For this series, Katja approached two fellow friends and artists, Kevin Bray and Alexandra Martens Serrano – both based in Amsterdam – to work on the project. The artists decided to develop a series of works which would seamlessly blend their artistic visions into something unique and appropriately weird for the new medium of NFTs.
The artists approached the theme of Raise Your Voice and the environmentally conscious aspect of Voice, the NFT platform for creators, by creating a collection that channeled the ‘voices’ of living things that cannot speak human language or communicate at all beyond their nature: animals, their genomes, proteins, microbes, mutants, biological networks, artificial organisms, laboratory experiments and other beings that exist between the categories of the living and non-living. They wanted to emphasize that in the age of synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology, collapse of biodiversity, widespread pollution and depletion of wilderness a massive re-articulation of life is taking place. On every scale, from a cell to the ocean, something like plastic pollution affects all forms of life, and most of it cannot speak back. Even processes within our own human bodies remain silent, and often the most affected communities remain unheard. The only way these shifts manifest is through our observation of their consequences and human-made scientific models that only approximate reality. The artists decided to translate these relationships into something culturally tangible and yet appropriately abstract – angel-like beings. With a given name and a virtual body, each angel captures and speaks for a certain aspect of contemporary ecological upheaval. The religious subtext of the series only points to our human need for symbolic interpretation of environmental change on scales beyond our control and comprehension.
Creating the angels, each artist was inspired by the visual language of 3D graphics commonly used in scientific visualizations of bio-molecular processes. Then, slick 3D forms are combined with raw pixelated lines and noise, emphasizing the contrast between things we definitely know and those we can only assume. They combined scientifically accurate models with speculative virtual sculptures that resemble proteins, embryos, cells, spines, ancient organisms, organs and tissues. Simple loops and motion bring the angels to life: they are breathing, birthing, assembling, moving, transcribing biological code, sending messages and so on. Together this series and our collaboration attempts to bridge the categories of living and non-living, art and non-art. As an NFT collection the works literally bring new life to the blockchain.
All NFTs are available as one of ten for purchase on Voice. Three more NFTs in the collection will drop later this month.
