NFT
Some opponents of NFTs fixate on their ethereal, elusive nature. How can they be art, critics cry, if they are only digital, virtual and detached from reality?
It would be difficult to make those claims against Foodmasku’s works.
That’s the nickname of Antonius Wiriadjaja, the multimedia performance artist who – for three years now – has been making NFTs in which he portrays himself wearing masks made entirely of food and then eating the masks. The final consumption of the work is a rule, an important part.
Thanks to: Foodmasku
The association between masks and food – and between food masks and the blockchain for that matter – is not necessarily intuitive. That may be because, for Wiriadjaja, those compounds were the product of organic necessity.
In the early months of the pandemic, the artist recalls, he and a group of remote colleagues navigated the still-bizarre realm of Zoom encounters. One fateful day, one of his friends unintentionally got stuck in a video filter that apparently turned their face into a pickle. The caller was embarrassed. Wiriadjaja’s first impulse was to make them feel better.
“So I took [a part of] my dinner, which was a piece of kale, smeared it on my face and said, ‘Hey, I have a filter too,'” Wiriadjaja recounted Decrypt at NFC Lisbon earlier this week.
The brined contestant was delighted, their shame washed away, and they asked Wiriadjaja what he would wear tomorrow. Foodmasku was born.
Thanks to: Foodmasku
In the weeks and months that followed, Wiriadjaja devoted herself to the mission of making, documenting and eating food masks. Banana eyes, broccoli nostrils, noodle noses, shrimp eyebrows… a new luscious self-portrait every day.
The project steadily gained momentum, but that success was a double-edged sword: People were so enamored with Wiriadjaja’s food masks that fake Foodmasku accounts have been popping up on numerous social media platforms.
Thanks to: Foodmasku
This was March 2021 and Wiriadjaja was frustrated. There had to be a way to own digital files, to protect his edible oeuvre. He did some searching online and came across NFTs. The artist Beeple had just sold an NFT artwork for $69 million, catapulting the emerging technology into the mainstream.
So Foodmasku became a Web3 artist. Not out of an ideological or artistic commitment to the ethos of decentralization, but instead — as with the incendiary kale flip — because it just made sense.
To date, Wiriadjaja has created nearly 2,000 Foodmasku NFTs, generating approximately 50 ETH or $92,000 in sales.
Thanks to: Foodmasku
Born in Indonesia and raised in Boston, the artist faced different reactions to his work in different cultures and contexts. A common thread, he discovered, is that people around the world are afraid of technology.
“Technology is scary for everyone, everywhere,” he said. “Indonesians are afraid that technology will destroy their traditional arts, Americans are afraid that technology will take all their jobs. But one thing everyone has to deal with is food.
If food and masks and emerging digital technologies can be brought together to give a cohesive statement to Wiriadjaja’s colorful, inventive and optimistic portrayals, any medium could have the ability to tap into the universal vibrancy of humanity.
In that vein, Wiriadjaja has recently become fascinated with artificial intelligence. He is developing a project called ‘Proof of Eat’, which aims to clear the air of the increasing unrest caused by the blurring of the line between man and machine.
“A big test of whether a maker is human or not is whether he can eat food,” he said.