A dialogue with the unseen world on the blockchain
On May 30, Cai Guo-Qiang launches his novel blockchain project in collaboration with Kanon, EET—an interactive AI-augmented oracle for communicating with the unseen world. Extending the artist’s long-standing aesthetic vision and methodology on-chain, EET aims to express the unseen world through visible means. It establishes a connection with the beyond in order to confront the chaos and complexity of the human condition anew.
Inspired by “kau chim”, a fortune-telling practice popular in the artist’s hometown temples, and the algorithm embedded in the yarrow stalks divination method from I-Ching, EET brings the timeless practice of seeking guidance and insights from the beyond to the blockchain. Its chatroom-inspired interface welcomes all kinds of questions from users the same way a real-life fortune-teller might and generates answers in two distinct forms of tokens: GUA is a 3x3 grid that provides background context for the EET Fortune, which is made of animated GIFs resembling both an asterism and a stock chart accompanied by a corresponding title, description, and six verses of aphorisms drawn from crypto and web3 meme culture crossed with the I-Ching. As an interpretive guide, EET features a chat-based AI assuming the role of the “monk in the temple.” The animated images of each GUA and EET Fortune are completely rendered on-chain making EET the first ever project to generate and store GIFs entirely on the blockchain.
With EET, Cai envisions healing the world through art, enabled by the creation of an eDAO, a new form of social innovation to assemble a decentralized group of long-term guardians and promoters of the project through a gamified structure. Since the beginning of his career, Cai has sought to represent humanity’s place within the larger universe around us, creating aesthetic bridges to unseen and unknown realities, believing that every atom in every human is connected to the flow and flux of eternity. A bridge between the material and unseen worlds, EET extends the artist’s quest to reach beyond Earthly reality to commune with extraterrestrial life forces as manifest in his series Projects for Extraterrestrials (1989–) and the renowned Sky Ladder (2015). But unlike his spectacular, pyrotechnic events and related gunpowder paintings, EET enables an ongoing exchange with the field. For the first time in Cai’s work, we have two-way communication with an otherwise invisible realm.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) artworks span multiple artistic mediums, including painting, installation, video, and performance art. His often site-specific artworks adapt to local conditions, interpreting and responding to the local culture and history as well as establishing a dialogue between viewers and the larger universe around them. His famed explosion art and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to oscillate freely between society and nature. Cai has held numerous solo exhibitions in major art museums around the world, such as the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (2018), Prado Museum in Madrid (2017) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). Cai has received many important awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2007. In 2012, he was honored as a Laureate for the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, known as the “Nobel Prize of the Art World,” in the painting category. That same year, he was awarded the first US Department of State Medal of Arts.
Kanon is a pseudonymous collective of art, design, and cryptonative technology professionals dedicated to pushing the boundaries of crypto-enabled artistic expression. Innovating at all stages of the digital creative process, from visual to open-source protocol design, Kanon is supporting a novel model in which creative expression, structural experimentation, and financial return are mutually reinforcing. For inclusion into the collective’s inaugural project, the K21 Collection, Kanon has acquired an on-chain dynamic artwork titled Fetus Movement from Cai Guo-Qiang that is generated from the tokens minted by EET users.
