By the time the fight started on May 2nd, 2015 everyone had won. Labeled 

 the bout between undefeated division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. and eight division world champion Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, obliterated historic box office and pay-per-view records. As promoters and cable channels alike anticipated, the entire globe tuned in to witness the brutal occasion. Two boxers of unparalleled records, reputations and brand recognition, were to, at last, meet in the ring, ‘mano y mano’, and use their fists and might to claim the prize as the last man standing.

To honor the occasion, the stars shone extra bright that night. Anything associated with the match would be on the front page of TMZ. News flash: Mark Wahlburg and Diddy made a $250,000 bet on the game. News flash: Justin Beiber crashes Mayweather weigh-in. On fight night, like bugs to a porch light, the celebrities came a-buzzing. Cramped in pricey concert seats, actors, sports stars, musicians, and anyone else who made money with their faces, dressed to the nines and put on their best smiles or glares. The list stretches long:  Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, Tom Brady, Robert DeNiro, Claire Danes, Ben Affleck, Adrien Brody, Michael J. Fox, Paris Hilton, Charles Barkley, Mike Tyson, Michael Keaton, Drew Barrymore, Nicki Minaj, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, Michael Jordan, Michael Strahan. And of course Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Queen Bey showed up wearing a deep-cut red cleavage-forward pantsuit, and news circulated widely that she was, in fact, the true winner of the fight.

And it didn’t stop there. The heralded ring entrance inevitably had its photo op opportunities, spectacle, and choreography. Mayweather, never a stranger to promotion, had last minute nixed his plan to enter with the Biebs and instead chose his coaching team, with one small exception: for the price tag of $1 million, Burger King had paid to have their crown-wearing creepy smiling mascot join the entourage into the ring. On the flip side, Pacquiao had written his own Eye-of-the-Tiger-sounding pop song ‘Lalaban Ako Para Sa Filipino’, which translates to “I Fight for the Filipino People.” Walking alongside Pacquiao was none other than television talk show host Jimmy Kimmel dressed in a Justin Beiber-inspired hat and hip-hop attire. And finally, to start the match itself, Jamie Foxx, who portrayed Ali’s corner man Drew Bundini Brown in the film Ali, sang the national anthem.

The event itself was an Alice in Wonderland of stardom, references, and of-the-moment clickbait.

Ultimately, Mayweather was ruled the winner by unanimous decision. Mayweather threw a total of 435 punches and 148 of them landed, Pacquiao registered 429 punches and only connected with 81. Mayweather’s signature defensive moves made it very difficult for Pacquiao to land punches and as far as a boxing match is concerned, the resulting product (the match) turned out to be a bit of a dud.

That said, the money had been made. HBO and Showtime teamed up for the pay-per-view broadcast with expectations that would make it the fight of the century. The fight itself was the highest pay-per-view event in history grossing $460 million in the United States alone. (For comparison the Super Bowl in 2017 made $720 million). The cost to watch per viewer was roughly $90, with higher prices for bars and restaurants reaching as high as $5,000. Half of every home in the Philippines watched the fight with most of them happening on pirate streaming services like Periscope. An estimated 4.4 million viewers paid to watch the fight.

When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans in 2005, it caused 1,883 fatalities and an estimated $108 billion in damages. And furthermore, the only place most residents could seek shelter and ultimately assistance was the 83,000-person capacity Superdome (home of the New Orleans Saints). During the most recent Covid-19 pandemic, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center was retrofitted to become a makeshift hospital for Covid-19 patients. Yes, the U.S. Open was set to become a morgue. And just to throw in another sports tidbit, contrary to public belief, Disney corporation doesn’t make the most of its dough on Disneyland, Star Wars or Disney films, but instead its ownership of ESPN. As Michael Eisner stated, “The Protection of Mickey Mouse is ESPN.”

All this to say something, that is both known but also not fully appreciated in its grand totality, “Sports is big business.” It is macro business. Sports is a business that operates at such a profound scale, its intimate, bodily subject matter belies a massive nearly irrational economy worldwide. Cities pay exorbitant costs in subsidies to build stadiums for local teams and the results on local economies are nearly negligible (in the first decade of the 20th century, the total in the United States for stadium subsidies was $10 billion.) Sports television produces nearly 645 hours of content a week. A week! In 2015, 93 of the top 100 shows in a season were sports. To claim that sports is an industry is putting it mildly. Sports is THE Industry and yet, the rules of its behavior and backroom dealings remain opaque.

This piling of sports, economic and trashy People magazine data, sets the appropriate stage to introduce the genesis NFT project by seminal contemporary artists Paul Pfeiffer. In this epoch, dazzling and bewildering series, we are introduced to two boxing matches. The first, as discussed above, presents Floyd Mayweather battling Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao in 2015 and the second features the 2017 bout between Pacquiao and Jeffrey Horn, often referred to as 

. Pacquiao would go on to lose that fight by unanimous decision as well, but this time, the decision was marred in vast controversy. This artwork by Pfeiffer is part of a larger series of works existing under the umbrella title of 

and they feature some part of sports found footage being erased or camouflaged by the background. In this case of 

, both opponents of Pacquiao (Mayweather and Horn) have simply vanished. All that remains is the singular body of Pacquiao taking blows, bouncing around the ring, and the eyes of the crowd staring at this ghostly, and ongoing, pummeling.

