Hello, hi everyone, welcome to the Open Metaverse, and welcome to week four of the University
of Nicosia's free MOOC on NFTs and the metaverse with Punk 6529 and me.
The topic of today's NFT art is going to be presented as always by 6529, but
before he takes the stage, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss a little bit
about the course logistics. So, okay, here we are, just to make sure that everyone understands
what type of material we produce from this course and where they can find this material.
So, each week we will be producing two main pieces of material. The first one will be
a PDF file that will contain the main presentation of the week. So, we have 12 weeks, there are
going to be 12 PDFs in total by the end of this course. And second, one or more than
one video for each of the live sessions. So, there will be at least one live session
each week, like today, but especially going forward, there will also be more than one
live sessions as 6529 and I'm going to start interviewing guests, hosting panels,
etc. So, we will be producing one video for each of these sessions and these videos are
going to be part of the course material. Now, where can you access this material? There
are four different places. First of all, in the course website, you can find both the
PDFs and videos there, our GitHub account. You can find both the PDF and the videos there.
The videos will also be available on YouTube, some of you are watching the video on YouTube
now on live streaming, but they are also available as recordings afterward. And finally, both
the PDFs and the videos can also be seen as NFTs in your Ethereum wallet or in OpenSea
or other NFT marketplaces. Now, for this last part, let me clarify that for the first week,
the material has already been air-dropped to everyone's wallet. All of you who have who
had minted the course access token should have received the week one material in your
wallet already. We wanted to air-drop this material to everyone because we think this
has a historic sentimental and maybe in the future who knows some provenance value because
it's the first material of the first on-chain course ever. But from week two onward, you
will have to proactively go and access the material. So we will not be air-dropping the
material as NFTs to everyone's wallets. We will be announcing this on Twitter and on Discord
every time something is ready for you. But we also expect you to go and visit the course
website, go and visit our YouTube channel and see what news is available there. We are
also working to develop a claim website where you will be able to go and claim all the NFTs
you want from the course. All the PDFs, and all the videos will be minted as NFTs. You will
be able to claim them for free. You just pay the gas fees. But it will be up to you because
we don't want to be flooding your wallet with material that you may not be interested in.
Finally, I wanted to let you know that we're working on the process of reducing the cycle
the time it takes for us to produce all this material. But it's not always easy. So there are too many
things happening in parallel. The transcription of the videos always takes a while. NFT minting
is an experimental process for us. We are minting very large video files and we have
had to test the limits of platforms like Arweave or OpenSea in the process of doing that.
So thank you for your patience with that. So that's all regarding access to the course
material. The second thing I'd like to say has to do with the weekly breakdown. As you
know, the course is 12 weeks long. Each week we cover one main topic. So last week it was
PFPs. This week is crypto art. But especially from now on, as more and more guests will be
joining us, please note that the educational coverage of each week's material would not
be necessarily confined to that week only. So for example, we may be covering art in
today's live session. But some of the discussions and the interviews with guests related to NFT
art will be recorded and broadcast or will be live-streamed in the coming weeks. We will
be using Discord, Twitter, and the course website for all the relevant announcements.
And in the website, in the end, you will be able to find all the material organized per
week, regardless of when it was live streamed or recorded. Finally, the third thing that
I'd like to inform you is that, as you know, we have been very busy building our Metacampus.
So soon we will be hosting our first live session there instead of sector zero where
you are today. As you are facing the main OM screen where you see me now, I invite
you to hit jump to just hit space on the keyboard. And while you're up in the air, turn to your
right. You will see there is a vast open space with one open amphitheater in the middle.
This is where the Metacampus is currently being built. I cannot say much today, but stay tuned
for announcements in the coming days. If you want, after the end of today's session, you
can walk towards the portal to the Metacampus. This is the door that you see on the right
of the park. You can hit E on your keyboard when you reach it and you will enter the space.
There's not much to see there apart from the open amphitheater, but we're going to be releasing
new buildings and new functionalities in that space in the coming weeks. But do that after
live session, because for now, we want you to stay here because we have none other than
Punk 6529 to walk us through the exciting space of NFT art. So, 6529, the floor is yours.
