The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has just opened a major exhibition exploring NFTs and the Metaverse. CGHBlockchain is proud to have loaned two of our NFTs to this important event.
The museum world is being challenged and invigorated by the unique properties and technology inherent to blockchain, Metaverse, and NFT art. Creation, collection, and curation are all entering uncharted territory, and exhibitions such as this will be looked back upon years from now as watershed moments.
For those not familiar with this new technology the first question is often how does one even view such an exhibition? Through online experiences and interactive Augmented Reality (AR) in the Metaverse.
The Celestial Hermitage exhibition page for The Ethereal Aether will help you explore this virtual show. When you are on this page there is a great deal of information you can scroll through in order to learn about the goals, challenges, and pioneering spirit which is fueling and forming this exciting new art form. There is also a link which allows you to enter the Metaverse exhibition. Just click, follow instructions, and you’ll be in. I recommend a desktop computer of more recent vintage and power, and a good high-speed internet connection.
If you’d like to watch the opening ceremony and get a quick tour around the exhibition with the curators, there is a youtube video. The event begins at the Hermitage and moves into the Celestial Hermitage. The video has an english voice-over and begins at the 8minute 40second mark.
Below are the information pages on the two important NFTs we’ve loaned to this exhibition. It is exciting to be a part of this new dimension of the art world which hasn’t changed all that much in the past 500 years!
Judicial from Nancy Baker Cahill’s series “Contract Killers” addresses the accountability of broken contracts. Using augmented reality video featuring two hands stretching out to shake one another, the handshake never happens. The moment the fingers begin to touch the virtual hands break down into pixels, which scatter and float away. Each work is site specific. Judicial depicts two red hands in front of a judicial courthouse. In her work Cahill examines “power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness” through new medias.
Tommy Hartung addresses cultural narratives through sculpture and video art. His series “The Old Testament” is made up of 25 chapters which are part of a whole, as well as unique individual works. Each chapter vignette tells a story, and together they weave into a larger narrative which addresses belief systems, humanity and surveillance. Hartung has designed “The Old Testament” to be an example of collective ownership of art. The different chapters may be reassembled by the individual collectors into a video in its entirety through the blockchain technology. Our chapter is #11 – “Song of Songs” and it is the chapter chosen by the exhibition curators to be displayed in The Ethereal Ether.
It was an uplifting and surreal moment to visit these works we own, which are being shown in what feels like a galaxy far, far away. Below is an image of my avatar viewing our Tommy Hartung NFT movie at Celestial Hermitage. Each cavernous space was an opportunity to see and learn about the artworks in the exhibition, as well as connect with strangers from across the globe who were also visiting The Ethereal Aether!
Viewing of Nancy Baker Cahill’s Judicial, another of our NFTs on display. What an exciting moment!
I hope to see you in the Metaverse viewing NFTs and talking about the future sometime soon. Tomorrow has arrived…today!
CGH Blockchain 