels like it could be left as an "artist study." I understand that you can do what you want with your money as collectors, but we are killing the whole space with this incestuous practice. No artist is that prolific to be able to do 5 collections of 100+ pieces each every year and actually deliver innovation and some kind of creative evolution. Of course, they can pretend play that the work has something new, but there is no precedent nor proof that that has ever happened in the speed that it happens in the NFT space. Again, people are free to through away their resources on whatever they want but with this way of doing things, we more and more are going to start seeing the consequences. Oh! There are consequences? Yes. Maybe unintended, but there are. Let's see. Let's start with the loss of belief in the NFT space as somewhere where emerging artists can come and find support for their experiments. Why even bother to bring experiments, innovation, and new ways to think of art on the blockchain if the same people have all the collectors hypnotized with their magical flutes? Why even try to come to a space where taking risks and challenging the status quo (the mission of art!!!) is overlooked? This makes the NFT space a social club and not a space for art. I guess it is fine, but IMO it is a recipe for disaster. New collectors stay away because the art will slowly but surely become stale and un-challenging. Why even bother to come and see what is happening here if you can't, as a collector, see new weird and up-and-coming artists? The amount of noise emitted by the same artists doing the same art over and over, drowns out any new voices. Again. A recipe for disaster. The NFT space is becoming a space of disappointment and doubt. We think that collections going to zero one after the other, over and over, is not damaging? I feel we are kidding ourselves. Disappointment piles up, and again, the people who will hurt are the emerging artists, the new blood, the ones who are willing to risk the most and, in return, put fire in this cold space of sameness. I love this space—don't get me wrong—it has changed my life, and I believe it has a ton of potential, but things need to change for it to become a beacon of light in art. But we need to support new voices. We need to support new ideas. The challenge is huge. I hope to contribute all I can to this change. I hope more and more see how exciting it is to go out and try to discover what else is out there and move this space forward. But again, I understand the leaps of faith needed, but if there is a space that is based on that, it's the NFT space...so there is hope. We will see. 📺by Boldtron

The Sabotaging Practice of Over Supply and Sameness in the NFT Space. The current zeitgeist of the NFT space is that the same artists are doing the same kind of work five times a year, with project after project leaving a trail of disappointment and discontent among collectors and all of us watching in disbelief as huge resources are extracted from the space over work that feels like it could be left as an "artist study." I understand that you can do what you want with your money as collectors, but we are killing the whole space with this incestuous practice. No artist is that prolific to be able to do 5 collections of 100+ pieces each every year and actually deliver innovation and some kind of creative evolution. Of course, they can pretend play that the work has something new, but there is no precedent nor proof that that has ever happened in the speed that it happens in the NFT space. Again, people are free to through away their resources on whatever they want but with this way of doing things, we more and more are going to start seeing the consequences. Oh! There are consequences? Yes. Maybe unintended, but there are. Let's see. Let's start with the loss of belief in the NFT space as somewhere where emerging artists can come and find support for their experiments. Why even bother to bring experiments, innovation, and new ways to think of art on the blockchain if the same people have all the collectors hypnotized with their magical flutes? Why even try to come to a space where taking risks and challenging the status quo (the mission of art!!!) is overlooked? This makes the NFT space a social club and not a space for art. I guess it is fine, but IMO it is a recipe for disaster. New collectors stay away because the art will slowly but surely become stale and un-challenging. Why even bother to come and see what is happening here if you can't, as a collector, see new weird and up-and-coming artists? The amount of noise emitted by the same artists doing the same art over and over, drowns out any new voices. Again. A recipe for disaster. The NFT space is becoming a space of disappointment and doubt. We think that collections going to zero one after the other, over and over, is not damaging? I feel we are kidding ourselves. Disappointment piles up, and again, the people who will hurt are the emerging artists, the new blood, the ones who are willing to risk the most and, in return, put fire in this cold space of sameness. I love this space—don't get me wrong—it has changed my life, and I believe it has a ton of potential, but things need to change for it to become a beacon of light in art. But we need to support new voices. We need to support new ideas. The challenge is huge. I hope to contribute all I can to this change. I hope more and more see how exciting it is to go out and try to discover what else is out there and move this space forward. But again, I understand the leaps of faith needed, but if there is a space that is based on that, it's the NFT space...so there is hope. We will see. 📺by Boldtron

