Bright Moments (Gen Art)

*2021-2024 Complete Works,* BRIGHT MOMENTS (EST. 2021)

Ian Rogers June 25, 2024

On April 22, 2024, a ten-city, three year voyage including one hundred fifty artists, ten thousand “Crypto Citizens”, and tens of thousands of visitors to a roving experiential art gallery came to a close. Despite starting without a plan and riding a roller-coaster digital art market, Bright Moments delivered exactly what they promised: ten exceptional in-person events between June 2021 and April 2024, each with hands-on celebrations of generative and AI art sustained by “you’ve gotta see this” word-of-mouth. In each production the tight-knit Bright Moments team were cast members in a stage-play of their own creation, smiling, excited and giving each visitor the feeling they were the single most important addition to the fledgling CryptoCitizen community. The momentum was palpable and they could have easily extended their run but the plan was always ten cities and ten thousand CryptoCitizens and with these in the past chapter one came to an emotional closing. The Finale in Venice, Italy, simultaneous with the Venice Biennale, was bittersweet, a gathering of the community of digital art pioneers for whom Bright Moments was an outpost where the bubble and its burst weren’t the headline. Some two decades ago, sci-fi writer William Gibson stated, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” At Bright Moments the future was evenly distributed, with artists and collectors sharing a world of art created by code and artificial intelligence, digitally scarce on a blockchain, delivered by a company espousing “OpenSource Capitalism”: no investors, only token holders/DAO member owners. This is their story.

“The legacy of Bright Moments will certainly be the community of artists it built and the works they have collectively left behind. More than one hundred fifty artists participated in Bright Moments events over the past three years, and the body of work includes some of the finest work in generative and AI art created during this time period.”

*CryptoVenetian #274,* Bright Moments. Owned by higallery.

Using Covid lockdown as a catalyst, Bright Moments invented an event with elements of a music festival, experiential theater, and an art gallery. Instead of tickets, visitors would buy “mint passes” online, then generate their CryptoCitizen live in attendance at a spectacular and thematically-designed venue, often in the company of the artists themselves. The “minting process,” or process of receiving your CryptoCitzen, brought the buyer into Bright Moments as a member of the cast, including elements and references from the locale as well as the play acting of the Bright Moments team to make the visitor feel like they are part of the creation process. Visitors received an unforgettable in-person experience for what is at the end a digital collectible.

Bright Moments is not a traditional, VC-backed startup, instead these digital collectors are also the owners of Bright Moments. They have built the brand the past three years without debt or equity investment, using only the Ethereum collected from selling CryptoCitizens at each stop. It is structured as a Distributed Autonomous Organization, or DAO, whose members are the owners of the ten thousand CryptoCitizens. Ownership grants rights, access, and input (members voted on which city would be Bright Moments next stop, for example) and owners are free to sell their non-fungible membership tokens on the open market at any time. Venture capital firm Union Square Ventures has bought 6% of all Citizens and a couple other individuals have accumulated 5% each, but the membership is spread out among nearly three thousand owner-members and all ownership/membership is in the form of non-fungible tokens.

Only one third of all CryptoCitizens were sold for ETH. In each city three hundred Citizens were given to existing citizen-members and another three hundred were gifted to the local community in an effort to both reward existing members and build a community with roots in each city they visited.

The legacy of Bright Moments will certainly be the community of artists it built and the works they have collectively left behind. More than one hundred fifty artists participated in Bright Moments events over the past three years, and the body of work includes some of the finest work in generative and AI art created during this time period. Tyler Hobbs’ Incomplete Control, Emily Xie’s Off-Script, and Bosque de Chapultepec by Daniel Calderon Arenas are all seminal works by celebrated digital artists first showcased and minted at Bright Moments’ events. Seattle-based Mpkoz contributed two of his most important series, Parnassus and Metropolis, at Bright Moments events. Artist, teacher, and co-founder of pioneering platform ArtBlocks gave a presentation at NFC Lisbon showcasing his Bright Moments contributions as fully one-third of his career in digital art. Bright Moments also innovated on the way art could be collected, such as with Ben Kovach’s 100 Print where collectors bid for tokens then were able to choose their piece from a physical print on a wall in an NYC gallery, highest bidder goes first.

The Venice, Italy Finale brought together sixty artists who had participated in Bright Moments since the first event in June, 2021 in Venice, California, for one final mint. Mint pass holders chose a walk-on song, danced up the stairs, then entered a grand hall in the Scuola Grande San Giovanni for a theatrical reveal of their CryptoVenizian. After, a contribution from one of the one hundred fifty artists to the Finale was revealed on a screen adorned to resemble an eighteenth century Venetian mirror, with the artist’s name and hand-drawn likeness displayed on accompanying iPads disguised in a similar style. The technology was a vehicle but the art was the main event. The traditional art world has taken notice – this week, Thursday June 27, 2024, Christie’s will auction ‘Bright Moments 2021-2024 Complete Works’ a collection of 216 unique generative and AI artworks.

Across the courtyard in the Chiesa de San Giovanni Evangelista Ganbrood’s AI-generated likeness of Jesus Christ appears to have been hanging in the church for hundreds of years and guests kneel, confess, and see artificial intelligence present their confessions in real-time via The Dream Cathedral by artist Huemin.

We left Team Bright Moments in Venice, Italy as they were cleaning up the Scuola and Chiesa, exhausted and headed for an adrenaline come-down from this three-year ultra-marathon performance. It was an unquestionable success. Regardless of your opinion on the cryptocurrency hype cycle of the past four years, there is no denying Bright Moments have transcended and created a community, a gallery brand that represents an entire movement, and beloved art. Additionally they pioneered the delivering digital products with a physical, in-person experience. Both the product and the experience feel like luxury for a future generation, substituting openness for exclusivity.

The question everyone politely poked for an answer to was, “What’s next?” Founder Seth Goldstein, “We have a community around the world that wants to come together, be together, and experience this new kind of art in magnificent, overwhelming, IRL experiences. Next we will do something different that still lives up to the Bright Moments name. The Citizens are done. Bright Moments lives on.”

Ian Rogers

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