Last updated 4 years ago
Art Beyond NFTs
Problem
What is the contribution of blockchains to the arts and modes of human expression beyond maintaining ownership records?
Total to date
This is the total amount allocated to Art Beyond NFTs.
About this idea
Blockchain is a new paradigm of human communication but the community and products around it are overwhelmingly business/finance oriented.
- Attracting the arts community towards experimentation with blockchain.
- Creation of new modes of art and artistic interaction.
- A shift in the conversation around blockchains through positive publicity in the arts community beyond NFTs.
- Highlighting lesser-known qualities of blockchains beyond ownership, trade, efficiency, reduced cost, etc.
- Introduction of a new generation of artists, writers, art historians, and the larger arts community to the unique possibilities afforded by the blockchain beyond NFTs and ownership.
- New mental models and framing devices for understanding blockchains, their role in the future of humanity, and the ways in which they illustrate and capture the human condition.
Since the dawn of time, artists have served an important role in human societies through the re-contextualization of the familiar and deriving new meaning from it. This act of unintuitive meaning-making can expand the mental model of a population and create new avenues for critical analysis of our role in history and the human condition as a whole.
Artists have been indispensable in re-imagining new technologies too. It was artists who for instance, turned the field of optics and light-sensitive materials to the engine of photography and film. Like many STEM fields, the blockchain community has thus far not been welcoming to the insights provided by artists. We do enable a level of independence from traditional king-makers of the art world through NFTs but at the end of the day, NFTs have become a financial product, above all else making artworks easier to speculate on.
We have created a new mode of human communication and organization but have largely handed it to the finance industry; And in doing so, we have alienated a community of creatives who could tell us novel things about this new mode of human connection, further expanding its historical role. It's as if we've invented roads but are only communicating their benefit as a way to make commerce more efficient.
I argue that we urgently need to enable a more ambitious look at artworks USING the blockchain and artworks ABOUT the blockchain. Grants given out by this challenge can serve as an invitation to artists to peel back the curtain on the blockchain as a mode of expression with broad applications.
We need artists to help the public rethink the blockchain as the new roads.
A 150,000 USD grant should be sufficient to empower at least 4 artists to create ambitious installations, sculptures, or interactive artworks using the Cardano blockchain.
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Check out the following references to better connect with the ideas within this challenge brief draft:
- Leonardo Journal of Arts and Technology:
- Representing Theoretical Physics Research in and on Ceramics
https://www.knightwebbgallery.com/artist/nadav-drukker/
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Some examples of art ABOUT technology and art USING technology:
- Forklift Ballet: The forklift ballet is an homage to the special relationship between humanity and machinity. The machines should become part of us and enhance our humanity. When they do, they disappear and we see only an extended person. The experience of embodying and using the machine is its own pleasure. In the forklift ballet the dance of the machine is actually the dance of the driver/ballerino. The driver has an intimate relationship with the forklift. The driver has embodied the machine. We see expression come through his extended body. When we embody the pen, or the sword, or the piano, or the computer, or the car, or the forklift we can feel pleasure from using it, allowing its machinity to conduct our feeling.
https://people.ece.ubc.ca/ssfels/pdfs/forklift.pdf
- Portals: Portals is a global public art initiative that connects people around the globe through real-time video audiovisual technology housed inside a gold-painted, converted shipping container or other structure. Individuals and groups enter local Portals and engage with individuals or groups in distant Portals through live, full-body video conferencing. The experience has been described as "breathing the same air." Portals are placed in public spaces such as public squares, museums, university campuses, high-level summits, and refugee camps. Participation is free, and the spaces are maintained by staff called Portal_Curators.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/portals-miami-beach-golden-shipping-container-384461
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An example of an artistic work using the blockchain:
Plantoid: On the face of it, Plantoid looks like a series of plant-like metal sculptures. Each one of these is associated with a unique digital wallet that accepts cryptocurrency (Bitcoin or Ethereum for now), and viewers are encouraged to send digital money to any of the sculptures they find beautiful or evocative. When a predetermined amount of money collects in one of these wallets, a piece of software triggers a process by which a new artist is commissioned to create another metal sculpture that will be part of Plantoid.
