I’m back home after three weeks in Spain working on my mid career retrospective which includes over 300 works from 21 years of work. It’s a privilege to get these kinds of opportunities. It has been more struggling than successes, but the pull to do art is far bigger than any of the problems I had to face in order to keep creating. Wishing all my artist peers get a chance like this in their careers.

To be an artist today. Being an artist is to be visceral, contradictory, passionate, emotional and opinionated. We are the ones culture has deemed as the portrayers of the symptoms of the good and the bad and how we feel about this very complicated world we live in. Yes we can create beauty, but since the 20th century, artists have been granted the opportunity to make visible the ugly and shifting conditions in which we live in. I believe in this very much. Being an artist is to be vulnerable; because of what you say (or don’t say), and what you create. That constant state of vulnerability is both unquieting and an opportunity. It makes you feel alive and close to the world. Being from the “global south” adds an extra layer of awareness in terms of being an artist. Our lives are lacking many of the economic and social certainties developed countries offer artists. Sometimes this is visible in the kind of art that spawns from the different regions. I personally feel committed to talking about the uncertainty we in latin America , even when my work seems aesthetically oriented at times. To be an artist today is to create contradictions. The harshness of life sometimes is rendered beautiful through our images. That is a constant struggle for many of us. To see the world from outside at times and still comment on it when you are not fully part of what it is that troubles your philosophical, cultural, economic or emotional positions. Again. Being an artist is complicated. To be an artist is also to hustle, sacrifice, stress, hope, desire, commit, and develop a vision. That path, for most of us, takes years to harness and grow. Many of my early artist friends have desisted and left art because of these difficulties (I sure have thought about it many times!). For most of us, we have to balance making a living and doing art. There is more economic uncertainty than a steady balance to be able to focus on just one thing. But then again, we can’t help ourselves! We need to say and create the things we want to create and if that means to struggle, so be it. Being an artist is also a privilege, and I think a responsibility. Hopefully both our inner worlds and outside views contribute to making this world more livable.

gm☀️

Lets call this a community alert 🥰🥰 But now might be a very good time to become closer acquaintanted with World Flag from our beloved @artblocks just before @ArtBasel opens showing, well, three Smoke Flags with @fellowshiptrust. Jgx artblocks.io/collection/worl…

we are all so unique on social media. we get to really express our ideas. our art.

may we all have great blessings today sound on

hot take 🫣 in web3 we champion artists spending more time building communities than artists building profound and meaningful art projects. if the web3 artist stops building, his art ceases to be seen (a rug 😣🤔) and becomes invisible and thought of as irrelevant. you can’t just do art. the artist focused on doing art on the other hand, and not a community, builds in sophisticated aesthetic and conceptual frameworks into their work that lets the work exist independently of them pushing it socially into relevance. the Art IS the community. being an independent artist is great and all, but as an artist, my dream is just to be doing art. the narrative of cutting out middlemen, doing all yourself, having direct contact with collectors has forced everyone to be a content creator (sometimes more than being an artist) in order to be able to be seen. Because of this, is all our art becoming more mid? i’m sure there is a middle ground and you can still create great art and be socially mindful, but the amount of anxiety that artists that just want to be artists have to endure in order to stay relevant in web3 is overwhelming at times. In the end it’s still super hard to be an artist, even with all the positive attributes of our little web3 artist niche…

Alejandro's art is blowing my mind. I am collecting his progression from discarded photos, creating a void, and using the discarded to create what was never there, or was it? "...I have been feeding a network nothing but faces, each a fragment pulled from Mexico City’s discarded photographs of its inhabitants, I've collected over the years...what happens when a machine digests those trillions of exposures and regurgitates a face that never lived?" @halecar2

gm☀️ See you in Basel.

