Arguably the most recognizable and destructive piece of artillery in the world, the AK-47 is quite literally loaded with symbology. Developed in the Soviet Union by Russian small-arms designer Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov in 1947, the assault rifle forever changed the landscape of weaponry. The acronym of the AK-47 is not only synonymous with the abbreviation for “automatic Kalashnikov,” but it is also deeply ingrained within our cultural lexicon. The unmistakable silhouette is imbued with a visceral power that fires a resounding echo in the mind without ever pulling the trigger. For Bran Symondson, a photographer, sculptor, philanthropist, and former soldier based in London, the AK-47 was once a weapon of defense while on the ground in Afghanistan and has since become a canvas to spread messages of hope and unity.

Symondson transforms deactivated rifles retrieved from conflict zones in the Middle East with intricate collages of dollar bills delicately scalloped from their printed frame. He replaces bullets with items retrieved in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. The artist now presents an AK-47 unique to his creative journey and has also assigned a new name that has been unchanged since 1947: “KRYPTO KALASH.” The one-off piece will be auctioned as an original artwork and will come with an NFT certifying its authenticity.

In 2004, Symondson started the selection process to join the British Army Special Forces Reserves. In 2007 he found himself embedded into the Afghan National Police, working to instill order in a place that greatly resisted his efforts. While documenting his journey with a point and shoot camera, Symondson noticed that the AK-47s used by civilians and soldiers alike were often adorned with stickers along the stock, receiver and magazine, and even had fresh flowers extending from the front sight. The silent gesture of decorating lethal rifles with delicate design elements struck the artist because it exhibited a sensitivity toward a weapon that was grossly misunderstood and even glamorized in Hollywood. A tool that symbolized militarism, fear, greed and capitalism also united the “good” and the “bad” guys. Upon returning home, Symondson began transforming weapons into sculptures to disarm the singular narrative of fear.

“The beautiful thing about the AK-47 is its simplicity, and the shape, and that’s why it’s since [become] universally recognizable,” he explains. He first began by placing organic forms like origami butterflies floating around the silhouette and soon after, he started integrating currency over the stark surface. In reflecting on the transition from Reservist to civilian life, Symondson had to separate his past from the present. “When I first started making them, I was very much [aware that I was] holding a weapon that people used to shoot at me with.” He continues being struck by the details of each rifle:

“KRYPTO KALASH,” aims to transform the instantaneous symbolism of the AK-47 from that of terrorism and revolution into a sculpture that contemplates the value of currency as it transitions from paper to crypto, and replaces bullets with glass shells filled with objects retrieved from the Middle East. Creating a collage with real dollar bills and Bitcoin and Ethereum symbols rendered in the same green hue, the artist felt aware that he was actively taking a bill out of circulation.

While the Treasury can continue to print money and release currency into circulation, there are only a finite number of Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which has no limit in general but releases a maximum of 18 million new coins per year, incurs a gas fee. In this sense, “KRYPTO KALASH” also questions the sustainability of the crypto currency model as it takes a great deal of energy and resources to create a form of currency that cannot be touched.

Always one to collect artifacts from places that he has visited, the artist created seven unique glass bullets that contain objects from the Afghan desert. Inside of the magazine there is a meticulously crafted set that contains elements that reference nature, science and technology. One bullet contains a snakeskin retrieved on tour that represents the shedding of an old skin and a changing of the guard from the traditional system of currency to a new one. Another shell contains blood shed in the name of greed, next to diamonds that accentuate the focus on material wealth. Copper wire is inserted within another glass shell nodding to technological advancements like electricity while another features the newly created £50 note featuring mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who helped the Allies win World War II with his masterful code breaking. Finally, a set of shells and pearls that allude to the early days of trading and the transition from organic matter to paper and digital currency indicates the changing nature of perceived value. The final bullet contains a chain that contextualizes the esoteric blockchain.

