POLARIS
Forever creating my own North Star, so that I never lose my way.
POLARIS is a signature VideoFeeling crafted in my studio during a wildly transitional time in my life. I have been meditating on the concept of the North Star, and the role it’s played in guiding wayward sailors and redemption-seekers to safety.
The need for a guiding light became paramount as I’ve been reorienting myself to my new reality. The work I’ve done over the past three years editioning my artwork on the blockchain has reached psychedelic new levels of visibility and import in the eyes of others, and I’ve been asking myself where I wish to point myself moving forward.
These new tools have always been about self-sovereignty for me, and as such, it seems only fitting that this guiding light must be self-derived. And so, I have created my own North Star.
It’s a glorious synthesis of rhythmic linear counterpoints and vibrating gemtones – a look I’ve been revisiting and refining since I first began working with analog video in 2015. The desire to hone this particular visual strain in my work has become a pet obsession, as I forever chase the combination of color, rhythm and texture that will unlock the ultimate pleasure of synesthesia.
I imprint this work onto the blockchain today, on the brink of Passover season and its tale of the journey from constriction into open exploration. I intend it as a beacon of ecstatic feeling that can guide us all toward that which makes us feel free.
And, therefore, bards of old,
Sages, and hermits of the solemn wood,
Did in thy beams behold
A beauteous type of that unchanging good,
That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray
The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.
-William Cullen Bryant
POLARIS is now available on SuperRare.
You Can Save This
Mimesis is the means by which culture flourishes!
2021 has been one of the most extraordinary years of my life. I’ve been a working artist for over a decade, largely without reward beyond the satisfaction of answering the call for expression within myself. This year, a confluence of events has led to my work being recognized on increasingly grand stages.
Not only am I grateful, but I am undeniably changed by the experience. I have spent this time steeped in the culture of our burgeoning community, as well as witnessing the pushback from those outside of it.
It’s only fitting, then, that I would end the year by debuting an artwork borne out of this feedback loop at Art Basel Miami – on my birthday, no less.
“You Can Save This” is a signature VideoThought – a statement with an open-ended context, visually manifested so as to allow for meaning to blossom.
I feel that one of my gifts as an artist is the ability to take ugly sentiments and transmute them into works that are transcendent and meaningful.
“You Can Save This” has become one of the rallying cries of those who reject NFTs. They believe that the ability to save and share our artwork is somehow proof that it does not hold value.
And yet, we who prize incorporeal art know that the ability to save and share it is a feature, and not a flaw. Its ability to network itself and spread is the very aspect which makes it valuable. We have a word for this, which we use also to describe the web-building tendencies of mycelium in the forest, or micro-organisms in a petri dish.
We call this “culture.”
And so, with this piece, I seek to alchemize this critique into a badge of honor. What we are doing here is a direct evolution of the human culture which has led us to this point. We are laying the groundwork for a new networked humanity.
As with most of my VideoThoughts, there are multiple interpretations. I don’t wish to squash the viewers’ experience by being overly prescriptive, but I do want to speak to an additional personal viewpoint.
Much has been made of the rapid growth of the NFT space, and its inevitable correlation with speculative finance. My feeling is that this will sort itself out, as it always does. My great hope, and intention, is that NFTs serve as a Trojan Horse, allowing for new digitally-native forms and voices to permeate mainstream consciousness.
The fiscal elevation of the artist class that we are experiencing is analogous to that of both the Renaissance and the Zombie Formalist movement – we get to determine whether we develop these markets around our aesthetics, or if we develop our aesthetics around the markets.
Ideally, the relationship between the collectors and the artists is one of glorious symbiosis – each plays a crucial role in the endeavor of the other. We risk losing the greater cultural meaning of this movement if we allow this dynamic to become unbalanced and favor only the desire for “number go up.”
And so, I see this piece as being both a statement of fact as well as a plea – You Can Save This. Decentralization affords us a degree of agency that’s new to us – we must reckon with the power of our will, and wield it with great responsibility.
The use of video feedback as a visual motif is central here, as it reflects the delicate paradox of intention we are all dancing with as we establish the nascent Metaverse.
I created this work in a rare 9:16 ratio specifically designed for IRL display. It will debut at The Gateway, the first large-scale presentation of Crypto Art at Art Basel Miami from NFTNow x Christie’s.
I was curated into the show by SuperRare, my OG and still most-used Crypto Art platform. I am putting the work on reserve auction there on December 2nd. Bids can be placed here.
YOU CAN SAVE THIS was minted on SuperRare on November 30th. It is on Reserve Auction as of December 2nd at 10am ET. Reserve is set at 12Ξ.
Self Transcending – Sotheby's Natively Digital
My work is on auction at Sotheby’s June 3-10, 2021 as part of Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale. Self Transcending is a signature VideoPainting I created to mark this moment in both my personal artistic journey and the evolution of Crypto Art and NFTs as a whole.
Interested collectors will be able to bid on the work in cryptocurrency, an aspect which streamlines the auction process for crypto native collectors while allowing for the work to be valued in its native format.
Self Transcending has been minted as Token #0 on the custom “Sarah Zucker” smart contract. The contract was built for me by Nameless specifically for the Sotheby’s Sale. This erc-721 has been elegantly crafted with crypto-savvy collectors and long-term provenance in mind.
You can hear me talk about the work and my background as a “CryptoArt OG” in the interview for the Sotheby’s Catalogue below. Read on for more in-depth information about the artwork and my journey.
THE WORK
Self Transcending is a vision of the Self as a Strange Loop – a narrative that reiterates itself into infinity. Every new Self informs the next, and it’s up to us to establish harmony within the chaos. The piece is unique within my oeuvre, as it fuses my signature VideoPainting technique with analog feedback – an evolution of my style befitting this moment in my career.
