ArtNovo is a collective of established media artists, each of whom has been instrumental in bringing dynamic and influential ideas to life. Each represents a practice that is rooted in experimentation, innovation and invention, and has gained significant recognition. Their works are recognized for challenging cultural norms in defiance of any artistic status quo, and have been celebrated in exhibitions by major international museums, galleries, across the internet and on broadcast television.
ArtNovo is Irit Batsry, Robert Cahen, Theo Eshetu, Terry Flaxton, John Sanborn, Guli Silberstein, and Nataša Prosenc Stearns – pioneering artists driven to explore new technology and modes of expression. Which is why they are engaging in crypto-art’s propensity to operate in a decentralized, self-curating manner without a traditional hierarchy -deviating from archaic artworld structures – but fashioning intersections with traditional structures and curatorial thought.
Their interest in creating and releasing NFT crypto-art works stems from their passion to instigate change, to assemble insights, to advance and strengthen their practices, and to demonstrate how the blockchain is
changing the very nature of art.
ArtNovo is actively recruiting members across race, gender and cultural background. We expect the collective to grow and develop to reflect the world we live in and the world we seek to advance.
Members of the collective will be releasing an independent artwork daily from 2/14 – 2/20 (see schedule below). On 2/21, the ArtNovo collective will celebrate the finale of its foray into crypto art with release of seven additional artworks.
This blog post will be updated with artworks as they are released.
About the Artists
TERRY FLAXTON – Dropping 2/14
British artist Terry Flaxton (b. 1953) has exhibited internationally since 1978. In 1971, he encountered sound, oil, etching, photography & film on entering Wimbledon College of Art – then video where he received a BA in communication design at the University of East London in 1979. Establishing himself as a Video Artist in the early years of Channel 4 he was commissioned to create work for Channel 4’s Eleventh Hour, Ghosts in the Machine which aired on PBS (Alive from Off Centre) and French TV (Avance Sur Image). He produced a series of 5 programs on Video Art for Channel 4 in 1986-1998.
He spent years working as cinematographer and as writer, director, producer and editor on productions for channel 4, and the BBC including US and Soviet Foreign Policy in the 3rd World with Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Steele. As a cinematographer he worked on promos for Queen Latifa and Van Morrisson and for MTV and Polygram with Def Leppard, Stones, Blink 182, John Mclaughlin fo which he won many awards.
In 2007, he became one of the first practice based Creative Research Fellows in the UK, and a Professor of Cinematography and Director of the Centre for Moving Image Research (2013), and in 2018 gained a PhD in High Resolution Imaging.
His work has been exhibited at over 200 festivals, museums and galleries and he has won prizes at Locarno, Montbeliard, Amsterdam and Algiers. He has had retrospectives at diverse locations such as Moscow, Algiers, Dublin, Rome, Ljubljana and Mill Valley. Flaxton’s works are held in collections including Lux London, Video les Beaux Jours, Strasbourg, Filmmakers Cooperative NY and AICE Milan. Four recent exhibitions in New York Cathedral attracted over 1 million visitors each. His 2008 work “In Re Ansel Adams” is in the permanent collections of the Harris Museum in Preston and the RWA Bristol where he is a lifetime academician, an honour accorded to only 160 living academicians. He became a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2020.
Learn more about Terry Flaxton and his background here.
NATAŠA PROSENC STEARNS – Dropping 2/15
Slovenian born visual artist and filmmaker Nataša Prosenc Stearns earned her BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She moved to Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant for her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her works range from single and multi-channel videos, video installations, short and feature films, video objects and print media. She is known for creative use of non-gallery spaces and large multi-channel installations.
Stearns’ films Souvenir, (released by Cinema Epoch), The Trial of Socrates, (collaboration of 23 filmmakers), Hotel Diary and others explore innovative strategies in storytelling and visual expression. She also completed a body of work for the opera Code L and for the theater play Misogyny. Recently she started experimenting with crypto art possibilities, expanding her practice into the metasphere.
Nataša represented Slovenia at the 48th Venice Biennale with her installation Gladiators for which she received The Prešern Fund Award, the national award for great achievement in art. She returned to the Biennale in 2015 as part of the group exhibition Twenty Artists from Los Angeles. She also exhibited in Douloun Museum of Art in Shanghai, ARCO Fair Madrid, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and in festivals such as SXSW, Films de femmes Paris, AVIFF Cannes, Brooklyn Film Festival, Chicago Independent Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives Berkeley, RedCat at Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and others. She is a recipient of the Durffee and Soros Grants.
Nataša lives in Venice California and in Ljubljana Slovenia.
THEO ESHETU – Dropping 2/16
Theo Eshetu is known for his pioneering work across cinema, television and videoart. Since the early 1980s, Eshetu has combined the formal components of electronic arts with anthropological ideas to re-examine the ethnographic gaze. His manipulation of time, light and sound leads to works that draws on themes and images from the artist’s dual European and African background to examine identity constructions and the notion of culture itself. As one of the first artists to work exclusively with video art, Eshetu has contributed significantly to the medium’s recognition within the context of fine art.
His videos and essay films have been presented film festival (Venice, London, Berlin, Mill Valley, Milan) world wide but he is known primarily for his video often spectacular video Installations. (Martin Gropius Bau, LACMA, ICP, Baltimore Museum of Art). He presented 5 video installations at the Musée Ethnogque de Genève in 2018 and has held gallery shows in Rome, Berlin, London and New York.
Eshetu was a featured artist in Documenta 14 and participated at the Biennials of Venice (2010), Shanghai (2016), Bamako (2019) and Gwangju (2020). He is a recipient of the DAAD fellowship in 2013 and fellowship at the Smithsonian in 2021. His art works have been collected by, MoMa, Tate Britain, The Smithsonian Institute, Royal Ontario Museum and The Montreal Museum of Fine Art among others.
