DADA Perspective at the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan

DADA.art
4 min readMay 2, 2023

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“DADA is a community and digital platform for collaborative art where artists from all over the world respond to each other through drawings, giving rise to spontaneous visual conversations. It is considered one of the absolute pioneers of the crypto art movement. Together with DADA, we will transform MEET into a huge disruptive laboratory.”
Eleonora Brizi.

From May 10 to June 20, DADA Perspective, our first solo retrospective exhibition curated by Eleonora, will take over the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan for an immersive journey into DADA.

Since the launch of our drawing platform in 2014, we’ve evolved to become a vibrant global community, one of the pioneers of art on the blockchain, and a complex artistic and socioeconomic ecosystem.

As we approach our 10th anniversary, we’re taking this opportunity to explore a panorama of what makes us who we are. DADA Perspective is a survey and a celebration of everything we have done in the past nine years, where we are now, and what is yet to come.

Eleonora terms this not a “retrospective” but a Perspective: “Retrospectives historicize people and movements from the past. Then they’re dead and gone. Crypto art is alive in the present, particularly DADA — which holds the future in its hands.”

The seed of DADA Perspective was planted when Eleonora met Maria Grazia Mattei, director of MEET, a center that promotes digital culture in Milan. Maria Grazia heard Eleonora talk about her experience of the early days of the crypto art movement in New York — a story of experimentation, innovation, and the potential for good — and invited her to create an exhibition at MEET. Maria Grazia wanted to explore the positive aspects of blockchain and NFTs, something that tends to be absent from the mainstream perspective about the technology.

Eleonora “chose DADA because it best demonstrates how a diverse range of artists is using technology not only to make art collectively, but building a socioeconomic system — using both blockchain and art to benefit society.
When I thought of how to really get people in Italy to experience the real, the true, the pure spirit of crypto art, I could only think of DADA.”

DADA Ecosystem diagram by Isa Kost

The Exhibition

For the last several months, The DADA Collective’s artists from all over the world have been creating interactive installations for an immersive encounter with the DADA ecosystem: its art, tech innovation, community, and history.

DADA Perspective opens with Common Place (2022), a mixed media installation created last year for the D.Y.O.R exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich that represents the relationships and collective memories of the people of DADA.

Common Place by The DADA Collective, 2022

The Living Staircase, a cascade of visual conversations curated from our drawing platform, leads to a timeline of the history of NFTs from 2011 to 2019 created for the first Historic NFT Festival organized by DADA in Barcelona last year.

The Perspective provides a closer look at the DADA Ecosystem, and includes an Innovation Room with projects like DADAGAN our artist bot, the Invisible Economy as well as a VR Corner showcasing some of our adventures in the Metaverse.

The journey ends in the Immersive Room, the soul of DADA, with an experience that allows visitors to fully experience its “grammar” and the distillation of creativity in all its glorious color, light, art and emotion.

Experiences

MEET and DADA will transform the premises into a creative laboratory with fun hands-on experiences like minting workshops, a treasure hunt, virtual reality guided tours, live collaborative drawing sessions, and much more.
Check out the calendar!

On June 14 special guests Operator will perform an Experiential Aperitivo and on June 15, we’ll be joined by our longtime collaborator Primavera De Filippi who will take the stage at the MEET Theater to talk about DAO systems of governance.

RSVP to the opening

Stay tuned for more news and join us as we celebrate DADA’s past, present, and future.

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DADA.art

A collaborative art platform where people worldwide speak through drawings. Building a blockchain token economy for the arts. https://dada.art