Reflecting again on my work with Fellowship last year "SPACES." Think back on your life just 10 years ago, preAI... prepandemic... Since then how much of the fundamentals of our basic ways of living have been uprooted? I often look back at these 4 pieces in particular and ask myself how many cumulative human hours have been spent building and working in offices we no longer care for, and how many hours have been spent commuting. How many hours of our day have been regained (or lost??) from exponentially increasing efficiency and productivity? Its going to be impossible to predict the future even 10 years from now but at the rate of change today our perception of "work" is about to radically change.

SPIRITS x SOLSTICE DANCE at @LACMA → June 21 This summer solstice, @john__gerrard's year-long artwork SPIRITS reaches its Mediterranean chapter, and @LACMA is marking the moment with a night of music and movement. SPIRITS is built from 96 discarded plastic sandals collected from beaches around the world, transformed into real-time digital sculptures. The work unfolds slowly across the solar year, tied to each solstice and equinox. On June 21st, it comes to life as a large-scale installation and live performance, with @richiehawtin (aka Plastikman) DJing through the evening. Doors open at 6:30pm under the new Geffen building. The event is alcohol-free and runs until 10pm. Produced by Space&Time and promoted by @6AMGroup. 🎟️ Tickets are free but required → grab yours here: tickets.lacma.org/25866/2807…

Digital value sometimes can’t be translated into value outside the online. For brands and influencers it seems to work, don’t get me wrong. We’ve seen online stuff translate into billions for some. But in art… it’s difficult and different. We aren’t selling content (or are we?😭). The parallel of online and in person for art and artists is in a constant collision. Good? Yes, there is a possibility for a new artworld to emerge and generally I’d say change is important for art. Bad? Yes, artists’ expectations get all weird because of the divide and discrepancy between the worlds. I feel we are in the biggest push-pull of this situation and soon “rules” will emerge for marking more readable value assignment. But until then, it’s a mess, and I do think that it is good for art.

sound on so far today has been not the greatest maybe tomorrow will be better 🤷‍♀️

David Hockney: "When I got there, I quickly saw that their program allowed you to draw using the computer. I realized this was the end of chemical photography. This was a big event." From Master Drawings, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 2009), pp. 3-16.

Incredibly proud to announce SPIRITS x SOLSTICE DANCE under the new Geffen @LACMA on June 21 630pm - 10pm for 2400 guests. Spend the summer solstice dancing to a DJ performance by pioneering electronic artist @richiehawtin (aka Plastikman) and celebrating the cycle of @john__gerrard's solar artwork SPIRITS. The evening is free to enter but ticketed and will include a large-scale installation and a live performance of SPIRITS. Guests are encouraged to avoid bringing single-use plastic water bottles. Please note that this event will be free of alcohol, with alternative beverages available throughout the evening. Event is produced by Space&Time and promoted by @6AMGroup. Find some remaining slots via 6AM code here : tickets.lacma.org/25866/2807…. Digital community outreach to follow led by @ZandieGuicai / West of Here and Digital Counsel. Collectors and friends DM direct if you seek a pass. jg (motion graphics by Ozan Tezvaran in dialogue with john gerrard Vaughn Rebis Westerman⁩).

ATTENTION VALUED EMPLOYEES, CUSTOMERS, CREDITORS, AND REMAINING HUMAN RESOURCES: all assets must be cleared immediately. Used desks, inactive ambitions, surplus personnel, dead office rituals, minor wear, obsolete authority, and fully functional emotional residue are now available at drastically reduced prices. No reasonable offer will be refused. No memories will be appraised above market value. Everything is operational until proven otherwise. Everything has been depreciated for your convenience. Browse now, before the system shuts down permanently. ↓ The Daily Program Presents: Liquidation, a new collection by @dontbuy_

