The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound. I certainly didn’t predict the current NFT mania, and until recently had written off our project as a footnote in internet history. The only NFT I own is the one I bought for $4, and I have no plans to sell it. Capturing an animation called Quantum, it could go for $7 million or more, Axios reports. McCoy has just put up for sale the very first NFT we created while building our system. Last week, Kevin Roose, a technology writer for The New York Times, offered a digital image of his column for sale in a charity auction, and a pseudonymous buyer paid the equivalent of $560,000 in cryptocurrency for it. Head-spinning prices are now being paid for artworks that, just a few months ago, would have been mere curiosities.
The system of verifiably unique digital artworks that we demonstrated that day in 2014 is now making headlines in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and it’s the basis of a billion-dollar market. Our first demo might just have been ahead of its time. We didn’t patent the basic idea, but for a few years McCoy tried to popularize it, with limited success. McCoy used a blockchain called Namecoin to register a video clip that his wife had previously made, and I bought it with the four bucks in my wallet. Our first live demonstration was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, where the mere phrase monetized graphics prompted knowing laughter from an audience wary of corporate-sounding intrusions into the creative arts. Exhausted and a little loopy, we gave our creation an ironic name: monetized graphics. And Kevin had been thinking a lot about the potential of the then-nascent blockchain-essentially an indelible ledger of digital transactions-to offer artists a way to support and protect their creations.īy the wee hours of the night, McCoy and I had hacked together a first version of a blockchain-backed means of asserting ownership over an original digital work.
As it turned out, some of the McCoys’ works were among those being widely “reblogged” by Tumblr users. This was around the peak of Tumblr culture, when a raucous, wildly inspiring community of millions of artists and fans was sharing images and videos completely devoid of attribution, compensation, or context. Seven on Seven was modeled after tech-industry hackathons, in which people stay up all night to create a working prototype that they then show to an audience. I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to be McCoy and his wife, Jennifer, were already renowned for their collaborative digital art, and he was better at coding than I was.Īt the time, I was working as a consultant to auction houses and media companies-a role that had me obsessively thinking about the provenance, ownership, distribution, and control of artworks. Back in May 2014, I was paired up with the artist Kevin McCoy at Seven on Seven, an annual event in New York City designed to spark new ideas by connecting technologists and artists. The only thing we’d wanted to do was ensure that artists could make some money and have control over their work.
0 kommentar(er)
