Anne Duffau

This time we look at 60s/70s psychedelic subculture with its acidic colours, geometric animations and absurd scenarios. Here the board is a selections of the most appealing ones, to make us trip and dream.

Psychedelia

We are all Weebs! Obsessed with Japanese animes, video games and comic books.
In this board, the focus is on famous anime characters such as Haki, Azuki or Demon Slayer's Kitsune Mask. From fandom drawings to short animations that refer to a video game scene or a famous super power, "Hadouken!" they all represent a world of pastel teenage spirit with a twist of otherworldly and magic nostalgia.

Manga and Video Games

A selection focusing on “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” And “Shocking Excess”!
Notes On ‘Camp’, Susan Sontag, (from ‘Against Interpretation and Other Essays’) 1966
Une fille au masculin / Un Gaçon Féminin
Maquillé comme mon fiancé
Et on se prend la main 
(A feminine boy A masculine girl Make up like my fiancé
And we take each other’s hand) from Indochine 3rdSex 1985

CAMP

https://thecurated.app/board/215

A series of sensory works from pleasure to pain, when our brain translate visual into sensations. Our brain translate one experience into multiple perception, here visuals being stimuli for multiple senses, often to do with haptics or tactics feelings but not only.

Synesthesia and Haptics sensations

Djinns
Witches 
Spirits
Sorcery
Mystic
Psychic
Salads & Tigers 
From the occult to a thousand and one nights / From Hydor to endless summers, this selection explores obscures and wizardry NFTs, from ancient tales to myths, from time travels to games and absurd commercials.
A spell of bewitchment, ethereal and uncanny nature summoned by a web3 necromancer.

Magic, otherworldly & the ethereal 

Extraordinary from SuperHero to Mythical characters

Xibalba Death

Ai Origin Moon

ADHISTA / Sunrising 002

Essence of the Dying Star

Sky Vessel

/ REFRESH /

This selection explores the fascination that many of us have for concepts such as infinity and space. Questioning what this uncharted, boundless field represents in terms of scientific discovery but also in the common imagination: is there life in another universe, another galaxy? Could there be another Earth (to save us from our dystopian Anthropocene)? Would this be an option?


Even though more than 80% of the ocean is unmapped, the human species cannot help but invest in space exploration, trying to find the unknown or the most urgent option instead of saving what we already have. This is an illogical paradox that characterizes political and mainly economic endeavors of our 21st century: imperialistic minds in power investing in useless space races, developing dysfunctional exploding rockets instead of researching natural resources that we could still (maybe) save. On the positive side, space exploration has led to the invention of GPS, solar cells, and ultraviolet filters.


Cinema has fed my fascination for this unlimited and intangible place, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Space is The Place to Moon, the Extant series, and many more! A common element is that the disrupting factor in the supposedly smooth running of a mission comes from the extraordinary, from outer space; it triggers dramatic outcomes. Maybe we could pinpoint it as the encounter between human and space that generates powerful consequences from outer to inner spaces, mainly due to human thirst for power.

Space is the place

#004 CALLED ME HAPPINESS

Lockdown

Pandemic

COLORFUL SILENCE

Excited Mind

Shoulder angel

Divorce

The Mystery v4-dv1

Blood & Damp

In this selection we look at the concept of kawaii to horror, which features as an inspiration in many NFTs. 
 
Kawaii in Japanese culture refers to what is lovely, cute, adorable and derives from the saying kao hayhushi, which means one’s face is blushing as well as (from other morphemes) dazzling, glaring, and awkward/embarrassing. It is embodied by humans and non-humans, anthropomorphic creatures that are charming, vulnerable, shy, and childlike.
 
It is seen as a rebellious style against adulthood but originally, in the 1970s, it characterized a new style of writing at school where pupils would use thin pencil and stylized their texts with lines, hearts, stars, and Latin characters. It was adopted as a trend against the rigidity of the post-WWII Japanese government. The style was recuperated by brands and advertising such as the stationery company Sanrio launching a series of products with Hello Kitty characters. This genre is present but also mixed with another side of kawaii, pleasing and pastel-soft but leaning toward the anxiogenic, horror side of storytelling, also known as gurokawa or creepy cute.
These works will take you on a journey from the cute to the uncanny dread of horror.


From Kawaii to Horror

When cuteness turns into the uncanny, the weird,& the eerie.

Mac + Amiga: Ultra/Deluxe Paint

RetroWave

Abstract Geometric Poster Design.