And with that simple gesture (well actually erasing a boxer takes painstaking frame-by-frame work), the viewer is confronted with a singular body. The image suddenly becomes bizarre, absurd, surreal. Suddenly, this normalized spectacle of violence is represented to us and we begin to take in all the other component parts. We become, yes, aware of Pacquiao the boxer, but also the background, the ring, the infrastructure itself comes slightly into view. By erasing, Pfeiffer reveals.

And part of that reveal hints at a pulling back of the curtain of the vast structures set up to allow us to gaze, gaze, gaze. In 2008, as part of the Sydney Biennial, Pfeiffer introduced his work. The eight-meter wide model presented what a million-person stadium could look like. It was a stadium for the globe. Working with the architects of the architecture team of the Olympic Stadium, the work nods to the infrastructure of spectacle and takes its name, of course, from the first century BC Roman architect Vitruvius.

And of course, the term caryatid as well is pulled from antiquity and again, carries architectural references. A caryatid is an architectural female support structure often used as a pillar. It’s not the most obvious term for this series of sports-focused works, but clearly, there is more going on than sports here. For the term is taken from ancient Greek architecture and a caryatid is a body that holds up a temple. They are figures of beauty whose grace upheld tremendous weight and social infrastructure. With that in mind, we are clearly asked by Pfeiffer and the artworks in question, whose body and whose temple? The eight-meter wide model presented what a million-person stadium could look like. It was a stadium for the globe. Working with the architects of the architecture team of the Olympic Stadium, the work nods to the infrastructure of spectacle and takes its name, of course, from the first century BC Roman architect Vitruvius.

To sum up, then, sports and religion are, theoretically, ‘soul mates,’ as athletes, fans, and believers alike ‘recite similar liturgies,’ ‘divide the world into winners and losers’, ‘require total commitment of body and mind,’ and are ‘bathed in myth and sustained by ritual." 

Michael Serazio, The Power of Sports, Media and Spectacle in American Culture



More than an industry, sports is a temple. It is not only economically irrational (cities lose money on them, fans splurge on them) but they are also subject to laws of devotion that exceed many other forms of cultural identity. The sports fan, and even those in their orbit, are nearly cult-like in their affections. The easiest corollary is religion itself. For the desire to belong, and identity, to wear colors, and claim mascots, to bring a sense of belonging to an alienated populace is the kind of sociological work often done by one’s god, priest, temple and church.

This temple is not just one of sports per se, but more importantly, one of belonging. It is one of collective viewing. Not surprisingly, Paul Pfeiffer has an equal fascination with large-scale religious services, and sees, and feels in the big church culture, a direct connection with his interest in sports. The operatic collective moment of devotion and ritual in the age of mass spectacle and culture making machines has become his subject of cultural ethnography.

As we look at this work

 by Pfeiffer, we are struck by the intensity of the eyes of the crowd (both in the room and the implied, television broadcasting to the world). We are not only viewing, but with his painstaking intervention of erasure, Pfeiffer has the viewer view the apparatus and social implications of viewing itself. Tongue twister yes. We are caught up in the moment of a gladiatorial battle with pageantry, music, devotion, and heartbreak. And in this experience of collective awe, fascination, primal collective visual culture, we also are part of the wave of global attention spans that says more about our need for myth, totems, and ritual than our modern philosophy would have us believe.

The temple is not only a physical place of collectivity, but perhaps more importantly in the digital dematerialized age, we are temporally together. The boxing match (like all sports) is an event of the ever-powerful, ever-galvanizing, now. The collectivity of the watching, the at-the edge-of-your-seat feeling, is not only a seductive deployment of the ritualistic needs of a global populace, but also a commercially and intentionally directed use by a vast infrastructure of sports. The now has power and the new, in and of itself, produces a temporary, and important, temple.


"Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution" 

— Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World



Sports are also about bodies and none more so than boxing itself. “I like boxing because the figures are nearly naked,” Pfeiffer said to me during a Twitter spaces. The eye naturally relates, sympathizes, and is affected by bodies. Particularly in the work of Pfeiffer, as one boxer has been removed, we become acutely aware of a singular body, that of Manny Pacquiao, moving, diving, ducking across the ring. As a viewer, one cannot help but be caught in the peculiar experience of identifying with both the body of Manny as well as the attacks of the invisible foe. We are both punisher and punished as we see the numerous punches land on the physical form of this everyday man from the Philippines.


Sports are physical by nature and what that says about a global population that experiences much of the world through its eyes, is telling. In American football, large men bash into each other with such severity that concussions are a regular part of the sport. Despite ongoing documentaries and studies on the effects of concussions resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the world of American football remains an ongoing juggernaut of ratings and advertising. In boxing and ultimate fighting championship, faces dripping with blood are a regular part of the viewing experience. In basketball, elbows fly, knees crash, and balls are slammed into a net.

In the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight, Pacquiao landed 81 punches and Mayweather 148. Throughout his heralded lifetime, Pacquiao has had 72 fights and has been knocked out three times. In an average boxing match, Pacquiao receives about 80 punches so after 72 fights, this man’s body has been pummeled, beaten, bloodied, and bruised for the world to witness, enjoy, and pay to see.

In short, we remain, as ever, in the age of the gladiator and mass spectacle.

"Images are sent and received instantly by every handheld device around the globe in the blink of an eye. The recent electoral cycle in the US reveals the extent to which people live in siloed realities. The algorithmic filtering of information and viewpoints forms a structure of self-encapsulating feedback loops. Isolation bubbles." 

