Divine Comedy

Divine Comedy is a series of 100 unique artworks that tell the tale of an artist’s journey through life and crypto art, each correlating to a canto of Dante’s classic work. Handcrafted over the course of 6 months using vintage Kid Pix software from 1993 – my first digital toolset!

The entire series is now available to collect, each work editioned on the blockchain as a unique erc-721 NFT.

http://divinecomedy.xyz

ARTIST STATEMENT

“In the midway of this our mortal life,

I found me in a gloomy wood, astray”

The Divine Comedy – Inferno, Canto I

The idea for this project came to me in the summer of 2024, after I read the book The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck. While I’m not typically one for the self-help genre, it came recommended as life-changing, and I felt like, yes, some change sounds nice. 

The book uses Dante’s Inferno‑Purgatorio‑Paradiso arc to map the climb toward integrity. The author means this not in the sense of moral virtue, but rather the idea of aligning your inner and outer self. I was hooked by this notion, because, like Dante, I too am midway on life’s journey, having found myself lost in a dark wood of error. 

The Dark Wood of Error. Inferno Canto 1 of Sarah Zucker’s Divine Comedy.

First, you are stopped in your tracks. Then, you go through hell reckoning with the error of your ways. This is followed by purgatory – a liminal time of healing, a fulcrum between the past and the future. And finally, you reach paradise, where you get to enjoy the outcome of your efforts and see how much richer your life can be when you are finally living in alignment with your truest self.

I have been editioning my art on the blockchain for 6 years, since April 2019. The hype and excitement around NFTs that exploded in 2021 brought a lot of new attention and support to my work, but it was also like trying to surf a tidal wave. The sheer force of it has been staggering. 

I was well positioned for the moment. I had already found my voice, honed my craft, and steeled my resolve over many years working as an artist. I understood and had a genuine belief in the technology. And, as a mischief-maker at heart, my psychedelic worldview served me well in navigating the many twists and turns of the experience.

But, the wave finally broke. I found myself far away from where I had started, left to pick up the pieces and make sense of all that washed up alongside me. Asking myself, which adaptations truly serve me, and which were just survival strategies to keep my head above water? Now that things have settled: what kind of artist (and human) do I really want to be? What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to nurture from here?

The artist as a young artist-child (avec beret)

I knew I wanted to go back to basics for this project. After testing a number of workflows, I chose Kid Pix Studio (1993), my first digital art tool, to tell the tale of my own personal reckoning and transformation. This choice has meaning beyond the aesthetic, as the series acts as a channel between the adult artist and the inner child.

The works contain the same DNA as my long-running Videopainting style, as KidPix Studio and my Sony Videopainter originate from the same early computer graphic era.  I relish the charge of minting these archaic pixels to the still-nascent future of the blockchain.

The day I got Kid Pix in December 1992.

And so, I set out on this quest in November of 2024, making an artwork a day (with some syncopation), until I completed the series in April 2025. There are 100 artworks, each correlating to a canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I have woven a great deal of meaning into it; linger on the series as a whole or zoom into the details of any single canto piece and you will begin to see the hypertext throughout.

This is the tale I want to tell, not only of my personal experience, but of our collective journey. If you are in the world of crypto art, my hope is that you will see your story here. We’ve seen some weird shit, and now it’s time to reflect. 

But, even in hell, it’s good to stay playful. To view even our own misdeeds and suffering with a wink. It is all equally sacred and profane – best to try and have a little fun with it. 

Divine Comedy is composed of 99 still JPEG tableaux painted pixel-by-pixel, and 1 analog video artwork representing the ecstatic “Beatific Vision” as a grand finale. Each work is a single edition, minted as an erc-721 on a standalone contract. 

The works are now available to collect. Existing collectors of my work are allowlisted, and new collectors may inquire to collect. 

The Integrated Self. Paradiso Canto 29 of Sarah Zucker’s Divine Comedy.

Strabismus

Strabismus is a series of 100 looping video artworks by Sarah Zucker handcrafted on VHS Tape.

The series is being released through a ranked auction powered by Highlight, running 24 hours from May 1st through May 2nd, 2024. The work is being editioned on Ethereum.

You can view the art and bid in the auction at strabismus.xyz

STRABISMUS ARTIST STATEMENT

“That’s 3D Art. Computers generate ‘em. BIG computers.”

• Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld Season 6, Episode 6

I was born with a magic eye. Thanks to a condition known as “Strabismus,” my left eye marches very much to the beat of its own drum. You could say that it is “crossed,” but I like to think of it as a bit of a maverick.

Beyond a charming appearance, this has affected my vision my entire life. While most people perceive depth physically through the stereoscopic coordination of both eyes, I have adapted to calculate depth algorithmically in my mind. This often leads to double vision and the illusion of depth where there is none (and also causes me to bump into the furniture a lot when I’m tired).

Ironically, this made it impossible for me to perceive the images hidden in the “Magic Eye” series that became popular in my childhood (immortalized, of course, on a 1994 episode of Seinfeld.) The “unfocused” or “blurry” vision required to witness the illusion was my everyday reality, and I would give my tiny self a headache staring at those psychedelic color fields and willing them to take form.

It’s an experience that has stuck with me as I’ve developed my art practice working with computer graphics and analog video techniques. My new series, Strabismus, explores illusions of depth generated through digital video synthesis and analog time displacement. 

Each work in the series aims to convey my own unique experience of depth – no crossed eyes required. I approached the creation of the work as a generative system, with my own personal optical algorithm and internal artistic feedback loop (a BIG computer) serving as the essential spice of randomness. The aesthetics emerged, no doubt, thanks to a year investigating and luxuriating in the work of Op Art pioneers like Bridget Riley, Yaacov Agam and Victor Vasarely.

This work evolved directly out of Temporale, my first long-form series editioned on the blockchain. Both projects distort the interlacing of analog video signal, where alternating bands of information yield motion. By directly manipulating this native aspect of the medium, I am able to weave together multiple timelines into a potent fusion of the temporal and the spatial.

Where Temporale channeled textural material video through this distortion to capture Time in a still image, Strabismus channels flat color motion through the distortion to conjure Depth out of Time. 

I see each of these two series as independent yet undeniably related. I have always loved my own fluidity in moving between modes in my work, from the figurative to the abstract, the narrative to the expressionistic. But these two series reflect a new maturity, a desire to dig deeper and manifest my ideas on a greater scale than ever before. I remain as playful as ever,  but am delighting in flexing my creative muscles.

Everything's Different Now

Nothing is as it has been or will be. The Present is a strange singularity.

EVERYTHING’S DIFFERENT NOW is a signature VideoThought crafted in my studio in summer 2022. I was commissioned by Friends With Benefits x OpenSea, and this vision came through the channels. The piece will debut in an IRL installation as part of The Flock at FWB Fest.

I’ve been creating artworks in my “Now” series since 2018, and see them as a chance to reflect on the flavor of the present moment. This leads to statements that are paradoxically both personally topical, and universally evergreen.

I’m struck by the cumulative effects of recent change. Dramatic shifts around digital art and NFTs, the end(?) of the Covid era, and a lot of personal growth as I’ve met the call to level up my art practice.

VideoThoughts are special little mindgems: they use video feedback to visualize the recursive nature of experience itself. Everything is *always* different now, which in turn makes the next now even more different, and so on and so forth.

This is the genesis token on my new VideoThoughts contract provided by Manifold. Like all my single editions moving forward, the piece will integrate with SuperRare and elsewhere for an elegant cross-platform collector experience.

Everything’s Different Now is now available on SuperRare.