“KRYPTO KALASH” honors the weight and power associated with an iconic weapon but simultaneously disarms us with its unexpected beauty. The sculpture contemplates the state of the future that is moving toward the untouchable and digital future but grounds us in the weight of history

Bran Symondson’s AK-47 artworks can be viewed at HOFA gallery where he is represented in Mayfair London.

Do we interpret our world through a myopic lens of fixed memory, or are we willing to unlock the doors of perception and consider a place with an open mind, as if experiencing it for the first time? Media artist and composer Jesse Woolston meditates on the interconnectivity between the natural world and the tonalities inherent in colors recognized on the visible light spectrum.

In his debut NFT, an audiovisual digital triptych aptly titled “On the Nature of Sound,” the artist employs AI, Computation, and Environmental design and music composition to challenge our interpretation of desert, tundra, and aquatic environments. The patterns and animation techniques used for each biome employ physics simulations. The sculpture distills specific colors so that we can better understand how our perception of an environment is informed by color. Just as Woolston visualized audio wavelengths for the soundtrack, each sculpture contains textured wave patterns that move with effortless fluidity as the 30-second infinite loop unfolds. Designing a meticulous soundtrack that combines classical string orchestration with electronic sequences, the artist asks us to consider our interpretation of places through an entirely new sensory experience.

A. Moret: “On the Nature of Light” morphs through three different biomes, and in each, the natural world assumes a feeling of the supernatural. How do you hope the viewer will engage with the environment?

Jesse Woolston: When you see these natural environments, you’re connected to them because you know what they are. But I’m using technology to show something completely different than what you’re used to seeing, and I think that’s when technology becomes really useful. In my practice, my entire goal is to really look at science and physiology and [to consider] how I can change or bring about a new perspective.

AM: The biomes each have a unique color story beginning with red and clay hues, then transitioning to ethereal tones and ending with a sea of blue gradations. What landscapes are each biomes referencing?

JW: Biome 1 directly references the dynamic desert biome where we find the Grand Canyon. The Canyon has a large range, starting from what we’d traditionally accept as a traditional desert to what I used as direct inspiration with the desert scrubs and what we’d find in California. Biome 2 references the tundra biome, inspired directly by what we find in international locations. Mountain ranges with swept snow and black rock. Biome 3 is our aquatic or marine biome. The central sculpture is blue with white, referencing directly the oceans, the clouds, and the mist we can experience out at sea. One thing to note, I made the mist to represent the natural laws of turbulent flow, which occurs with liquids and gases throughout our universe.

AM: What mathematical principle was applied to create a tone for each hue represented in the biomes?

JW: To create the effect musically, I composed and designed the sound to take on the dynamic shape of waves, referencing how we interpret waves in both the audible and visible spectrum. The effect produces the ability to listen to the music both forwards and backward, which doesn’t break the sense of immersion when observing the work like you would in a traditional film sequence.

AM: “On the Nature of Light” creates a fourth biome, if you will, as it encapsulates the three landscapes and an infinite soundtrack.

JW: My aim with my work is to create a controlled space that encourages an immersive quality. The work allows someone to sit with the experience for an extended period of time both visually and audibly without breaking concentration. The visual and audio plays in two different directions, looping infinitely, allowing an immersive perspective that doesn’t rely on a traditional linear format.

AM: Just as there are visible layers contained at the center of each sculpture, what discoveries did you make when layering the sounds from each biome

JW: What was fascinating is that no matter where I looked at those frequencies, they all hit the same exact notes in an audible spectrum. So I used that convergence on the spectrum… it’s this very strange, realistic kind of sound. You can feel like it’s embedded in something that you know but it’s abstracted from what we’re used to.

“On the Nature of Light” inspires viewers to perceive the world in a way that they hadn’t considered before, which is precisely what the artist intended. Woolston distills his complex view of the natural world in these simple terms:

Jesse Woolston’s genesis piece goes live today.

