CHOOSE THE NEXT ARTIST FOR MoMI
Community Curation for the Schlosser Media Wall
The public is invited to vote on the prospective artists whose work has the chance of being presented on the Museum's Schlosser Media Wall. A fragment of the chosen artwork will be offered as a free digital collectible, minted at no cost.
This Community Curation initiative is the next project in the year-long MoMI x Tezos partnership, focused on opportunities for artists and Museum visitors.
Voting ended September 22. The three final artists will be announced the week of September 23 and the first work will go on view November 22.
The ten nominated artists for the Community Curation project are:
Ceren Su Çelik
Grida on Ceren Su Çelik:
Ceren Su Çelik’s work investigates the evolving relationship between technology and humanity, utilizing AI and 3D animation to challenge the boundaries of artistic expression. Her projects, such as the Primordial Soup series and Synthetic Spider, explore intersections of identity, memory, and technology, merging physical and digital mediums in ways that provoke reflection. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of constant transformation, her work delves into how technology reshapes identities and bodies in a dynamic digital landscape. Exhibited in major institutions, Su Celik’s mastery of form and content aligns with "MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS: MOMI X TEZOS," making her ideal for this project.
About the Artist: Ceren Su Çelik graduated from Marmara University (2019) and completed her master’s at Yeditepe University (2023). Her works have been shown in various domestic and international exhibitions, including Art on Tezos (Lisbon, 2024), Noise Media Art Fair (Istanbul, 2024), New (Ankara, 2024), and Positions Art Fair (Berlin, 2023).
Linda Dounia
Danielle King on Linda Dounia:
Linda Dounia is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work explores the intersection of identity, technology, and social justice. Drawing from her experience as a Black, Senegalese woman, she interrogates power dynamics and the experiences of marginalized communities in a digitized world. Her diverse output spans creative coding, AI, generative adversarial networks (GANs), painting, collage, and more. Many pieces merge African aesthetics and imagery— from the built and natural landscape, to nostalgic memories of her childhood —with cutting-edge technological tools.
Central themes Dounia explores include culture, race, gender, and systemic inequality. I feel a particular connection to her poignant works reflecting on girlhood, motherhood, and how it feels to inhabit a female body. She critically examines how global systems of control and surveillance erase marginalized identities, particularly in digital spaces. Dounia’s work not only brings these issues to light but also imagines a future where technology empowers rather than oppresses. Her work is deeply personal, historically rooted, and conceptually rigorous.
In 2023, Dounia curated the exhibition In/Visible for Feral File, featuring 10 Black artists working with AI to challenge the misrepresentation of Black culture and identity in technology. In her Curator’s Note, she wrote, “Any Black person using AI today can attest that it doesn’t actually know them...it offers a fragmentary, perhaps even violent, picture.” In a TIME interview, she emphasized the importance of Black creators pushing back against these biases, stating, “Even if it’s an infinitesimal difference... there’s still hope we can interrogate and change the data.”
About the Artist: Linda Dounia is an artist and designer who investigates the philosophical and environmental implications of techno-capitalism. Her work mediates memories using generative technologies, namely Artificial Intelligence and Creative Coding. She is an advocate for more transparency and greater agency over AI, a topic she writes and speaks about. In 2023, Linda was recognized on the TIMEA100 list of most influential people in AI for her work on speculative archiving—building AI models that help us remember what is lost. In 2024, she was the recipient of Mozilla’s RISE25 award for her work in AI. Her work has been featured by MoMA, Chanel’s 19M gallery, Museum Folkwang, Bright Moments, Avant Arte, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. Linda’s work has been shown at Art Basel, The Biennal Sur, The Dakar Biennale, ARTXLAGOS, Digital Art Fair Asia, and galleries globally.