— Paul Pfeiffer, Aperture Magazine, August 2021



Most notably, and importantly, the artwork 

 by Paul Pfeiffer is his genesis NFT drop. And as we interrogate the role of the body and sports in digital circulation, we can’t help but consider what this means as the speed, technologies, and distribution techniques of web3 offer a new vehicle for the body to circulate. For certainly, just as in the age of televised media, and then streaming media, sports and the role of the physical body offer an important, and powerful, device by which to understand the transformation of our mediated landscape. In Pfeiffer’s 

. in particular, we find an opportunity to witness the body again in motion under new conditions.

Unsurprisingly but tellingly, sports and NFTs early on have had a deep and currently unfolding relationship. Launched in 2020, Dapper Labs, the creators of the seminal NFT project CryptoKitties, made a splash with the launch of their digital sports card company, NBA Top Shots. Sports fans and NFT collectors alike are able to buy, sell, and trade their favorite tokenized video clip whether it is LeBron James making slam dunks or a classic Stephen Curry three-pointer.

Additionally, the notion of utility of the user (a phraseology that has become a part of the NFT experience) has perhaps found its most traction with sports fans, who are already waist-deep in digital ticketing and collectibles. NFTs have been widely embraced across every league within the span of about two years.

And finally, the connection between fantasy football (or perhaps more generally sports betting) and the namesake of the web3 generation degen (as in degenerate gambler) cannot be ignored. The power of the now to produce analyzation, data accumulation and ultimately, speculation is part and parcel of this dematerialized temporarily urgent culture. In October of 2022, the premier fantasy football sports betting app, DraftKings, adopted NFTs into their digital repertoire. The power to make a bet is baked into sports and web3 in no uncertain terms.

And this is all to say something at the root of the 

 series and all the more so with the genesis launch of Paul Pfeiffer’s 

., that this entire infrastructure of the now, the speculation, and the spectacularization rests, hard, on the vulnerable and physical body. The attention span of the globe turns to watch the pummeling, beating, and light bulb flashing, and in so doing, Pfeiffer asks us to also turn that camera lens back on the ring, the stadium, the streaming, the crowd, the spectator.

Paul Pfeiffer's genesis NFT collection 

 launched on Artwrld's platform on June 7, 2023. The collection consists of two long-form video works (each an edition of 5 plus 1 AP) and 

 (each unique and variable in duration). 

Ready To Rumble: A Letter from the Curator by Nato Thompson

 by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy confronts the viewer with a recognizable jumbled environment; a dizzying array of disparate, jarring, familiar and synthetic images sutured together. Redwoods scroll by like an early 80s television locating a channel. Gray snow-covered mountains tower up into a moody, dingy sky above. Sage grass plays along the banks of flickering ponds and bathers with twisted Francis Bacon-like faces gather along glitchy shores. Strip-mined hilltops mingle with pine tree branches and puddles and gently rippling lakes. Any one of these elements would be quietly odd in their own right, but the aggregate of these disparate landscapes, bodies of water, trees, and sky provides a world askew and hypnotic. The mind reels to comprehend the complex information coming across on screen. And in fact, as is the purpose of this essay, many complex factors provide that visceral gut feeling one initially experiences in encountering these digital artworks.

One of the more immediate observations is that these works are separated by what feel like rough-hewn coordinates. Hand-cut zones appear to delineate the various sections that comprise the overall image. As inspiration for this work, the McCoys utilized a series of cut-out zones that lend shape to the various parts of these digital collage artworks. The results were a series of areas that correlated to various typographies of the landscape such as water, land, sky, trees. Being quite literal in their interpretation, the McCoys cut out spaces for land, sea, sky, and trees.

“Stormy seas off the Alabama coast” and “Skys above the desert near Las Vegas”

Their next step is to create archives of AI-generated source material by feeding in prompts such as “Stormy seas off the Alabama coast” and “Skys above the desert near Las Vegas”.. Using the popularized AI image generator StableDiffusion, the resulting images are culled from various materials representing the geography of the American landscape in all 50 states. This collage imagery is the aggregate of these source materials randomly fed into the various zones and thus, creates a bricolage of sourced images; a generative, digitized and highly hybridized landscape.

The McCoys' methodology appears straightforward enough, and its origin not only develops out of their nearly 30 years of making art, but also borrows heavily from a long history of art-making processes and innovations. The one I want to discuss in more length is the history of collage. Collage, that art form that initially meant images made using glue and sticking things together. Collage is by nature disjointed and developed by way of found materials. Art history often begins the story of collage in the early 20th century with the Cubists 

 and the pioneering spirit of the modernist avant-garde. In their anti-representational spirit, they found true energy in sticking wallpaper, bits of magazines, and even found domestic objects onto the canvas itself. They wanted the viewer to understand that sight itself was a construction. And that this simple act of bringing disparate materials together allowed one to appreciate a basic lesson through the juxtaposition of different forms of sight. And clearly, I bring this up due to that same maneuver in 

Collage, of course, dates back before the early 20th century. And to state the obvious, it did not begin with two famous male painters. Paper was invented in China AD 105. It doesn’t take long before the invention of paper, that people are sticking and gluing materials together to produce new and inventive meanings. For much of its history, collage was considered a craft using materials around the home and at times, magazines or wallpaper. When in art history, people say “craft” they also mean a few factors that run counter to the western avante-garde narrative. Craft was often female, often found inside the home, and often incorporated traditional forms. Crafts use ordinary materials and its results clearly indicate the everyday qualities of its representation. Why say this all? To make the case that craft and collage are deep friends, and that history still travels with collage today, even in these artworks as they deal with Artificial Intelligence and modernist photographic techniques.