Thank you, as always, George and great to be here as always. Let me get the presentation
up.
Okay, today's session is going to be a little bit different and a little bit shorter than
some of the prior ones. And the reason is, crypto art and one-of-one art is a vast topic
area. One-of-one art is really just another way of saying art that happens to be an NFT.
And the art of any type. So, it's not an easy area to box in, get a hold of, put in a handful
of bullet points. And partially because of that, we have a lot of guests coming for this
topic area. And so, similarly to what happened last week with PFPs, but I think specifically
for this week's session more so, probably the most of any of the week sessions we're
going to have. I think this is, by far, the broadest, least-defined session. What I'd
like to do today, which I think will be particularly useful for those who are less experienced
in this space, it provide some basic background, some basic frameworks, some context terminology
that will help you in the sessions that we have with the artists, the collectors, and
some of the other curators in this space. And then, as we do these sessions, I want to
see what we absorb from these sessions and work it back into the presentation. So, I
want to say this for now. This specific PDF for this specific week is going to come out
later. It's not going to come out in a couple of days. I'd like to do the sessions. And
I'd like, I'd like to do the sessions because we have just incredible people coming for
the sessions. On the 28th, we have people. People are arguably the most famous NFT artist
in the world. I think I'm going to learn a lot from the session. I think there will
be interesting conclusions from that session. And I want to take those conclusions and
feed them back into the document. So, it felt strange to me to write up all the document
and finalize the document before we speak to some of the top people in the world on this
exact topic. So, there will be a delay on this PDF. We'll do it after we've completed
the sessions. And I think that's fine. So, what we're going to do today, a little bit
of background, a little bit of background was coming. I think it's going to be one of
our shorter sessions, which is okay. The last few sessions have run very low. And even
though the quote unquote live session, the official session of the week is going to be
short, the total number of sessions and the total hours for this topic is going to be
very high. I think as we get into this week, next week, the week afterward, we also have
a lot of guests for next week. We also have a lot of guests for the week afterwards. What
I would like to suggest is the following. Of course, try and attend as many of the sessions
as you can, both live or on-demand afterwards. But if you miss one, it's okay. There's going
to be a lot of material. There are going to be a lot of sessions. You might not get
the total number of hours of sessions of guest lectures. It's going to be significantly
higher than a typical course. So, it's okay if you don't get told them. Of course, we'd
love to have all of you see all of them. That's why we're doing them. But I think it's also
okay if you don't see every single one. The other thing that's going to happen, and this
is just a matter of logistics. Not all the sessions for week four, session four, will
happen in the next five calendar days. That's simply because we have a lot of people in
the next few weeks. So, we're going to stretch them out a bit over the course of the next
few weeks, just so that the whole team can actually be there in time. And it's partially
my availability, but also partially the availability of everyone that is helping with the course.
So, we have a lot of things to cover. We're going to spread them out of it. I don't think
it makes a big difference. We are talking about a maximum a couple of weeks up or down
before we complete the sessions. And then we'll circle back. We'll circle back with
the final presentation. That includes everything that we've learned and that I have also learned.
So, as I said, a little bit different, but I think okay. Okay, this week, we said it's
week four, it's art NFTs. We said we were going to discuss frameworks. So, we'll come back
with the conclusions. This is the general disclaimer. These are the guests we have and
I'll talk about the artists a little bit more at the end. But we have a great set of artists
and also a great set of collectors who will discuss crypto art and NFT art both from the
perspective of the artists and from the perspective of the folks who are collecting these artists.
So, let's start with the general framework. And to me, this is a very useful slide. Again,
for some of you, this is going to be a completely obvious slide. But for those who are newer
to the space, I think this is a helpful way to think about NFTs that have an art association
with them. And why do I say NFTs that have an art association with them? Metaverse land
is also sometimes shown as a representative, represented as an NFT. Gaming objects are
also sometimes represented as an NFT. Maybe someday our houses will also be represented
as an NFT. But I think everyone agrees that none of these are art. So, the part of the
NFT landscape that people look through the lens of art tends to be these three areas
and let's go through them. The first is PFPs, which recovered last week and on the whole
most people do not consider them art. But not 100%, right? So, like, you know, we discussed
this when we were discussing the crypto punks last week. Are the crypto punks collectibles
like baseball cards? Or are they a form of digital art? Are they both? Does it matter?
