M○C△

March 31, 2023

Matt Kane is Eternal - And his Generative Collection, Gazers, is an Unprecedented Exploration of Time, the One Thing that Binds Us

“Every bit of Gazers’ technical brilliance would be impossible if not for the blockchain’s time-keeping foundation, But with it, artists can code their artworks to change in perpetuity, some changes taking place once a day, others once an hour, once a decade, once a millenia. It’s possible that, 100 years from now, Gazers will still be in the process of unveiling themselves fully. We can’t know, and Kane surely won’t tell us. What he’ll say instead — cheekily, I might add — is, “All my work is really about transformation, as an artist it’s all about transformation, it’s all about change, it’s all about time.””

PROOF

January 31, 2023

From Lurker to Leader in the Cryptoart movement: Matt Kane on Dankness

On this episode we are honored to speak with artist and cryptoart community activist Matt Kane! Matt is a self taught programmer who came to coding as a way to better actualize his artist visions through his own custom software. His work features dense multi-layered works that bring to mind complex, intricate, mesh-like, webs or networks. Matt is perhaps best known for his tremendously successful 2021 Art Blocks project “Gazers.” With Gazers, the works respond to the cycles of the moon and are perpetually shifting, making these works collectors want to live with and regularly revisit.

In this episode, we discuss Matt’s journey from “lurker” to leader in the Cryptoart movement. Matt is candid about early successes and struggles to make it as an artist and the positive opportunities cryptoart opened up for him. We learn where his interest in currency as a theme in his art stems from and his discovery of crypto. He also shares his love of art history and how analog painters like Monet serve as inspiration for his digital works. Matt shares an important story detailing how he collaborated with other important members of the crypto art community in 2020 to successfully lobby for a minimum secondary resale standard for artists. The Dankness is grateful to Matt for sharing so much of his story, it’s a special and insightful conversation, and we hope you find it as engaging as we did!

MoCDA

November 18, 2022

MoCDA Artist Talk: Matt Kane's Gazers

Conversation between Matt Kane (artist), Chiara Braidotti (curator, MoCDA), Sia Pineschi (curator, MoCDA)

Right Click Save

September 1, 2022

TIME ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

“Gazers recognizes the symbolism of 12 new moons associated with major moments in Kane’s life. These moments are the basis on which the rest of the project emerges. Amongst other traits, Kane’s NFTs have an annual moment that the artist calls “Celebration Period,” ranging between 24 and 144 hours. It occurs yearly as well as every 33 “moons,” at which point the central motif expands into a “Blue Moon.” These cyclical returns are poignant attempts to align personal experience with natural events, with technology a vital means of remembering.”

Vanity Fair

May 9, 2022

Gazers exhibited in Vanity Fair's Venice Biennale digital museum MetaVanity

Here we are! Today, April 21, MetaVanity opens, the first pioneering Vanity Fair museum in the Metaverse created in collaboration with Valuart . We present it in Venice, on the occasion of the Biennale Arte number 59, but anyone can visit it. Wherever you are, you have the opportunity to experience the possibilities of this new technological frontier and to move in the 12 rooms of the great exhibition that brought together the 19 leading names of the international digital and crypto art scene , from Skygolpe to Matt Kane.

PROOF

May 9, 2022

Artist Spotlight: Creative Expression Through Coding with Matt Kane

Kevin Rose chats with Matt Kane, whose artist journey spans 20 years from traditional oil painting to generative art.

Dune

September 6, 2022

Dune Statistics for Gazers

Visualize historic Gazers sales data by some of the most popular traits with collectors. Thanks to @0x_catherine for assembling this!

6529 Museum

May 26, 2022

Gazers are the most complex NFTs in the collection by far

“Gazers are the most complex NFTs in the collection by far. They have an huge amount of traits and are programmed to change behavior over years, centuries and millenia with the moon cycles. Nobody knows the full extent of their behavior. The 6529 Collection has 10 Gazers, including ultra rare Rocket and Hours:Minutes:Second Gazers. It also has the #1 stat rarity Gazer but really more for the vibe than any other reason – the vast number of traits in Gazers makes a mockery of the analytical value of statistical rarity in this collection.”
Click to visit the 6529 Museum.

ladysabrina.eth

May 16, 2022

Matt Kane’s “Gazers”: in Crypto Space, Man Lands on the Moon

“Many nights we point our telescope at the night sky, and members of my family, both young and old alike, search for the moon. There is a feverish frenzy to cast our eyes upon that ghostly orb and when we spy it, the delight and thrill are unmatched. It is a chance to see something beyond the familiar terrains of our worldly horizons, and glimpse something brilliant in the vast realms of space. Matt Kane’s collection “Gazers” captures mankind’s enchantment with the moon and satisfies some of our need to seize something above and beyond by allowing collectors to own a living simulation of the moon through his pieces.”

