It is hard to know where to start to learn about Web3, AI, immersive technologies, and their relationship to cultural and art projects.
We have listed below a list of trusted online and print publications that we think will help you get started, starting with the most recent publications to keep things current.
2024
Tokenistic behavior? Exploring Blockchain and DAOs as a participatory practice in museums
Author: Frances Liddell
About: The paper examines the possibilities offered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for supporting audience participation in the museum sector . DAOs, a type of digital infrastructure underpinned by blockchains and smart contracts, have been seen as informing a more autonomous, self-managing, transparent, and more efficient online organization, one capable of shaping how users participate and communicate with one another.
Publication Date: April 2024
Type: Research Paper
Taschen Book “On NFTs.”
Author: Robert Alice (and contributors)
About: Encompassing the entire NFT ecosystem—from algorithmic art to avatars—the first major art historical survey of this field includes 10 academic essays and richly illustrated profiles of 101 key artists. Connecting the disruptive contemporary medium to its context in art history, this volume offers a deep dive into the sphere of non-fungible tokens and is also available for purchase in crypto.
Publication Date: April 2024
Type: Book
FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS VOL. 4 - Art x Public AI
Author: Serpentine (with contributors)
About: Provides analyses, concepts and strategies for cultural organisations, artists and the broader art and advanced technologies ecosystem responding to the transformations of AI systems on culture and society. FAE4 lays bare the various layers of the AI stack – from its software components like applications, data and the AI models themselves to the natural resources that AI systems need to function, showing that public and non-public entities are deeply entangled in every layer of the AI stack.
Publication Date: March 2024
Type: Free Online Report
Right Click Save Book “The New Digital Art Community”
Author: Alex Estorick (and contributors)
About: Documenting a new community of creators and collectors, this is a selection of essays, interviews and roundtable discussions. Some of the biggest hits from our first two years for you to cozy up with.
Publication Date: February 2024
Type: Book
2023
Museum Tech: 10 Blockchain Stories
Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)
About: Explore new ways of using blockchain technology for museums, and hear it directly from museum professionals.
Publication Date: October 2023
Type: Free PDF Handbook
Blockchain for Art & Culture 101
Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)
About: Your first step to make sense of the art & culture blockchain space, from NFTs to marketplaces + how museums can use it with.
Publication Date: September 2023
Type: Free PDF Handbook
Blockchain 101 Handbook
Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)
About: Explore the origins of web3 and decentralisation, as well as blockchain technology and its impact on the arts and culture sector.
Publication Date: August 2023
Type: Free PDF Handbook
World of Art - Digital Art
Author: Christiane Paul
About: The fourth edition of the essential introduction to digital art, one of contemporary art’s most exciting and dynamic forms of practice. This new edition of Christiane Paul’s acclaimed book investigates key areas of digital art practice that have gained in prominence in recent years, including the emergence and impact of location-based media, interactive public installation, augmentive and mixed reality, social networking and file-sharing and tablet technologies.
Publication Date: May 9, 2023
Type: Book
Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs
Author: Omar Kholeif
About: Since 1989, the year the World Wide Web was born, the art world has grappled with the rise of networked culture. This unprecedented survey of the artists and innovators in this area from 1989 to today is interwoven with the personal narrative of one of the leading voices on the digital world. In this book, Omar Kholeif, whose prolific career parallels the growth of the internet, tells the story of this mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists, both analog and digital.
Publication Date: April 26, 2023
Type: Book
Proof of Work - Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021
Author: Rhea Myers (and contributors)
About: A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions.
DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain.
Publication Date: April 11, 2023
Type: Book
2022
FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS VOL. 3 - Art x Decentralised Tech
Author: Serpentine (with contributors)
About: Identifies new patterns for organisational and creative innovation within the broader space of decentralised technologies, variably dubbed as ‘web3’, ‘crypto’ and ‘dweb’. FAE3 offers a series of strategies for existing and new cultural organisations formulated through insights gained from industry, policy and art-making such as Laura Lotti, Cem Dagdelen, and Internet Archive.
Publication Date: 2022
Type: Free Online Report
SURFING WITH SATOSHI
Author: Domenico Quaranta
About: Written amidst an explosion of technological hype and a speculative frenzy, Surfing with Satoshi sets the promise of the NFT market in a historical context, investigating the technologies it is based on, the role of certificates and contracts in contemporary art, and the evolution of the media art market over the last thirty years. Riding the wave of the ongoing debate, the book tackles a series of as yet open questions, including: what does art have to do with the blockchain? Does it make sense to talk about “crypto Art”, and if so what can be said to define it, apart from the way it is traded? Is speculation the be-all and end-all of this trend?
Publication Date: August 2022
Type: Book
Radical Friends
Author: Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty (with contributors)
About: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.
Publication Date: August 2022
Type: Book
2021
CURATING DIGITAL ART
Author: Annet Dekker (with contributors)
About: What is the role of the curator when organizing digital art exhibitions in offline and online spaces? This book focuses on how the experiments of curators, artists and designers have opened the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods of presenting and accessing digital art. In the process, it addresses how web-based practices challenge certain established museological values and precipitate alternative ways of understanding art's stewardship, curatorial responsibility, public access and art history.
Publication Date: 2021
Type: Book
2020
Video/Art: The First Fifty Years
Author: Barbara London
About: Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. This first-hand account by the curator who has been following video art from its beginnings in the late 1960s, when artists first adapted portable consumer technology to art-making, spotlights video’s ongoing importance in the art world, tracing the genre’s development alongside the advances in technology that have continued to open up new possibilities for artists.
Publication Date: January 22, 2020
Type: Book
2019
There is no Such Thing as Blockchain Art
Author: Maria Paula Fernandez, Stina Gustafsson, Fanny Lakoubay
About: A report on the current status of the intersection of Blockchain and art
Publication Date: June 2019
Type: Free PDF Report