Studio 54 is no more: not in the way we remember. No man on the moon with a coke spoon sign above the door—no crazies and geniuses and going-up-in-flames beauties. Bill Bernstein documented life at Studio 54 and NYC discos for three years, and through the film rolls, we keep going back. Night Fever: New York Disco 1977–1979, The Bill Bernstein Photographs was on display at New York Museum of Sex for three years—and you can buy a book (Disco, from Reel Art Press), or print editions, direct from Bernstein himself. And if Studio 54 the place is gone, Studio 54 the sprawling enterprise endures, as a record label (an album was produced in tandem with Studio 54: Night Magic, which was on view at The Brooklyn Museum in 2020), as a website/shop, as a radio channel on SiriusXM, and now, as an NFT.    

NFTs: collectibles, fine art, or something in between the two? The NFT has bombshelled vast swaths of the traditional collectibles market: sports, and now the ephemera of culture. Once cluttered mantelpieces; now cluttered desktops. Fine art? The marketplace has registered the disruption, but there are still doubters: even with a giant gigabyte NFT, you’re not getting a painting, you’re not getting a ten-ton bronze sculpture. And there are the foibles of authentication; the blockchain was supposed to free us of the hucksters, and instead, it breeds them like a wet sponge breeds mosquitoes. 

Regulations? Tweeks? Will NFT platforms and sellers and buyers find their protocols? Probably, even if for now an old-school has resorted to old-school paper authentication, and you better check twice before you bid on that Rembrandt NFT.

But what about the third category? The in-between? If there’s a societal inclination to merge collectibles and arts, there’s an entrenched resistance to a unified market. Art Basel is not the Antique Roadshow. And while NFTs are already part of an artworld orthodoxy, if you look at the work of Claudia Hart, let’s say, who tallies the bonafides and has enthusiastically taken to NFTs, she’s always been drawn to web aesthetics—incel or Donkey Kong—while the thruline of NFT to Ad Reinhardt is harder to fathom. Would other art/artists work better? A Jean-Michel Basquiat banana peel? Yup. Part of what’s so exciting about NFTs is the slice-it, dice-it applicability. But that big, big money: those paintings; those bronzes. How can the art market scale “great masterpieces” to NFTs? Maybe the in-betweens, those works that are part high art, part collectible, will catalyse the transition of NFTs from the museum gift shop to the museum.

The Bernstein/Studio 54 NFTs, soon to be released on SuperRare, strike the balance. Fine art? Yes. Collectibility? Yes. History that you want to own forever? Yes. 

1977: The Village Voice, then the pre-eminent downtown arts & culture rag, sent twenty-eight year old Bill Bernstein to shoot some photos for a libs feel-good piece about UNICEF honoring President Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian. The venue? Studio 54. Bernstein didn’t know what to expect; Steve Rubell’s every-night party had opened to a nearly instantaneous notoriety. Andy Warhol talked about dictatorship at the door, and democracy on the dance floor—which undulated with the city’s most freakish and most fabulous. After shooting the rolls of film he’d bought for the Lillian Carter thing, Bernstein hadn’t had enough, and bought ten more rolls of film from a photographer who was out. Bernstein kept shooting that night, and kept shooting Studio 54 and New York discos for three years. He was awed by the splendor of the clubs and the club people, one night after another. And what was wild—drugs, gender everything, and all kinds of sex—was just part of the pageantry.

