It is hard to know where to start to learn about Web3, AI, immersive technologies, and their relationship to cultural and art projects.

We have listed below a list of trusted online and print publications that we think will help you get started, starting with the most recent publications to keep things current.

Digital Art: 1960s to Now

• Author: Pita Arreola, Corinna Gardner, Melanie Lenz (V&A, London, UK)

• About: A new history of digital art from the 1960s to the present day, with decade-by-decade essays exploring evolving digital art practices, alongside interviews with artists, gallerists, museum curators and collectors. This is the global story of digital art from its earliest beginnings to the innovative work of today, encompassing wide-ranging, experimental practices, from computer-generated works on paper created by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, programmers and artists in the 1960s to interactive installations, virtual reality, net art and videogames. A collaborative, dynamic approach still characterizes the practice of today's digital artists, who employ technology as a tool while examining its social, ethical and political impact.

• Publication Date: October 2024

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Tokenistic behavior? Exploring Blockchain and DAOs as a participatory practice in museums

• Author: Frances Liddell

• About: The paper examines the possibilities offered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for supporting audience participation in the museum sector . DAOs, a type of digital infrastructure underpinned by blockchains and smart contracts, have been seen as informing a more autonomous, self-managing, transparent, and more efficient online organization, one capable of shaping how users participate and communicate with one another.

• Publication Date: April 2024

• Type: Research Paper

  Download →

Taschen Book “On NFTs.”

• Author: Robert Alice (and contributors)

• About: Encompassing the entire NFT ecosystem—from algorithmic art to avatars—the first major art historical survey of this field includes 10 academic essays and richly illustrated profiles of 101 key artists. Connecting the disruptive contemporary medium to its context in art history, this volume offers a deep dive into the sphere of non-fungible tokens and is also available for purchase in crypto.

• Publication Date: April 2024

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS VOL. 4 - Art x Public AI

• Author: Serpentine (with contributors)

• About: Provides analyses, concepts and strategies for cultural organisations, artists and the broader art and advanced technologies ecosystem responding to the transformations of AI systems on culture and society. FAE4 lays bare the various layers of the AI stack – from its software components like applications, data and the AI models themselves to the natural resources that AI systems need to function, showing that public and non-public entities are deeply entangled in every layer of the AI stack.

• Publication Date: March 2024

• Type: Free Online Report

  Read Online →

Right Click Save Book “The New Digital Art Community”

• Author: Alex Estorick (and contributors)

• About: Documenting a new community of creators and collectors, this is a selection of essays, interviews and roundtable discussions. Some of the biggest hits from our first two years for you to cozy up with.

• Publication Date: February 2024

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Museum Tech: 10 Blockchain Stories

• Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)

• About: Explore new ways of using blockchain technology for museums, and hear it directly from museum professionals.

• Publication Date: October 2023

• Type: Free PDF Handbook

  Download →

Crypto Art - Begins

• Author: Andrea Concas and Eleonora Brizi

• About: The volume tells of this exciting movement through the history and works of 50 crypto artists—including Hackatao, Refik Anadol, Kevin Abosch, Osinachi, Federico Clapis, Giant Swan, and DADA.Art—who contributed to its creation and form a part of it with their NFTs (non-fungible tokens) representing the present and future of this new world.

• Publication Date: September 19, 2023

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Blockchain for Art & Culture 101

• Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)

• About: Your first step to make sense of the art & culture blockchain space, from NFTs to marketplaces + how museums can use it with.

• Publication Date: September 2023

• Type: Free PDF Handbook

  Download →

Blockchain 101 Handbook

• Author: WAC Lab and We Are Museums (with contributors)

• About: Explore the origins of web3 and decentralisation, as well as blockchain technology and its impact on the arts and culture sector.

