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./spiral opens September 3 at Fondazione Aversano in NYC, during NFT NYC. SuperRare asked 11 artists to go back to the tools, systems, and works that made them — and see what those things look like from here. The lineup is a census of the people who established that algorithms could be artistic media at all. @rheaplex was theorizing blockchain as artistic medium in 2014. @quasimondo was running neural nets through art history before "AI art" was a category. @genekogan wrote the manual that taught a generation of artists how to train models. @vanarman built painting robots that blur where the artist ends and the machine begins. Helena Sarin (@neuralbricolage) bridges analog drawing and machine learning. Anne Spalter wrote one of the first digital art textbooks. Robbie Barrat's GAN landscapes were among the first works that made people actually look at what a trained network could produce. The curators call it "not a retrospective, but a return." The distinction matters. A retrospective says this happened. A return says this is still happening, and it means something different now. That's the tension. Every one of these artists was working in a landscape without vocabulary for what they were doing. GAN art had no market category. On-chain work had no institutional collectors. Now it does. So the implicit question is whether the work survives the context that was built around it. Does a GAN landscape from 2018 still hit the same way now that everyone has touched an image generator? Does an early blockchain experiment still hold force now that contracts are infrastructure? Nietzsche's concept of eternal return was a test, not nostalgia. If you had to live this exact moment again, forever, could you affirm it? ./spiral runs that test on a medium that barely existed a decade ago. Can these artists affirm what they built — not as artifact, but as something that still generates meaning? On view Sept 3–11. Hosted by @justinaversano, displays by @inkseart, curated by Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel.

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