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carpooling at night to get workers through the city. play the game on your NFT, or other players' tokens on OpenSea, and record your score on-chain.
0:24
halecar2's profile picture

carpooling at night to get workers through the city. play the game on your NFT, or other players' tokens on OpenSea, and record your score on-chain.

alejandro cartagena

68,590 views • 3 months ago

I love finding artists that are really giving a lot of thought to how they are creating their art with AI and why. The most interesting way to think about AI art works I´ve come across lately is from Jason Handshsu: "I've been teaching a class on technology and it's forced me to really examine the topics at hand. Reading essays by established art historians in the late 1800's condemning photography as incapable of contributing to the knowledge of art, even 50 years after its invention, really highlights how easy it is for people to misidentify fundamentally what something can do. A lot of those interpretations in the past didn't recognize, at the heart of photography was the capturing of light, and that the exploration of photography inherently relies on modeling the behavior of light. With machine learning, what it captures is concepts. So in order to explore image generation, it requires a person to model the conceptual space of language and images". This idea is one step closer to finding the "what is this tool doing". Very excited to be collaborating with him for The present and future is pretty exciting.
0:23
halecar2's profile picture

I love finding artists that are really giving a lot of thought to how they are creating their art with AI and why. The most interesting way to think about AI art works I´ve come across lately is from Jason Handshsu: "I've been teaching a class on technology and it's forced me to really examine the topics at hand. Reading essays by established art historians in the late 1800's condemning photography as incapable of contributing to the knowledge of art, even 50 years after its invention, really highlights how easy it is for people to misidentify fundamentally what something can do. A lot of those interpretations in the past didn't recognize, at the heart of photography was the capturing of light, and that the exploration of photography inherently relies on modeling the behavior of light. With machine learning, what it captures is concepts. So in order to explore image generation, it requires a person to model the conceptual space of language and images". This idea is one step closer to finding the "what is this tool doing". Very excited to be collaborating with him for The present and future is pretty exciting.

alejandro cartagena

141,530 views • 2 years ago

A Plea for Difficult Images (A small rant about what I think art is today) Why does the contemporary art world embrace the ugly, the every day, the absurd, the nonsensical, and the visually and conceptually challenging? Why is that? You know this is the case because, 5 out 10 times, you come out of a contemporary art museum asking: What just happened!? What the f*** is this? Why is this art? Well, it is a long story, but let's start with something basic, like, pretty, beautiful images have been done ad infinitum up until the 20th century. Every pretty sunset, cityscape, landscape, still life, and portrait has been done before to perfection. You just need to open up a history of art book, and you will find hundreds of examples of pretty images. The challenge for artists after the invention of the photographic camera, which rendered things so perfectly, was to see other things. The challenge for artists today is to see the world differently: ugly, weird, absurd, unrecognizable. The artist´s mission suddenly became to ask questions and to think and represent differently: art is the place where we can have no certainty; where it is ok to make no sense and just present questions. Beautiful things still get made. Cute is still a thing in 21st-century art, But for completely different reasons. Beauty is not done for beauty's sake, but to challenge why we would, after thousands of years, still want to see beautiful images. Abstract art was once a f*** you to the establishment. But ever since the world tamed it, abstract art has become decorative at best. The last moment or revival of this form was called "Zombie Formalism" for it´s complacent visuals with "modernist and expressionistic styles,” which worked perfectly to please collectors interested in flipping works of art they did not understand from emerging artists who essentially crafted hundreds of generic images indistinguishable from one another. Contemporary art has moved into a space where artists tend to challenge art and beauty. They´ve become philosophers of the image, and in doing so, they have left many viewers perplexed and confused as to what exactly it is that they are witnessing or supposed to connect with. It seems that art today asks viewers and collectors to go on the same trip that the artist has gone through: understand thousands of years of art, read all the books that questioned why that was all made, and experiment with them in what can be considered art today. For those curious about art and collecting, they usually come to art with a blank slate and arrive at pretty pictures and, as many viewers for thousands of years, enjoy what they are looking at. The creators of those pretty pictures call themselves artists, and so it seems the system works. But when those pretty pictures escape the niche they are produced in and try to mingle with the contemporary art world, rarely do they become accepted, because, the museums, the informed collectors and the contemporary art market ask the questions of why pretty pictures again? Why today? How is this advancing our understanding of art? How is this commenting on all we know about art? What are these poster-looking, perfectly designed illustrations proposing to the art world that we have not considered before? And so those questions need to be answered for pretty images to be seen as art. And pretty is not only an aesthetic concept, but it is also about the intentions and the way the artist is capable of expressing his artistic intent. You can have “pretty intentions,” and that, too will be challenged. Simple themes, simple concepts without historical and conceptual rigor, are torn down and debunked because why do we need pretty artistic intentions anymore? Why do we need to see images based on explorations of color or form, self-portraits as an exploration of self, the line between reality and fiction, and the list goes on... These ideas have already been explored to the depths of their possibilities and those explorations became movement in the past. To go down that path again is a matter of practicing or studying to be an artist, but the contemporary art world rarely could see this as a proposal to move forward the world of art. So, you see, a plea for difficult images is a plea to be committed, respectful, thoughtful, and innovative. We cannot move forward, as in all practices that thrive on “the new,” without committing to understanding and challenging what came before. Science asks this of us, technology asks this, literature asks this, and cinema, too. We need pretty images, but they should only be a path to something way more profound. To do and understand art takes time, vulnerability, and a willingness to change… not everyone is willing to take that path. (Healed by Jess Mac)
0:42
halecar2's profile picture