Displayed above:
Not at home in my body (2022), Unplanned (2023), The Garden Under the Sun (2022)
Anna Malina
Vincent Van Dough on Anna Malina:
Anna Malina mines collective visual histories—of cinema, moving image, and the Internet—to express personal visions of today. Her work innovatively blends past and present materials and techniques, both analog and digital, to arrive at hybrid works that thwart easy categorization. Indeed, she is an artist working firmly in the “immaterial” digital realm, while addressing and incorporating materiality head-on through her multimedia techniques. Her work is deeply analog and historical—with explicit references to early modernist and midcentury experimental cinema - while also being natively digital and Internet-bred. Through her chosen subjects—often originating in the self, the body, the suggestively erotic transience of flowers and still lifes —she injects subjectivity and poetry into a medium and aesthetic realm that can sometimes come across as unfeeling or inhuman.
A longtime Tezos artist, Anna Malina represents not only a beautiful signature digital practice, but also an exploratory teaching moment for new audiences at MoMI. With Anna Malina’s work on view, MoMI visitors will be exposed to a vision of on-chain digital art that will expand their understanding of the realm specifically—what it looks like, how it is made - and which offers valuable referential throughlines to the history (and future) of the moving image more generally.
About the Artist: Anna Malina is an experimental artist working with self-portraiture and appropriated images, creating .gif animations, short films, and music videos. She is heavily influenced by her exploration of cinema and moving image history, and is obsessed with materiality, failures, and absences.
Displayed above:
Kollaps (2023), no rest for the wicked (2023), T◻chMyErr◻rs .x. Str◻keMyKeys (2022)
Maya Man
Olha Pylypenko on Maya Man:
I think the web is one of the most interesting mediums to explore, and it is my pleasure to nominate Maya Man as the artist who has been continuously contributing to the conversation about our perception of self online.Maya Man is an artist who creates software-based art on and about the internet. She uses the performance as medium, embracing the web’s complexities to explore our on-screen identities. On the internet we’re users, subscribers, creators, commenters, customers and commodities. You might find yourself ambitious, anxious, filled with social comparisons, psychological vulnerability, attention-seeking, filled with conceitedness. While addressing these in a critical self-aware manner, Maya Man’s works are filled with humor, intimacy and cuteness. She puts us as active participants and playful observers in her world of collaged websites, generative systems, and online art artifacts. During our participation, we become a bit more than just ‘users' and together with Maya we build spaces of honesty and desires online.
About the Artist: Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, installations, textiles, and posts examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. She is the creator of the browser extension Glance Back and the Art Blocks curated collection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. She has exhibited internationally at bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Vellum, Los Angeles; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; and Feral File, online. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Forbes, Zora Zine, Outland, Refinery29, and more. Maya holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Computer Science and Media Studies from Pomona College and an MFA in Media Art from UCLA.
Displayed above:
Glance Back (2023), FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT (2022), love/hate (2022)
Martina Menegon
Kika Nicolela on Martina Menegon:
Having first encountered Martina's works in 2017, I was immediately struck by the artist's willingness to expose her vulnerable digital self-bodies to manipulation, fostering a unique interaction between artist and audience. Martina uses technology—such as 3D scanning, AR, VR, and game engines —as tools for a new form of self-portraiture, transforming viewers into 'interactors.' In her constant experimentations with the hybrid nature of her digital bodies, Martina Menegon is challenging the Cartesian notion that we need a body of flesh and blood to perceive the world. Her works suggest that a physical body alone is no longer adequate to experience the computerized world we live in. Engaging with Marina Menegon’s artworks is an invitation to confront, question, and transcend traditional concepts of corporeality. It encourages us to abandon the confines of physical versus digital, and embrace the emergence of a novel, multifaceted presence in our world
Martina Menegon (she/her) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Vienna. Her artistic practice is centered around creating intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality. With a focus on Interactive and Extended Reality Art, Martina experiments with new forms of performative and glitched self-portraiture to explore new simulated fluid identities and create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature. Martina’s work has been exhibited internationally online and AFK, in festival, galleries and institutions such as Francisco Carolinum Linz, MAK Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Roehrs & Boetsch Gallery, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Spark Art Fair, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, FILE Festival, WRO Biennale, Parallel Vienna, Virginia Bianchi Gallery, HeK - House of Electronic Arts, Epoch, Vellum LA.
