This week at Frieze New York, LG Electronics, Global Partner of the art fair, exhibits new works by NFT pioneer and artist Kevin McCoy, co-created by Jennifer McCoy. The evolving generative artwork is displayed on LG’s cutting-edge digital canvas, examining technology’s exquisite capacity to produce new ways of shaping and experiencing art.
Collaborating with LG and its cutting-edge self-lit OLED technology enhances the integrity of my work and offers viewers a new way to experience art in a way that wouldn’t be possible on conventional displays,” said McCoy. “This digital canvas allows my abstract, code-based work to manifest physically in space as a tangible canvas within a museum-like architecture that gets out of the way and lets art happen.”
Photo by Jin Ho Choi, courtesy of the artist.
The artist reveals his latest NFT, Quantum Leap: Primordial Star 3 (2022),where several levels of code-based systems interact. Each token from Quantum Leap produces a mandala that evolves, inspired by the lifecycle of the stars, which shift colors as they age. These tokenized “stars” alter their form and color as the code-generated images mature, evolving from three to twenty sides over the span of their lifetimes. The artwork is inspired by his 2014 work, Quantum, the first work ever to be tokenized on a blockchain, also on view at the LG OLED Lounge.
“Kevin McCoy is an artist who transcends genres and disciplines, and he’ll lead the discourse around art and technology at Frieze New York this year,” said Kate Oh, Head of Home Entertainment Marketing Communications at LG Electronics. “LG OLED technology will bring Kevin’s works to life in an unprecedented way for the fair visitors.”
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “Quantum Leap: Primordial Star 3,” 2022; courtesy of the artist.
Photo by Jin Ho Choi, courtesy of the artist.
Guests will also experience Quantum Leap 3: Dark Star (2022), which showcases the Dark Star produced as each Quantum Leap: Primordial Star slowly loses its color over the course of its lifespan. This token is a “memento mori,” an animated ghost of what was once living. After producing it, Quantum Leap: Primordial Star is reborn in full color with a new central shape and palette, replicating and generating new tokens autonomously.
Quantum Entanglement (2022) unveils a new hybrid work of drawings and NFTs that place in dialogue “drawing” as performative act and “the drawing” as physical document of that performance. Both the physical drawings and the digital animations of Quantum Entanglement are created with software and a robotic drawing machine that are designed and fabricated by the artists. Though computer-driven, the machine uses conventional materials such as ink and paper to physically create the drawings.
The presentation “exemplifies LG’s commitment to innovation within the arts and supporting artists to push their creative boundaries,” said Oh. “We look forward to continuing our efforts on leveraging our industry-leading technologies to enable new possibilities in digital art and beyond.”
Photo by Jin Ho Choi, courtesy of the artist.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, “Quantum Leap: Dark Star,” 2022; courtesy of the artist.
