Posts tagged NFTs
Digital patterns in architecture depicting the post-future

Kevin McCoy’s Quantum is widely credited as being the first NFT. It appears as an octagonal aura, floating on a black background with color pulsating from its core. Kevin McCoy has described the work as his interpretation of the moment of creation. Minted on the Namecoin blockchain in 2014, and later on Ethereum, after which it sold at Sotheby’s Natively Digital sale for $1.4 million, Quantum is now iconic, standing as it does at the first intersection of the blockchain and art.

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Survival of the fittest: the perils of viral memes, internet algorithms and the rise of the NFT market

What does it take to go viral? What’s the secret formula that makes one clip about a child biting another child’s finger worth £500,000 whilst the cute, funny home videos on my iPhone only have sentimental value to me? So much about going viral, or skyrocketing prices pegged to your NFT is about being first, new, fresh and surprising. But equally, it can feel like a murky world out there when it comes to the deep, dark mysteries of internet algorithms that bounce one meme to the top of the forwarding pile and leave others lingering to fall into oblivion.

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Curation vs Gatekeeping

MORROW collective is working with galleries and artists to bring together art from around the world in curated, themed exhibitions. One word in that sentence may stand out to cryptoart purists, who often prioritise frictionless, open and free access to making art available: curation. But is curation a bad thing in cryptoart?

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All Seeing Eye: The legs have eyes with Vestica

Mariah (Veštica) is a contemporary artist from Belgrade, Serbia. Her style is often characterized as a digital and traditional avant-garde experiment with indication of surreal, magic realism and post-expressionistic elements. Using the diverse approaches within a formally divergent field of media, from physical painting to processing art, she is confronting new and traditional techniques while questioning the position of art in technological society.

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Enter the Digital Era, How NFTs are Impacting Art, Creativity and Beyond

In 2021, Collins Dictionary announced that NFT was word of the year, which was a rather curious situation for a word that isn’t even a word. NFT is an acronym that stands for non-fungible token. Collins defines it as “a unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible.” The rise of NFTs in popular discourse over the course of the past 12 months has been meteoric and frankly unprecedented especially given that the vast percentage of people had never heard of one before March 2021. This month two things happened to catapult them into the headlines. First was Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey selling the first ever tweet as an NFT for USD 2.9 million and the second was the sale of an artwork by a previously unknown artist called Beeple whose digital collage sold at Christie’s for USD 69 million. Of course, this was not the birth of NFTs. Actually, the first ever piece of art minted [this is the term for making an NFT] on a blockchain was in 2014 but March 2021 will go down in history as a watershed moment.

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