Blur is closing its doors.
@blur_io says its marketplace website shuts down on Nov 12, and Blend, its NFT lending product, stops matching new loans the same day; the on-chain marketplace protocol keeps running. CoinDesk puts monthly volume at about $1.43 billion in March 2023 and under $7 million by March 2026. Plenty of collectors cheered, remembering the optional royalties and token rewards that carried Blur past OpenSea and sped up a market-wide slide in creator fees.
Generative art, from a cave.
Le Random (@lerandomart) has launched The Living Timeline, an interactive history from 71,000 BCE to 2026: 1,147 moments, from ochre crosshatching in South Africa's Blombos Cave to Jacquard's 1804 loom, Harold Cohen's AARON and today's diffusion models, plus 36 machines of generative art you can operate yourself. Written by Peter Bauman with contributions from Sasha Stiles (@sashastiles) and http://net.art pioneer Vuk Ćosić.
Epic goes all in on AI, and artists push back.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) says the Fortnite maker has "a huge pivot underway," moving developers "to retool for maximum AI acceleration" so that everyone can build "MORE and BETTER stuff," not the same with fewer people. Bloomberg reports staff on Epic's Disney game were told its art would be "generated with full AI workflows." Concept artist Karla Ortiz (@kortizart) told Epic to "stop using GenAi for art," since the models were trained on artists' work without "credit, consent or compensation."
Claude goes to a Tokyo furniture maker.
Machines of Loving Grace, presented by Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) at the Karimoku Research Center from Sat Oct 17 to Sun Oct 25, borrows its title from Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem. Daito Manabe (@daitomanabe) shows Timber / Timbre, an electronic instrument housed in wood crafted by Karimoku Furniture; in Yusuke Kamiyama's Dance As Waves, illuminated arms sweep around a central column. Both artists used Claude "as a tool," the show says, "but never as a replacement for their own creativity." Free entry.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: William Mapan (@williamapan) is preparing a new work with Avant Arte (@avant_arte) for the V&A's Digital Art Season and its Vera Molnar exhibition, after a visit to the museum's collection with Matt DesLauriers (@mattdesl); Avant Arte says it will come as 2 limited edition prints.
And Antonio Batzu (@AntoniBatzu) sends his Peer to Peer Army, 210 handmade ceramic and bronze Bitcoin warriors from Sardinia, to collectors in the United States.
Ahead: On Thu Oct 22 in Karlsruhe, ZKM opens Agentic Constellations at the EnBW headquarters.
Daniel Heiss and Marc Schütze let several AI agents search the internet for public data about the energy company, form hypotheses about hidden connections and turn them into diagrams, networks and maps on a large LED wall that keep changing as new information arrives. Free admission.