BEAUTY, IDENTITY, & NFTS: A CHAT WITH ALEX BOX
Micol Biondi: Just to start out, would you like to introduce yourself and let the audience know what brings you into the digital space?
Alex Box: I've been an identity designer, I would say for about the last 20 years, working between physical and digital and creating identities and characters and emotional surfaces, for the face and the body. A body architect, environmentally, the body, and I use the face to convey my artwork. That's spawned me from the art world into the fashion world into the tech world, and full circle. I tend to bridge a lot of those disciplines. I'm a bit of a human API. I do bring a lot of those different disciplines together, but also in a different way. I would say different worlds together because a lot of the time they're all speaking a different language. It needs people to bridge that gap to be able to give the full panoply of what's possible with the body.
MB: So you just launched your first NFT - playing with and warping traditional notions of beauty - do you think from the perception of beauty that this could be a new way to democratize beauty within crypto art?
Democratizing beauty - that would be a dream. That anything that re-evaluates and recontextualizes the idea of beauty and the body and identity is, is vital. Because we all have been given so many almost stereotypical ways of feeling, and being, and seeing ourselves for so long. These have been curated by the patriarchy, and you can see the gamification. How you are in all these different social domains that you create different characters for. How you adopt different ways of being. That is now being pushed to the surface a lot more when now there are lots of different ways to express that through digital means. But with NFTs, it's just scratched the surface. Obviously, there's a lot of conjecture around the ecological implications. Though with NFTs, it's moving very fast. And now, there's much more of an understanding about the consumption of energy. The problem is, nobody talks about how much energy it takes to just watch a Netflix series and drive your car. And, the open transparency of energy used needs to be at the forefront. Tech has come to a crescendo with aesthetics and with platforms and with new engines that can have the capacity to be for you. To have a creative tool to be able to get out what's in your head. That's what's exciting for me. And we're seeing that explosion with just the unification and the decentralization of art as a whole.
The NFT and crypto space have allowed people to take away the gatekeepers. What has happened is it's opened up a discourse between a lot of people who would not have been able to see each other. You've got clubhouse gaining popularity at the same time as NFTs which is no surprise. Because a lot of the NFT communities live solely on Clubhouse. And it's not just that the algorithms have changed slightly, but the organic connection is so curated. So you are meeting people totally organically, which has not happened for decades on social media, because of the algorithms within Instagram and Twitter. And you actually have to pay for it. If you want to see organic growth, you have to pay for it. So at the moment, you could go into a Clubhouse room and make real-time connections, which has never happened before on social media. And that's when things move really fast. I find that even as a model for how, the growth of an idea of a system can work. I find that organic push of community support really inspiring because it just isn't the same in most of the disciplines. Most people shut the door, and bask in their new space. Whereas in this world, you pull people up, you pull together, and I've always really believed in that. That is the most exciting thing about this space for me. The absolute transparency of moving as a group and the democratization because it's moving people equally.
MB: I see that you've worked with the concept of phygital identity. Can you explain your relationship with blended realities more? This pandemic brought us into this new artificial reality, do you think beauty will change aesthetically?
It depends on how you define beauty. Beauty for me has always been something that is both an ethereal sense of a person that we hold beautiful. It is also an aesthetic, and so many of those things are about how you interact with what you're looking at. So depending on where you were or what you're aspiring to, what you're connecting with, that's what you find. What gives you pleasure, all those things are what you define as useful.
Digital is the intersection of where we are as a human race. At the end of the day, we are slowly moving into and seeing the depth of this body. We have been integrated with technology for a very long time. It's only going to become more so, we know it intrinsically, but the actual, cerebral connection of knowing that our body is going to be integrated with AI and with technology. It's quite a bit of a grieving period. that it's hard to understand, it's hard to come to terms with, it feels repellent. But also absolutely attractive, because it has an aesthetic and a knowledge that we may have gone as far as we can. Though I'm talking about this and at the same time rejecting it because I'm massively spiritual. But I understand that this is coming.
Where we're comfortable as humans is to let in the aesthetic of digital, as we control it at the moment. It's the acceptance of letting it in as an aesthetic. But in a way, that's my problem because the aesthetic is driven by the software. And the software at the moment has a very hard, Mercurial mirrored, almost sci-fi feel. It's Paco Rabanne’s idea of what the future was, the future in films forever, is that courage pack from a bad idea of the future, which was started in the 60s - it's hysterical. It's got a very particular look, when you say beauty, digital or otherwise, everybody can go to what they think that is, and that's driven by tech. Because the software only does what the software does. The next step is to break the machine a bit. To bring the physical into the digital and start to mix it together. Get something that feels a little bit more authentic, maybe a bit broken, more akin to nature. Because nature grows, as a system not giving a shit what you think about it. “Oh, isn't it beautiful?” It's purely functional. We forget that nature exists to function. It doesn't exist, beautiful, but we assign beauty to it. Because it gives us peace, harmony, and tranquillity.
We assign beauty to function. In the same way, we're still applauding the software. Oh, a shiny object. Isn't that great? Well, yeah, that's the aesthetic of the moment. But that's going to shift very quickly after that, we're in the infancy of aesthetics. Everybody knows what a really good handmade garment is, and then knows what a cheap handmade garment is, right? But in digital at the moment, it's still good enough if things move, look efficient, can do a 360 spin and have a shiny surface. People are still saying, “Oh, that's great.” That's because we're in an early aesthetic, establishing our aesthetic. But what's coming, and what needs to happen is the evolution of that. And that comes from the creatives, from the makers, and the dreamers. To build on top of these systems and question the software. Is it enough that we've got this hardshell body with, almost, zero emotion coming out of it? No, it's not. This is why I don't think digital is going to get rid of every single shoot you've ever seen. But you'll see it integrated, and you'll see different strains of biotech, which is huge. We're already digital. It's just that we probably don't think of our earbuds in our head and walking around asking Alexa as cybernetic experiences. But they are!
MB: Do you think that this new era of digital beauty will hide our identity? New 3D programs give the possibility to create digital models for necessity (covid) and now this technology is spreading everywhere. What do you think about our relationship with our identities as we move into a post-pandemic world?
AB: It's very exciting. And there's going to be a lot of education needed. Because there's going to be anxiety around, well, who am I? How many times have you had an existential crisis in your life about who you are? Even just in your soul, suddenly. Then people say, Well, come on, we want this Ready Player One version of what life is. Well, what is that? What if you're given limitless opportunities to create another self or, or digital double? People are going to panic, they don't know - because they've not been. They've never been given the space to ask that of themselves. And it's very indulgent…
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