Artist Tom Sachs has long explored the intersection of craft, branding, and American consumer culture through hand-built recreations of mass-produced objects made from humble materials. Fascinated by space exploration since childhood, he developed ambitious immersive installations simulating space missions, culminating in his Art + Technology Lab–supported project Rocket Factory, a blockchain-based platform where participants assemble branded rocket components as NFTs to create “Perfect” or “Frankenrockets.” When launched, these digital rockets generate physical counterparts that are flown, documented, and either preserved, donated, or destroyed. In collaboration with SpaceX designer Anthony Sims and LACMA’s Corporate Partnerships team, Sachs created a museum-specific Frankenrocket that launched at LACMA in November 2021, merging digital culture, performance, branding, and sculpture.
Artist Statement
Even though I am a plywood prosthelytizer, I use computers every day. The studio has been making movies for twenty years and that’s digital art, it only exists on the screen, but has the same values as anything we make in plywood. A real artist isn’t afraid to use technology. Technology is how I connect with a larger community, and expand on the values of my work and my studio. Half the job is making the sculpture, and the other half is communicating the ideas.
The blockchain is about transparency. In my sculpture you can see the pencil marks and the glue drips. The wood is painted and then cut. It is evidence of how the thing was made and who made it. What excites me about NFTs is that the rules, the boundaries, are transparent and concrete throughout the blockchain. No one person owns the information, and you can see the digital fingerprints of everyone that was there before you. That degree of transparency makes it democratic and decentralized. It allows for everyone to control it. It’s utopic. [Regarding LACMA’s Frankenrocket,] I’m interested in the comparison between Apollo and Dionysus as the two extremes in our world, my identity, and my work. The Trojan nose cone in a way represents the two sides: Responsibly irresponsible. The 30 brands we chose for the Rocket Factory are all deliberate. Brands form our sense of tribal belonging. We picked our 30 Rocket brands because of some attachment I have or because I identify with them on some level. The story of LACMA’s Frankenrocket shows the power of one of the Rocket Factory’s most unique aspects. We allow people to create these stories themselves. We just provide the framework, but it’s up to you to decide what Rockets get made. The community decides, out of over 113,500 potential combinations, which 1,000
rockets the world needs.
We see the potential for NFTs to reshape the way art is produced and distributed. The Rocket Factory, and all of the NFTs it generates, are artworks. These artworks draw on the foundation of sculpture and painting I have made for over thirty years. I see no difference between this project and a Tom Sachs sculpture at a museum.
