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Quote from CohentheWriter on 15. July 2022, 5:51

Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xb932a70a57673d89f4acffbe830e8ed7f75fb9e0&token=25022&page=4

Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/agora-25022

Date Minted:  June 1, 2021

Artist Description: The virtual commons.

CohentheWriter’s Commentary:

I’m at my happiest when I’m in the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire, hiking. My favorite of all these hikes is a tremendous 9-miler called the Franconia Ridge trail, its name an amalgam of its locale and its unique property: A substantial portion of the trail takes place along the ridge line between three peaks. Mt. Lafayette stands tallest at 5300 feet, then you walk down to the slightly shorter Mt. Lincoln, and after a number of small peaks and dips, you find yourself upon Little Haystack, just over 4800 feet, but not prominent enough to be considered a mountain in its own right. Most hikes get you do around those parts get you up a peak and back down. Some get you up one, take you back down into the woods, and have you summit another. Only very rarely do you get a chance to spend substantial time, hours, up there among the clouds, at the apex of the landscape. But let me get to my point. As you traverse the Franconia Ridge, you pass a number of fascinating rock formations, tall jagged spires, clearly weathered, along the trail. Evident in these obelisks is the subtle communication of their creation: how the rocks danced again and again with the elements, gaining their current shapes after so much rain and snow and eroding wind. We are aware that these spires are snapshots of a moment, natural phenomena in the continuous process of being formed. Though Untitledxyz’ inventive architectural creations lack such overt naturalism, they almost uniformly maintain that incomplete quality, and we question the processes of their creation. So many of Untitled’s structures seem to be erecting themselves in real time, and what he shows us are buildings engaged in that same dance: surfaces lack uniformity, stairways twist in unforeseen ways, there are sporadic holes and sudden columns, the structures unfolding like beehives, arranged like living things in the process of self-construction. Agora is no different. Using blocks, folds, creases, and plays of light —and relying on his patented style of modular architecture— Untitled has crafted an architectural marvel en media res. It seems to possess both logic and randomness; it depends where you look. It seems to have a strangely living quality to it; doesn’t it seem on the verge of uncoiling and walking away? It is the Greek Parthenon shivering with life, stolid and ground-bound in initial impression alone. 

Am I being too partial? Forgive me, Untitled’s works always knock me around a little bit. It’s something about the composition, which appears somewhere between a scaffolding and an alien spaceship. And that quality of life which is omnipresent, the sense that this building is a living being, that it hasn’t been built necessarily by another but has built itself, just as those spires on the mountaintop did: Inanimate objects, but shaped by a strange and unknowable kind of internal logic.

An “Agora” was a central public meeting place in Ancient Greece; the word gave rise to the concept of “agoraphobia,” i.e. fear of going outside, crowded/open spaces, etc. Untitled has designed his Agora to feel somehow claustrophobic even with its bevy of open space. The building, which is mostly made out of modular cubes, is itself a modular cube of sorts, a 3D cube that’s hollow in the middle, with its edges clearly defined and stretching back into the frame’s distance. These edges are entirely nonstandard. In places, they are made of solid, contiguous cubes. Then, suddenly, archways will emerge, both big and small, squat and long, thin. Ovals of empty space. Open slots. Staircases and interspersed columns. Amidst them all, framed by the cube’s edges, are a trio of beautiful, multi-tiered staircases. They rise from bottom of the cube to the top in swirling fashion, like flower petals unfolding. The staircases are —it figures— entirely unusable. They are too steep. They begin at right angles. They don’t lead…anywhere? Just up into black space, ending unceremoniously. At the top of the entire structure is a segmented pane of stained glass: pink, orange, green, teal. A light from above shines down upon the entire structure, mimicking daylight, and as it passes through the stained glass, disco-ball polka-dots of color paint themselves onto the staircases. Everything else remains off-white, somewhat beige. But every now and then, the pockmarks of color appear on the surface, disappearing once more as the light falls aside. 

It’s not that the structure is senseless, per se, it’s that the logic which built it is alien to we who see it. It seems that Untitled has achieved a facsimile of randomness. And it seems, as well, that Untitled’s structure exists for no overt reason. This is not a structure with a purpose. It is not built to house, nor to shelter, nor to, say, display art (though it does bear mega similarities to the metaverse museum Untitled built for MOCA). It is more akin to a naturally-occurring phenomenon than perhaps I’d realized even writing that introduction. Just like the spires on Franconia Ridge, it doesn’t have an explicit purpose other than existing and being beautiful, being contemplated. If it has a use, it is one retrofitted, as a field mouse may make its home in a dead log not intended to provide it shelter. 

Untitled himself is the natural process. He, the wind and rain and snow, it all. I wonder if he was careful to rain in only certain spots, to not snow too hard, to reign in the wind except in specific instances. I wonder, truly, if he actually created whatever he set out to create, or if he set out to create any one thing at all.