Claudia Hart, Perfectionism is a Weakness, NFT born-digital movie with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022, 18-seconds.
The Art of Survival: Aphorisms by an Old Girl, Mp4 movies, between 10 and 40 seconds in length, audio track enacted using an open-source “Queen Elizabeth'' bot.
2020/2023
Claudia Hart
The Art of Survival is a series of NFT, inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War - the classical canons of power politics. These aphorisms are the words of another OG (me), narrated by the late and great OG paradigm, Queen Elizabeth (or rather her bot). My versions are not tangible books but instead are animated NFT, mottos meant to heal a flaming world where discussion has been polarized by social media and current real politics. Evoking Times Square billboards and branding slogans, this is public-address but imagined here as homily directed to the divided space of social discourse.
These are recent works, but they are a revival of my earlier practice because my first works were also aphoristic. Over forty years ago, I was a painter who was very influenced by conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner. At that time, I produced a work called A Child’s Machiavelli - an early form of a graphic novel - before the term was in common use. In 1996, I published A Child’s Machiavelli as a Penguin edition - a so-called “gift book” for adults. I decided to animate it, my initial motivation to learn 3D animation. But the simulations-technologies behind 3D lead me into another direction. For years I considered myself a post-photographer, simulating instead of photographing the real. But when NFT came along, minting appealed to me for two reasons: because it was a new way of simulating, but at the same time, a compact version of publishing and perfect for my aphoristic style.The Art of Survival aphorisms produced for the Feralfile.com NFT platform, for I Know, an exhibition curated by Synthesis gallery, Berlin, were a way of experimenting once again with language. The Old Girl aphorisms are a personal version of the 1990s Machiavelli project, created over thirty years later but now with a strong dose of The Art of War by Lao Tsu thrown in. My plan was to publish it as an NFT hybrid between text and image and between image and object, channeling the voice of Lawrence Weiner – and also a strategy for integrating all of the aspects of my various periods and practices into one.
Claudia Hart, In the Land of Ethics There is Only Grey, NFT born-digital movie, with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022, 18-seconds.
Claudia Hart, Refusal to Compromise is Capitulation, NFT born-digital movie, with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022,18-seconds.
Claudia Hart, Replace Militancy with Perfect Navigation, NFT born-digital movie, with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022, 18-seconds.
Claudia Hart, Step Back, See Patterns, NFT born-digital movie, with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022, 18-seconds.
Claudia Hart, Transcend the Pain of Being, NFT born-digital movie, with audio interpreted by an open-source Queen Elizabeth bot, 2022, 14-seconds.