ACCURSED BLOG

As the first NFT collection produced in an exclusive partnership between Accursed Share and Mat3ria, Rome, Priscilla Pallante’s Augmented Rome engages with two exciting artistic and philosophical techniques: cymatic imaging technology and psychogeography.

To illuminate the conceptual and artistic themes of Priscilla Pallante’s new NFT collection with Accursed Share, Augmented Rome, we present an updated and expanded version of a conversation between Pallante and Niccolò Fano of Mat3ria first held in 2019. Fano and Pallante discuss the early life and evolution of the Augmented Rome project, as it moves into the Web3 space.

This marks the third and final entry in our series of posts contextualising the nine sites and histories that Priscilla Pallante pictures in her NFT project, Augmented Rome. Spanning 3d maps, 3d souvenir models, and cymatic audiovisual ‘slices’, Augmented Rome offers a new view of a city ancient and eternal. Here, we explore Fori Imperiali, Pantheon, and Santa Maria Maggiore.

Showcasing Priscilla Pallante: Augmented Rome, an exquisite NFT collection from Accursed Share’s partnership with Mat3ria, Rome.

This entry continues our series of posts inviting the Accursed Share and larger NFT community to learn more about the urban sites and vivid histories behind Priscilla Pallante’s upcoming cryptoart project, Augmented Rome. Here we discuss San Pietro, Piazza del Popolo, and Ponte Sisto.

As context for the sites and histories pictured in Priscilla Pallante’s upcoming NFT collection, Augmented Rome, this series of posts explores groupings of three distinct points on Pallante’s audiovisual map of the city. Up first: Piazza di Spagna, Castel Sant’Angelo and Colosseo.

Accursed Share and Mat3ria, Matèria gallery’s Web3 laboratory, are proud to present Augmented Rome, a project by Ms. Priscilla Pallante, an emerging artist who is pushing photography past conventional bounds and into uncharted territory in the NFT space.

Accursed Share announces an exciting new partnership with Matèria Gallery, in Rome, and its new and innovative Web3 iteration, Mat3ria.

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The Entangled Life NFT sale will support the ground-breaking work of the Fungi Foundation, Sheldrake’s involvement in the Fauna Flora Funga Initiative and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and his research into the decentralised problem-solving ability of fungal networks.

The Entangled Life: Worldbuilders collection is powered by Algorand, the pure proof-of-stake foundational blockchain technology that drives electricity consumption to almost zero.

Merlin Sheldrake and Accursed Share’s Mónica Belevan discuss the theoretical and biological underpinnings of the Entangled Life NFT collection, as it relates to developments in mycorrhizal studies and Web 3.0.

Whether in agriculture, forestry, or in our attempts to restore degraded ecosystems, we depend entirely on the healthy functioning of mycorrhizal relationships. But they are hard for us to see, hidden within plant roots and buried underground. To create this collection of symbiotic rootscapes, Merlin Sheldrake used a novel technique that provides an extraordinary view of the fungal relationships that underlie all life on land; an entangled flourishing that underlies our past, present and future.

Accursed Share is proud to present the second chapter of Captured Moment: The Master’s Process, the first NFT collection by photographer-to-the-stars Frederic Auerbach. The collection consists of NFT drops of process and master photos (1/1s) of five A-listers, plus airdrops. The stars in this collection are Benedict Cumberbatch, Natalie Portman, Sharon Stone, Mike Tyson and Zendaya. The airdrops include names like those of digital artist Krista Kim, Young Hollywood it-girls Jena Malone and Phoebe Tonkin, and a special 1/1 of Mike Tyson.

If art is ever a matter of outwards projection, from beyond the silo of the self, Entangled Life: Worldbuilders prompts audiences to commingle with two functional superspreaders: the mycelial and technological imaginaries.

The peculiar strangeness of the fungal circuitry that undergirds earthly existence is in some ways echoed by evolving Web3 sensibilities. As a general guideline, we suggest that fungi, and Sheldrake’s study of them, complicate notions of identity, autonomy, individuality and intelligence in ways that resonate with ongoing transformations in the Web3 space.

At first glance, Entangled Life: Worldbuilders appears like a straightforward NFT series, adapting an assortment of mushroom photographs and animations, the field recordings of an esteemed biologist. The project is, in fact, a work of conceptual art more complex than the sum of its parts, bound to expand in scope and accrue in value as it takes digital root.

Exclusively for holders of the Process Series, Accursed Share has designed a dynamic NFT of one of Auerbach’s photos of Kim, which changes colour every 6 hours. The NFT is animated in collaboration with Accursed Share’s artist-in-residence and Brand Director, Filipe Oto Medeiros. Dropping Thursday, February 3rd.

Introducing HeadlessDAO, Accursed Share’s decentralized autonomous organization.

Accursed Share and Wilmore Academy are proud to announce their collaboration on Algorand’s carbon-negative blockchain with Merlin Sheldrake, bestselling author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures” (2020), and winner of this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. Entangled Life explores the ways that fungi – and their remarkable symbiotic relationships – have profoundly shaped the history of life, and provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live.

Inspiration, the fifth and last film in the Auerbach series, recalls a demanding 2013 commercial photoshoot for Dior with Natalie Portman.

It was the busiest set-up in this series, with a correspondingly large team on the client’s and the model’s side. In this far from intimate and tightly managed setting, the assignment was to manifest spontaneity. Alas, the catch with inspiration is it can be practiced, but not faked.

Timelessness, the fourth film in the Auerbach series, is a meditation on the bewitchment of timespace by Sharon Stone.

One should not think of Stone as just a sex symbol: every generation has its slew of vamps, most of which leave no dent in memory. Most of the smokeshows will age into air, but the femme fatale lingers.

Part of the proceeds from Captured Moment: The Master’s Process will be donated to Farm2People, an LA-based non-profit working to create equity in the food supply chain by supporting local farmers and food-insecure communities through regeneratively grown produce.

The third film in the Auerbach series is Efficiency, the only video in the series dedicated to an athlete, not an actor. The sports’ star in question is none other than Mike Tyson, whom Auerbach photographed in 2020 for Haute Living, a luxury bimonthly publication.

Two great modern masculine archetypes of force and flow—the boxer and the jazzman—take pride of place in the American imaginary. Among the former, Tyson remains an undisputed titan: a heavyweight of heavyweights, with a life suitably bedecked in triumph, sacrifice and controversy. As with jazz, the Empyrean of boxing admits no easy heroes—nor does it want them. These are men the way gods dreamt them; men with terribilità.

The second film in the Auerbach series is Adaptation, centered around one of the most prominent male stars of the 2000s, Benedict Cumberbatch.

These photos were taken for GQ UK in 2014, when Cumberbatch was in the heat of his fame, coming off Season 3 of the acclaimed BBC adaptation of Sherlock. He was in Boston, filming Scott Cooper’s Black Mass—the Whitey Bulger crime drama with Johnny Depp—so expectations were great, time was of the essence, and timing—as ever—eternal.