I think most people consider the crypto punks to include both aspects. They are both, yes,
a collectible, but they're also something like Andy Warhol's soup cans that they're
a form of conceptual art. And, you know, the same questions existed back then about some
of Andy Warhol's work. Do you really art? Or is it just some type of marketing thing?
Well, what about the other PFP collections? Well, I think the reality is it depends.
You know, the stereotypical case of someone went and found someone on Fiverr to make some
cartoons and minted as a PFP collection. I think most people would think of that as
collectible. But there are people who have made PFP collections and they are individually
hand-drawn PFPs by an artist who drew them in their own style. Well, it's not obvious
to me that those are not art. So I think where most people come out is that PFPs are primarily
collectibles, sometimes art, and that might mean that some collections are 100% collectibles
in some art, or it might mean that some collections have aspects of both. I think that's
where we are with PFPs. Then next week, we'll discuss generative art, which is a form of
digital art. It's a form of procedural art. But because it has been so successful in the
NFT space, it is generally thought of separately as its own thing. And in particular, the type
of generative art that is thought of as its own thing are long-form generative collections.
And we'll talk about this more next week, what these are, but where they are one of
ones of X. So there are a thousand Fidenzas. That's the X. But each Findenza is unique.
That's the one of one. So this is viewed as a distinct category. The boundaries of this
category of generative art are actually quite clear. Long form generative art in particular,
is very clear if it's that and if it's not something else. So this tends to be thought
of as its own category. And then people discuss the category of one of one art, which it's
funny because it's not exactly a thing. It's not exactly one of one art is not a category.
It's like a generic container. It's what in the non NFT world people would just call art.
If you think about let's say the leading site for high end curated one of one art, which
is super rare, I think today's fair to say that's still the case. Today in 2022, there's
no obvious style that exists for this art. Some of it is glitchy animated dark art. Some
of it is traditional oil like painting. Some of it is photography of various types. There's
no specific definition. It's not a category of art. It's not like impressionism. It just
means it's almost a way to think about it. It's not one of the other two categories.
It's not a PFP collection. Those are obvious. You'll know a PFP of collection when you see
it. It's not a long form generative art collection. That's also fairly obvious. You know them
when you see them. It could include short form generative art, like people who have made
a generative art piece they created procedurally and they published the individual piece. It
could include photography. It could include animation. It could include video. It could
include literally anything. It's just art. And even I think the one of one is a misnomer.
You know the one of one in this context came in as a distinction between the PFPs because
the PFPs are also a one of one of X type format. Your crypto punk is a one of one of
10,000. So what people meant casually here was that it's not that. It's not part of
a broader collection. It's an individual piece. Now it doesn't mean necessarily that the addition
size needs to be one. You could have a photograph and instead of minting it as a literal one
of one, you could mint it as a addition of 10. And I still think it falls into this category
what people call one or one art even though it's actually an addition. I wouldn't break
out additions as their own category. So and then I think an area that people get somehow
confused or mixed thing about is what people call crypto art. Crypto art is not a horizontal
definition like one of one art. It's a vertical definition. It is a definition of something
like an art movement. It's a definition of a distinctive style. It overlaps with the early
days of one of one art. In the early days of NFT based one of one art, most of that was
crypto art. Today, that's not the case. Today, you can find art of different types that
is linked to those are one of one NFT. And so I think the right way to think about it is
crypto art tends to be one of one art, but not all one of one art is by definition crypto
art. We'll talk a little bit more about this in the next section. But you can play around
the margins of these four circles, but I think they're broadly helpful. They're broadly
correct. It's broadly a useful way to think about art oriented NFTs. And again, I separate
those from gaming oriented, metaverse oriented, utility oriented NFTs. Those are different
things. So in these three buckets or four buckets, it's a useful framework for thinking
about NFTs. It's interesting. I'm going to bring a topical point into this discussion.
It's not in the slides, but I was treating about it this morning. A lot of people are
saying that it's very good what happened with Reddit recently. Reddit, or the Reddit community
historically was I think quite anti NFT. And then Reddit launched polygon based NFTs.
