CASE STUDY: CULTURAL INSTITUTIONINSTITUTION: The Museum of Modern Art
TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS: Feral File & Tezos
Background
Seeking a new way to engage with blockchain technology following their successful collaboration with Refik Anadol, MoMA wanted to develop a creative tool that would attract new museum audiences, engage existing audiences, and further their experiments with web3. Creative ideation was crucial: any engagement had to feel like a natural extension of MoMA’s institutional mission and values while building upon the breadth of their permanent collection.
The Concept
MoMA, Feral File, and Tezos created The Postcard Project: an interactive tool for friends to collaboratively design digital postcards using blockchain technology. The concept was inspired by the mail art movement of the 1950s, where artists exchanged works via postal services, and Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture”, by which an artist creates structures of human coordination as artworks. The Postcard Project enables 15 friends to design their own pixel-art stamp and affix it to a 5x3 grid, sending the postcard around the world via the Feral File app and minting their collaborative creation on the Tezos blockchain. A dynamic interface for social exchange, each Postcard serves as a micro-community within the broader Postcard community.
The Kick Off
To kick off the project and illustrate the concept, MoMA invited 15 leading artists to co-create postcards together. These artists come from diverse backgrounds and practices but are united by their shared engagement with and understanding of blockchain technology. Each artist devised a verbal prompt for a postcard, which was then passed around all the participating artists to create a collection of digital mail art. The “First 15” postcards traversed 35 cities, 11 countries, and 5 continents, and included the artists Kim Asendorf, Peter Burr, Dmitri Cherniak, Linda Dounia, Sarah Friend, LoVid, Anna Lucia, Operator, Osinachi, p1xelfool, Ykxotkx, Casey Reas, IX Shells, Sasha Stiles, and Grant Yun.
Whitney’s Participation
As a member of the Tezos team, I supported the project with strategic ideation, funding approval, blockchain integration, and beta testing.
As a member of the Feral File team, I supported the project launch, roll out, and ongoing management of the project.
Read More:
MoMA Magazine, “MoMA Postcard: Collaboration and Creativity on Blockchain", 3 October 2023.
The Art Newspaper, “Mail art meets NFTs for all in the ‘MoMA Postcard’ programme” by Clara Che Wei Peh, 24 November 2023.
Right Click Save, “HELLO WORLD | The MoMA Postcard” by Madeleine Pierpont, 3 October 2023.
NFT Now, “Exclusive Interview: Inside MoMA’s Web3 Embrace With Postcard Project” by Arthur Parkhouse, 3 October 2023.
Anna Lucia, Vermillion-Network-Architecture, Prompt: “a path from A to B.”
Operator, Puce-Radial-Etching, Prompt: “Number of hearts you’ve broken (romantic love or not). Black pixels, white background, numeric characters only. Please sign.”