Featured Speakers
NFT ART DAY ZRH brings together international contributors, leading figures, NFT pioneers and visionaries to share their knowledge and to shed light on the intersection of art and technology, in the realm of blockchain, metaverse, and NFTs. Their insights are set to open a critical dialogue and to offer new understandings and perspectives of the relationship between the traditional art world and the crypto ecosystem.IX Shells
IX Shells
IX Shells
Artist
Itzel Yard, also known as IX Shells, is an artist and self-taught coder based in Panama. During her childhood, Yard played video games, which sparked her creativity and led to a deep fascination with coding at a young age. Looking back on her journey, Yard credits her five-year stay in Toronto, where she studied architectural technology, for much of her growth. Although this was a difficult time for her, it pushed her to find her own voice and creativity through computer science. By merging her observations of natural patterns with her love of Brutalist architecture, Yard has used computer science to simulate an extension of her mind, resulting in generative art. While her art visually represents the physical world, Yard intends for each piece to act as a metaphor for inner exploration. Her code serves as a context-based portrait of her current experiences, inviting the audience to enter her world of self-reflection. Yard's friendly demeanor, warmth, and genuine appreciation for her work results in a unique form of ingenuity that is unparalleled.
Kenny Schachter
Kenny Schachter
Kenny Schachter
Artist, curator, lecturer, and writer
Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art shows in museums and galleries while teaching art history and economics for more than thirty years between Switzerland and the United States. He has a column on Artnet.com and contributes to various international publications, including the New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK). After making digital art for decades, Schachter has spearheaded the traditional art world’s adaptation of NFT in 2020-1 by lecturing at Yale and the Hirschhorn Museum and writing 12 articles on the subject. In 2021, he curated wide-ranging NFTism exhibitions (a term he trademarked) at Nagel Draxler in Cologne, and Institut in London. Schachter had a retrospective of his art at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in New York in 2018, curated a show at Simon Lee Gallery in London in 2018 and a solo show at Kantor Gallery in LA in 2019.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows.
Sabine Himmelsbach
Sabine Himmelsbach
Sabine Himmelsbach
Director of HeK
Sabine Himmelsbach has been director of HeK (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel) since March 2012. The art historian worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna from 1993-1996 and then managed exhibitions and accompanying symposia at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz. In 1999 she became exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005-2011 she directed the Edith Russ House for Media Art in Oldenburg. In 2011 she curated 'gateways. Art and Networked Culture' for the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, as part of the European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011. Her exhibition projects at HeK in Basel include 'Sensing Place' (2012), 'Semiconductor: Let There Be Light' (2013), 'Ryoji Ikeda' (2014), 'Poetics and Politics of Data' (2015), 'Rafael Lozano- Hemmer: Preabsence' (2016) and 'unREAL' (2017), 'Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies', 'Eco- Visionaries' (2018) and 'Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence' (2019).
Alex Estorick
Alex Estorick
Alex Estorick
Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save
Alex Estorick is a media theorist who seeks to develop socially progressive approaches to new technologies. As Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save, he aims to drive critical conversation about blockchain, NFTs, and Web3. He is also Contributing Editor for Art and Technology at Flash Art, establishing the magazine’s digital column, “The Uncanny Valley,” as a bridge between contemporary art and new media. Recent curatorial projects include Cure³ at Bonhams (2023), FEMGEN at Art Basel Miami Beach (2022), and Ecotone on Feral File (2022). He contributes to various publications – from Frieze to the Financial Times – and is responsible for the first aesthetics of crypto art: a data-driven study of the early genesis of the NFT phenomenon.
Luba Elliott
Luba Elliott
Luba Elliott
AI Art Curator
Luba Elliott is a curator and researcher specialising in AI art. She works to educate and engage the broader public about recent developments in creative AI through talks and exhibitions at venues across the art, business and technology spectrum including Impakt Festival, The Serpentine Galleries, arebyte, ZKM, The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, CogX, NeurIPS and ICCV. Her projects include the Feral File exhibition 'Reflections in the Water' and the ART-AI Festival in Leicester, UK. She founded the NeurIPS Creativity and Design Workshop and curated the online galleries aiartonline.com and computervisionart.com. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, she worked in start-ups, including the art collector database Larry’s List. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge.
Brian Droitcour
Brian Droitcour
Brian Droitcour
Critic, Editor, and Curator
Brian Droitcour is a critic, editor, and curator. He has contributed to publications including 4columns, Artforum, and Rhizome, and catalogues for exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. From 2014 to 2021 he worked at Art in America magazine, where he organized special issues on topics such as the digitized museum, generative art, and immersive art. He is now the editor in chief of the digital art platform Outland.
