Feral File is a curated NFT exhibition platform launched in March 2021 by Casey Reas, the artist and co-creator of the Processing programming language. Rather than running open auctions, Feral File commissions themed group and solo exhibitions of code-based and generative art, minting editions first on the Bitmark blockchain and later extending to Tezos and Ethereum.,
One of its earliest exhibitions, “Social Codes”, offered ten artworks priced at $75 each in editions of 75, certified through the Bitmark Rights System. The show sold out so quickly that the site crashed, prompting a review by the writer Bruce Sterling in April 2021.Every artist showing in a Feral File group exhibition receives a free edition of each other participant's work, a structure Reas has said fosters a community of artists who collect one another.,In September 2021 curator Pau Waelder organized the platform's fifth exhibition, “Instructions Follow”, a group show of twelve digital artists sold in editions of 75 for $75 that sold out within 40 seconds of opening. Feral File is built on a published Artist and Collector Rights framework granting artists resale royalties in perpetuity, and Waelder has said some artists earned more from resales than from an exhibition's original sale.
In 2022 the platform presented “Ecotone”, exploring collaboration between artists and engineers, with works including Interplanetary by Gene Kogan and Littor[alter]ms by Kalen Iwamoto. Reas, a Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA, described Feral File as committed to its artists across whichever blockchain they choose to use, rather than tied to one network.By contrast with big-gallery ventures such as Pace's Pace Verso, launched in November 2021, Feral File was created by and for the digital and new media art community that had been developing outside the legacy gallery system.
