Feral File is thrilled to present BOOM TOWN, Peter Burr’s fictional neighborhood built, on the blockchain. The solo NFT exhibition, curated by Julia Kaganskiy, was launched Wednesday, December 14, 2022, at 11 AM for viewing, and at 12 PM sales will commence.
Each piece in BOOM TOWN represents a unique, living artwork comprised of 1,000 images that will change over time, evolving as a kind of durational stop motion animation over an undetermined period pegged to Ethereum’s block time—that is, the length of time it takes to add another block to the blockchain. Collectors receive the full set of images as part of their acquisition package and can browse or even create prints of the work’s past or future state, but they cannot make the work advance any faster or slower than block time.
Influenced by the tools and aesthetics of video games, Burr’s compositions draw on generative dynamics and the complexity that emerges from simple, rule-based systems. Each of the eight works in BOOM TOWN follows a precise logic for generating the structure’s architecture, its ground and field, its shadows, planes, and colours. The resulting images are reminiscent of 8-bit video games and early computer graphics, as well as the flat diagrammatic quality of CAD architectural drawings.
Utopian architecture and the built environment hold a particular fascination for Burr, whose work frequently mines the poetic tension between the architect’s idealism to remake the world, and lived reality. Lofty aspirations that a particular configuration might produce certain relationships between people and their environment tend to falter confronted by emergent forces that govern the real world. Inspired by the boom and bust cycle of capitalist-driven locales, Burr’s BOOM TOWN is galvanized from the landscape of the American West, when makeshift settlements, or “boom towns”, sprung up wherever valuable resources were to be found. Informed by the ideals of Manifest Destiny, colonialist expansion, and get-rich-quick schemes, these towns attracted prospectors, speculators, and those in search of a fast track to a better life.
Online, architectural metaphors are often invoked when discussing information and systems architecture, or in the form of digital real estate like domain names or plots of virtual land in the metaverse. Importantly, unlike much of Burr’s recent work, the locations in BOOM TOWN are devoid of people. The streets outside the factory and shopping plaza are empty. The windows of the apartment blocks show no signs of life. Burr is interested in drawing attention to the vacancy of these spaces and their potentiality as sites of projection and
collective imagination. On day one of the exhibition, BOOM TOWN is little more than a collection of empty structures, yet through the process of collecting, the town becomes populated and inhabited, in a sense, by the proprietors of its NFTs. At a time when Web3 is still, by and large, a vacant space to be developed and designed, Burr seeks to underscore that it is we who will come to determine what kind of social and civic life it will ultimately enable and support. Not only will we be the ones who come to populate and activate these spaces, to breathe life into them, make them vibrant and give them their unique character and vibe, but the most potent promise of web3 is that we can choose to build them differently, with a different set of principles and values.
Like most of his works, Burr’s BOOM TOWN is a richly crafted narrative world that is deeply evocative while remaining mysterious and restrained. Displaying the artist’s gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, they invite the viewer to conceptualize their interpretation.
Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. His practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in the form of immersive cinematic artworks. Various institutions have presented these pieces internationally, including Documenta 14, Athens; MoMA PS1, New York; and The Barbican Centre, London.
Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship.
Feral File commissions curated exhibitions of digital artwork and partnered with artists and institutions to explore new ways of exhibiting and collecting. Evolving from the art gallery and digital publishing models, Feral File borrows the best traits of each to inform a new kind of art space. Feral File works in tandem with a community of technologists, new media artists, collectors, and curators to redefine and frame a sustainable model for the future of digital experimentation.
