Tower of David Museum to hold four-day digital art, NFT festival

• Author: BARRY DAVIS
• Published date: 20 December 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

If your response to any of the aforementioned acronyms or technical terms is a quick shake of the head or a blank look, you might want to hook up with the ZERO1NE event, which is due to take place under the aegis of the Tower of David Museum, in Jerusalem, December 27-30

The four-dayer has been called "the country's premier digital art festival" and takes in 30 works of art, six original site-specific pieces, nine lectures, 10 live performances, 12 international artists and 28 Israeli artists.

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In addition to the Tower of David Museum, patrons will be able to catch some state-of-the-art endeavor over at Hansen House, with a Zoom performance on offer from the Mazkeka music venue in downtown Jerusalem.

ZERO1NE BEGAN life in 2019 under the learned guiding hands of joint artistic directors Yair Moss and Danielle Zini, with the pandemic logistics stymieing the exercise last year.

Now it's back and looking to keep tabs on the exponentially expanding world of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual domains, and how creative pursuits use the advances in these fields – to paraphrase the intro to the 1960s Star Trek sci-fi TV series – to go where no artist has gone before.

Over the five days Moss and Zini hope to enlighten us about just how far the digital art world has shifted, particularly in the wake of the enormous strides taken in virtual communications in a post-pandemic reality.

The festival feeds off some of the rudiments that lie at the very core of art. Whence does art issue? Where does the process of creation, of conveying something in visual and/or aural and/or corporeal form, come from? Is it simply a matter of an angel, muse or some other unearthly being winging its way down, alighting on the artist's shoulder and infusing their consciousness with an idea for an artistic venture, whereupon the mortal creature ingenuously gets on with it? Or is there some sort of wellspring which one needs to identify, draw upon and go with the flow?

If Paul Cézanne and Marc Chagall are to be believed, it is about far more than – once duly inspired – just putting in the requisite elbow grease, although that is an undeniable element along the road to creative fruition. "A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art," the former is said to observe, whereas his Jewish Russian-French counterpart stated: "If I create from the...