e30d #12 − Machine Imaginaire (Themes and Variations) Object: Themes and Variations #495, #445, #99 Artist: Vera Molnár x Martin Grasser Owner: SEEDPHRASE Date: April 2024

In July 2023, Hungarian-born Vera Molnár collaborated with Martin Grasser to release "Themes and Variations" – Molnár’s first foray into long-form, blockchain-based, generative art. Molnár’s journey first began in the 1950’s, where she pioneered new forms of creative experiments with generative processes and rule-based systems.

"Themes and Variations" builds upon and extends her early letter-based works. The series, which released through Sotheby’s and minted on the Ethereum blockchain, began with simple sketches, presenting the letters N, F, and T within squares of equal sizes. The selection of these letters reference the acronym for non-fungible tokens, which were standardized through the ERC-721 format and facilitated the first wave of mainstream adoption of digital objects in 2021.

Each output presents variations of a single letter; none combines them to a signifier. This month’s exhibition object is therefore a triptych of three distinct works that together spell out the signifier “NFT,” which the initial letter selection alludes to.

Meaning is not given in the series; it is generated through the combinatory logic of randomization, and scattered across the spectrum from order to chaos. The series as a whole can be interpreted as hinting at the emergence of artistic meaning from the "conversation" between human and machine, order and chaos, randomness and determinacy. From the early experiments with grids in the 1950s to the 2023 variations on the letterform, Molnár pursued this “conversation” through the exploration of automation and abstraction.

As the artist herself put it seven years before her passing in 2023, just months after the debut of “Themes and Variations”:

“I have no regrets. My life is squares, triangles, lines.”