When the surrealists took up collage, they of course couldn’t but dwell on the more sexual and intimate qualities of what collage implied. For the surrealists, collage meant “to cohabitate” or in  a more dicey manner, “to live in sin”. Things that shouldn’t be together (under one roof, in a bedroom, with the door locked) become intrinsically bound together. Images that are meant to stay at arms distance, are conjoined. Unnallowed couplings emerge. The subconscious, as they loved to invoke, did not differentiate histories and materials, but instead synthesized these various symbols into a language of desire.

"Let’s face it, is not an art-making couple, a collage in and of itself?"

The history of collage sits well alongside the McCoys. Looking over their vast career of merging cinema, technology, developed software, ready-made techniques, semiotics, personal narratives, performance art, and the list goes on, a history of mash-ups, peculiar couplings, discordant juxtapositions and a deep awareness of the viewer emerges. We find a collaboration and/or an aberration as ever integral to each work. Let’s face it, is not an art-making couple, a collage in and of itself? Do they not, in making art together, embody a certain living in sin of the artist? As the Dadaists enjoyed collage because it de-centered the author so too does the artist-couple duo inherently challenge the author-genius narrative.

In previous artworks by the McCoys, various experiments transpire in landscape, depictions of urbanism, juxtapositions of historic technology, and always, a self-awareness around the mediums of representation. Take for example, their 

 with works like Clouds #1, Man (2005), Clouds #4, UFO (2005), Clouds #8, Airport (2005). Each work is inspired by the

 Equivalence Series (1925-1934) by early photographer Alfred Stieglitz

 wherein he photographed numerous clouds in the sky, and because they became so abstract, the photograph is credited as being the first to liberate the subject from its context; to make the subject abstract. For their Clouds series, the McCoys created small media surveillance contraptions equipped with a video screen and a small cylinder with cotton wool attached. As the cylinder rotates, the camera captures the movement of the wool, presenting it as the backdrop on the video screen which has a variety of subjects painted on its surface. The result is a poetic dreamy image wherein its construction is readily present and part of the work itself.

There is a tinkering quality to their oeuvre where cinematic and photographic images integrate into a larger artwork that overtly demonstrates its technological and at times, quaint, construction. Building on the Marshall McLuhan adage that the medium is the message, the McCoys’ work presents both the message as well as the medium.

And as part of that strategy is ever a combination of antiquated and contemporary. In their work from 2014, 

, the McCoys painted a fantastical landscape inside a shadow box equipped with a video screen, photographs, and sculptural palm trees and ferns. A physical and technological collage of materials, Terminal Beach presented a dreamy depiction of the Adobe headquarters in San Jose, California. This is just one of many uses of landscape by the McCoys.

Wrapped up in the eye of the beholder, artists have long sought to paint the majestic qualities of what they see. What the McCoys have achieved in their ongoing use of the technologies of seeing, is that we come to appreciate the specific vantage point, and perhaps promise, that each technology has to offer. And perhaps by stitching these different forms together, the viewer comes to appreciate and contextualize the inherent technological and social formation of these promises.

So what do our mediums say to us today? What is their promise?

, as an example, in painting the great frontiers of the American West not only illuminated the majestic qualities of the great wilderness, he simultaneously lent a visceral reality to profound American expansion. Each medium and its connected artists often present the ambition of the era. And so, of course with this artwork, we must also ask what is the promise of AI-generated images? Before we answer that, allow me to quickly recount an important question that Jennifer McCoy proposed, “But what about the monster?” The monster she refers to has come up again and again in their early work and certainly presents itself here. That monster is the making of Dr. Frankenstein.

In 2000, the McCoys conducted two versions of what they called 

 (one online and one in an installation setting). Each version presented an auditory collage of fragments from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein of 1818. Using custom software, these tidbits of text (much like the 

and the Dadaist version of sound poetry) were re-organized into  ongoing and randomized blurts thus creating an entirely new creation. A reflexive artwork to say the least, but to spell it out, the collage that became the art embodies the spirit of Frankenstein himself. A jagged rough-hewn body developed by the technologies (old and new) of its era.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

And of course, Dr. Frankenstein gave life to a monster, did he not?  A corpse reanimated; his flesh sewn back together, soaked in contemporary chemicals, and brought to life by a spark of electricity. This mythic being conjured not only by way of Mary Shelley’s wonderfully dark imagination, but the zeitgeist of the industrial revolution. Famously, neither Frankenstein’s monster nor the villagers he encountered understood the seismic shifts in daily life that were occurring during this time and as Mary Shelley wrote, “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” This monster, of course, embodied this change in all its promise, flaws, hubris and visceral depravity.

So, as we end on the subject of Artificial Intelligence, we will do so in the lap of Frankenstein. For not only did Dr. Frankenstein scientifically give life to dead flesh, he did so by cobbling together various body parts to make a whole. With thread and needle, he sutured together desiccated limbs and torso, he plopped in an old brain – in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, the brain was labeled Abnormal which the assistant thought said the name of the owner, Abby Normal – and lent ambulation with a bolt of the high wattage future. Frankenstein’s monster presented the villagers with a living breathing aberration, an ambulatory collage of life and limb.