But labeled them digital collectibles. They actually are NFTs. But they didn't use the
term NFT. They use something friendlier. And it's been a success. And so it's very interesting
to me to think about what that might mean. Because again, you have a similar overlap,
you have overlapping circles, not every digital collectibles in NFT. Not every NFT is a digital
collectible. Nobody is going to think that a refric and a doll will look at one of it
as a digital collectible. It's a possible work. Not everyone is going to think that a
unique access token is digital collectible. It's a utility NFT token. And so I have mixed
feelings, not exactly my word, interesting feelings about this. I'm glad that now millions
of people on Reddit are now using NFTs. And if what needed to be done is to call them
digital collectibles. That's fine. It's a form of consumerization. But I also would say
that it is everything about the token ultimately being hidden in the marketing and branding
may or may not be right. Because a digital collectible could also be stored in database.
It's fine. It doesn't require being on a blockchain. And I think we're not going to
end up with one non NFT definition of NFTs. Because it's very common, this idea, we'll
just call them digital collectibles. Well, sure, some NFTs are digital collectibles.
Mostly a subset of one of these circles. But a lot of NFTs are not digital collectibles
and they would, you know, certainly a lot of the artists in the second two buckets,
I think would be quite unhappy or insulted if you said, oh, oh, look at this digital
collectible you've made, right? But it has been helpful in these last few weeks of Reddit
of getting an option. So we'll see how it plays out. So these definitions matter and
don't matter. They're helpful. They're not complete. I think they help, but they're
never perfect. And yet they are used and there's a bit of social construction happening on
what they mean and where you use them. Now, most one of what PFTs didn't come from, you
know, didn't come from the heavens brand new. There's a tradition of, there is an art tradition
that from which they spray, that's the joy. Most one of one NFTs are not, in fact, they
have a physical sculpture carved in marble visible in your courtyard. That's not likely
to be a good one of one NFT, right? I mean, you can't represent it natively. It doesn't
really have anything to do with a blockchain doesn't have any use computers. A useful way
to think about, you know, where they came from in the history of art is the joy. We have
had digital art before. We had cryptocurrencies and public blockchains. In fact, we have had
digital art even before we had widespread use of personal computing. And Warhol famously
made some digital art in the early 1980s when most people did not have a PC. And like with
other categories, there is a fuzzy and emergent and evolving definition of digital art is.
If you see what computer is going to say, that it says something like the first bullet
point, but it incorporates digital technology in the creative process or in the presentation.
Okay. I think in 1960, that would be a pretty hard boundary. And it would be useful for
defining the piece of art because digital tools were not very widespread. And so you
could say, again, if it involved digital art, a digital tool of some type, that's digital
art. Well, today, there's digital tools everywhere. And even works of art that I don't think you
would think of as digital art might have passed through digital tool. This is an example that
I mentioned here. You could take a photograph, take it on film, because you want that certain
grain or aesthetic or what have you, you could scan it, make some changes in photoshopping,
print a piece of paper or piece of aluminum, what have you, you have a physical installation,
here's the photo. It would not be obviously the case that someone say, Oh, this is digital
art, but it did involve a digital tool along the way. It's hard to get away from digital tools
in 2022, right? Like where we spend a lot of time using computers. And so the more advanced
thinking, advanced, in quotes, more contemporary thinking, let's say on what digital art is
that the digital art, the piece of art interrogates the digital medium in some way, right? There's
some real meaningful interaction with the medium, not just somewhere you use the digital tool
in the creation. But like everything else, everything else of this type, it's a fuzzy boundary.
I think you cannot definitively classify every piece of art in the world into digital art and
not digital art. Also, another thing to think about is this comes up a lot in one of these.
Digital art, pre the internet, pre widespread PC usage, usually came with a physical installation,
right? Because how do you actually, how do you actually display it? And so yes, there was the
part that was digital that might be a piece of computer code or graphics. But then there would
be a machine or a broader installation that embedded it. And of course, that still happens
today. There are all types of interesting digital art installations that have a physical
representation. And that's normal. And some of those will end up on NFT as we'll talk about one
in the next slide. But where NFTs have found a very strong fit with digital art is an art
that's 100% digital. That is not a digital, some digital code, plus a physical installation.
