The 2021 exhibition ‘Between Particles and Waves’ united a group of international artists who are known for their artistic practice in public spaces in cities throughout the world. For this show – the first of its kind – they were asked to create artworks in Minecraft, a virtual public space consisting of 28 million × 28 million × 256 blocks. Twice a week from July to September 2021, famous YouTuber Surry (Salvatore Cinquegrana) constructed the artists' works and streamed this process live on his YouTube channel. Then, during a short period of time in September, the exhibition was open to the public, allowing everybody with access to Minecraft to immerse themselves in the environment, experience the artworks in-situ, and take part in guided tours in different languages.

Nuart Journal sat down with the curators of this exhibition, Brad Downey and Jan Vormann.

‘Between Particles and Waves’ brings together a group of artists who usually work in real public space that you might not expect to find in virtual space. Where did the idea for this project come from?

Brad Downey: It was right at the beginning of the NFT hype, in December 2020. I was talking to Jan because I had heard that he had done a sculpture in Minecraft and I thought that I would like to do an artwork that was like a memorial for artworks that had passed, that you could physically install into a new environment. I wanted to approach this working in a digital way, but I wanted it to be work that you could almost physically experience.

Was this to memorialise your original Melania sculpture that was destroyed?

Brad Downey: Yes, I thought it might be interesting to make a sort of digital memorial to the monument which could live on forever, conceptually in digital space. But I thought if I was going to create something like that, I would like to be something that could be physically installed, like a site–specific artwork. And this was even before Minecraft was in the discussion.

Jan Vormann:I had the impression that Melania would also fit perfectly in this virtual environment. There is a naive blocky texture to Minecraft that echoes Melania's naive or art brut aesthetic.

‘A Monument to Melania.’ Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘A Monument to Melania.’ Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘A Monument to Melania’ post-anarchy mode. Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘Melania.’ Brad Downey. Sevnica, Slovenia, 2019. Photograph ©Borut Krajnc.‘A Monument to Melania.’ Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘A Monument to Melania.’ Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘A Monument to Melania’ post-anarchy mode. Brad Downey. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘Melania.’ Brad Downey. Sevnica, Slovenia, 2019. Photograph ©Borut Krajnc.

So, how long had you been planning Between Particles and Waves?

Jan Vormann:I met an Italian YouTuber, Surry, by chance during a project in Venice. He was invited by the Guggenheim to participate in one of my workshops. I then gave him a photoshopped version of my work that he put into his Minecraft world.

And this is where Brad jumps in. I was myself was very unaware of NFTs. Back then, I was more aware of crypto. But Brad was pointing to the fact that this environment is interesting because it materialises art – so it's not only a GIF, or the ‘floaty ether’ kind of virtual art, but it is something that could produce a 3D sculpture. We were talking about making work in the metaverse, and Minecraft is one of the biggest metaverses that already exists. It's a place where if you fall down, you can die. So, it has these physical boundaries, and there's a level of immersion that people come to accept even though it's so blocky. It's easy to immerse yourself once you are not looking for the perfect graphics.

Brad Downey: Jan immediately said like OK, it's a good idea, but maybe we should be more inclusive and curate a group show together and do a serious exhibition of site-specific artworks in this Minecraft metaverse.

The title ‘Between Particles and Waves’ sounds poetic. Is this a reference to quantum physics?

Brad Downey: This is another discussion that we had for months because we were trying to figure out which parts of our physical reality would transfer over to this other reality. The first title I threw out was ‘Let There be Light’, because I thought that light is probably one of the things that this reality has in common with that reality – as it's totally made of light. But then we had so many discussions around this because you know, it's referencing the Bible. I thought that was funny, but it wasn't to some of the artists. So, in the end we settled on particles and waves.

Jan Vormann: This is the duality of light – we are never sure whether it is a particle or a wave. So, we're referencing light, but what I also find poetic is that there is an ocean in Minecraft – there are actual waves. Also, you might not see them, but in the texture of Minecraft you can also find particles, in the blocks. For me it has this double meaning. At the same time, we were trying to navigate algorithms. Surry was concerned that if we called it something like ‘Minecraft art exhibition’ this would not work, as these buzzwords are overused.

All of the artists in Between Particles and Waves have an existing practice working in public space. Why did you focus on artists who work in public space?

