One of the most-discussed cultural shifts of the past two years is the unprecedented surge of interest in digital art. Although galleries, museums, and festivals have been publicly exhibiting digital art for decades, its sudden popularity is tied to the relatively new phenomenon of trading digital assets (including artworks and also cryptocurrencies, collectibles, and memes) via blockchains, or distributed ledgers of digital records secured by cryptography. Formerly known as “computer art,” digital art first emerged in the 1960s, when artists and technologists began using computers to create novel aesthetic forms, such as algorithmically-generated abstract compositions. Today, it is a diverse field that includes not only digital images, videos, and 3D printed sculptures, but also networked, interactive experiences ranging from websites to virtual worlds, online games, and social media performances. Despite their technological novelty, many of these works explore the same themes that recur throughout modern and contemporary art, including the relationship between abstraction and figuration, the creativity of the unconscious mind, and the definition of art as a conceptual system. Inarguably, blockchains have helped create new markets and audiences for digital art; in rarer cases, blockchains have become a new medium, as some digital artists use blockchain-based tokens and smart contracts just as painters use canvas or sculptors use marble.

Since its founding in 1862 as one of the world’s first museums devoted to the art of the present, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) has helped define artistic movements as they emerge. For example, the AKG presented the first major museum survey of photography in 1910 (organized by Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession), helping to legitimate these new images as examples of fine art that deserve to be displayed alongside paintings and sculptures. As digital technologies increasingly influence every aspect of our lives, the AKG has an important opportunity — and even responsibility, given its mandate to operate in the public trust — to help identify the artists who are creatively and critically exploring the aesthetic potentials and social consequences of these powerful new tools. Museums regularly organize group exhibitions to map the terrain at the cutting edge of art; singling out key digital artists from the broad field of those who have experimented with blockchains amplifies those approaches that are shaping the evolution of not only art markets, but also art history. Many of these artists are even shaping technology itself, whether by pioneering new applications or questioning its supposed “neutrality.”

Building on its history and mission, the AKG has organized Peer to Peer, an exhibition of new artworks made by 13 of the leading artists who are exploring the impact of blockchains on the production and distribution of digital art and the future of the internet. Mirroring the global networks of digital art since the 1990s and blockchains since the 2010s, these artists are from not only North America and Europe, but also Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Their works similarly exemplify the rich diversity of digital art: they were produced with a variety of technologies and applications, from Artificial Intelligence to 3D modeling and Microsoft Word to Processing. The resulting works exist in a range of formats, from PDFs and PNGs to GIFs, MOVs, software applications, and smart contracts. Importantly, the artists in this show approach their respective tools and mediums as productive constraints, thereby drawing our attention to their capabilities.

At the same time as they contribute to a larger conversation about technology, the works in Peer to Peer also update or expand our notion of different artistic genres and aesthetic strategies. For example, one might classify roughly a third of the works as figurative (Mitchell Chan, Amir Fallah, Auriea Harvey, Osinachi, Sarah Zucker); another third as generative (Entangled Others, Casey Reas, Itzel Yard/Ix Shells, Anne Spalter); and a final third as conceptual works dealing with blockchains and the metaverse (LaTurbo Avedon, Simon Denny, Sarah Friend, Rhea Myers). But they also prompt a reevaluation of those art-historical paradigms: what does it mean to make “figurative” art after processes like photogrammetry have transformed how we model volumes in space, “generative” art after algorithms have infiltrated every moment of our lives, or “conceptual” art after the dematerializations of the information economy?

To foreground these questions, Peer to Peer stages an exchange between these artists and their historical “peers,” pairing each new work with an existing work in the AKG’s renowned collection of modern and contemporary art. The new works are less digital recreations of their analog antecedents than responses that speak in more or less direct ways to their concepts or composition. Of course, the practice of citing other artists is itself a time-honored tradition in art, as each generation works through (and defines itself against) the achievements of its peers and predecessors. The collection artworks selected by the artists in Peer to Peer are as varied as their homages, including a genre painting by Winslow Homer; neo-classical caryatids by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; a Surrealist landscape by René Magritte; an abstract composition by Mark Rothko; and a language-based work by Joseph Kosuth. The exhibition thereby celebrates both the continued relevance of the historical “peers” to our contemporary moment and the contributions of the new “peers” to art’s ever-expanding network of ideas. The exhibition also highlights the important role of the museum as a facilitator of encounters between artists over generations, thanks to its commitment to conserving cultural heritage.

Peer to Peer is an online exhibition presented in partnership with Feral File, which has emerged as a leading platform for curated exhibitions of file-based artworks. Although the exhibition has an end date, it will in fact remain viewable on the Feral File website — a new model for making museum exhibitions more accessible. After the first week of the exhibition, the works in the show will be offered for purchase as limited editions sustainably registered on the Ethereum blockchain. Half the proceeds from the sales will benefit the museum, which reopens in 2023 with a state-of-the-art gallery dedicated to media art and a hands-on digital technology lab. As the Buffalo AKG’s first fully-online exhibition and fundraiser, Peer to Peer is an experiment in how the museum might adopt (or adapt) new technologies to continue supporting those artists whose practices expand the practice of art, as well as art’s audiences.

In computing, “peer to peer” networks decentralize file-sharing, allowing users to send and receive files directly between computers, without relying on a centralized database that is controlled by a single authority. The exhibition’s title is thus also a provocation about the future of museums: how might our institutions change if we imagine them not only as centralized repositories, but also as a kind of cultural protocol facilitating the open exchange of ideas between artists and their contemporary peers, historical predecessors, cultural workers, and public audiences? We may then also want to ask the inverse about the future of technology: how might blockchains change if we imagine them not simply as autonomous agents of decentralization that will make existing institutions obsolete, but also as public infrastructures embedded within — and accountable to — the larger social sphere?