The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) has never shied away from exploring how technology shapes storytelling. Now, in partnership with the Tezos Foundation, the Astoria institution is venturing into territory that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago: commissioning artists to create works that exist as living, breathing entities on a blockchain.

Rather than chasing crypto hype cycles, this initiative asks a fundamental question: Can blockchain technology become an artistic medium as essential to contemporary art-making as oil paint was to the Renaissance or video was to the 1960s avant-garde?

Starting in November 2025, the Museum’s Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall will host a new cycle of commissions exploring blockchain as creative material. The initiative, built on the Museum’s successful 2024 collaboration with the Tezos Foundation, pairs ten artists to investigate the conceptual and structural possibilities of blockchain technology itself.

Aureia Harvey, Echo: Core, 2024, on display at the minting station in the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the 2024-2025 partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

The opening salvo comes from James Bloom and Gottfried Jäger, a pairing that signals the program’s ambitions. Bloom, a contemporary artist working at the intersection of systems and photography, joins forces with Jäger, a pioneer who helped establish generative photography as an art form in 1967. Their commission builds upon Jäger’s historical work creating networked digital images, translating those structural approaches into smart contracts and laying philosophical groundwork for what follows.

The subsequent pairings read like a deliberate global survey of artists wrestling with technology’s implications. Sarah Friend, a Canadian artist and software developer, explores economics and self-engagement with emerging technology alongside Yehwan Song, a South Korean-born, New York-based artist who visualizes digital systems’ boundaries. Linda Dounia, a Senegalese-Lebanese artist recognized on TIME’s 2023 AI 100 list for speculative archiving work, collaborates with Rhea Myers, an artist, hacker, and writer who has been using blockchain as an artistic medium since 2014. Swedish conceptual artist Jonas Lund, known for critically examining networked systems, pairs with Yoshi Sodeoka, a Japanese-born artist and musician whose work has appeared at Centre Pompidou and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Contingent [still image from work in progress], 2025, James Bloom in collaboration with Gottfried Jager, courtesy of the artists.

What distinguishes this initiative from the countless blockchain art projects that have proliferated in recent years is its institutional context and technical specificity. The Tezos FA2 standard offers artists capabilities particularly suited to complex, interactive works: multi-asset structures, batch operations, and notably low transaction costs.

Rather than treating blockchain as simply a new way to sell art, the cycle introduces the FA2 Fellowship, open for all, which invites artists and developers to explore these technical features as creative constraints and possibilities — much like how early video artists learned to work with the specific characteristics of magnetic tape and cathode ray tubes. Following the educational sessions, participants will develop project proposals with curatorial and technical guidance. The final media wall exhibition will be selected among those FA2 Fellowship participants.

“Since the days of hic et nunc, I’ve hoped to see more artists engage with the Tezos blockchain itself as a behavioral and performative component of their work.”
REGINA HARSANYI

Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at MoMI, frames the initiative with refreshing candor about blockchain’s potential: “Since the days of hic et nunc, I’ve hoped to see more artists engage with the Tezos blockchain itself as a behavioral and performative component of their work. With this initiative, we’re grateful at MoMI to help foster that creative direction and provide a platform for artists to experiment with blockchain as a material.”

Museum of the Moving Image entrance. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

That word—material—is crucial. Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, Head of Arts at Trilitech (Tezos R&D Hub), emphasizes that the partnership aims to empower artists with “resources that allow the blockchain itself to become part of the artwork—interactive, experimental, and alive.”

“Artists have always been the pioneers of new media,” Artamonovskaja says. “Museum of Moving Image is the perfect partner for this vision, bringing the curatorial context and institutional support.”

“Artists have always been the pioneers of new media.”
ALEKSANDRA ARTAMONOVSKAJA

This approach echoes how earlier generations of artists treated electricity, video feedback, or networked communication: not as neutral delivery systems but as media with their own aesthetic properties and conceptual implications.The program’s structure reveals sophisticated thinking about how artistic experimentation actually works. Fellowship participants who attend more than 4 sessions will be eligible to apply for microgrants of $500 to $1,000 to support development following the workshop phase, acknowledging that moving from exploration to realized proposals requires resources.

The two-month exhibition period for each commissioned work on the 50-foot Media Wall provides substantial time for audiences to engage with pieces that may evolve or respond over time. Artists will also release “production artifacts”—source code, sketches, generative tools—with eight artifacts published across the cycle and available to the public at no cost. This creates a parallel record of experimentation and development, making visible the usually hidden processes of digital art-making.

Accompanying public workshops, performances, and time-based works extend the range of practices presented, acknowledging that blockchain-based art isn’t confined to static visual objects.

This initiative builds on Museum Without Walls, MoMI’s June 2024 collaboration with Tezos Foundation that introduced an annual exhibition series and interactive lobby station enabling visitors to mint and take home digital art fragments at no cost. Most recently, Compositions in Code: The Art of Processing and p5.js paired Processing pioneers Marius Watz and LIA with p5.js artists Aleksandra Jovanić, Sarah Ridgley, and Melissa Wiederrecht in a series celebrating code as creative material. The new FA2-focused cycle represents a deepening commitment to supporting blockchain’s role in contemporary art.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the initiative is what it doesn’t emphasize: there’s no mention of cryptocurrency values, investment potential, or revolutionary decentralization rhetoric. Instead, the focus remains squarely on artists asking questions, experimenting with constraints, and creating work that engages critically with the medium itself.

Rodell Warner, World Is Turning, 2024. Displayed at Museum of the Moving Image, New York, as part of the 2024-2025 partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Image by Thanassi Karageorgiou, courtesy of MoMI

Whether blockchain technology ultimately proves essential to contemporary art-making or becomes a historical footnote remains to be seen. What MoMI and Tezos Foundation have created, however, is a structured opportunity for serious artists to investigate that question with institutional support and technical resources—treating blockchain neither as salvation nor gimmick, but as one more set of tools and conditions that contemporary artists might bend toward meaningful expression.

The Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall has hosted everything from early cinema to cutting-edge digital work since the Museum opened in its current location. Starting this November, it will display art that exists simultaneously as visual experience and as code executing on a distributed network—images that are also contracts, aesthetics that are also logic. Whether that represents the future of art or simply an interesting experiment, audiences will have two years to decide for themselves.

The MoMI partnership is part of a broader institutional embrace of Tezos as a platform for artistic inquiry. Across the Atlantic, Art on Tezos Berlin (Nov. 6-9) is becoming a key hub in this growing cultural network, uniting artists, collectors, and technologists in a city long tied to avant-garde and technological innovation. Together, these efforts mark a shift from speculation to experimentation, treating blockchain not as a marketplace but as an artistic medium itself.