Future Wastelands - Station II

Earth passing by

Licky Loaf

Sunset

From Nam June Paik to Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Cory Arcangel, and other artists influenced by the idea of the glitch.
A glitch, a malfunction from a TV monitor or in a video game, distortions, misalignments, malfunctions, grainy images, and hardware failures are tools to transmit repetitions, technology and sentimentality for a lost era, an attempt to refer to nostalgia and/or net art. What is commonly used by the artists in this selection is the crossover between digital and analog that seems to be a recurrent point in some of the practices and an important aspect in the treatment of the imagery and of the sound—the collapsing of the linear time frame seems to be of interest and an important creative methodology.
The glitch aesthetic is an effective and affective tool to explore contemporary yearning for past generations, often used nowadays by artists who have not necessarily experienced a real TV glitch! But it is also a trend of its own, a creative and critical tool of a failing technology and society.


*"In a society that conditions the public to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics—illicitly and implicitly encouraging an ethos of “Don’t rock the boat!”—a “glitch” becomes an apt metonym. Glitch Feminism, however, embraces the causality of “error”, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure."* (L. Russell, The Society Pages, 2013)

Glitch and retro TV aesthetics

Artists influenced by the glitch and 80s TV nostalgia.

fazmaticca

PARADIGM N1

Watercress Wand

This Light in Oneself [Small Space 4]

Reverie

Promised Land

The Mystery Cell 1/3

With this selection I focus on the place of worldbuilding in digital creations and our capacity for constructing other spaces and ecosystems that might encompass ideas of futurities or parallel universes. Ursula Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin are inspiring writers who are oracles of a becoming humankind. They allow us to imagine, expand, and extrapolate the evolution of our environments with different parameters to those we have currently set. What can transport us to a threshold of possibilities, environmental parables, and change scenarios and encourage us to question ourselves, our societies, politics, ethics. Worldbuilding is a philosophical tool that challenges us with questions: How is nature defined? What is progress? What is adaptability? These other worlds allow us to imagine how we would live in a climate-changed earth.


This selection is the first part of a fantastic and eerie imaginary environment where new materials, textures, and flora come to play.

Oracles from new worlds

A fantastic and eerie imaginary environment.

Everything's Different Now

夢 & DREAD

Beats #5 [REGULA]

Entering The Mandala

落ち武者蛸

CENTERED//

From magic to retro futurist aesthetics, psychedelia is a recurrent topic in the NFT realm. For the end of 2022 curator’s choice, I wanted to focus on something that is not only colorful but also that is frequently explored in the art world by many artists, the idea of the psychedelic or more precisely reaching another state of mind induced (not by chemicals but) by imageries, sometimes sound; a state where all senses are acute , elevated into an uncanny cognition. References to this hallucinatory genre take inspiration from the 60s psychedelic posters and music movements to our web0.3 realm from deep dream to kaleidoscope filters, The Holy Mountain selection is a fun roller coaster ride to some surreal visual perceptions. The title is an homage to 1973 Alessandro Jadorosky’s movie, a dreamt landscape of the weird and occasionally the extra-ordinary, the wonderful and magic.
(AD)

The Holy Mountain

Acid state, hallucinogenic imagery and mirage.

No Adventure Land

Dance I

Horizon

Hold Me

∞III

'Awakening' by Wes Viz feat. The Anix

Larry Cove

{Specimen no. 5, Coelopidium leucopterus}

“To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them.”
Okorafor, Who Fears Death.

I am paying tribute to women and queer influencers, pioneers of sci-fi literature such as Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin, and more recently Nnedi Okorafor and N. K. Jemisin. This Curator’s Choice is inspired by people who think outside the normative boxes of our world and explore the potential for societal changes through science fiction(s). Indeed, sci-fis is a genre that not only allows us to think of alternative worlds, other bodies, and different embodiments, it also is a means to address and criticize current political frameworks and socio-political contexts.

There’s a playfulness here in terms of perceiving Science Fiction as something uncanny, something we might find familiar and unknown at the same time.

In the Arms of the NFT Dragon

There’s a playfulness in perceiving Science Fiction as uncanny.

Zizi - Queering the Dataset #1

Nonbinary

Grave markers of tetrapod

Celestial Perception

Gemini

INCARNATION I ☥

The Magician

@Username

Conduits

The freedom of being yourself, oneself or an other is often talked about when using online platforms such as social media, gaming or AR/VR experiments – The idea of having an alterego and being more than the self IRL is something that many individual from communities either being from a specific ethnic minority and/or queer have seeked when not being accepted in their societal environment. The web becomes an escape and a way of re-building/creating one’s identity and story. This selection is dedicated to queerness and being FREE!

Self-Portraits 0.3 and the Avatars

This selection focuses on the idea of being yourself online.