A Plea for Difficult Images (A small rant about what I think art is today) Why does the contemporary art world embrace the ugly, the every day, the absurd, the nonsensical, and the visually and conceptually challenging? Why is that? You know this is the case because, 5 out 10 times, you come out of a contemporary art museum asking: What just happened!? What the f*** is this? Why is this art? Well, it is a long story, but let's start with something basic, like, pretty, beautiful images have been done ad infinitum up until the 20th century. Every pretty sunset, cityscape, landscape, still life, and portrait has been done before to perfection. You just need to open up a history of art book, and you will find hundreds of examples of pretty images. The challenge for artists after the invention of the photographic camera, which rendered things so perfectly, was to see other things. The challenge for artists today is to see the world differently: ugly, weird, absurd, unrecognizable. The artist´s mission suddenly became to ask questions and to think and represent differently: art is the place where we can have no certainty; where it is ok to make no sense and just present questions. Beautiful things still get made. Cute is still a thing in 21st-century art, But for completely different reasons. Beauty is not done for beauty's sake, but to challenge why we would, after thousands of years, still want to see beautiful images. Abstract art was once a f*** you to the establishment. But ever since the world tamed it, abstract art has become decorative at best. The last moment or revival of this form was called "Zombie Formalism" for it´s complacent visuals with "modernist and expressionistic styles,” which worked perfectly to please collectors interested in flipping works of art they did not understand from emerging artists who essentially crafted hundreds of generic images indistinguishable from one another. Contemporary art has moved into a space where artists tend to challenge art and beauty. They´ve become philosophers of the image, and in doing so, they have left many viewers perplexed and confused as to what exactly it is that they are witnessing or supposed to connect with. It seems that art today asks viewers and collectors to go on the same trip that the artist has gone through: understand thousands of years of art, read all the books that questioned why that was all made, and experiment with them in what can be considered art today. For those curious about art and collecting, they usually come to art with a blank slate and arrive at pretty pictures and, as many viewers for thousands of years, enjoy what they are looking at. The creators of those pretty pictures call themselves artists, and so it seems the system works. But when those pretty pictures escape the niche they are produced in and try to mingle with the contemporary art world, rarely do they become accepted, because, the museums, the informed collectors and the contemporary art market ask the questions of why pretty pictures again? Why today? How is this advancing our understanding of art? How is this commenting on all we know about art? What are these poster-looking, perfectly designed illustrations proposing to the art world that we have not considered before? And so those questions need to be answered for pretty images to be seen as art. And pretty is not only an aesthetic concept, but it is also about the intentions and the way the artist is capable of expressing his artistic intent. You can have “pretty intentions,” and that, too will be challenged. Simple themes, simple concepts without historical and conceptual rigor, are torn down and debunked because why do we need pretty artistic intentions anymore? Why do we need to see images based on explorations of color or form, self-portraits as an exploration of self, the line between reality and fiction, and the list goes on... These ideas have already been explored to the depths of their possibilities and those explorations became movement in the past. To go down that path again is a matter of practicing or studying to be an artist, but the contemporary art world rarely could see this as a proposal to move forward the world of art. So, you see, a plea for difficult images is a plea to be committed, respectful, thoughtful, and innovative. We cannot move forward, as in all practices that thrive on “the new,” without committing to understanding and challenging what came before. Science asks this of us, technology asks this, literature asks this, and cinema, too. We need pretty images, but they should only be a path to something way more profound. To do and understand art takes time, vulnerability, and a willingness to change… not everyone is willing to take that path. (Healed by Jess Mac)

