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Minted on Transient Labs ERC 7160 Token
for CRYPTOART V9.0 as part of The White Night of The Galleries 2024, in Craiova, Romania, where the theme was "Utopia".
The following text, "Notes on Utopianism" was included:
There is an infernal contradiction in the logic of every utopian scheme ever devised: from Plato’s republic, to the utopian socialism of Fourier, the Jacobins, numerous “workers paradises,” Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch, various utopian religious communes, up to and including the technological utopianism of today. Foundational to all is the notion that humanity is perfectible given the implementation of ideal social circumstances (in accordance with a particular ideology). The flaw in the logic is two-fold. First, it assumes the perfect society can be built by fallible people. The utopia would then, in turn, be the instrument of humanity’s perfection. Alas, the perfect human would no longer be human, as our flaws in large part define us.
I’ve painted with a broad brush to tar these schemes, but I think not unfairly. In the accompanying work, I have reduced my scope to an incident relating to the ongoing technological utopianism with which we are currently confronted. A VR user, who seeks to transcend the limitations of the everyday world, in so doing is oblivious to the distracting device being the instrument of her leaving that world in a more literal sense. This promised new world is just another rug pull. It is always a rug.
To that end, I have incorporated the texture of rug fibers over this glitchpainting, entitled “Rugged by Utopianism”. The piece is an AI output that I have glitched, and then performed various other manipulations on, including collage, digital painting, and selective repainting using AI generative infill.
5,824 x 10,384 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, jpeg, 2024