Usher in the use of StableDiffusion, the text-to-image generator used by the McCoys and many other artists in the last few months. For all the uses of the term” artificial intelligence” what they really mean is associative big data softwares. In the case of stable diffusion in Land, Sea and Sky, the McCoys provided prompts for the generation of the various landscapes that fill these cut-out zones. What we see are not, in fact, actual landscapes, but instead a vision of specific landscapes developed with what is being called Artificial Intelligence. The images possess glitches and mistakes that point toward their fabricated origins.

And certainly Artificial Intelligence can be seen as a corollary for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. A creature developed out of the potential and hubris of its time, met with extreme fear, hostility and set loose on a society still clinging to its old way of life. These landscapes provide not only a backdrop in this artwork but a vision of a place that is both recognizable, and simultaneously, never existed. That darkness, as it does in much of the McCoys’ work, certainly haunts these images.

But perhaps, to close out, let's do so in a glass half-full trajectory. For what stands out the most when one looks at Land Sea and Sky, is not the AI generated landscapes that collide and crash, but in fact, the hard edges of these zones that separate and arrange the image. The seams if you will. Rather than focus on what fills these zones, we can appreciate those hand-cut edges that bring them into contact. Rather than be afraid of the totality of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, we can appreciate that this lumbering body had to be healed and mended by way of prosaic materials such as a sewing needle and thread.

We can appreciate that this grand gesture of resurrection remains as ever a sympathetic attempt to ease the suffering of the human body. And in that attempt, like a living collage itself, we find the body a result of historic technologies ever shaping, twisting and perhaps, ultimately trying, to heal itself. In Land Sea and Sky, we witness a palimpsest of historic technologies and visual approaches, combined to present us with a discordant, jumbled landscape. We see something familiar and unfamiliar. A world topsy-turvy with different ideas of what vision, what landscape, can be. And yes, the reason they look ever so familiar, is that we ourselves, experience the world in this manner. We are all a living breathing collage. And magically, we are all Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Jennifer & Kevin McCoy's collection, Land Sea and Sky released on Artwrld's platform on April 5. The collection is comprised of 310 animated collage works – 300 short-form works available for random mint and 10 long-form works with audio available at a fixed price. Learn more about the collection 

A Sutured Sea and Sky: A Letter from the Curator by Nato Thompson

A Letter From the Curator by Nato Thompson

“ That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

This story is about flowers of course. These botanical harpies summon bees and lovers alike with prismatic elegance, delicate curves and abundant fragrance. Surpassing a symbol of beauty, is the equivalent of beauty itself. We gaze upon them. We desire them. We give them. We show our affection and concerns by sharing them on holidays, funerals, dates, and Valentine’s Day. Yes, the story begins with flowers. But the flowers that artist Jill Magid has brought to our attention, unlike those at your corner bodega or pinned to a lapel at prom, are farmed, sold, exchanged and desired in that world of online games.

To tell this story, we must introduce two unlikely characters  who met, of course, on an internet farm. We have to talk about Brock Pierce, the child actor of Mighty Ducks, who took his obsession with online gaming to found a company called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) in 2001 and then after its class action lawsuit demise in 2007 would go on to found cryptocurrency Tether and co-found trading crypto giant. Block.one. We must also, with admitted perversity and awe, introduce the enterprising super villain of the Trump administration and Breitbart news, Steve Bannon. This frumpy right wing zealot, would be brought on by IGE to raise $85 million dollars in venture capital through Goldman Sachs.

What brings this duo into this conversation is that for a period in the early 2000s Pierce and Bannon shared a commercial interest in the power of digital farming. And while ultimately this story is about flowers, in the early internet farming days, just like the dawn of agriculture in the fertile crescent, the story begins with harvesting. Pierce recognized the power of using low wages in China to get players to “farm” items in a digital game and then to sell that in-game currency for out-game money. In some cases, that meant literally gathering digital agriculture  in the game (as in flowers and wheat), but in general, the term farming meant the gathering of items to sell at a digital market in the game for digital gold. In the world of what are known as MMORPGs or Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games, it turns out you can grow digital plants. And ultimately, as Pierce demonstrated to Bannon, not only could you harvest on the internet, but  just like in the real world, these products have tremendous value.

Imagine this: you are playing this dungeons and dragons inspired online game World of Warcraft in the early 2000s. You are an orc wizard and you are running down a digital road with your global group of gnomes, elves and humans. Off to your left, you spy a player, out there in the fields harvesting. Furthermore, if you stayed long enough, you might also notice that that player continues to do that menial work for hours on end. What are they doing?  If you could jump through that internet to find out what kind of player would stand in a field for hours gathering with their digital hands the flowers and herbs, more likely than not, you would find that that player was a young Chinese man in Shanghai being paid 25 cents an hour. And the company that paid these workers for this menial and exhausting task, in a form of labor known as gold farming, was none other than the company Internet Gaming Entertainment.

"Games are work. There are economies popping up in games now because people value them."

While this story has been about digital harvesting, this artwork by Jill Magid focuses specifically on flowers (Magid still incorporates what she calls “Bannon wheat” in the artworks as well as a nod to the origin story where plants are the root of finance and trade).  Like many of Magid’s in-depth research-heavy artworks, her process starts with a point of interest and she follows the trail to where it leads. In this case, the trail begins with actual you-can-smell-them flowers and more specifically, the cheap flowers in plastic buckets found commonly in front of New York City corner bodegas. She was interested in their forlorn yet readily available status as an icon of New York City and how that corresponds to their street price. What made a bodega flower less valuable than a flower at a higher end florist’s shop?