The four Bernstein NFTs (more may come) pair his now iconic photographs, as well as photos not seen before, with disco tracks produced by Morgan Wiley, who’s worked with Midnight Magic, Hercules & Love Affair, and Jessica 6, and recorded with LCD Soundsystem. The first of the NFTs, “Studio 54 Couch Scene Contact Sheet,” to be released September 22, moves through the 24-shot roll of Bernstein’s much reproduced corner couch tableau: five then four figures are bored and cool and lusty. A Ken-Burns style zoom and pan is synched to a synth drum loop. “Studio 54 Dancefloor Ecstacy,” to be released September 29, cuts from wide to close on a grainy, color flux image of the dancefloor in motion. The scene is agitated by the palpitating music, but there’s something almost zen about the figures, who are simultaneously in the moment, and watching the moment. “3AM at Paradise Garage, July 1979” captures the fashion and disco moves of the sweaty mirrors-and-velvet venue; the black and white still is the single NFT of the group to present a static shot, sans music. To be released October 11 in tandem with National Coming Out Day, “Studio 54 Solar-NRG Ft. Patrick Cowley” zooms, pans, strobes, flips and reverses on the swarming dance pit: clap those hands; take a deep drag on that, uh, cigarette; just look pretty; and beam in on that electric sound.

The four drops highlight work from Bernstein’s forthcoming book, Last Dance, which documents NYC club culture from 1977-81. Ten percent of the proceeds from the NFT sales will go to the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and its mission to “protects and defends the human rights of black transgender people.” A second campaign, Pixel 54, release date to be announced, will drop pixel/music NFTs which loosely correspond to the Bernstein Photos, and groove to Jitwam & TEYMORI’s Help Yo Self, released as of August by Studio 54 Music. The Pixel 54 NFTs gif the dancefloor and the Studio 54 couches as a photographer, possibly Bernstein himself, shoots with a flash. Just beyond the velvet ropes, a woman crosses the front hall on horseback. Bianca Jagger? These drops will come out every Friday for four weeks beginning on September 24th, and ten percent of the proceeds will go to Sound Mind Live, which is dedicated to an open, communal approach to mental health through music.   

Familiarity, in the context of NFTs, drives bidding. But in the context of the artworld—of Chelsea, of 57th Street—familiarity dulls value. Not always true—tick off obvious exceptions, Banksy, Damien Hirst—but there is nevertheless a greater proprietorship in owning a physical object. A sculpture or drawing can be made inaccessible to anyone but the owner and those so-blessed by the owner. And the other thing: in the artworld of yore, value is not only derived from inaccessibility, but inscrutability. If everyone understands and loves a work, it doesn’t have the same value as a work that most people just “don’t get.” Art is a demarcation of sophistication. If it’s for everyone, it’s for nobodies. Will that ever change? Should it? Despite the hierarchical horror of the art-collector-as-ubermensch, the isolation of art from popular opinion allows for experimentation, and, ironically, also allows artists an increased freedom of perspective on political, etc., subjects. Creative freedom in exchange for indenture to the rich? A bad trade? Maybe. But if art for everyone is the answer, do we condone fame culture? The question post Andy Warhol has been one where fame culture might take us: to a nirvana of egalitarianism, or a new Gods class, a la Mount Olympus, or, well, not that much further than it’s taken us already.      

Photography, to the galleried artworld, has always been the odd duck out. The numbers in the editions feel arbitrary and insincere—there could always be another edition of one hundred, two hundred, ten thousand, and there are heaven knows how many valueless reproductions of, let’s say, Lisette Model’s Coney Island series. At the same time, popular images are a commodity—and the blockchain could solve the longstanding problem of authentication and provenance. 

What’s wonderfully appealing about the myth of Studio 54 is its prescient vision of a diverse, inclusive, non-judgemental mindset. Of course, that’s a misremembering of history. The NYC club culture of the ‘80s was not one of supportive acceptance: the idea was very much to make a new culture totally apart from normative culture, which could fuck off. Fabulous people only—and fabulous specifically in the Warhol equation of the very rich, and the very self-destructive, and the very cool. Studio 54, the Mudd club—uptown, downtown—one of the more distinguishing characteristics of a club was who it didn’t let in, who was in the line outside, who wasn’t deemed worthy. The wrong celebrities, the not beautiful, whatever. And today’s bourgeois safe space was teetotality not part of the ethos. Does the chosen-few psychology play to the NFT? To what can be a culty, secret-knowledge sect? Studio 54 forever. But only if you’re in the know. Only if you help yo self.