Displayed above:
It feels like home (2021), one last click and i'll be gone (2022), falling asleep (2023)
Sarah Ridgley
Steve Sacks on Sarah Ridgley:
Sarah Ridgley's work acts as a performative extension of conceptual art. Her practice invites a set of rules encoded in software that unfold in real-time. This premise invites a series of chance outcomes that are impossible to predetermine. Both MoMI and Tezos advocate for the exhibition of ephemeral, time-based digital artworks. The support of Ridgley’s generative compositions would represent a critical engagement with emergent technology.
About the Artist: Sarah Ridgley is an internationally exhibited generative artist who has experimented with Blockchain since 2019. Her work investigates the materiality of pixels and explores new techniques and ways of using code as a method of mark-making on a digital canvas. Ridgley uses Processing (p5js) and JavaScript to build her programs, designing algorithmic brushes and rendering techniques to complete each series.
Kerim Safa
Xer0x on Kerim Safa:
Kerim Safa's meticulous and innovative art techniques are unique and thought-provoking. His work is distinguished by its technical precision, featuring seamlessly looping mechanisms and repetitive patterns that subtly evolve over time. "Time" in this instance is something Safa masterfully distorts as the viewer is often not aware that the animation sequences created are a mere 1-3 seconds in length. This is achieved through complex animations within a minimalist aesthetic, keeping viewers engaged.
Safa's animations are not just visually engaging; they are deeply thoughtful, designed to be experienced without a defined start or end, giving viewers the freedom to engage with them for as long as they choose. This cyclic and open-ended structure demonstrates Safa's mastery of temporal dynamics in digital media.
Safa's key strengths include his ability to work within the limitations of pixel art, a medium typically associated with retro video games from the 80s and 90s. Every pixel in Safa's work becomes critically important. His attention to pixel placement, combined with his use of minimal color palettes, creates a tight, controlled aesthetic that elevates his work beyond mere nostalgia. Safa uses these restrictions to his advantage, finding creative ways to break and establish rhythm within his animations.
Safa also integrates sound into some works, drawing from his experience as a musician; emphasizing rhythm through auditory and visual elements. Combining traditional pixel art techniques with new opportunities made available by modern software and hardware highlights his versatility and commitment to expanding the language of digital art.
About the Artist: Kerim Safa is a digital artist known for his captivating, manually created conceptual pixel art animations. Originally from Turkey and now based in the Netherlands, Safa creates work that features looping mechanisms and repetitive patterns, offering viewers an endless and meditative experience. Influenced by the pixelated aesthetics of retro video games from the late '80s and early '90s, Safa uses minimal color palettes and carefully places each pixel for maximum impact. Trained in visual arts in Izmir, he later shifted to music in Istanbul. Safa’s creative journey took a new turn in 2020 when he discovered NFTs, which perfectly suited his pixel-based loops.
Displayed above:
i am two and two is four (2021), PC-2 (2024), The Unnecessary Machine (2022)
Travess Smalley
thefunnyguys on Travess Smalley:
Although Travess Smalley tends to work within the constraints of a square format and a deliberately restricted color palette, his Pixel Rugs never cease to captivate. Maybe that's because Smalley draws inspiration from a diverse range of visual culture, spanning different time periods, art movements, mediums and content types.
One week, he might be intrigued by medieval woodcuts and pattern books, and the next he is fascinated by the weavings of Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks. He also delves deeply into the work of his favorite artists, such as Sonia Landy Sheridan and Eduardo Paolozzi. What makes his research stand out most, however, is his interest in more atypical domains such as video games, pixel art, sound visualization, or even wheat weaving.
As a result, Smalley also likes to express himself in more than one medium. Over the years, his Pixel Rugs have taken the shape of Game Boy cartridges, plotter drawings, game assets in Minecraft, and handwoven rugs.
About the Artist: Travess Smalley is a digital artist and educator who works with computational software to create complex and unique generative systems. His work spans diverse mediums that include computer graphics, digital images, painting software, books, and the renowned Pixel Rugs. Using Photoshop as an extension to his generative process and scripts, Smalley is able to incorporate alternative processing methods into a cohesive system that produces unimaginable, emergent images. Smalley’s work has been featured in editorials such as HABITAT, Artnews, RISD, Forbes, Outland, Rhizome, and more. With over a decade of exhibition presence across the globe, Smalley has worked across both physical and digital spaces with exhibitions at Verse, Foxy Productions, Expanded Art, the Herbert W. Franke Tribute, and Feral File.
