Anne Morgan Spalter — academic practice bridges generative and NFT art

2018

Artists: Anne Morgan Spalter · Year: 2018 · Medium: Generative and AI-based artworks — prints, video, NFTs bridging pre-NFT academic practice and on-chain distribution · Substrate: Custom Processing and openFrameworks code; photographic source material; later AI-based work; multiple platforms including Art Blocks and Kate Vass Galerie · Place: New York, USA · Institution: RISD (teaching); Brown University (previous); independent practice Anne Morgan Spalter, a painter and academic who had taught digital-studio practice at Brown University and subsequently at the Rhode Island School of Design since the 1990s, began selling her algorithmically-generated work on SuperRare in 2018 — making her one of the earliest university-based American artists to engage the NFT primary market seriously. Spalter's practice is formally descended from the 1960s Stuttgart-school computer-art tradition: plotter-style geometric compositions, procedurally generated, produced with her own custom software. The 2018 NFT release was an institutional and commercial experiment more than an aesthetic pivot. What makes Spalter's 2018 engagement historically interesting is the specific bridging role it played. The academic digital-art world of the mid-2010s had been largely skeptical of the NFT space, which was then dominated by figures with little historical awareness of prior generative-art tradition. Spalter was one of very few established academic practitioners who went to the NFT platforms, made work visible there, wrote about the experience, and helped bring the two worlds into partial communication. Her subsequent writing — particularly her contribution to The Computer in the Visual Arts (2020) and her curatorial work at the Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich — has been instrumental in positioning the NFT era within the longer history of generative art. Spalter's own practice has continued across painting, digital-print output, and NFT releases through the 2020s. She has taught for over twenty-five years and is one of the American academic digital-art teachers whose former students populate the broader field. Her 1996 textbook The Computer in the Visual Arts (co-authored with Gary Hill for Addison-Wesley) was a widely-adopted undergraduate text in the pre-Processing era. The book has been reissued in updated form multiple times. Lore Spalter's 2018 SuperRare engagement was partly motivated by her exposure to the NFT scene through her son's peer group — several of her son's college-age friends were making early NFT purchases, which prompted her to investigate the platforms as a primary-market experiment. She has said in subsequent interviews that the experience of selling work on SuperRare in 2018 was unexpectedly friendly: the collector base was knowledgeable about generative-art history in ways she had not anticipated, and she had genuine intellectual conversations with collectors whose names she recognized from the 1990s software-art scene. The Kate Vass Galerie curatorial work has extended her bridging role into the Zurich-based European NFT collector community. Sources • Spalter, Anne Morgan — The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). • Kate Vass Galerie, Zurich — Anne Morgan Spalter catalogue. • Spalter, Anne Morgan — annespalter.com (artist archive).