But things that are 100% digital, where they can move around the internet at internet speed,
without not at UPS or DHL or FedEx speed. And the NFT solves the problem of ownership and
provenance and duplication. And that has been a very powerful combination, right? Because when
you had a 100% digital pre NFT piece of art, it's very hard to handle provenance and ownership
and deduplication. If there's a physical installation, you can, right? If someone says, I've made
them digital art. And now this art plays on this specific screen and this specific sculpture.
And now you have the sculpture in your house. It's very clear that the sculpture is in your house.
It's not in someone else's house. It can't just be copied. But if you were making as X copy was
interesting illustrations on Tumblr, and they're 100% digital, well, there's no particularly
obvious way to protect them. There's not particularly an obvious way to say these belong to 6529 or
these belong to George. And so NFTs by solving this issue for digital art, 100% digital art,
are going to, are going to, I think, be extremely supportive of digital art. I think they're going
to lead to an explosion of digital art. And this, to me, is super interesting, right? I think this
is what's happening anyway. And I just don't see how that stops because it allows all the benefits
of being digitally native without the pre NFT downsides of it. Now, having said that, and for
everything I just said, there's always a counter example slightly to show it. This is a piece of
art by Raffa Ganadol, who's an incredible artist. We bought this in one of the NFT 6529 funds. And this
is a very complex hybrid piece. And I'm going to describe this not because it's a wonderful piece,
it is a wonderful piece. But I'm describing it in order to think about the types of things that can
be done. So this is the Gaudy House. Raffa made an incredible light show on the Gaudy House,
where the light show itself holds information from environmental sensors in the Gaudy House in
Barcelona to UNESCO site. And then in a physical installation, that's a Rockefeller Center,
or as the screen and that screen shows what is happening from the environmental sensors and
the light show. And further, the code and the models are linked to an NFT and this was all sold
as an NFT. And so this is hybrid, this is obviously digital art, but in its digital art that was
minted and collected as an NFT, but with a huge amount of hybridization and touchpoints to the
digital world. As we get further into the evolution of NFTs, we'll see more of this. I still think
most NFTs will be 100% digital for the reasons that you're older, but I think you will also see
innovators like Raffic do innovative things like this piece. And I can't tell you what it's going
to be. That's why we need people like Raffic now. I would have never thought of this before I saw
it once I saw it as it was incredible. And so even when we're in the NFT world in the area of one
of one art, you still might have a hybrid aspect, both in the creation here, in the creation of
the environmental sensors are hybrid. And in the presentation where it can be presented,
yes 100% digitally, but also into the physical world. Again, this is for background knowledge,
most of you know this. Unlike PFPs, and most generative art collections that tend to
primarily be bought and sold on generalized platforms, like open-sear literature,
one of one art has historically invented and collected on specialized platforms for one of
one art at the very high end super rare is the most famous today. But the auction houses,
the traditional auction houses are making their own platforms. Foundation is quite popular,
the one in the right. And there's been a variety of them, but there is a somehow specialized
ecosystem that supports this. So this was used, I think hopefully useful, background for this.
Let's talk a little bit about crypto art, which is that is a subset of one of one art. And
here I am going to absolutely liberally borrow from Artnome, who I think has been the best
writer on this topic. And later in the semester, even though Artnome is not an official guest of
week four, I think is week six, perhaps officially, we're going to talk to Artnom and really dig into
this topic because Artnome has just been early and excellent to this topic. And his view is that
the first crypto art started with the Rare Pepes. Like the punks, the Rare Pepes
probably sit on a bridge between collectibles and art. But I like the crypto punks that was a
unified project. The rare peppers were more like a platform. So there were many, many artists
who made Rare Pepes and all in different styles, but with the Pepe being the unifying team.