Sandra Nedvetskaia
Sandra Nedvetskaia
Sandra Nedvetskaia
Curator and Art Advisor
Moscow-born entrepreneur, curator, auctioneer and art advisor, Sandra Nedvetskaia graduated from the King’s College London and the London School of Economics. She started her decade long career at Christie’s London in 2005 and went on to spearhead the auction house’s business in Eastern Europe. Today, Sandra is working as an advisor with international collectors, galleries, private and public institutions and artists, organising and curating exhibitions/happenings, managing artists and collections and working with technologies in art. Sandra is an accomplished public speaker and auctioneer, wielding the gavel for the Kunsthalle Zurich, Human Rights Watch, Clima Now, AmfAR, the Naked Heart Foundation and other causes. She is also the co-founder of the Electric Art Collective and Partner in Khora Contemprorary - the first production company to focus on creating artworks in Virtual Reality with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Shirin Neshat and Tony Oursler.
Dr. Omar Kholeif
Dr. Omar Kholeif
Dr. Omar Kholeif
Author and Curator
Dr. Omar Kholeif CF FRSA is the author or co-author of more than 30 books on art and culture, most recently, Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs. The latter, a memoir and social history of growing up inside and outside of the world of art and digital culture, has been applauded by critics for its "accessible breadth [and] depth" in the subject field. Dr. Kholeif has curated numerous landmark exhibitions in the field, including, Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) (Whitechapel Gallery, London and MAAT, Lisbon 2016), I Was Raised on the Internet (MCA Chicago, 2018), Art in the Age of Anxiety (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020), and My Life in the Metaverse (DCT Abu Dhabi, 2022), among others. Their bestselling books include, Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age (2018), Moving Image (Documents in Contemporary Art) (2015), and You Are Here: Art After the Internet (2013/14). Kholeif serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE and is the founder and co-director of www.artpost21.com, a not-for-profit agency that supports creative voices working at the nexus of art, tech, and social justice. You can find out more about them by visiting their website.
thefunnyguys
thefunnyguys
thefunnyguys
Generative Art Collector
thefunnyguys is a Belgian generative art collector who has been building his own digital collection since early 2021. As an early adopter of Art Blocks and other platforms, this resulted in a leading collection of over 5,000 unique pieces. Recently, he has founded Le Random, a digital generative art institution that aims to build an iconic generative art collection representing the history of the art movement as well as possible. Le Random will also publish editorial and educational content on the generative art movement.
Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter
Digital Artist
Anne Spalter is a mixed media digital artist exploring the dynamic between the nature world and the modern landscape. Her pieces reflect her childhood longing for escape from the mundanity of everyday life, and her interest in science fiction. Her art is an expression of her desire for adventure and a search for beauty in technology. For decades, Spalter has been an influential figure in digital art. This past year she was part of MASS MoCA's residency, named one of the 50 most important crypto artists by Rizzoli, had her work featured at SPRING/BREAK NYC Art Show, and released the 557-piece RABBIT TAKEOVER drop. Her video piece The Bell Machine was acquired by the Buffalo AKG Museum. Her works are held in many collections and museums, sold through Sotheby's and Phillips, and have been featured in the NYT. She is a frequent lecturer on digital art.
James Bridle
James Bridle
James Bridle
Writer, Artist, and Technologist
James Bridle is a writer, artist, journalist and technologist. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. They are the author of 'New Dark Age' (2018) and 'Ways of Being' (2022), and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019.
Operator
Operator
Operator
Artist Duo
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative practice, Operator, in 2016. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine) and “LGBT power couple” (Flaunt), their expertises collide in large-scale conceptual works recognizable for their signature nuanced integration of technology. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and Human Computer Interaction technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer and performance artist make for a uniquely medium non-allegiant output, often bringing together environments, technology and the body. For their most recent work, Human Unreadable, the artists developed an on-chain generative choreography method. Operator has been awarded The Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve spoken and appeared in BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, SCAD Museum of Art, MIT Open Doc Lab, Ars Electronica, Art Basel, CADAF, MoCDA, Universität für angewandte Kunst (Vienna), Francisco Carolinum and ZKM. The duo are originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin.
Valérie Whitacre
Valérie Whitacre
Valérie C. Whitacre
Head of Art, Trilitech, powered by Tezos
Valérie has spent over 15 years leading sales and business development at private photography galleries in London. She is a subject matter expert in photography, specialising in the modern masters of the medium. In spring 2022 she joined the Tezos ecosystem as Head of Art at Trilitech, a business development hub for Tezos. Working alongside ecosystem teams as well as the marketplaces and platforms that drive the creator economy on the Tezos blockchain, Valérie leads the strategy and objectives for global and regional arts & culture efforts. Additionally, she spearheads partnerships such as that with Serpentine Galleries and Champ Medici, as well as NFT projects and integrations with leading cultural institutions as the Arts Vertical of the ecosystem continues to drive innovation and adoption of the Tezos blockchain.