alejandro cartagena

40,956 views • 2 years ago

It is official. Carpoolers enter the Collection of The National Gallery of Victoria ✨ I am honored to announce the acquisition of 12 works from the Carpoolers project by the NGV. It is a dream come true when an institution with such a strong collection decides to acquire my art and pair it with works from so many artists I admire. Again, I am honored. Thank you for supporting my work! The artworks acquired are: Carpoolers #25, #8, #29, #16, #55, #40, #4, #5, #28, #15, #37 & #45 (detail), 2011. Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 © Alejandro Cartagena. Thank you to Circuit Gallery and their constant support.
0:24
halecar2's profile picture

It is official. Carpoolers enter the Collection of The National Gallery of Victoria ✨ I am honored to announce the acquisition of 12 works from the Carpoolers project by the NGV. It is a dream come true when an institution with such a strong collection decides to acquire my art and pair it with works from so many artists I admire. Again, I am honored. Thank you for supporting my work! The artworks acquired are: Carpoolers #25, #8, #29, #16, #55, #40, #4, #5, #28, #15, #37 & #45 (detail), 2011. Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 © Alejandro Cartagena. Thank you to Circuit Gallery and their constant support.

alejandro cartagena

17,021 views • 1 year ago

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DAILY PROGRAM The Fellowship Daily Program is about to celebrate one year, and what a year it has been. All through this crazy "bear market" artists have continued to show up because this AI video thing is happening now...not tomorrow but today in front of us all! To be here means that you were here when the seeds for the future AI filmmaking was being experimented with. With over 130 artists from around the world, experimenting and pushing their practice to new levels, we come to a year that will go down in history as the first period of AI video with so much production and experimentation. It is not that AI video didn't exist before, but 2023-2024 is the year with the most technical advancements that have ever happened for this medium, and the number of creators using the tools have come to a critical mass. This period is also very much based on creating visual narratives and storytelling. It is also about control and guiding the hallucinations into the artists' visual language. This period is about visual narratives that contain stories or experiments like we had not seen before. The Daily NFT collection will also contain a mix of possibly all AI tools available to date. From Runway to Kling to a few more we will announce shortly. The Daily collection is one of a kind, built in public, during the work market for NFTs, but with some of the most talented artists in the world, pushing, pushing, pushing. Some of the amazing artists who have "grown up" in the program include niceaunties, noper, LEGIO_X, Mind Wank, Andrea Ciulu, Frank Manzano, B O E Y, Ethereal Gwirl, Le Moon, doopiidoo among many many more! We are happy to add a few new names and new works to the collection. Stay tuned for their releases coming in September. Video by Running a Fever
0:39
halecar2's profile picture

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DAILY PROGRAM The Fellowship Daily Program is about to celebrate one year, and what a year it has been. All through this crazy "bear market" artists have continued to show up because this AI video thing is happening now...not tomorrow but today in front of us all! To be here means that you were here when the seeds for the future AI filmmaking was being experimented with. With over 130 artists from around the world, experimenting and pushing their practice to new levels, we come to a year that will go down in history as the first period of AI video with so much production and experimentation. It is not that AI video didn't exist before, but 2023-2024 is the year with the most technical advancements that have ever happened for this medium, and the number of creators using the tools have come to a critical mass. This period is also very much based on creating visual narratives and storytelling. It is also about control and guiding the hallucinations into the artists' visual language. This period is about visual narratives that contain stories or experiments like we had not seen before. The Daily NFT collection will also contain a mix of possibly all AI tools available to date. From Runway to Kling to a few more we will announce shortly. The Daily collection is one of a kind, built in public, during the work market for NFTs, but with some of the most talented artists in the world, pushing, pushing, pushing. Some of the amazing artists who have "grown up" in the program include niceaunties, noper, LEGIO_X, Mind Wank, Andrea Ciulu, Frank Manzano, B O E Y, Ethereal Gwirl, Le Moon, doopiidoo among many many more! We are happy to add a few new names and new works to the collection. Stay tuned for their releases coming in September. Video by Running a Fever

alejandro cartagena

12,832 views • 1 year ago

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