Artwrld presents the genesis NFT collection, Out-Game Flowers, by Jill Magid
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Artwrld Presents:
Out-Game Flowers: In-Game Flowers Plucked from Online Games
A genesis NFT collection by Jill Magid, launching February 14th
Jill Magid’s journey into the online gaming world in search of its most valuable flowers brings together the forces of power, desire, exchange, and commerce. The series will be made available for sale exclusively to Artwrld’s community on Valentine’s Day, Tuesday, February 14, 2023, on the Artwrld platform, with the public release to follow on February 16. The collection consists of 165 unique, digital bouquets – 15 large with audio, and 150 small – all arranged with popular, ready-made flowers hacked from iconic video games like Final Fantasy, Super Mario Galaxy, Ragnarok, and World of Warcraft.
Out-Game Flowers is the latest artist collaboration with Artwrld, which launched its NFT platform in 2022.
Creative Time will collaborate with Artwrld as the official nonprofit partner organization for Out-Game Flowers.
Jill Magid's work interrogates power at an intimate level. With Out-Game Flowers, she started by examining the history of gold farming – the practice of exploiting cheap labor to extract “in-game” digital assets, such as flowers, to sell to Western gamers for real-word currency. “Inspired by the highly-questionable practice of gold farming,” Magid says, “I imagined myself as a naughty girl running through the unwalled gardens of the online gaming landscape, and taking the rarest and most valuable flowers for my bouquets.”
The video-game flowers Magid selected are iconic and hold economic weight, being incredibly rare and difficult to locate within their respective landscapes, factors that drive their desirability both in-game and out. To get them, Magid ventured through the blocky gamescapes of Minecraft, across the post-industrial Planet of Final Fantasy VII, foraged the World of Warcraft, and traversed the rolling hills of Ragnarok, and returned with valuable flowers and grasses, each with rare and enchanting powers. Her chosen specimens, pulled from nine different games, vary in resolution and style, some rendered in 3D detail, others as flat GIFs. Arranged as “hand-hacked” bouquets, the NFTs are spinning, three-dimensional composites of the gaming worlds in .MP4 form.
In plucking these digital flowers, arranging them together in unique bouquets, and releasing them as NFTs, Magid places a variety of forms of beauty and hierarchies of value and meaning into conversation with one another. Digital flowers, like NFTs, crystallize the capitalist fusion of aesthetics and value. The sale and ownership of each assemblage on the blockchain introduces an entirely new dimension in which to consider the complexities of their worth.
About Artwrld
Artwrld is an artist-driven organization that believes in building an art world worth inhabiting. Artwrld works collaboratively with artists to commission and produce projects that engage broad audiences and explore the emerging possibilities of blockchain technology for creative practice. They support artists throughout the entire process of making new work—from the initial concept to the final presentation—while fostering critical conversations about the issues driving digital art and culture. Artwrld’s mission is to create art projects that are thoughtful, challenging, and inspiring, and help artists advance their work and ideas in the space of web3. Every project Artwrld presents benefits one or more nonprofit organizations, selected by the artist to receive a portion of each sale.
About Creative Time
Creative Time is a public arts organization that works with artists to contribute to the dialogues, debates, and dreams of our times. For nearly 50 years, Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across the country, around the world—and even in outer space.