I see this concept as a continuation of a personal revelation I had in 2019, around the time I first started editioning my work as NFTs on the blockchain. I was reading a book about mushrooms, and the “wood wide web” they create with their mycelium – essentially a mesh network that allows interspecies communication in a forest.
I was struck by a vision of the Internet as the extension of the human nervous system, and the human nervous system as an extension of the mycelial networks of the natural world.
Self Transcending continues many of the cyberdelic themes that weave throughout my VideoPaintings. The chakra-like motif I use to indicate inner harmony connects the work directly to Astral Antenna, the first VideoPainting I tokenized in March of 2020, which was collected by fellow “Natively Digital” artist Matt Kane.
Where Astral Antenna depicts inner harmony as a means of becoming a receiver, Self Transcending depicts that inner harmony as a means of broadcast – they reflect the yin and yang of transcendent experience.
As I see it, we’re living in a very potent time in human history, where we’re redefining our notions of humanity as we merge with our technology. This can often be strange and uncomfortable, and societal growing pains are not uncommon. But a more zoomed out perspective allows us to see how we’re extending beyond ourselves, bursting through our borders of separation to connect with each other, like nodes in a network.
The natural impulse to weave into an interdependent organism can be met with a lot of resistance, as it requires us to recalibrate the scale with which we view ourselves. But, when we engage with the Internet– our Ancient form of Future technology– we get glimpses of how we fit into this fractal reality.
For the past decade, I have been creating art in dialogue with the Internet. I beam my techno-mystical TV broadcasts into the ether as a means of illuminating this massive step we’re taking as a civilization.
I can trace much of my fascination with this topic to Michio Kaku’s talks on the Kuleshov scale. Recognizing our experience as the birth pains of a new planetary civilization contextualizes the push-pull we feel between regressive and progressive forces in contemporary culture.
I offer the video below as it was a direct inspiration for my body of work leading up to the creation of Self Transcending.
THE JOURNEY
I minted my first NFT on SuperRare on April 4, 2019. While that’s not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, it puts me on the earlier side of entry into the NFT space, and has led to me being oft referred to as an “OG” Crypto Artist. But that was not the beginning of my journey as an artist.
I have felt compelled to create art since I was a child, and was fortunate to have access to a computer as a toddler, which was somewhat uncommon at the time. I have told the story in various interviews of how, at 10, I had an art teacher who told me that Art made on a computer wasn’t real Art, and she forbade me from ever using a computer in my assignments.
I switched my focus from Art to Drama, a choice that I carried through my entire Academic career through the end of my MFA in Dramatic Writing.
This decision to never study Art academically has been one of the greatest gifts I could give myself. I am an autodidact by nature, and I developed my own approach to creative practice over the years, educating myself from the wealth of information available on the Internet.
At the age of 15, I took up film photography, and it was my primary mode of expression for the next decade. I posted on various film photography forums as “thesarahshow,” and enriched myself through that rich pre-social media online community.
I sold my Art for the first time at the age of 18, when several of my photographs were licensed for a French book about the photography movement I was part of, called Le Lomo: L’Appareil Photo qui ose tout!
Self as Odalisque, 2006.
I worked as Interim Curator at The Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography in 2011, which is where I learned a great deal about Fine Art Editions and the Art market. We had works by legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz and Diane Arbus on offer there, and I acquainted myself with the processes by which valuable artworks were bought and sold while creating my own run of limited edition prints.
One day, a customer came in off the street and said they had seen a print through the window and they absolutely had to have it. I was beyond delighted to discover that the print was one of mine – The Rainbow News. It was an exhilarating moment for me, as I realized I had developed my craft to the point that a complete stranger wished to place value in my work.
The Rainbow News. Sarah Zucker, 2009.
I started moving into video and time-based media in 2011. I had shot lots of interesting footage over the years as a street photographer, and began incorporating that with found footage in creating visuals for bands. I began working more and more in the GIF format, and it became the primary focus of my practice around2013.
From 2013-2016 I released work under the banner of my collaborative studio The Current Sea. We produced an audiovisual show in Los Angeles called Prism Pipe, which showcased many of the emerging GIF and New Media Artists of the era, many of whom are now making moves in the NFT space.
In 2015, we spoke with The Creators Project about “The Future of GIFs as Gallery Art,” where I mused on the potential for GIFs to be taken seriously as fine art if they could be editioned on the blockchain. 🤯
The Future Of GIFs As Gallery Art, According To The Current Sea http://t.co/OhSjsN18GE pic.twitter.com/ardkM9Uymt
— Creators (@CreatorsProject) March 11, 2014
I began working with Analog Video in 2015 and returned to releasing my work under my own name / @thesarahshow.
Being consistent in my output and always experimenting with new techniques, I developed my own signature aesthetic over the years, and cultivated a wide community of followers for my work through Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Giphy – where my GIFs currently have over 6.6 billion views.
When I became aware of SuperRare in 2019, it felt like destiny. My Art and experiences made me uniquely suited to the Crypto Art space, and I hit the ground running. I continue to evolve my practice organically in conversation with the Metaverse and its denizens, and feel electric with the possibilities that lie ahead.
I am thrilled to be able to offer my work at Sotheby’s as part of their first curated NFT sale. This is a watershed moment for digital art, as this new technology is finally allowing this longstanding and potent cultural tradition to get its due in the greater world of Fine Art.
All my thanks to curator Robert Alice for including me, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Specialist Michael Bouhanna for organizing the sale, and my greatest respect to the incredible artists offering their work alongside mine.
View and Bid on my Work on the Sotheby’s Website
In case you’d like to digest everything I said here in Dance Music form, I leave you with the incredible “Sarah Zucker Remix” by Eclectic Method. 😎
