The studio.
soft world is a London-based curatorial art studio, post-platform by structure. We work in protocol art, network art, simulation, and reality hacking: art concerned with how socio-technological infrastructure shapes cultural reality, authorship, and value.
‘soft’ works in two directions: a world built from software is editable, reality treated as pliable material rather than settled fact; and a soft studio holds its positions provisionally, slow to publish and willing to spend time with the work.
After the death of the ‘platform’, a third era: tokenisation {2017–21} gave way to curation {2021–25}; what follows is protocol {2026+}.
Protocol art treats the artwork as executable rather than static. Instead of a file that sits in a collection, the work runs: it reads the world, evolves over time, and changes through the way people interact with it. We publish it as speculative artefacts, on-chain protocols, governance experiments, and narrative exploits: work that acts on the world rather than depicting it.
We curate artists, technologists, and collectives for whom cultural production is inseparable from infrastructural design, who treat the stack {cryptography, consensus, markets, AI, generative systems, emergent agentism} as native material. We are less interested in the names that defined the last cycle than in the artists defining this one, and we would rather be early to the artists who matter than late to the ones who already do.
The founder.
Atay Ilgun
Atay Ilgun is a London-based curator, artist, and creative technologist working across AI, blockchain, and experimental media. His practice considers how technology reshapes myth, identity, and perception, drawing on cyber-folklore, machinic poetics, and reality systems.
Realiti (2019), the earliest AI artwork with its own smart-contract minted on Ethereum, was included in Sotheby's Contemporary Discoveries and is documented in The Definitive Timeline of Early NFTs on Ethereum. He has curated at IKLECTIK in London since 2020. He has been supported by the British Council, presented at CVPR and the NFT Biennial, and worked with DAOs and research programs at the Sorbonne and the University of Washington. He has spoken at Sonar+D, Creative AI London, and UAL's Creative Computing Institute. His work has been covered by The Wire, Crack, FACT, CLOT, Resonance FM, and the BBC.
In 2026 he founded soft world, a curatorial art studio working in protocol art.
Frequently asked.
Q.What is soft world?
A.soft world is a curatorial studio working in protocol art, post-platform by structure: the practice in which the contract, the model, and the network are the medium rather than the means of distribution. We commission, edit, and publish a small body of signed work, and we hold long relationships with the artists who make it. We are a studio, not a marketplace, organised around a point of view rather than a catalogue.
Q.What is protocol art?
A.Art in which the system is the medium. Where earlier digital work used the network to distribute a fixed object, protocol art makes the object out of software, contracts, and models: work that holds rules, reads its environment, and behaves over time. The artist's first decision is not how the work looks but how it operates.
Q.Is this an NFT thing?
A.Mostly, yes, though that's the least interesting thing about it. We publish most of our collections as NFTs, often with physical elements alongside. The chain is a means of guaranteeing provenance and authorship, not the point and not a precondition. But what we make is not a receipt pointing at a file. The category concerns us far less than whether a work understands what it is.
Q.What does a release look like?
A.Whatever form the work takes: an image, a contract, a model, a swarm of agents, a website, a speculative prototype between art and research, a collectible series.
Q.How do you select artists?
A.By invitation. We are not interested in leaning on the pioneering names of the space. We commission the next generation, often artists with no prior history on-chain, and give them the infrastructure to work this way for the first time. We look for work that takes its own infrastructure seriously, from people who move between practice and protocol without reducing either to the other, and we invest in few of them, closely and for a long time. We do not accept submissions.
Q.What are you launching with?
A.Xenominthe, by Erin Robinson: three hundred networked works drawn from the fairy taxonomies of the British Isles, across six classes, each bound on-chain by the folkloric rule that defines it. It is a study in how images travel the web as enchanted commodities, where the languages of folklore, spam, and speculative finance turn out to be the same techniques for holding attention.
Q.Do you have a gallery?
A.No. Digital art has spent too long on neutral white-walled websites and in the clean rooms that even digital spaces inherited. We stage work in spaces with no art-world precedent instead: underground tunnels, abandoned offices, rooms taken for a single night. Rooted in club culture, performance art, and immersive installation, each one is a physical extension of the work itself, and the people in the room are participants rather than spectators. The space is not a backdrop or an atmosphere. It is the argument: what digital art becomes once it is let out of gallery logic, a system that runs in the world rather than an image hung on a wall.
Q.How does the mailing list work?
A.We write to subscribers infrequently: notes from the editors, and a letter when there is new work. The list is not a marketing channel.