Hackatao

Hackatao is an Italian artist duo, Nadia and Sergio, who began working together in Milan in 2007. The name joins "hack", for getting under the surface of things, with "tao", for the balance of two opposite halves. In 2012 they left Milan for the mountains of north-eastern Italy, where they live and work. Their pictures set flat, brightly colored pop figures against dense black and white line drawings about society, the environment, crypto, art history and gaming. Their first major works were the Podmorks, small ceramic totems painted with drawings.

They minted their first NFT, the animated GIF Girl Next Door, on SuperRare in April 2018, and took part in early talks with platforms and collectors about paying artists a royalty on resales. In 2021 Christie's London commissioned Hack of a Bear, an animated response to Leonardo da Vinci's drawing Head of a Bear, and showed it at King Street ahead of the drawing's sale. The duo gave one of its NFTs, Hack of a Bear XR, to the Museum of Crypto Art. That October Sotheby's London sold their painting Imago, 2k2 a.C. together with its NFT, and Beyond the Void was shown beside the work of Lucio Fontana at the Ca' la Ghironda museum near Bologna.

At the end of 2021 they launched Queens+Kings, 6,900 avatars that holders can rework, with support from Sotheby's and NFT Studios. Later projects include Aleph-0, a long-form generative series made with Insigħt in 2023, and HACK the TAO, a game experience in The Sandbox, in 2024. Fortune named them to its NFTy 50 in 2021.