In trying to understand the answer to such a basic question, Magid discovered that these flowers all actually grow on the same farms. They are not in fact, grown differently, or tilled by superior farmers. The soil is neither more oxygenated or enriched. In fact, what makes a bodega flower a bodega flower is a grading system that assesses the value of a flower based on its attributes of stem length, stem deviation, flower diameter, and stem strength to determine its beauty.

Take a beat on that: a grading system to determine both economic and aesthetic value of a body. Does not the flower not stand in for vulnerable bodies writ large?

In November of 2022, Magid installed a new artwork 

 (2022) at the Modern Art Museum Ft. Worth. Consisting of hundreds of fresh cut bodega flowers displayed in the plastic buckets, the flowers greeted visitors evoking their experience as graded bodies in circulation. This individual project had also spun out of a larger public art project with Creative Time (the non-profit partner on this project ) titled 

, where Magid engraved the phrase “The Body was already so fragile” on 120,000 pennies from 2020. This number corresponds directly to the 1200 dollars issued by the Trump Administration through the CAREs Act. Thus, just like the bodega flowers, the body becomes equated with a financial number.

Her interest in both flowers and economic circulation were very much on her mind as she considered what it meant to create her first digital artwork secured through blockchain. She asked: what do flowers mean in online games? Or perhaps, more poetically, 

 As it turns out, as we have just described, they most certainly do. In fact, they are blooming widely, powerfully, excitedly and in vast, vast numbers. And thus, the seed of the project grew.

, Magid assembled a range of bouquets with high value flowers culled from a variety of epoch video games such as Final Fantasy, Mario Brothers, Minecraft and The Legend of Zelda. Each online game, as you probably know, transpires in a vast landscape unto itself replete with rich mythologies, terrifying monsters, specific forms of architecture, racial categories, and of course, plenty of weapons, potions, spells and yes, flowers. They are chalk full of the materials of life (each in their own gaming way).  And in creating these role playing games, these gaming companies construct relationships of desire, gifts, economies, value and exchange (just like the real world). This vast world developed by software programmers and enjoyed by millions transpires, to state the obvious, inside a realm highly controlled by private interests and power. And to state the obvious, the gaming industry is so moneyed, it is bigger than porn.

And thus, Magid’s flowers are both elegant and motley. The resolution on each flower differs widely with each game. Their underlying aesthetics vary. The power of each flower also corresponds obviously to the needs of each individual game. Some flowers are two dimensional and disappear upon rotation. Others are lifelike, bending with the breeze. One has a pop-up speech bubble that most definitely differentiates itself from the others. They are in essence plucked from their in-game environments to exist outside the game (or out-game as she likes to say) for us to appreciate, purchase, consider.

 means that some of these flowers’ properties only make sense in the environment of the games themselves. For the companies that produce them and the players that collect them, the value of these flowers ranging from their economic to cultural to utility predominately transpire in what is called a walled garden (yes, the agriculture metaphors never end). The gaming environments  are not only produced through their underlying programming code but obviously, through legal frameworks of intellectual property and copyright.

Within each game environment, these flowers hold values, powers, unlock possibilities, are sought after. For example, there is the black lotus plucked from, again, World of Warcraft. The Black Lotus is, of course, very rare in World of Warcraft. It was reported that in the days of gold farming a player could pay their rent with these if they could focus on selling them. There is also the Silent Princess based on the Wild Blue heart Tulip plucked from the massively popular game The Legend of Zelda. These flowers hold utility, beauty, and lend themselves to the ecosystem of in-game walled gardens.

 is commonly used in gaming circles, the term 

 is much more a creation of Jill Magid herself. In plucking these flowers from their in-game environments, Magid liberates the flowers into a very different reality altogether.  Magid calls these bouquets a series of 

 flowers and it is in their wrenching from their in-game environments that the social political dimension of the project edges its way to the fore. Pierce and Bannon recognized that if one could trade FIAT for in-game gold, then everything inside the game had a value outside of the game. Something profound transpires when items inside these games are mobilized outside their political, programmed and walled-gardened environments. So strangely, Magid shares a twisted kinship with Pierce and Bannon.

And of course, in the process of taking these flowers outside their native walled-garden environments, Magid is also dancing with the question of intellectual property and copyright. Like Dada collage artists of the early 20th century, the artwork comes into relief through  the juxtapositions of other ready-made source materials. Rather than a piece of paper with glossy magazine cut-outs, her end result is a bouquet of ready mades. Each bouquet consists of no less than three games represented in each bouquet, thus culling on the tradition, and important necessity of artists, to use fair-use in their appropriation of images in order to make a larger statement about the sources of meaning and culture in our everyday lives.

To put it mildly, flowers are the tip of the digital produce iceberg and certainly one could ruminate much about the implications of choosing flowers for example verses swords or potions or some dead monster’s horns. Clearly, Magid chose flowers for reasons beyond finding a symbol of trade. The flower offers a compelling lens to consider value, trade, images, and beauty in online games (and the world)  and to follow each thread is more than this essay can dig into. But certainly, we can briefly make it evident that there is a correlation between gender and flowers, the direct connection with concepts of beauty or even the actualization of the farming metaphor in an agricultural product. Each of these directions offers a critique or opening up of what the actual value systems that are transpiring in video games and how they connect in the out-game, at times, real world, environments

Finally, these bouquets are digital artworks with a secured provenance through blockchain technology. That is to say, basically, they are digital artworks secured by Non-Fungible Tokens. While this is Magid’s genesis NFT project, the direct connection between forces of value, ownership and aesthetics (that are the inherent part of the contract and the art being so intricately bound) is purposefully on the nose. Like flowers, behind an image of beauty, just under the surface, NFT artworks host a range of forces of value, rarity, distribution, circulation, power.

