MoMA Postcard: Collaboration and Creativity on Blockchain

On Blockchain and Community

One of the aspects of web3 that might be obvious to its participants, but not so clear to outsiders, is just how global this movement is. As a Canadian, I now have friends all over the world who I talk to, sometimes through translation software, on a daily basis.... It’s a great reminder that even though our surroundings and customs are different, most people are kindhearted and well-meaning, and for whatever reason, art is universally something we can all bond over.... Although the miles between the artists are being added with each stamp, hopefully the act of creating these postcards brings us closer together.
—Dmitri Cherniak

Broadly, we are excited to work in the blockchain art world with all its communities and complexities.... The community engaged with NFT art is global and phenomenal. Our days are filled with conversations and meaningful exchanges with artists, collectors, and other art professionals from around the world who are thinking about contemporary digital art, building, and investing in new systems for this work. This intersection of philosophy, technology, and economy is fun and challenges mainstream art-world conventions daily.
—LoVid

A blockchain is an idea—an ecology of ideas—first and foremost. We’re exploring how to realize these imagined tools. Unexpectedly for many, blockchains are conduits for social interactions. They are an emerging medium for connecting with others.
—Casey Reas

As an artist working with technology, I have always felt lonely. I live in Dakar, Senegal, and wasn’t meeting many artists who worked with digital mediums. Joining the blockchain, which felt at the time like the very edge of the Internet, was the first time I didn’t feel like the odd one out. I felt like I belonged. It didn’t matter where I was from, what I looked like, which art school I attended or didn’t attend, I could relate to artists I met and eventually was able to build a community through the blockchain.
—Linda Dounia Rebeiz

On the MoMA Postcard First 15

Participating in the MoMA Postcard project and watching these first 15 cards fly around the world in real time has driven home the fact that this is a global art movement, a decentralized residency or gallery where imagination is unbounded and ignited in some truly unprecedented ways. The project is also just plain fun—a game where poetically constrained pixels and palettes yield infinite possibilities, suggesting that art is action and connection, and creativity is always at our fingertips.
—Sasha Stiles

I like the postcard because you need little to no understanding of the underlying technology to interact with it. It’s not unlike any other app we interact with daily on our phones. The format is simple enough for accessibility yet allows interesting concepts to emerge, taking away the emphasis from the big-number auction sales of NFTs and focusing on community building and creativity.
—Anna Lucia

It is a huge honor to play in this space alongside friends and fellow pixel-crushers who I greatly admire.
—Peter Burr

I am proud to be here as one of these (15) artists and happy I have the ability to share my voice and vision with a larger audience…. I hope people in the future will reflect on moments like this as monumental timestamps that shifted the narrative for blockchain and contemporary and digital art.
—Grant Yun

I think it’s extremely exciting to see the blockchain being used in conceptual ways such as in this project. But more importantly, knowing that computational art has such a novel history, to see an established institution like MoMA opening space for dialogues across the field is quite fulfilling. Not to mention that I deeply admire the artists involved.
—p1xelfool

The MoMA Postcard project...will show people that there are artists all over the world who are active in the web3 area, and I think it will also be an enlightenment that web3 makes it possible to collaborate and share art in a way that has never existed.
—ykxotkx