Brad Downey:We were literally trying to extend the public space. You know, like in this classic understanding of the Internet as the digital commons. We wanted to do a site-specific public exhibition in this virtual public space because it's a publicly accessible space on an open server and people can visit from all around the world.

So, it was accessible and open to all?

Jan Vormann: Yes. The inclusion department of Guggenheim wanted to participate but they said it's not inclusive enough because you need to buy the game. Which is true, right? But once you have the game, if you have the server address you can join.

Brad Downey: That [having to buy the game] was also one of my problems with this whole thing. Surry has a very good relationship with Minecraft and with Google and with YouTube, so they were asking us to collaborate, but for me it was very important that we didn't officially collaborate with any of these companies. If we had done, we wouldn’t have been able to work with artists like John Fekner and Jazoo Yang. In this context, I had to speak to John over many long conversations to convince him to participate, because for him it's absolutely off the table to start occupying a virtual space and to inspire people to stay inside games and computers and media. This is a thing that he's absolutely against, so the works that he made were about this floppy disk crushing a child – simple messages saying that maybe you should get out of here and go outside.

‘Don’t B Angry.’ John Fekner. Pre-anarchy mode. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘Don’t B Angry.’ John Fekner. Post-anarchy mode. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘Slow Down Children Growing.’ John Fekner. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.

In terms of production, did the artists build their work themselves? How did this process work?

Brad Downey: It took us six or seven months to build all the pieces because once you start to involve serious artists, you need to enable them to actually say something in this space.

Jan Vormann:In the case of Brad's work, we worked with programmers from Chile and France. The Melania is a real copy of the physical work. We took his photographs of the original work and put these into a 3D mesh, which was then voxelised. A voxel is a three-dimensional pixel. It's a voluminous pixel. We put this into a schematic to get the layers and rebuilt the 3D sculpture in Minecraft.

We were in constant discussion with the artists. For example, Brad was talking to John Fekner to figure out what he wanted to make, Add Fuel was giving me all kinds of PDFs from drawings, and Vhils's team were producing sketches.

Jan Vormann:We had to collect all the materials to build the works. For example, we had to build a wool farm to make the Melania.

Brad Downey: To get the colour we needed, we had to make a sheep farm, grow the sheep, and dye the sheep blue. These are the totally ridiculous details that you deal with when you start working in this gamified space. We had to grow the wool, and then dye the wool, because most of the sculpture was built out of wool – which meant that at one point during his process the whole thing blew away. So, in real life the Melania was burned and in this virtual world, a storm came through and blew the piece away completely.

If you go inside, you can actually feel it. It's not something that you can really feel with the screenshots of the space. But when you're walking around in the actual space, you really can feel the dimensions of the objects and you really can feel the scale. It feels like something much closer to an actual public artwork because you can feel yourself standing next to it. Like with Esther Stocker's work, you really feel that the exterior and the distance between the pieces, you know it takes time to get from one piece to the other. So, this environment offers scale and dimensions and materials. Each piece is made out of different materials. The aesthetics do get kind of flattened out overall because the Minecraft environment has a certain aesthetic limitation to it, but then so does our own environment.

‘Something Went Wrong.’ Vhils. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.‘Something Went Wrong.’ Vhils. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.

Through the limitations do you end up creating things differently?

Jan Vormann: Yes and no. For example, for Add Fuel and Vhils, it was a translation of what they do in their real-life practice, using the graphics tool to expand their practice into this world. Brad and Jazoo Yang used the space to memorialise a real-life object that does not exist in real life anymore. They used the digital space as a memory medium. In John Fekner's case, he was referencing the idea of there being kids inside this space that are wasting a lot of time playing there. In my case, I’m referencing real-life Lego. So, I grew the texture of Lego to match the texture of Minecraft.

Brad Downey: We considered where we put each of the works in this environment and how you people would engage with them, like a real exhibition. Just on a massive scale.

Jan Vormann: All of the production was featured on Surry's YouTube channel [Surrywastaken]. He built the works in survival mode live on YouTube. He made episodes for each artist. Some works were a lot more resource intensive than others. We had to mine all the stone for Vhils's work and then use explosives to produce it. Surry actually [virtually] died while exploding Vhils's work and that's also the point where we reached the end of the production. And then we opened the world to people.