• Publication Date: August 2023

• Type: Free PDF Handbook

  Download →

World of Art - Digital Art

• Author: Christiane Paul

• About: The fourth edition of the essential introduction to digital art, one of contemporary art’s most exciting and dynamic forms of practice. This new edition of Christiane Paul’s acclaimed book investigates key areas of digital art practice that have gained in prominence in recent years, including the emergence and impact of location-based media, interactive public installation, augmentive and mixed reality, social networking and file-sharing and tablet technologies.

• Publication Date: May 9, 2023

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs

• Author: Omar Kholeif

• About: Since 1989, the year the World Wide Web was born, the art world has grappled with the rise of networked culture. This unprecedented survey of the artists and innovators in this area from 1989 to today is interwoven with the personal narrative of one of the leading voices on the digital world. In this book, Omar Kholeif, whose prolific career parallels the growth of the internet, tells the story of this mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists, both analog and digital.

• Publication Date: April 26, 2023

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Proof of Work - Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021

• Author: Rhea Myers (and contributors)

• About: A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions.

  DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain.

• Publication Date: April 11, 2023

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS VOL. 3 - Art x Decentralised Tech

• Author: Serpentine (with contributors)

• About: Identifies new patterns for organisational and creative innovation within the broader space of decentralised technologies, variably dubbed as ‘web3’, ‘crypto’ and ‘dweb’. FAE3 offers a series of strategies for existing and new cultural organisations formulated through insights gained from industry, policy and art-making such as Laura Lotti, Cem Dagdelen, and Internet Archive.

• Publication Date: 2022

• Type: Free Online Report

  Read Online →

SURFING WITH SATOSHI

• Author: Domenico Quaranta

• About: Written amidst an explosion of technological hype and a speculative frenzy, Surfing with Satoshi sets the promise of the NFT market in a historical context, investigating the technologies it is based on, the role of certificates and contracts in contemporary art, and the evolution of the media art market over the last thirty years. Riding the wave of the ongoing debate, the book tackles a series of as yet open questions, including: what does art have to do with the blockchain? Does it make sense to talk about “crypto Art”, and if so what can be said to define it, apart from the way it is traded? Is speculation the be-all and end-all of this trend?

• Publication Date: August 2022

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Radical Friends

• Author: Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty (with contributors)

• About: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.

• Publication Date: August 2022

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

CURATING DIGITAL ART

• Author: Annet Dekker (with contributors)

• About: What is the role of the curator when organizing digital art exhibitions in offline and online spaces? This book focuses on how the experiments of curators, artists and designers have opened the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods of presenting and accessing digital art. In the process, it addresses how web-based practices challenge certain established museological values and precipitate alternative ways of understanding art's stewardship, curatorial responsibility, public access and art history.

• Publication Date: 2021

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

Video/Art: The First Fifty Years

• Author: Barbara London

• About: Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. This first-hand account by the curator who has been following video art from its beginnings in the late 1960s, when artists first adapted portable consumer technology to art-making, spotlights video’s ongoing importance in the art world, tracing the genre’s development alongside the advances in technology that have continued to open up new possibilities for artists.

• Publication Date: January 22, 2020

• Type: Book

  Purchase →

There is no Such Thing as Blockchain Art

• Author: Maria Paula Fernandez, Stina Gustafsson, Fanny Lakoubay

• About: A report on the current status of the intersection of Blockchain and art

• Publication Date: June 2019

• Type: Free PDF Report

  Download →

The RAREST Pepe Book

• Author: Eleanora Brizi and Louis Parker

• About: “The Rarest Book” is a physical volume collecting 36 series of Rare Pepes, 1774 in total, along with essays that cover the history of the project and put it in context. It’s a fat paperback edition with a striking green cover, as playful and comprehensive as the work it covers. The Rare Pepe Blockchain Project shows the strength of social and memetic content for building community and value in crypto projects. This book is an excellent way of doing that and makes a strong case for the interest, value, and alterity of the project.

• Edition: 300 volumes only

• Publication Date: December 2018

• Type: Book

  Purchase →