Chinese Translation by studionano.eth

In Conversation with Matt Kane

“In Gazers, we invest in time and a multitude of evolving experiences. You will mint an NFT and see an artwork. But you will not begin to experience the artwork even after a year. The NFTs speed up their frame rate fractionally over time depending on a couple traits. Give me 10 years. 20 years. 60 years. 200 years. 1000 years. Then you will begin to understand the experience of Gazers.”

It's Monday Night

May 16, 2022

Professor Jun Reflects on Gazers

“Gazers are unique, changing, and ephemeral at every moment. They are eternally unique, changing and ephemeral. Each phase crossed may be perfectly predictable, the very moment of the transformation is immeasurable, fleeting. There is no pseudo-wisdom of bad psychological magazines horoscopes in Matt Kane’s gazers, it is the direct confrontation between the silent visual talisman in constant transformation and the quest of a sign in the hypnotic wanderings of the moon.”

LEDGER

May 9, 2022

GENERATIVE ART: THE ARTISTS DEFINING THE SPACE

“In his early twenties, Kane left the traditional-gallery-exhibition-world-of-art to pursue work as a web developer. Moving to a new field, but maintaining his love of art, he taught himself how to program and code and made active career choices to keep art in his scope. Mixing the two, he now devotes his vocation to both and has developed special software that he hand-coded (!!) to make works of digital art that tell a unique story.”

KUNSTFORUM

May 9, 2022

The three most popular misconceptions about crypto art. Or: Why the art world doesn't warm to NFTs

“Yes, if you want to refute the critics who seem to laugh out loud when they hear the three letters NFT, you never end, because the list of examples of aesthetic programs and artistic progress is long. Actually, one should now open the broad field of generative art and write about “Ringers” by Dmtri Cherniak, “Fidenza” by Tyler Hobbs and “Gazers” by Matt Kane, and of course Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro. The Gazers, for example, act as a lunar calendar, algorithmically synchronizing with the phases of the moon in the sky. And one would have to write about PFP Avatars, whose history begins with the CryptoPunks, but actually goes back to the beginnings of portraiture in art history and which leads directly into the much-touted future in the Metaverse.”

Note, the full text article is behind a paywall. Please consider supporting in order for quality arts journalism to thrive.

PROOF (collector)

May 16, 2022

Gazers 101 - A guide to choosing a Gazer

gm, fren! So you’ve been hearing a lot about Gazers, the fascinatingly complex (and somewhat mysterious) Moon phase inspired work of generative art by Matt Kane. And you’re ready to collect your first piece (of many!). So what are some things that you should consider when choosing? Let’s get right to it!

a16z

May 9, 2022

After Years of Groundwork, NFTs Shine Bright

Matt Kane’s career as an artist started in Chicago around 2004 when a local gallery began selling his oil paintings. After moving to Seattle three years later, art took a backseat as he taught himself to code and became a web engineer to make ends meet. A few years after that, he finally had enough time on his hands to pursue an idea he’d had for a while: combining his creative and tech chops by making digital art.

Much in the way he’d stretched his own canvases and mixed pigments as an oil painter, Kane committed to building his own software so he could control how his digital images came to life. This past September, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, his digital art piece “Right Place, Right Time” sold on the blockchain for 262 ethereum, at the time equivalent to more than $100,000.

The sale was significant, not just for Kane, but also for digital art. While artists have been creating digital works for years, blockchain technology, which can help distinguish an original from a copy, has helped to create a market for them. As a result, digital art has begun to fetch increasingly handsome sales prices and the attention of more and more art collectors.

“People have been experimenting in this space for years, but it was Matt Kane’s sale last year that created a big shift,” says Lindsay Howard, digital art curator and head of community at cryptoart platform Foundation.