Certainly those in the web3 space are quite familiar with the grading systems of rarity and beauty that have come to be the calling card of an NFT drop. They are part and parcel of digital culture and hopefully, as this project quietly reveals, they have real world corollaries. And while all of this is true and has been for some time, the flower always retains its role as desirable and wanted. So, as this project drops poetically on Valentine’s Day, Magid offers this work as a way quietly enjoy a perverse but nevertheless, real form of affection, trade, value and love.

 launched on Artwrld's platform on Valentine's Day, February 14 to our allowlist. The collection consists of 165 hand-hacked bouquets–15 large with audio and 150 small bouquets–arranged with flowers plucked by Magid from the worlds most iconic video games. 

 to get notified about upcoming artist collaborations and collection drops. 

Do Flowers Grow on the Internet?

“A secret is powerful when it is empty."

"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

A lidded, captivating eye stares out from inside a pyramidal confine with rays of light emanating from its enigmatic gaze. This unflinching retina looks out from a time long lost and its ever pressing vision becomes palpable. What is this strange surveilling image? 

 famously resides on the backside of the United States dollar bill. Perhaps more than any other image, it evokes the cryptic and mystical allure of one of the more heralded and rightly critiqued secret societies in world history: The Freemasons. Certainly, like many Masonic images, it is meant to evoke several meanings at once and in their paradox and tensions resides a deeper, historic, meaning. For the eye can be an eye of a supreme being, God, looking over its people and weighing justice. But it can also stand in for an eye without a face, an eye ever watching, without us knowing who it is that is watching us.

Another image: A conical beehive too greets the viewer with its sign of industriousness and insect camaraderie. A homespun insectal abode known for honey now stands like an icon of the teamwork and social networking of a vast group of workers. A longstanding Masonic symbol, the beehive is an architectural honeycombed labyrinthine tower orchestrated by the natural world. Neither biblical nor an industrious tool, the beehive derives from an altogether different order of symbol making.

A final icon: a mason’s square and compass lay over each other forming the shape of yet another triangle. This image certainly evokes the masonic order itself highlighting the tools of architectural geometry. These two tools are identifiable with the early work of the Freemasons, whose skills as masonry allowed them to adorn the facades of churches and bridges across Europe from the 13th to 16th centuries. They are craftsman tools set across each other to form that pyramid, the number three, a triad that could reference either the holy trinity, the power of the geometric pyramid, or perhaps, the three orders of the Masonic degrees of initiation.

, the hypnotic NFT project by artist Marco Brambilla, explores the captivating iconography of the Masonic tradition and does so by way of the three levels of initiation: 

, each level offers an opportunity to not only focus on these enigmatic symbols, but to also set them into motion in three distinct manners — from object, to still life to composition. Each arrangement in each degree becomes a study in the meanings of the objects as they are solely displayed, set into conversation with each other and then finally, placed into the realm of time (and thus dissolution and death.)

This artwork spins out of a series of videos equally titled 

 featuring beehives, chalices, urns, scythes, and hourglasses hovering and rotating out of a deconstructing Temple of Solomon, set against a backdrop of the Watchful Eye. A kaleidoscope of Masonic imagery comes flying out at the viewer and Brambilla’s arrangement takes its cues from the vast, and visually stimulating, fantastical imagery of the Masons.

Brambilla often takes cultural artifacts, whether in this case from the Masonic tradition, or in another recent work 

 (2022), from cultural materials from the silver screen of Hollywood to produce Heironymous Bosch-like settings. They are dazzling, eye-popping and full of the found world of imagery we have come to know. Found moving imagery spirals, twirls, gasps and gestures, in an overwhelming array of meanings and implications. The sheer volume of the iconography that Brambilla often deploys leaves the viewer in a state of surplus, of excess, of a gluttony of vision.

 makes public the visual culture of this long-standing fraternal order whose ranks are as much heralded as critiqued. We are confronted with husks of corn, ladders, a compass, a skull, and many other macabre and prosaic tools and images that allow a unique set of compositions and relationships to emerge that speak to a different sense through which to interpret the world.

By no accident, 

transpires in the realm of web3 (the realm of crypto so to speak) where the good, bad, and ugly of secrecy, image making and community are put into a dynamic and sudden set of entanglements. Crypto itself is born in secrecy with the white paper that developed bitcoin, created by a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto. Much speculation has transpired as to the true identity of Satoshi, but the fact that a form of currency which develops by way of complex algorithms (or riddles) is founded by a person whose identity has yet to be revealed, only scratches the surface about the connections, and perhaps problems, of two cultures whose modus operandi depends in large part on secrets. Secrets have long been a part of structures that run counter to dominant forms of power and thus, allowing them to produce new forms of power.

In a strange historic mirror, we find a world rich in iconography culled from a variety of cultural influences that unlock, reveal, obscure, misdirect and always offer speculation as to where these meanings are headed and what their intentions are. Without praising this realm of fraternal camaraderie, Brambilla hoists a shrouded mirror full of paradox and tensions, pointing toward a secret society and symbols that are both captivating and chalk full of light and darkness. This artwork isn’t meant to uplift or praise so much as to explore, study, put into conversation. The Masons were a fraternal order often consisting predominantly of white men in power and with that comes a highly problematic, and all too familiar, history that has shaped inequities for millennia.

