Anna Thorne, Luminous Visions (2021), NFT, Looped Video, 16 sec., https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/303771
Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching:
Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.
Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.
Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.
The immaterial nature of NFT's reminds me of Taoism, particularly passage 14 of the Tao Te Ching. We can see NFT’s with our eyes and yet they are ungraspable. We can think about and conceptualize them, but they are ultimately ineffable. NFT’s feel as is they are enlightening angels sent from the future, a future where materiality is transcended altogether.
Our present reality is deeply tangled in materiality, with whole industries dedicated to beauty and perfecting the human form. Don’t get me wrong, I am by no means an anti-materialist, I am simply interested in expanding our current state of consciousness to include the formless, ineffable and ephemeral aspects of reality. By these aspects I do not mean the paranormal but the very real and invisible phenomena that surrounds our daily existence, the phenomena of our very own consciousness.
The mind is not a concrete form, but a very ephemeral, ever shifting entity. It ebbs and flows, some more than others. We are ever morphing and yet the material world we live within feels like it’s constantly attempting to be concrete and static. I live more in my immaterial mind than I do in the material world. I have more in common with the NFT than the material reality my body exists in. It is the immaterial and formless world that feels more natural to me than the literal concrete one. I suppose NFT’s feel like glimpses of home, but I couldn’t explain what I mean by that if I tried.