Casey Reas

Crypto has crashed and burned, but NFT visual culture is the better for it, and here's why, says the pioneering artist and programmer

- J.J. Charlesworth

Feral File, launched in 2020, is one of the more inventive projects to come out of the recent convergence of digital art with Blockchain and NFT platforms. Founded by programmer and artist Casey Reas, Feral File is an online gallery, in which NFT artworks – by digital artists including Auriea Harvey, Mario Klingemann, Lu Yang and Sarah Friend – are brought together by changing guest curators. While the NFT explosion put the focus on high prices and star names (think Beeple), Feral File experimented with how the relationship between artists, curators and the market for digital works might support artists more equitably, while showcasing artists and projects that reach beyond the NFT hype. In the wake of the crypto crash, J.J. Charlesworth spoke with Reas about the origins of Feral File and the recent launch of the platform’s second iteration, Feral File 2.0.

ARTREVIEW Feral File came out of your 2019 project a2p – ‘artist to peer’. That platform was very convivial – allow- ing artists to share and ‘trade’ their works with each other. But with Feral File you’ve been dealing more actively with the other relationships that go on in an art ‘scene’, which are both economic and institutional relationships: you have the artist, the curator and the collector; relationships that are potentially ones of unequal influence. So it seems that with the shift from a2p to Feral File, you’re dealing with the different pressures that come to bear on that more ideal model of artists sharing a community, before a market gets involved.