And I think he says, he says, but he thinks it's the beginning of crypto art. We'll discuss this
with him. And is it okay with crypto art? What's some type of framework to think about? This is
Artnom's definition. I think we're going to hear other definitions as well. But I think it's a good
starting point. And he has eight parameters. I think some of them are definitely true. I think
some of them are a little bit aspirational. But let's go through them. So these first five,
I would say, are more about the medium itself, but it's digitally native. It is a geographic
agnostic that is democratic and permissionless. And I think this is quite a big difference from
the traditional fine art scene. The traditional fine art scene is highly permissioned. You do
have to pass through, for better or for worse, quite strict tradition. And I think the people
who are the creators as in all pre-internet businesses think they're playing a very important
role in curation, it's how they preserve quality, supply, and things like that. But the
NFTs aren't like that, right? Anyone can mint. And then some combination of the audience,
the market, the artist will retrospectively decide if they value it or not.
Decentralization, we've discussed this at length. I do think blockchains are a more decentralized
way to create transport art in the off-chain system. And anonymity, pseudo-nimity, which of course
has existed in the traditional art world as well. Nobody really knows who Banksy is to take a recent
example, but it is more common in this space as we discussed. And so these are, let's say,
platform-y type concepts. And then when we get into the substance of the world, the substance of the
world, it does tend to be highly memetic. And I think this comes from its roots on the internet.
And it's funny, it's like evolution. It's not exactly that you have to make memetic work to
make a crypto art. It's that if something is memetic, it spreads more, it becomes more well-known,
it gains more attention, it gains more social construction and say, oh, this is crypto art.
And there is, it's like evolution. It's not like the way evolution works isn't that
animals and plants wake up one day and say, oh, I need to evolve into a better version of myself.
The way evolution works is that there's a variety of different things being tested
in the environment. And some evolutionary changes are more fit for the environment and they spread
further. I think this is what happens with the memetic nature of
crypto art, because it is internet native. And one way to, probably the main way to get attention
in an audience is this, which is somehow different than the main way to get attention.
So the audience is, I don't know, the Gaussian picture, a great artist, and holds a cocktail party.
And then through a variety of steps, someday you're in a museum and the art history books.
And that's, of course, another way. And there's nothing wrong with that way.
But it's not an internet native approach. So I think that does tend to be a memetic aspect,
please. Self-referential, here he means within the crypto industry, which makes sense. I mean,
these are the early works of a community that lives on blockchains, that thinks blockchains
are important, that things, crypto assets are important. So it's logical that a lot of the
early works touch upon that and don't touch upon, I don't know, the episode in reinforced.
I say that for a reason, I'll come back to it. It's often collected by the crypto patrons,
which again, makes sense to people who are most likely in the beginning to buy a token to find
an NFT potentially valuable or people who previously found a Bitcoin or Ether valuable.
Prioritist is more a general platform point that the intermediaries do tend to take lower
take rates than in traditional art, for better or for worse. And then dankness, which is a hard
concept. I'll go with Artnome's definition as a potency of expression and creativity
is a good way to say it. I was thinking when I was looking at the slide, if I could think of
a better way to say it, then I don't think I can't think of a better way to say it. So is this a
reasonable starting point? I think Art Nome wrote this in 2018, so we're going to come back and
speak to him in 2022. And a lot of these things have now changed in the broader one-to-one space.
The Solgado, a fantastic photographer, minted a collection of several thousand photographs
of the Amazon rainforest. That has nothing to do with this. It's not self-referential to crypto,
it's not particularly pneumatic, but it's an amazing collection of work. And it's now an NFT,
so that's a one-of-one with not crypto art. And it will be interesting to me to see how much
crypto art can continue to hold coherency as a lot of digital art rolls in to
NFTs. Because I'm of two minds of this, right? Like one version just might be as
individual artists and all different artistic genres, minted NFTs. The initial
approach of crypto art will get better. I mean, it's not a matter of certain to happen in
any case. But the alternative point of view is that there will remain a tradition of crypto art
within the broader context of one-of-one art. And we will continue to see it and it will speak to a
community of collectors who are more crypto-native, which might be different than a community of
collectors who are just not necessarily, their values don't necessarily align with crypto assets
and that principles per se. But they do see a nice piece of digital art and they'd like to
buy and it happens to be an NFT. And that's fine, but it's almost
parenthetical to the underlying piece of art. So we just have to see how this evolves and we'll
have to see how art did feels about this in 2022, because things have definitely changed since 2018.
