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Marina Abramović on New Possibilities

Marina Abramović’s prolific career spans over six decades of experimentation with performance and audience participation. The storied artist brings these concepts to the blockchain, which offers a medium to comprehensively survey her journey and practice, using a digital avatar to explore ideas previously limited by physical reality.
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Peter Bauman: Your new project, Marina Abramović Element (MAE), examines your artistic philosophy and life journey. Why did you choose to tell this story now and through a fictionalized lens on the blockchain?‍

‍Marina Abramović: I am 79 years old today and my career spans more than 55 years. The time has come to assess what was done and what can still be done. Marina Abramović Element surveys my life and practice to the fullest extent, traveling through my static and dynamic works, my method and my new digital self, the avatar.

‍Peter Bauman: When audiences encounter your avatar, this “new digital self,” what do you hope they feel or understand about this mythic version of yourself?‍

‍Marina Abramović: I hope that they will see the real me, the beginning of something new and the reason why I was made.

‍Peter Bauman: By showing something new, you’re also recalling the mature. Since the early 1970s and your Rhythm series, you’ve tested the relationship between performer and audience. In MAE, where the performer may be an algorithm or avatar, how do you continue exploring those same tensions of presence, vulnerability and trust?
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Marina Abramović: The avatar is a tool and is not replacing anything—only adding new possibilities. 

This technology is not pretending to present as a living human.
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‍Peter Bauman: Can you talk about emerging technologies like blockchain as space for performance? With certain MAE tokens adapting to the moon’s cycles, how do you balance the dynamism of network-based art with the singularity and impermanence of performance?‍

‍Marina Abramović: The blockchain allows for the work to exist, even if it is a large-scale collection, as a single body of work, with its own audience. Regarding this point of tension—the performer-audience interaction—not much changes. The audience still participates but through showing up, minting, engaging in the community and helping us shape the next stages. The tension aspect is amplified by different blockchain mechanics; for instance, the black box, where you have to unveil each performance by hand, without knowing which one you get in advance.

‍Peter Bauman: In your previous performances, your body itself has been the art object. As your practice now moves into digital space, how do you consider the concept of objectness in NFT-based works? Does the blockchain offer a new kind of materiality?
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Marina Abramović: NFTs as objects or art pieces are not that different from the physical items.

They have their own dimensions, traits—even weight; it’s simply measured in a different way. What changes is the experience of this materiality, not the concept of materiality itself. The way we interact with digital objects is without the constraints of the physical world.
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My avatar will be able to achieve some of the “impossible performances” I have envisioned over the years but was unable to complete due to the limitations of our 4 dimensions.

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‍Peter Bauman: In your possible performances, you’ve blurred your sense of self in the work as well with collaborators. How does working with a machine or generative algorithms compare to human collaboration? Are there new dynamics—perhaps even intimacy—that emerge from that?
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Marina Abramović: The reason I work with a machine and algorithms is to connect with younger generations of the public to suggest that they slow down time and connect with themselves. I don’t want to replace anything; I just want to try possibilities of new media. This is an experimental phase, and we will see the results later.

The digital world is already an obstacle itself with personal connection and it is creating more and more alienation and distance from human emotions. This is the problem and is exactly what I would like to address: how I can use this problem and turn it into positivity and how we can use this medium to go back to simplicity.
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‍Peter Bauman: You have typically put a great deal of trust in the audience or partner, testing to the most extreme how deserving they are. In this new digital space, where the audience is mediated and often anonymous, how do you establish or invite trust?‍

‍Marina Abramović: I already have trust. I don’t need to do anything more than connect with this audience, who is not anymore anonymous to me. They are the same audience who follow my shows and my work internationally. But now, as I am open to technology, I hope to reach a new audience who isn’t as familiar with performance. They can connect with my life’s work through a new medium.

‍Peter Bauman: Speaking of that new audience, you’ve said that working with NFTs and digital technology is a way to build a bridge to a younger generation. Beyond the medium itself, what is it that you most want to communicate to them? What conversation are you hoping to start—or continue—through this work?
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Marina Abramović: In my career, I have worked with many media and regardless of the chosen vessel, my work has always been about presence and connection. 

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‍Peter Bauman: You’re known to confront fears in your work. How do you view technology—as another fear you’re examining and thus working through?
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Marina Abramović: I have a love-hate relationship to technology. It is good for so many different things but it is also addictive and humans have addictive natures. We don’t know what to do with our free time. Using this same technology, I could teach the young public what to do with their free time and learn how to detox temporarily from technology.
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Marina Abramović is a pioneering performance artist whose work since the 1970s has used her body as both subject and medium to explore endurance, ritual and transformation. Over a decades-spanning career—including landmark collaborations with Ulay and solo works like The Artist is Present—she has exhibited globally, founded the Marina Abramović Institute and remains a key figure in the history of performance and conceptual art.
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‍‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.