Miami 2025, the sweat of modern kitsch was steaming. The first year digital art was accepted as mainstream canon alongside other mediums on the main floor. Good, great, wonderful ~ it was not so much that truth and beauty was absent so much as it was beside the point on this occasion. But beauty is always a specter which haunts the new. Progress though, a moment of progress, a moment to mark the occassion of progress, people were excited about it. What could be unhappy beneath the palm trees and promise. Access to unlimited Capitalism, fun and a celebration of price.
Zero 10 featured artists Beeple, Jack Butcher and poet Ana Maria Cabalero among others curated by Eli Scheinman. Miami is moving into the new age, from the largeness of the reception perhaps the new age land at its centre. The future of art has arrived, or rather it has barked at the door for long enough, the proprietors opened the gate… for the first time. Now, the casino has some new members at the baccarat table.
Round the corner at M2 Kaleidoscope was taking place, cinematic poetry, and the venue of 50 screens all around reimagined into turning Kaleidoscope. I gave a reading of the first poem in the collection “Green”. I had met the patron of the work for lunch earlier that day, the man who commissioned the entire collection Mr. Seth Quinn. After over a year of acquisitions and dialog over twitter over our mutual love for the arts and the potential of web3, at last we met in person.
Seth has always struck me as a man of vision and our meeting did confirm it, as he spoke to me of his admiration for Michael Saylor and Walt Disney. And how he saw himself as a protege of both men, after all the pioneers of the digital age, are coming into their own now. Such a strategy to own the culture at large, is being as widely discussed this past week in Hollywood as it was in Miami Art Basel ~ as Netflix acquires Warner Brothers for $82 Billion a sizemic shift took place in Hollywood with a single transaction. The original Hollywood models were always aimed at ownership of IP, producing the IP was another matter altogether.
Seth accompanied me to the test runs of Kaleidoscope as the mirrored worlds turned around us ~ the slow rotation of chance was like the ceremony of a roulette wheel.
And as I saw Seth staring into the turning shards, like a modern Medici witnessing a triptych ~ an elephant walked out from the unknown towards him. This elephant was born out of Seth and my several months long dialogue about the collection. A key part of what I wanted to do with the funds from the acquisition was to take a trip to Thailand (where I now sit) and spend six weeks training Muay Thai kickboxing and writing poetry. Few may know about my 20 years of training in Muay Thai, though it’s been almost a daily practice for me, training under some of the greats like Bren Foster and Rafael Cordero in Los Angeles ~ it has mostly just been a personal ambition of mine, the discipline and daily practice saving me from some dark times in my 20s. In a way this warrior’s journey I’m taking is a return to my roots. I first started writing poetry and taking it seriously after my Muay Thai practice each morning, I would lick my wounds at a lol cafe and the words would come streaming out. My first poems were written this way. Now I’m here at the birthplace of May Thai and excited to see what poems come out of me.
So as the elephant lumbered towards Seth the space was transformed, another dream come to life. My third cinematic poetry immersive experience of 2025. The first was “Trials Of Destiny” with Superchief in Los Angels, the second “A Labyrinth Of Dreams” with NFC in Lisbon, and now the third and final Kaleidoscope with Nolcha Shows in Miami. As more immersive venues are popping up around the world, we did ourselves at a dawn of dreams ~ only we will not be waking at this particular dawn.
After the show Seth and I took ourselves down to BitBasel where I had rekindled with Superchief for a piece in the Immortal Exhibition. “Cyclops” much more of mythic fable with Baroque aesthetics, than Kaleidoscope’s post war nostalgia ~ though still another fragment of the same story. We’re all battling Cyclops in our own way, and playing out trials with father figures, bluffers, posers and kitsch obelisks.
I’m grateful to report that both my collections this year SOLD OUT.
Immortal Exhibition featured Cyclops alongside fellow artists Paul Reid, Strano, Amadon, Alien Queen, Delta Sauce, Dave Krugman, Rebecca Rose, Al Crego, Infinity Way, Violet Bond and others.
Cyclops was the first piece in the “POEM Collection” by Laurence Fuwr, 154 Haikus 1/1s themed with fables from web3. Drops December 22nd on Ethereum x Opensea.
https://opensea.io/collection/poem-collection-haiku/overview