Lukas Amacher
Lukas Amacher
Lukas Amacher
Curator 1of1 Collection
As curator of the 1of1 collection, Lukas Amacher runs one of the premier NFT collections in the world, focussing exclusively on digital art. The collection takes an activist approach to the work it collects, supporting forward thinking artists and institutions at the cutting edge of art and tech, while solving for the crypto native challenges digital collectors face. Works from the 1of1 collection have recently been involved in projects with Castello di Rivoli in Italy, the MoMA in New York or M+ in Hong Kong.
Micol Ap
Micol Ap
Micol Ap
Founder & CEO VerticalCrypto Art
Micol Ap has been working at the intersection of Web3 and art, with over 8 years of experience in the tech and creative industry. She is the Founder & CEO of VerticalCrypto Art, a web3 platform for art and culture on the blockchain. Micol has curated shows for Tezos, Art Basel, VCA exhibitions during Frieze LA and NYC, and Sotheby’s to name a few. Micol also sits on the curatorial board of Art Blocks.
Tiffany Zabludowicz
Tiffany Zabludowicz
Tiffany Zabludowicz
Curator of Zabludowicz Collection & Director of Daata
Tiffany Zabludowicz is curator of collections at Zabludowicz Collection and Director of Daata, a digital art platform and agency. She has curated shows internationally including in collaboration with Performa, MoMA, Leila Heller Gallery, Andreas Siegfried, Life is Beautiful Festival and more. In 2016, Tiffany Zabludowicz founded Times Square Space, a residency and exhibition program in vacant offices in Times Square, New York. She has been collecting and curating digital artists since 2010. She has a BA from Brown University, 2014, and an MA in history of art from Courtauld Institute of Art, 2020. She is co-chair of the Young Collectors Council at the Guggenheim Museum and a founding member of the Artemis Council at the New Museum and a member of the Brown Arts Initiative at Brown University.
Mario Klingemann
Mario Klingemann
Mario Klingemann
AI Art Pioneer
Mario Klingemann is an artist who uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to create and investigate systems. He is particularly interested in human perception of art and creativity, researching methods in which machines can augment or emulate these processes. Thus his artistic research spans a wide range of areas like generative art, cybernetic aesthetics, information theory, robotics, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent behaviors, neural networks, cultural data or storytelling.
Since early 2020 he has been active in the field of blockchain-based art and played an instrumental role in the stewardship and emergence of the ecologically responsible NFT community around Hic et Nunc and Tezos.
Mario is also the creator and guardian of Botto, an autonomous decentralized AI artist which, steered by its community, has created and sold NFTs for over 2 million US$ since its inception in fall 2021 and currently ranks among the top-10 artists on SuperRare.
He was winner of the Lumen Prize Gold 2018, received an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2020 and won the British Library Labs Creative Award 2015. He was artist in residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab and has been recognized as a pioneer in the field of AI art. His work has been featured in art publications as well as academic research and has been shown in international museums and at art festivals like Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, ZKM, the Barbican, the Ermitage, the Photographers' Gallery, Colección Solo Madrid, Nature Morte Gallery New Delhi, Residenzschloss Dresden, Grey Area Foundation, Mediacity Biennale Seoul, the British Library and MoMA. He is represented by Onkaos, Madrid and DAM Gallery Berlin.
Anika Meier
Anika Meier
Anika Meier
Writer & Curator
Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art and NFTs building EXPANDED.ART. She is part of the curation board of Art Blocks. She collaborated with Operator on "Unsigned", with CIRCA on the first NFT drop by Marina Abramović, and with Quantum for Herbert W. Franke’s NFT drop, "Math Art". Her curated exhibitions include: "LeeMullican.PCX" at FeralFile, "Who Is Online? Game Art in the Age Post-NFTism" at HEK Basel (Virtual), "Art NFT Linz" at Francisco Carolinum in Linz; "In Touch. Art in the Age of Post-NFTism" (with Micol Ap), "Tribute to Herbert W. Franke", "The Artist Is Online," KÖNIG GALERIE and at KÖNIG in Decentraland, "Exercise in Hopeless Nostalgia. The World Wide Webb" by Thomas Webb at KÖNIG Digital, "Link in Bio. Art After Social Media" at Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, and "Virtual Normality. Women Net Artists 2.0" at Museum of Fine Art Leipzig. Her exhibitions and writing has been written about and published in, among others, artnet, Hyperallergic, Monopol, Kunstforum, Spiegel, and Tagesschau.