Jill Magid sells NFT bouquets made from flowers from ‘The Legend of Zelda’, ‘World of Warcraft’ and other video games
A new type of bouquet is available for purchase this Valentine’s Day – and each one is filled with fake video game flowers.
That’s the idea behind”Out-Game Flowers“, Jill Magid’s new and first ever NFT project, created through the young crypto art platform Artworld. Available starting today, the artist’s digital bouquets consist of flowers that were hacked, without permission, from the source codes of classic games, including Final Fantasy, Minecraftand more.
Every plant has one special value within its original virtual world. In Magid’s bouquets, you may find the silent princess from The Legend of Zelda series, which can be used for a stealth boost effect, or Fire Flower from Super Mario Bros, which gives its users the power to throw fireballs. Some flowers even have significant value outside of their games: That’s how powerful Black Lotus is from World of Warcraftfor example, that players are sometimes willing to pay exorbitant real-world prices to get their hands on it.
A small bouquet from Jill Magid’s “Out-Game Flowers” NFT collection. Courtesy of the artist and Artwrld.
If you’re not already hooked on Magid’s conceit, consider some additional context. When it comes to established artists making NFTs, the truth is that the number of ill-conceived projects far outweighs the interesting ones. But Magid, as she said “strongly dislike the vast majority of NFTs” don’t do anything that is poorly thought out. Whether she is hijacking a public television monitor or to have himself monitored by the policeher work is always thoroughly scrutinized, and she often immerses herself in the very systems she interrogates.
In other words, if ever there was an artist to make an interesting NFT, it’s Magid.
The artist’s bouquets are, at face value, simple NFTs – that is, they look and act like digital collectibles, equal parts art object and speculative asset. But few elements of Magid’s practice are ever simple; gnarled, complex systems are what she is most interested in, and indeed, beneath the flowers, conceptual layers are ready to be peeled away.
A large bouquet from Jill Magid’s “Out-Game Flowers” NFT collection. Courtesy of the artist and Artwrld.
To understand these layers, it is useful to understand the origins of the project. It goes back to Sensitive, Magid’s 2020 Creative Time artworkfor which she laser-engraved the phrase “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” on the edge of 120,000 pennies.
For the artist, the ironic metaphorical contradiction between the pandemic-era rhetoric surrounding the struggling economy, which was often characterized as a financial “body” in need of revival, and the rhetoric surrounding human life, was so often reduced to data points. on death statistics. For Magid, the ubiquitous penny – a financial symbol worth practically nothing that suddenly became symbolically charged as a transfer vector – symbolized the intersection of the corporeal and the economic..
To spread the engraved pennies, Magid dropped them off, roll by roll, at bodegas around New York City. As she did so, she began to think about the flowers that were for sale outside so many of the shops. (She even recreated rows of bodega flowers for one Sensitive-related exhibition at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth.)
In his research, Magid learned that bodega flowers come from the same places as those found at high-end florists. Most are grown in industrialized farms in Europe or South America and then shipped to the Netherlands to be graded on a scale based on criteria such as stem length and flower diameter. Low-grade flowers are sent to New York corner stores, where they live only a few days. Many are not even purchased at all.
Magid learned that what we as consumers think of as a natural symbol of beauty is actually a carefully controlled asset backed by a wasteful international economy. The plants “It seemed like they were masking so many transactions and so many value systems inside them,” she said.
It was at the height of her flower fascination that Nato Thompson, curator and founder of Artwrld, approached the artist about doing an NFT project. “It’s a shame flowers don’t grow on the Internet,” she recalled telling Thompson.
“Well actually they do,” he replied, noting that flowers, like NFTs, symbolize a “merger of aesthetics and value.”
A small bouquet from Jill Magid’s “Out-Game Flowers” NFT collection. Courtesy of the artist and Artwrld.
“Do you know about Steven Bannon?” Thompson asked.
What the curator was referring to was gold farming, or the practice of employing underpaid workers in China and elsewhere to harvest rare in-game items – as with World of Warcraft’s Black Lotus – to sell them outside the game for hefty prices. . Before becoming editor of the far-right news website Breitbart, Bannon served on the board and then as CEO of Internet Gaming Entertainment, a company built around this exploitative model.
With this bizarre story, the project suddenly clicked for Magid, and “Out-Game Flowers” was born. Although her NFTs look like simple bouquets, they represent something more: a convergence of multiple markets—those of video games, blockchain art, and real flowers. “What I think through and am really interested in is how different economies work and how values are exchanged and traded,” explained the artist.
A large bouquet from Jill Magid’s “Out-Game Flowers” NFT collection. Courtesy of the artist and Artwrld.
So, how much do Magid’s NFTs cost?
Some 150 of her 165 bouquets are smaller and fetch buyers $325 to $550. They are priced to sell, the artist explained; as with pennies at a bodega, the goal is availability and rapid circulation. At the time of publication, they have smaller bouquets already sold out.
The remaining 15 bouquets, meanwhile, are larger — they contain one of every type of flower sourced by Magid’s team — and come with a price tag intentionally closer to that of a “traditional” gallery artwork: $10,000. (Paris Pompidou Center has already acquired one of the larger bouquets, and Magid hopes other museums will also do so.)
For a project built on layers upon layers of thinking about utilization, aesthetics and circulation of value in and between digital and IRL worlds, the market status of Magid’s blockchain bouquets is quite conventional – status quo even
But for Thompson, this act of recapitulation is a feature, not a bug. The project, he said, is “much more a mirror than a critique.” In other words, “Out-Game Flowers” is meant to reflect the systems it’s based on, not evaluate them.
“I would call this a soft representation of the system for itself,” he said.
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