The first part of the project is celestialhermitage.ru. Here you can find an online catalogue of the exhibit, curatorial texts, information about exhibit partners, an online guestbook with comments –– and the entrance to the virtual gallery.
The second part is a virtual gallery, created using the Masters digital multifunctional digital art platform. Inside the gallery, visitors can virtually walk through the halls, studying exhibits and interacting with each other. The gallery can be accessed both from the project site and from the Masters digital platform. To help visitors get their bearings in the still-unfamiliar environment of an online exhibit, there will be a set of detailed instructions on the site.
The exhibit will also be accessible using QR codes placed at the entrance to the Hermitage and on the facade of the Exchange Building.
The virtual space for the exhibit is based on the interiors of the Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange, the central architectural landmark of the Strelka on Vasiliev Island, created in 1816 by Jean-Francois Thomas de Thomon. NFT technologies are inseparable from the functioning of crypto exchanges and cryptocurrencies, so the image of the Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange, the leader that drove the development of exchange trading in the 19th century, was chosen as the most organic analogue for such an exhibit.
The exhibit will showcase 38 NFT projects that follow the developmental story of tokenizing art works from different points of view. These are both landmark works in the history of NFTs and completely new ones, created especially for the exhibit. Here you can see examples of generative art, on-chain works, collective ownership of works and projects with collective creation algorithms. Various aesthetic and genre approaches to creating NFTs are represented: utopian visions of the future, a return to the images of classical or modern art, glitch art, digital sculptures and projects about the connection between the real and the virtual.
Krista Kim’s Mars House is the first digital NFT house in the world, created by the Canadian artist during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. In designing its interiors, Kim was inspired by Japanese architecture, grounded in minimalism, harmony and zen. She considers this “healing and meditative” design a natural reaction to the abrupt changes facing the world now and in the future. The house’s primary effect is achieved through soft light, spreading throughout the space of the crypto house and magnifying the impact of the dramatic Martian landscape outside.
The exhibit will also feature an NFT project from the Snark.art platform with a unique collective ownership algorithm, Organic Growth: Crystal Reef by Michael Joo and Danil Krivoruchko. Their collaboration is the result of Joo’s many years of studying process-oriented art, crystal forms and collective identity, as well as Krivoruchko’s rich experience in generative art and algorithmic content creation. The project consists of 10,301 crystals that change and grow with each resale transaction. The crystals’ changes depend on the state of the owner’s crypto wallet and the their transaction history; in this way, they create a visual record of digital and organic processes. The result is an enormous collective work: the sculpture Crystal Reef, assembled from 3D printed crystals and exhibited all over the world.
Environment and ecology are at the core of Two Degrees, part of the Terra0 project. Terra0 is a developing project created in 2016 on the Ethereum platform by a group of developers, theoreticians and researchers studying the creation of combined ecosystems in the technosphere. Two Degrees is a 3D image of a forest, created using a LIDAR scanner in Southern Germany in 2019. The work warns about the danger of destroying ecosystems, illustrating the direct connection between global warming and a forest’s survival. As soon as the yearly average temperature on Earth increases by two degrees, according to NASA data, the token can be “burned” (taken out of circulation). The environment lies at the core of other important parts of the exhibit. For example, one of the platforms participating in the exhibit, AlterHEN is created using the carbon-neutral Tezos blockchain.
In addition, a special section of forest will be planted to offset the exhibit’s carbon footprint. with the support of the Grinvest company. The area will be calculated based on the exhibit’s technical data (duration, hosting server specifications and more). Essentially, this is the exhibit’s only contact with the real world.
Worthy of special mention is Zhang Huan, whose 2020 exhibit at the Hermitage was a popular success. The artist created Ash Square especially for the Hermitage, an NFT project based on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square in the Hermitage collection. In his work, he uses recognizable aesthetic forms adapted to the digital format.
The State Hermitage Museum’s “Invisible Ether”: A Digital Art Exhibit will mark an important historical event for the worldwide trend toward digitizing museum exhibits in the multiverse and a launchpad for the creation of the Celestial Hermitage, the museum’s new digital avatar.
The exhibit was prepared by the Hermitage’s Contemporary Art Division as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project and is a continuation of a series of projects about the forefront of art: Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Dialogue and Innovation as Artistic Method.
Curators: Dimitri Ozerkov, head of the State Hermitage Museum’s Contemporary Art Division; Anastasia Garnova, member of the State Hermitage Museum’s Contemporary Art Division. Digital architect: Oleg Soroko. Consultant: Nadya Taiga, executive director and curator, Snark.art
The exhibit’s digital gallery partner is Masters digital, a multifunctional digital art platform that combines a digital gallery with permanent and temporary exhibits, a digital art news and education portal, special projects with leading cultural institutions and collaborations with artists.
The exhibit’s strategic partner is the Aksenov Family Foundation, which both created the exhibit site and monitors the NFT phenomenon as a tool for creating local platforms for direct interactions between artists and collectors.
The exhibit’s program partner is the Snark.art platform, an innovator in the NFT and digital art field that works with world-famous artists to create groundbreaking projects using the blockchain. Each project by this technology laboratory passes through careful curatorial selection, from the moment it reaches the platform to a digital art analysis and final sale. Snark.art seeks to show that the blockchain can transform art––and that art can stimulate innovation and advance the use of crypto technologies to a new level.