HEK.editions #1: Ursula Endlicher, Custom HTML Plant Tags, 2022

As an art center and museum for media art in Basel, Switzerland, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) offers editions on the Tezos Blockchain to accompany its exhibitions, events and as autonomous art projects. The HEK.editions are published on the art NFT platform objkt.com and are extensions of current artworks, independent creations or special projects by internationally renowned media artists. Custom HTML Plant Tags by Ursula Endlicher Input Field reversal #2 and Custom HTML Plant Tags, two new works by Ursula Endlicher, currently on view at the exhibition Earthbound at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) are intrinsically connected: The nature and environment – the trees around HEK – become topic and physical trigger for both works.

Input Field reversal #2 is a Web browser-based landscape that grows digital trees in the shape of user-interfaces, turning the trees that grow in its vicinity, into digital interfaces that react to real-time weather. The code that builds these digital tree-interfaces is based on Custom HTML Tags that the artist created for defining the “inherently digital” side of the “natural” tree in the digital work.

In the same vein, the image series Custom HTML Plant Tags was created as a response to the intertwined relationship between the digital and the “natural”. Custom HTML Plant Tags merge the tradition of taxonomic drawings – biological layouts of different plants and their characteristics – with the organizational structure of HTML elements for creating web pages.

Custom HTML Plant Tags are a digital image and print series. In the exhibition Earthbound at HEK, Custom HTML Plant Tags are accessible through an AR experience by scanning the bark of specific trees growing around the museum. When “extracting“ Custom HTML Plant Tags from each tree, visitors can decide to acquire them as NFTs, living on an eco-friendly alternative proof-of-stake blockchain on the Tezos based Objkt marketplace. A third of each sold NFT is donated to the conservation organization Pro Natura Basel. Custom HTML Plant Tags are available in editions of 35 per artwork on https://objkt.com/profile/hek/collections for 100 Tezos (XTZ) (≈ $ 150.00) About the artist

Ursula Endlicher is a New York City-based Austrian media and interdisciplinary artist working with interactive media and the Internet since the early 1990s. Her works oscillate between the “natural” and the digital world, and are exhibited internationally.