gm📌 @dontbuy_ @FellowshipAi @opensea

Daily Timeline: @bbeetthh Over the past three years, The Daily Program has become a survey of artists exploring new narratives and formal ideas using digital and AI tools. Beth Frey has been building her absurdist universe for a while. Her background spans painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and installation, with an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from the University of Victoria, and exhibitions across Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the US. That analog foundation shows up in how she approaches AI tools: with a painter's eye for composition, but a deliberate willingness to let the machine get confused. A lot of her work starts with the self. Working from a personal bank of images, early AI-generated pieces and studio photographs of herself, Frey feeds disparate, mismatched source material into the generator, intentionally destabilizing its logic to produce something genuinely unsettling. The body becomes both raw material and active player. Sentient Muppet Factory, which launched as part of the Post Photographic Perspectives II Program back in 2023, is the clearest expression of this. Presented as invented film stills from a time that is both past and future, the series stages Muppet-like figures within compositions that echo Renaissance portraiture, formal arrangements, artificial backgrounds, tangled figurative forms, while filling that sacred visual language with subject matter that is purely kitsch. The cognitive dissonance is the point. The project wears its references openly. Inspired by Laurie Anderson's use of puppets as an analogy for new technologies, and by the spectacle of The Muppet Show's original late-1970s run, Frey occupies a space where wacky children's television collides with the seriousness of auteur cinema. These generated bodies are abnormal, yet somehow feel at home in their inhabited spaces. The humor is never decoration. Like her analog work, it's the mechanism through which she draws out contradictions, the beautiful and the grotesque, the innocent and the perverse, the handmade and the mechanized. The "factory" in the title is both a joke and a thesis: AI as industrialized image production, churning out new characters with the efficiency of an assembly line, filtered through the sensibility of a painter who knows exactly how strange that is. Her contributions to the Post Photographic Perspectives program remain a sharp early marker of what this moment in AI art could look like, irreverent, formally rigorous, and stranger than it first appears. ↓ Here are some pieces from that collection

The Terminator: An artist from the future! @newrafael is one of the most thoughtful artists I've met in a while. A few moments of absolute wisdom from this small doc we created for @fellowshiptrust. Be sure to watch the full documentary. Enjoy! "...the internet is so pervasive and so woven into every aspect of life that any artist at this point is a digital artist. So I think in 1999, saying “I'm a digital artist” was quite confusing to people. At this point, even the most analog painter at some point sends an email, sends an image, and the image becomes documented. It's just part of everything. And there's just a gradient from how much you emphasize the digital." "Software is a system to collaborate. Even if you look at YouTube, you would think, okay, YouTube is infinite, but actually, you have to make your point within the first 30s it can’t be longer than this or it should be longer than that. The thumbnail should be as crazy as possible. So the system starts to dictate a style. It's very measured, you can A/B test like, if I do a thumbnail with a blue background, it works better than the green background. The culture there is so quantified that it actually creates a sameness." "I think artists more than ever have a role to talk about where our eyes are, what the screen is doing to our eyes, and how we feel when we see things. Not in a spoken way, not writing it down, but feeling it when you're in front of the work." "For me, the computer was a tool of artistic empowerment. So when you think of artist-run spaces, the reach of an artist-run space is quite limited, especially if you're in a small town. Which is fine, but I just started putting my work online, and it quickly traveled, and it quickly got traction. And that was just very energizing. I always thought it was interesting that any form of creative expression comes with editing at some point. Where if you make a book, you might work with a publisher, if you do a show, you might work with a gallerist, and they might give you full creative freedom, but there's this tiny question always that is like, Are you sure that's the right work right now? And the internet doesn't ask you that. So that was interesting to me that it's almost like opening up your subconscious, which now we know is terrible for politics; it really is bad. But from an artistic point of view, the idea of “I'm not sure why this should exist, but I have a feeling it should” is very powerful. A lot of my work beforehand, I don't know if it's good or bad; I don't judge it. And it might be five, six, seven years later that it finds its right place, or maybe it doesn't, and I find that openness still; there's nothing like it. As much as the internet now is also a place of doomscrolling and online shopping, etc., for me as an artist, making moving images and being completely unedited and sharing that with an audience, those fundamentals still exist."

Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon Debuting at @ArtBasel's Zero 10, Booth Z9 (June 16 - 20, 2026). A comprehensive survey of the canonical history of digital art spanning 70 years, tracing the rise of computation as medium through masterworks from the digital art canon.