Yeah, so these are examples, right? Like everyone would definitely say that
X-copy is crypto art oriented and Matt Caine will talk about this. We'll talk about X-copy in a bit.
Hold the iPhone so too. For most, this is an amazing artist. It makes amazing NFTs
about more their personal emotional journey. And are they incredible and important one-of-ones
in the NFT space? Yes. Are they particularly obviously crypto art that they have to do with
self-referential mimetics to crypto assets? Not really, right? So it's going to be a fuzzy border,
I think in many ways. I want to take a moment to mention the Last
Robbies. It's an interesting piece of NFT lore. And for those, I was very confused about these at first,
when I first claimed this place. And so I'm going to use this to share some insider knowledge for
people who weren't that deep in that space. And Robbie Barrat was asked, I think I have a type of
there, it's an H, was asked in 2018 to, he had made a portrait that had AI generated,
in part 7, it was divided into 300 frames. And it was at a Christie's summit and the participants
thought like a scratch card, but if they scratched the card, they'd get the key that would allow you
to claim the artwork. And the reason these became incredibly famous is most people threw them away.
Most people came to this art plus tech conference, it's 2018, and NFTs hadn't done very much by that point,
they're okay, I can't be bothered. They throw them through them away, that's why they're the
lost Robies. And initially, 12 were claimed, I think now we're close to 40, we're in the mid-30s,
and it's believed there might be another five or 10 floating out there where the participants
still, know where they are, they might have not scratched them and claimed them yet they
have them. But most of them are lost. And it's a story that has taken on symbolic meaning,
symbolic meaning from the perspective that the traditional artwork didn't initially
recognize NFTs, recognize this type of work, and literally threw them away. And the funny part is
these now trade for 1 to 200, 250 ETH, so anyone who did throw them away is probably kicking themselves
because it's 200,000, 300,000, 200,000, 250,000, they trade for these types of prices. Now of
course if everyone had claimed all 300, well the supply would be much larger plus the story
wouldn't have this type of resonance, and so they wouldn't be worth that amount of money,
so it's one of those. The ideal scenario is as a participant of the conference and everyone else
throws their ways, and you keep yours. And I note this because this is an interesting and
seminal event in the lore of NFTs, of one of one NFTs in particular. Now Robie actually stopped
minting NFT shortly afterwards for a variety of reasons, but the story has taken on a
power of its own, let's say. People, now most people who don't know much about NFTs
have still heard of people, and I'm very excited and honored that people will join the course later
in the week. People very famously has had the largest NFT sale by a wide margin, and it's interesting
because it was that NFT sale was largely because there became a competition in that option between
two very rich crypto folks, which drove the price up to $69 million, but also it's important to
know that like that work called Every Days was that one piece of art people every day has been
making a new piece of art since 2007, which is rather incredible accomplishment. A lot of people
say, oh, I don't like his art or I do like his art regardless, I use some glittery colors you like
over that level of commitment every single day to come up with a new piece. And I would say
these pieces do have some level of, you know, for sure they have social commentary, some of the
later ones do have crypto commentary, and they obviously started before Bitcoin existed, so they're
not all crypto commentary. And they were all brought together into one piece called Every Days,
which is 5,000 pieces of art. So, yes, 69 million a lot of money, and it is the highest NFT sale
by a wide margin. I actually think the second highest is also people's as in the 20-something
million range, which was an individual piece, not like Every Days was. But it is also 5,000
individual pieces of work. So, I'm going to plot my pocket calculator here.
If you divide 69 million by 5,000, you get to 13,800, which is arguably not an unreasonable
amount for a successful artist to have one of their pieces so far. It's just that people
turned out to be a very successful artist and really worked very hard over a long period of time
to create this. So, we've talked to people about this and many other things in the coming days.