Jan Vormann: When we opened the show for the first time, we thought we had put it in a mode where you cannot manipulate the blocks, but people came in and hacked the space.

Brad Downey: They went into some hell part of our world. They found a hole. There's like one pixel in every world where you can go to hell, and they figured out how to hack from hell. Then there were lava portals coming out of Melania's chest. They were hacking back up so they could change the exhibition from below, from hell basically.

This sounds like a horror film.

Brad Downey: Yeah. But that hell area is also where you can mine precious materials, which is, I think what they built Vhils's work with.

Jan Vormann: So, then on the second day we had to reboot the whole world and put it in spectator mode where people could fly around but not interact with the works. We left it like that for a couple of months, and then we put it into anarchy mode. And then people were able to interact with everything.

So, the anarchy mode, that's the product of just letting people loose in the space?

Brad Downey: Yes, we literally opened it up in this anarchy mode, which is when everything got destroyed and changed. Just like in real public space people are going to interact with your work, sometimes they’re going to add stuff. I was happy when they added a Pinocchio nose to Melania. But they’re also going to destroy stuff. The sad thing that translates to both of our realities is violence. You know, once we opened up the anarchy server, anarchy didn't necessarily mean a good thing. It's fun in a way, because the artworks get changed and turned into modified funny versions of their original selves, but if you take it as a parallel of a real situation, the fact that they often just blow everything up is sad.

Jan Vormann:It was an illustration of people kind of misunderstanding anarchy. So, you're saying this is anarchy, but anarchy obviously doesn't mean destroy shit, it actually means the opposite. Respect other people's shit, and then do whatever the fuck you want, and I will respect your stuff.

A lot of these artists, including yourselves, have worked together before in public space. Is there a sense that this exhibition was a way to re-connect that otherwise wasn't possible during the pandemic?

Brad Downey: At this point we were saying let's put all these politics aside and try to make the best exhibition that we can, curating artists that we wouldn’t normally curate. We wanted to mix these things together in a way that would be inclusive and open, and also because of the lockdown and Covid. Because of this sort of feeling of wishing to reconnect, I think you're right about that.

Jan Vormann: Yes, absolutely. Everybody was so used to Zoom, which everybody used all the time then. So, in that respect, it was perfect, and we got a lot of people involved. We had people making tours on Zoom in Spanish, French, English, Russian, and Arabic. There is also a YouTube channel, and a discord channel.

Brad Downey: I think from my radar, this was one of the first serious exhibitions in the metaverse. We wanted to have a serious cultural input, so we asked real curators to do guided tours of the exhibition. So, Korea's Total Museum of Contemporary Art did a long tour explaining every work, but from an academic point of view. That's why we didn't want people to be able to change the works at the beginning, because we wanted to have these academic tours with serious curators. That's also why we didn't have zombies coming in and killing people because we could also have opened this stuff in a funny way. We wanted to stay with a serious environment at the beginning. It was an exhibition with guided tours from serious curators from all around the world and with serious artists.

Jan Vormann: In the tours, you are effectively looking through the eyes of the curator or through the eyes of the artist. How does the artist look at the work when they are showing their work to somebody? Where do I put my focus? Some tours were live and some were recorded. I would share my screen and walk around so people could experience the environment. Vhils had a solo show in Shanghai and we talked to the curator there. When Vhils opened his show, they put up a computer in the gallery so people could also access the game and see his work there. Jazoo Yang did the same from a gallery in Berlin.

So, there were different windows into this environment from different physical galleries around the world?

Brad Downey: The funny thing is, in discussions with the Guggenheim in Venice, we realised that most of the kids in the game had never heard of this museum. So, in fact we were bringing a huge audience to the Guggenheim because Minecraft has a much wider audience. And there were also so many stories of parents with their kids going and looking at art together for the first time. The directors from the museum had to ask their kids to bring them to the Minecraft exhibition.

Jan Vormann:And the kids wanted to know how we made the work. My little brother plays Minecraft but doesn't go to museums often. So, whereas John Fekner says he doesn't want to support this idea of people playing games and being in virtual space, I see it the other way around. I want to reach these kids because whether we do so or not, they will be living in this virtual space. We have to go there to find them because we cannot find them in the streets anymore. So, in a way, this was also a way to reach these forgotten audiences.