For Brambilla, however, 

 focuses on these wild iconographic images that spill out of their vast lore. They are evocative in part due to their motley assemblage of references ranging from actual, hand-in-the-dirt masonry, to Egyptology, to Christianity, to lost gnostic lore. It is this near lack of cultural allegiance to any one symbolic order that hints at a quiet subculture whose spiritual affinities are outside the range of traditional society, and in that, they offer intrigue and many times, apprehension.

The Freemasons emerged in the early 13th century as a guild of stone masons. They were builders to be certain and their handicraft at the construction of cathedrals and bridges were much sought over. The stone masons were well aware of the power of their knowledge and they controlled its dissemination and those that were allowed to gain access to it. Each stage of entry into the order was considered both a spiritual and enlightened step, but perhaps more importantly, a step into the upper ranks of control and power. Thus the guild formed and they used their control of their market to leverage large contracts with the largest employers in the land: the Catholic Church and the various monarchies.

It is during this period that the secrets of geometry, mathematics and early physics, began to take hold. Beyond the church, it appeared that inside the very fabric of the lived world, there was a deeper truth, perhaps even a secret truth. So, with these images of levels, compasses, plumb lines, and trowels, what we are also witnessing is a set of tools that allowed those that could use them to access a truth — a spiritual truth beyond that which the church offered.

Like any guild with its relationship to management, the dynamic was quite fraught and full of struggle. Secrecy became tantamount early on as the church and the monarchy often tried to do away with the Masons in order to open up their corner on their much-needed market. So, to be quite short, a secret society of Masons emerged that developed complex symbols and meanings in order to communicate a different personal, political and perhaps spiritual trajectory. Like any historical relic that lasts over 100 years (let alone 700), the organization itself has mutated, shifted, changed and evolved radically since its more literal and handicraft beginnings. Far from a guild, the Masons evolved into a highly organized secret society of men in power between the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, they have perhaps run their course and play host to lodges and drinking halls in major cities around the world.


For Brambilla, The Orders offers a chance to tear these various symbols out of their Masonic shadowlands, and to place them into digital space. 

Totemic, spinning, and curious, each symbol acts as a crucible of meaning (much like a tarot card). They point toward historic and contemporary tensions and also allow us to encounter them in the digital realm.

In the first stage, 

, the focus is on the individual or as the Masons describe it, the rough stone from the quarry. This raw form requires shaping and polishing. The tools that are made available to the initiate are those that allow them to work on themselves, their vices, and their self-control, such as the common gavel and the rough ashlar.


, each object quietly spins alone in solitude. This initial stage is both the object as well as the subject. Hinting at the lone individual, this work allows the viewer to not only consider the object on hand, but what that individual object means in respect to themselves. For the Masons, the initiate works on their own sense of humility and desire for work. Like any organization, the initiates were the grunt workers whose skills were utilized for larger organizational needs. Here we find the core objects of the artwork including: the level, the compass and square, the chalice, and the anchor, among others.

In the second stage, 

, the Mason becomes a skilled craftsman and the lessons are geared toward refinement and brotherly love. This emphasis on perfection and camaraderie are what inspire Brambilla’s next phase of 

. Here we are introduced to a set of juxtapositions of three objects. Just as in the Masonic tradition, the second stage offers a moment to reflect on collectivity, and in this case, the new meanings develop when three sets of meanings are put into relationship with each other.

 is introduced to the trowel. The trowel is a tool that allows the mason to spread cement across the stones and bind them together into a common structure. The trowel is a tool that not only represents the shaping of a collective object, but also a collective object that exists through time. In the final stage of the Masonic levels and particularly in Brambilla’s 

, the final stage confronts time itself.

We are confronted with a central floating object with three objects orbiting, deconstructing and reconstructing over time. This final stage emphasizes the existence of time, with its handmaiden’s death and birth as a central figure in the orbiting and movement of these Masonic objects. In the Masonic tradition, the final stage tackles many subjects, but death figures most prominently. The role of a society is to not only care for its members of the now, but for its consideration and construction of a world yet to come. In this final stage, the Masons introduce symbols more cryptic and unnerving such as the skull, the scythe, the hourglass, the heart, the urn, and the sword.

Brambilla makes dazzling use of the already highly fetishized and saturated imagery of the Masons. In keeping with his incredible oeuvre, he deploys the already heavily laden images of our society and throws them back into play in front of us in dazzling, hypnotic arrangements that allow us to see them in a new, and revealing manner. Operatic in scope, this three part arrangement offers an opportunity to consider the vast iconography of this fading, but once powerful, fraternal order. While the meanings are ever in flux, what remains clear as a bell in

, in the Masonic tradition, and crypto-culture in general, is the power, allure, and long-standing resilience of secrecy itself.



 will be released on Artwrld’s platform in three phases with artworks that evolve in both complexity and rarity. Presale Suites from the collection go on sale from September 12 - 17 which are comprised of nine Apprentice Objects and one Fellow Craft Still Life. On September 19, the Entered Apprentice tier will unlock with a 24-hour open edition mint of Apprentice Objects followed by a limited mint of Fellow Craft Still lifes on September 20. The most distinguished works from the collection, the Master Mason Compositions, are available on an 

Curatorial Essay