Random International and Pace Sell 990 NFTs in Under 24 Hours – ARTnews.com

There hasn’t been much excitement in the NFT world after the crypto crash this past June. But yesterday, an unexpected victory took place at Pace Gallery’s Web3 arm, Pace Verso, which sold out all 990 available NFTs from a Random International collection.

These NFTs had been made in collaboration with Danil Krivoruchko, and they were part of a collection called “Life in Our Minds.” They were all gone in less than 24 hours. Selling at 0.25 ETH each, the collection’s primary sale raised a respectable but not eye-popping total of around $380,000.

Random International is the creative studio best known for Rain room, which debuted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Founders Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass have long experimented with swarming behavior in birds and humans, and intend to bring their ideas about the behavior to NFTs. With the help of Krivoruchko, a digital artist, they conceived the NFT project as a social sculpture.

“We’ve been working on flocking, swarming, collective behavior and its implications for 15 years now,” Koch said in an interview with ART news. “With NFTs, we saw a really fantastic opportunity to experiment further.”

The resulting NFTs are called Boids (think “birds” but said with a Tweety bird accent). Collectors of them will find that the longer they hold onto their NFTs, the more characteristics the NFTs will exhibit, making them rarer and more valuable. Properties will also vary depending on what other NFTs the collector has in their wallet.

At the same time, “Mother Flock”, which is available to the public on OG.art, will continuously display all 990 boids in a constantly evolving, 3D, virtual sculpture that represents the market for the collection in real time after its November 1st release.

“It’s a sculpture that reflects emergent behavior,” Koch said.

Given the market conditions, Koch even looked forward to seeing what the “Mother Flock” sculpture would look like in these depressed times.

“We developed all these scenarios of what the public sculpture would look like if only half the collection was sold or something. For us, it was a graphically interesting case,” Koch said.

“What you describe as a difficult market – I don’t think it’s very difficult,” he continued, not denying that it was a crypto winter, but saying that the difficult market itself was full of potential in this particular work. “I think [the market] a wonderful material to create social sculpture with.”

For Koch and his team, NFTs represented a way to explore the artistic possibilities of collective behavior without the constraints of producing a massive, technologically complex institutional show.

“It’s a very daunting process to build, say, one Rain room program or train a bunch of balloons to fly according to an AI algorithm. It takes a lot of resources, Koch said. “In this digital space, you are more free to experiment and you can share your work with a different, perhaps larger, audience.”

While Koch considers Random International’s work to be digitally native, he found it amusing to enter the NFT space and find himself representing the old guard.

“In the art world, we were always the odd ones out, crawling out of this art and technology corner and into mainstream contemporary art. We were quite content to be the vanguard, Koch said. “But now we’re getting into the NFT space, and we’re considered these super traditional artists!”