Brad Downey: We had a famous YouTuber releasing this as content from his POV in his actual world, so we had this layer of something between highbrow and lowbrow, academic and street art. We curated serious site-specific artists, and so this is another layer of audience. Then we connected museum curators to do academic tours, and then at the very end, we opened this world up into anarchy mode, which allowed everybody to flood in and change all the art and destroy all the art. Finally, after it was destroyed, we planned to chunk out the preserved original pieces to sell as NFTs.

Work by Octavi Serra. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Michael Johansson. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.'Happy Anarchy.' Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Esther Stocker. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Add Fuel. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Octavi Serra. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Michael Johansson. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.'Happy Anarchy.' Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Esther Stocker. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.Work by Add Fuel. Between Particles and Waves, 2021.

Can you tell us some more about the NFTs?

Brad Downey: From the beginning I said it makes no sense to make this unless it has the chance to be installed as an actual sculpture. So, we have downloadable content that you can physically install in any metaverse. You can do whatever you want with it, but for us the main point from the beginning of this whole exhibition was that every work that we make can be reinstalled in an environment – it's not just a floating useless thing, it's actual work. Yes, it can be printed, but I think it's the lame way to deal with it.

It sounds like you've generated a lot of process documentation. Does this form part of the NFTs or will this appear in some other form?

Brad Downey: We were thinking of making a film about this, but after working for a year on it we are ready to take a break from this content. As we're artists, we've already moved on to our next idea. But we do have all this content and we will put together a short film at some point. We're jumping out of this Minecraft scene, as we have other projects we're working on now. The aesthetics of Minecraft don’t really carry over for us in the long term.⁠¹

Jan Vormann: Although the works fit very well with the aesthetics.

Brad Downey: I think it's the best place to start if you want to organise a virtual exhibition, because there are already millions of people using Minecraft and it's already set up so you can just download it and go in. So, it's a very easy way to open a worldwide public exhibition where people can actually know how it works, go in and walk around easily, even if you don’t know anything.

How was the reception of the exhibition?

Brad Downey: It was quite a frustrating process from a producer to an audience point of view because when you put up an Instagram post with a little video or a screenshot of the exhibition, you know that the audience can't really feel these works. But when you bring somebody into the exhibition and you're walking around, people are suddenly like wow, because they’re walking around in the space, and they can feel the scale and feel the works and feel the environment. It really has a much bigger presence when you actually see it in the environment. And I know that almost 90% of the people from my network didn't go in to see it.

Getting a random person from our networks in there was almost impossible. They thought, ‘what a funny idea to put something in Minecraft’, but they did not really engage with it as a serious public art show that they could walk around in. They just like looked at the screenshots on Instagram and moved on. As an artist that was frustrating because the content and the works give so much more if you actually go to see them.

Jan Vormann: But when we opened the world and then Surry announced it on his millions-of-followers channel, people started to flock in by the hundreds. I was also disappointed by those within our circles who didn't seem to accept it, because Minecraft has this blocky aesthetic and is perceived to be for kids and gamers. Most people seemed to think Minecraft was not serious enough for making art.

But doesn't a lot of site-specific work on the streets also have a playful or non-serious element?

Brad Downey: Yes. Also, there was a big difference between how the Asian audience accepted it versus the Western audience. Honestly, the Chinese and the Koreans were really hip to this. They knew how to promote it. Jazoo Yang was super engaged. She became a really important component because she understood this more than any of the other artists, and she also got so many more people and art institutions involved from Asia.

Jan Vormann: The digital readiness in South Korea especially was palpable. It was just accepted way easier in Asia than by our networks in the West.

It seems like Between Particles and Waves was the culmination of a very elaborate process. This was not a straightforward move from idea to NFT – you've got all of these considered months of work, and time spent opening it to the public as well. It feels more democratic than most NFTs.

Jan Vormann:Yes, it was open for a long time. Now the whole world is also for sale, so somebody could buy it and reinstall the whole world with the exhibition and then they would also be able to own all the artworks. You know you're going to have a piece of the artists. This is the first NFT for many of them. For example, this was a first for me and Octavi Serra, and the first NFT for Brad and John Fekner. So, it's quite a historical moment.

This is actually quite a cool thing to have.

You know, John Fekner's first NFT.

All photographs ©Brad Downey & Jan Vormann. etweenparticlesandwaves.com