JOHN SANBORN – Dropping 2/17
John Sanborn is “a key member of the second wave of American video artists” whose career spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of 80’s MTV music/videos and 90’s interactive art to digital media art of today.
John Sanborn’s work has been exhibited on television (MTV, PBS, Comedy Central), as video installations (ZKM, Videoformes, Jeu de Paume, Whitney Museum, The Kitchen), screenings (Mill Valley Film Festival, MoMA, Sundance, Tribeca Film Festival) video games (Psychic Detective EA, Strife), Doom, Internet experiences (NONSELF) and music/videos (Rick James, Van Halen, Philip Glass, Nile Rodgers, Grace Jones, King Crimson, Tangerine Dream). He is known for collaborations with virtuosic performers, contemporary composers and choreographers.
Projects from 2019 – 2021 include live video/theater performances of God in 3 Persons, a collaboration with The Residents, at MoMA NY; commissions from the National Museum of Qatar (the permanent installation Alchemy) and Jeu de Paume, Paris (NONSELF); solo exhibitions at Galerie Tokomona, Paris; 836M and Telematic, San Francisco; and the premiere of The Friend, starring John Cameron Mitchell, at the Digital Arts Festival Videoformes, in Clermont-Ferrand, France. In 2022 he will be the subject of a survey show at ZKM in Germany.
John Sanborn holds an honorary Master of Cinema degree from ESEC, in Paris, and was honored as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture for Republic of France. Sanborn’s YouTube channel has over 21 million views and over 110,000 subscribers. In 2017, the Mill Valley Film Festival honored him with its lifetime achievement award.
ROBERT CAHEN – Dropping 2/18
Recognized as one of France’s foremost video artists, Robert Cahen has since 1972 produced a distinguished body of work for cinema and television. In Cahen’s uniquely nuanced world, fiction and reality alike are presented as metaphoric voyages of the imagination, exquisite reveries that describe passages of time, place, memory and perception.
From the formal elegance of Cartes postales video (Video Postcards) (1984-86) to the intricate musical and visual transitions of Boulez-Répons (1985), Cahen’s work is characterized by a sophisticated application of electronic techniques that manipulate sound and image, space and temporality, resulting in subtle transmutations of the illusory and the real. Resonating with wit and charm, executed with technical precision, his works allude to both formal and thematic motifs of travel, movement, and transition. Cahen’s dreamlike journeys depict fleeting glimpses of a transitory reality, transformed in time within the pictorial frame.
Robert Cahen was born in 1945 and lives in Mulhouse,France. He graduated from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, and was member of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales de l’ORTF from 1971-74. From 1973-76. He was director of Experimental video for ORTF/INA. Many of his film and video works have been produced in conjunction with Institut National Audiovisuel (INA) His videotapes have been broadcast and exhibited internationally, at institutions and festivals including the Paris Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; International Center of Photography, New York; Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; FestRio, Brazil; Tokyo Festival; and the Festival of Locarno, Italy.
In 1992, he won the prize of the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs and in 1995, he created a permanent video installation for EURALILLE Public Space in Lille, France. in 2010, a complete retrospective of his films and his video works took place in the Museum of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was, during the year 2009-2010, associated professor at the National School and Studio for Contemporary Arts, Le Fresnoy. France.
GULI SILBERSTEIN – Dropping 2/19
Guli Silberstein is a London-based artist creating digital works since 2001, following his graduation from the MA in Media Studies program in The New School University, New York, USA. His artwork is characterized by processing personal recordings, found footage, and mixes of both, by digital technologies such as ‘glitch’, and lately focusing on the exciting possibilities inherent in Artificial Intelligence.
His work has won awards and been shown in numerous festivals, art venues and online platforms worldwide including WRO Media Art Biennale (Poland), Transmediale festival Berlin, Ars Electronica (Austria), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts USA, London Short Film Festival, The French Cinematheque Paris online channel, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) Moscow and Sedition Art London.
Inspired by dreams, visions, and memories, his works experiment with video form as poetic expression, and tell visual stories, developing thematic inquiries often involving both public and personal footage. It’s a continuous practical research, tracking down peculiar usages of computer processes, to produce moving image assemblies that are forms of new aesthetics.
“In Silberstein’s works, the image error or glitch is always representative, a phantasmagoric presence of sorts, evoking the spiritual, the political, the intimate, the human: it’s the activity of mankind at its most critical, involved in war, conflict, acts of resistance, but also in the intimate, the tender and its relation with nature.” (José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, Found Footage Magazine #6, March 2020)
IRIT BATSRY – Dropping 2/20
Irit Batsry is an artist working mainly in video and installations. Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries. She was awarded the prestigious Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award (2002) given to “an artist whose work demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination – a person who promises to make a significant contribution to the visual arts”.
She received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and the Grand Prix Video de Création of the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimedia, Paris (1996 and 2001) as well as other distinct fellowships from The Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2012), New York Foundation For The Arts (2002), Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology (1999) and the Jerome Foundation (1990).
Her video artworks received many festival prizes including: Grand Prix – Locarno 90 and 95, First Prize – Vigo 94 and 01 First Prize – the Australian Video Festival 89, First prize – San Francisco Poetry Film Festival 89.
Selected shows include the National Gallery in Washington, the National Film Theater and the ICA (London), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), Museu d’Arte Moderna (Rio), Ludwig Museum (Koln), Tel Aviv Museum, Artists Space, In 2006 the Jeu de Paume in Paris organized a retrospective of her videotapes (1981- 2006), A second videotape retrospective was organized at Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca in 2014.
Her work is part of private and public collections including those of the Whitney and MoMA in New York City.
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