The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) frenzy is getting to new levels: Rimowa, the LVMH-owned luggage brand, auctioned in May four digital artworks. For the occasion the luxury travel brand partenered with multidisciplinary design practice Nuova and created four images of a food cart, lamp, sound system and table integrating signature elements from the brand. The pieces are being auctioned on NFT marketplace Rarible and the proceeds will go to the creators of the artworks, while a portion will be donated to a charity focused on humanitarian issues.
Despite good intentions (trying their hand at interior design NFTs and donating part of the profits), the NFTs developed for this project look rather appalling. There are interior designers who went down the NFT path with brilliant results, while in this case Rimowa's NFTs, though accompanied by a grand title - "Blueprints from the Metaverse" - look like unconvincing combination of luggage with interior design pieces.
You would expect that the "metaverse" would indeed bring you something more extraordinary than a horrid glass table combined with a trolley handle, not to mention the mobile dinner service cart with compartments to store 18 serving trays, the result of a horrific and unlikely accident between a hard shell suitcase and an airline service trolley.
The NFTs produced as the result of the partnership between former retail fashion director Nick Wooster and Vancouver-based apparel, personal care, and household essentials Consumer Commodity (CON-C) were also rather questionable.
In this case we have four versions (gold, silver, bronze and color - in limited editions of 50, 100, 300 and 500) of Wooster looking like a LEGO minifigure wearing Consumer Commodity apparel (that is glorified hoodies and sweat pants).
The NFTs, available on Open Sea and Rarible, and selling for $2,500 (gold version), $1,200 (silver), $900 (bronze) and $500 (color), pose some questions and doubts as they look too similar to LEGO minifigures and may represent a copyright issue as the famous Danish toy company may claim consumers may get confused and think this is an official collaboration.
So, if you're a designer, fashion house or company and want to release an NFT, you should research this field more and find some clever artists who may develop something more exclusive and extraordinary for you, as also suggested in yesterday's post. In much the same way, if you're a crypto collector, you'd better search for works by proper artists and leave behind all these trendy yet superficial projects that may soon lose their value.
To get some ideas, try Sotheby’s auction "Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale"(June 3-10). The sale puts in evidence the importance of a curator of this new tech field (a figure that maybe fashion and consumer brands jumping on the NFT bandwagon are underestimating).
This sale is co-curated by Sotheby's and London-based artist and pioneer in the crypto art and NFT space Robert Alice, better known for the landmark work "Portraits of a Mind (2019 -)", a global art project to decentralise Bitcoin's codebase into 40 fragments. The auction showcases some of the earliest, raw NFTs built on pre-Ethereum chains alongside newer, complex NFTs that showcase the cutting edge technical innovations, so there are both "old masters" and emerging crypto artists in this auction.
All the NFTs included in this sale are visually intriguing: "Visor" by Toronto-based artist Michah Dowbak aka Mad Dog Jones is a tribute to cyberpunk, combining Japanese animation and metropolitan settings. Part of Mad Dog Jones' 2019 Tokyo exhibition "AFTERL-IFE WORLD", "Visor" embodies the arist's passion for combining vibrant shades with backlighting.
"DRAGON!" by OseanWorld, one of the leading millennia creatives working natively across the digital spectrum, is also a combination of bright and bold visually exciting psychedelic worlds, intense clashes between art, design, fashion and social media, that trigger emotional responses into the viewer.
Inclused in Sotheby's auction there is also Kevin McCoy's "Quantum", minted on 2nd May 2014 21:27:34, probably the mostimportant work in the history of NFTs, a work that represents this radical new technology.
"Quantum" is a round octagon pulsating with colours going from purple and acid green to fluorescent yellow and blue. Endless and in perennial flux, "Quantum" is an elegant and minimalist visual expression of McCoy's background in music (McCoy developed his creative coding as a form of musical play while training at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the musician Pauline Oliveros).
As the auction site highlights, McCoy's "Quantum" aesthetically calls to mind Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based art, Jasper John's Target Paintings, and the work of computer art pioneer John Whitney, while the mesmerising light source effect was inspired by the work of science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick (in the novel "VALIS", the main character sees history as a simultaneous event communicated through a mysterious pink light) and Stanislaw Lem.
One of the freshest and most technologically NFTs included in the auction is "To the Young Artists of Cyberspace" (2021) by Robert Alice in collaboration with synthetic media company Alethea.ai. This artwork introduces indeed the concept of a new token standard, the iNFT, that is the first intelligent, self-learning iNFT to be distributed for sale and public release.
Robert Alice offers indeed the possibility to his collectors to converse live with an iNFT: the work is a sort of living manifesto, delivered through a fictional digital Alice built using generic stock CGI models. Alice is therefore a 3D humanoid avatar that uses GPT-3 technology to communicate intelligently with its viewers. The basis for Alethea AI's proprietary AI model is the seed text written by Robert Alice. The seed text lives on the blockchain and acts as the basis for Alice’s identity. The iNFT has been coded with its own personality and will answer questions on the nature of itself ranging from the profound to the absurd. With each question asked, the artificial intelligence that sits behind the work will continue refining itself, so that from static, the manifesto turns into a dynamic document.
Technically speaking, the artwork poses new challenges when it comes to decentralised blockchains as the iNFT in its current form is built across a bridge of decentralized and centralized structures. On the decentralized side, the image, seed text and AI fingerprint of the character are hosted on Arweave; with the lip syncing, neural net and voice feed from centralised databases, such as Amazon and Google. This will likely mean that over time the intelligence of the NFT will slowly fade as the centralised databases disattach from the decentralized side, returning the artwork to its truly decentralized form, that of the image, seed text and character, a memorial to the first iNFT to be offered publicly for sale. From then on, both these decentralised elements and the portfolio of NFTs that constitute its historical documentation will take primacy, awaiting the ability for its intelligence to be resurrected on the creation of a fully decentralized structure for neural networks to exist on.
The artwork prompts us to wonder what will happen in future to visitors in a gallery and artworks - will they be able to interact with each other, will they develop intelligent relationships and maybe mutate forever the history of art? In the age of the intelligent art form, will we still be able to say that we "own" a work of art, or does that work of art become our companion if we can interact with it?
Besides, will the work of art in question be able to progress, learn and develop? As the visitor to a museum of the future or the collector of this piece contribute to developing the conscience of the iNFT, do they become the creators of the iNFT together with the original artist? With each question asked, the artificial intelligence that sits behind the work will continue refining itself offering a tantalising glimmer of the future and making us realise that this field is moving faster than expected and that, while commercial and superficial "trendy" NFTs, will keep on being minted, they won't definitely last long as the attention will reshift on proper artworks by professional artists.
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