Displayed above:
09-25-23 Pixel_rug 01 (2021), 09_27_23_Pixel_Rug_01.png (2023), Pixel_Rug_Tangible (2022)
Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez
Jiggy on Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez:
I chose Marcelo for a multitude of reasons that cannot be explained simply. In a time where we are thrown an overabundance of information, it is incredibly difficult to make sense of all of it. Marcelo simplifies that, while maintaining multitudes through his art and actions. His sensibility, emotional intelligence and vision sets him apart from others. He is able to singularly straddle the line between experimentalism while maintaining supreme quality. Drawing from all of life’s influences whether it is his little girl drawing hearts to the vast data that modern scientists explore.
There’s a reason why platforms such as hic et nunc and fx(hash) have become so regarded on Tezos for their generative art and it is because of the profound justice that Marcelo has deployed while releasing his work there. On top of that, he has released via Art Blocks Curated as well as Art Basel Hong Kong via fx(hash)—an honor that is only his own.
You could imagine that he’d stop there and that it was more than enough, yet he has not. Always active in the arts community, for the better of the community, while releasing works influenced by and with machines for the betterment of humankind. Works for these causes are not limited to an orb, created for the BRGEXE initiative / fund investing in Brazilian artists, work in part for #tezos4iran, a tribute to the bird-worm society based on birds by Iskra Velitchkova @pointline_ and worms by Kazumasa Teshigawara @qubibi and a collaboration between Cure Parkinson’s, Bonhams and Artwise, with support from fx(hash).
About the Artist: Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez is an artist led by exploration, experimentation and curiosity. His work is influenced by a plethora of sources not limited to machines, abstraction, data, time and his contemporaries. His works are featured on the leading avant-garde crypto art platforms and galleries not limited to fx(hash), Art Blocks Curated, Verse Works, Kate Vass Galerie and hic et nunc. As a result of his history of founding innovative non-profit data startups such as databeers as well as working in legacy financial institutions such as BBVA, Marcelo is uncommonly positioned and experienced in leveraging the abstraction of such systems into profoundly beautiful art inspired by the range of encounters that life offers.
Displayed above:
el ineffable momento (2022), Toccata #4 (2022), string theories / luz i (2022)
Rodell Warner
Chris Coleman on Rodell Warner:
Rodell Warner is a maker of lenses. Looking through them, we see the past and the future, lost histories and possible tomorrows. While the lenses focus and obscure as they spin, they also protect, preserving bits of life inside them like amber. Rodell Warner’s Terrarium and Heirloom series of artworks ask how we can collectively preserve life as represented by plants and historic illustrations. But these are not simply representations - in Terrariums the plants are carefully crafted by Warner and exist as digital shadows, and the illustrations of Heirloom are by colonial scientists trying to interpret the lives of others.
The collective decision on archiving will move forward by being seen and captured by the thousands of visitors to the MoMI. Every rotation of Warner’s lenses will be etched into neurons, solid state memory in phones, and on scattered hard drives across the Cloud. The MoMI’s function as both showcase and archive mirrors Warner’s work, asking questions about whose perspectives are saved and how representation operates in our culture. At MoMI, Rodell Warner’s digital gems will give visions of the past and ever-changing glimpses of our futures.
About the Artist: Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography, and a moving image master’s student at Bard College. Rooted in the exploration of race, nature, and technologies of representation, Rodell’s artworks draw on personal and institutional archives to rethink the past, and on digital processes to index emancipatory futures. Warner’s animated works intervening in early photography from the Caribbean have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the landmark exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory in 2022, and in 2024 in the solo exhibition Fictions More Precious at Big Medium in Austin, Texas. Warner’s animated works showing hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants seen through unique lenses in virtual environments were exhibited in 2024 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in the exhibition Sea Change.
Displayed above:
Waiting Backstage (Heirloom Collection) (2024), Terraria 2 (2022), Terrarium 006 (2021)
