Refraction is thrilled to announce an exciting new opportunity for artists at the forefront of creativity and innovation. In collaboration with LUKSO, the Refraction x LUKSO Grant Program offers artists a chance to bring their vision to life through groundbreaking digital and phygital projects.
This program is not just a grant—it’s a chance to pioneer the future of digital collectibles and explore the potential of blockchain-powered art. Each selected artist will receive 400 $LYX, mentorship, and hands-on support from both Refraction and LUKSO teams as they develop and launch their projects on the Universal Profile platform.
LUKSO is a next-generation blockchain platform designed to revolutionize digital identity and creativity. Founded by Fabian Vogelsteller, one of the creators of Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, LUKSO focuses on creating a decentralized ecosystem where fashion, design, and digital art can thrive. The platform’s Universal Profiles provide secure, blockchain-based identities that allow artists and creators to own their data, showcase their work, and interact seamlessly within a Web3 environment. This collaboration offers artists a chance to innovate within a groundbreaking framework that redefines ownership and artistic expression.
Abstracted Parameters invites artists to explore how abstraction can help navigate today’s increasingly blurred realities. At the crossroads of physical, digital, and technological spaces, this theme encourages participants to push boundaries and rethink abstraction as a tool for storytelling and expression.
Inspired by techniques like computational poetics and movement, and building on the legacy of abstract pioneers like Kandinsky and Malevich, artists are challenged to experiment with distortion, form, and new mediums. The goal is to uncover fresh ways of communicating and creating meaning, using the interplay between the expected and the unexpected to shape their work.
Through this lens, artists will investigate how digital and phygital mediums can expand the possibilities of abstraction, crafting pieces that resonate with today’s hybrid, ever-changing world. See full curatorial statement below.
Selected artists will:
Successful applicants will be notified by January 27, 2024, and immediately begin their onboarding journey to bring their Universal Profile to life.
This grant is perfect for artists ready to explore the possibilities of Web3 technology and integrate blockchain into their practice. By creating a Universal Profile, artists can establish a secure, decentralized digital identity that connects them to an expanding ecosystem of innovative projects.
Additionally, this program represents a meaningful step toward empowering artists with creative and financial autonomy, providing the tools to not only envision but actively shape the future of the art world.
Interested artists can apply via the application form. Share your vision, and let’s redefine what’s possible in art and technology.
abstraction:
Living in a time of mind bending between IRL, the digital, the technological, the global, movement, and beyond abstracted parameters look at new ways that artists as a group, community, and beyond vision see in today's ever more blurred world.
In using different digital techniques of computational poetics, movement, focus, and slowing up the speed itself, new forms of abstraction can be found following (in some cases) similar precepts, motions and movements of past abstract painters, but from within the unexplored gaze of the lens, and what the lens is meant to be.
Each art in itself, within its material limits! is tempted to cover the entire spectrum of the community it forms with other arts, and what lies in between or beyond the normative lens of viewing and relations.
Bellour referred to this as the Double Helix, specifically the work that lives between the lines of what is foreseen, and unforeseen by science with regard to nature.
It is within that space, and through the movements that occur there, that different forms of abstraction can be achieved. “The phases of movement, of false-movement, of passage from one frame to the next, which are very sudden and punctuated with a blue flash, amount to so many outburst of distortion whose effect spreads beyond their own duration; they damage the image we discover, the resemblance that is being created to the point that we are hardly surprised at what is most surprising, and look at it twice before we watch out”
These ‘outbursts of distortion’ are, in fact, focused on one of the main tools of artists experimenting over time. This has to do with the traditional range of what can and cannot be recorded.
It is very clear, either the (moving) image is transported and immediately reaches the level of a mental analogy; in the shape that it finally took in Kandinsky and Malevich, or of a sensual abstraction!or the digital carries the analogical inside itself, even if it is as the divergence between what the image designated and what it becomes, in front of the fiction that it establishes in the way and cannot avoid establishing.
For Abstracted Parameters all artists, as a group project, will take their own visions into forms of abstraction today, and create new mediums of meaning, communication and discussion in the process.
Artists Connie Bakshi and Ellie Pritts reflect on how AI influences their work and perspectives on storytelling, identity, and the evolving role of the artist following their curation in Livepeer x Refraction's Limitless AI exhibit in Bangkok.