This caused a lot of consternation in the non-crypto world that both, oh, is this really art? Is the
art good? Is this money laundering? Is this, wow, did anyone do this? But I don't know. Someone
works for a decade, create over a decade, creates 5,000 pieces of art and just happens to solve
them all at once. It's not quite as wild as people might think. Now, ex-copy, I think most people would
agree, ex-copy is a crypto art artist. I would think, I think this is probably fair, most people,
if they wanted to give you a definition, an easy definition of a crypto art, artists would
point to ex-copy. It's uncontroversial that his work is in the crypto art genre. It tends to be
very, it tends to be a little bit dark animated glitchy and often refers to
themes that have to do with crypto art, crypto assets and so on. So on the bottom left is right
click save as guy, which is a piece of art that reflects the common criticism of these that you
can write click save. And so this, there's a lot of people who are not exactly sure if they're crypto
art artists. Xcopy, I am pretty sure, is. And it's just amazing to see the evolution, right,
like he, he worked on Tumblr is at some point he discovered cryptocurrency and NFTs and his early
work would sell for $100, something like that. And recently this year, he made an open edition
or anyone could mint as many as they wanted and it minted out at 23 million in 10 minutes for an
open edition and his largest pieces have, or his most expensive pieces have sold in the
one to eight million range. But this is also, I think, a reflection of how early we are in this
movement as well, right? Like, I mean, Xcopy, who I think most people would say is a prototypical
crypto art artist. A few years ago, four years ago, not 10 years ago, was an artist whose piece
has sold for $100. And this has been, you know, we're in the period where this genre has taken
form and taken shape and has grown from being something that a very tiny handful of people
paid any attention to, too. A slightly less tiny handful of people, right? We're still,
I think, in a world where if you surveyed 10,000 people in the world at large, without any
particular orientation to them being crypto people, I don't know how many would know
of ex-copy, but it won't be that many. And so we will see, you know, how this evolves,
if it becomes, if it becomes a broader movement, and if it becomes a broader movement with the
folks who were there in the early days. And so these are all things that we're going to learn
along the way. This is just some data to give some context of volume of, yeah, this is volume
on the major one-of-one oriented marketplaces. And so as you can see before,
say, March of 2021, volume was, hey, it looks like there's nothing on the chart, but there
are data points on the chart, they're just invisible. It was effectively no volume before
March of 2021. It's when the first pickup happened with the first very large sales of alien crypto
punks. There was a lot of activity last summer when crypto at large was very gloomy. And it's been
much quieter recently. And as you're trying, I'm trying to look at super air through that data.
We're kind of back, and this is how everything is in the NFT space at large, we're kind of back
to the first half of 2021 for kind of super air, maybe a little bit foundation, say the first
quarter of 2021, maybe a little bit higher for super air. And, you know, this is, again, it's
going to be one of those very interesting topics, because people outside the space,
like all you see, NFTs are just a bubble. NFTs are over. And while not making any forward-looking
projections, I have no idea exactly what's going to happen. This has been the history of
cryptocurrency, right? It spikes, it booms, it collapses. And when it collapses, it tends to
collapse in price and volume at the same time, where people lose interest. But then it tends to
come back in waves. And so this is, this is going to be more of a builder type period,
where there's not automatic free money floating around. And we'll see which artists,
which other application builders stick around and do interesting things in the space.
Yeah, so this is interesting. If you look on the left-hand side,
there has been more of a change in secondary volume, collector to collector,
than there has been in primary volume. Of course, primary volume is down quite a bit,
the primary volume artist to collector has not fallen to the same amount. And the number of active
collectors have not fallen to the same amount. What has happened is a drop in prices. And a drop
in price is both because the price of ETH has fallen, and also because the price of a lot of
this artwork in ETH has also fallen. So the interesting, the underlying usage data on the right
has less of a drop than the US dollar data. But anyway, you look at it, these are very small
absolute numbers. These are tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of collectors. And this can mean
one of many things. It could mean A, maybe this doesn't happen. I doubt that's the case, but it
could mean O, or quote-unquote early, and this will pick up in a different cycle. But that might
not mean that super rare or a certain notice pick up in a different cycle, maybe in a different
cycle, something new picks up. And so maybe the thing that gets mass adoption hasn't been invented
yet. We just don't know yet. So it's interesting to see, and I think it's interesting to see this
in the context of, in some ways, I think NFTs have taken on a much bigger mind share and reaction
in the world at large than their actual mathematical point. I've said this before, I said this
was almost all my presentations. NFTs are about 1% of the crypto market space in terms of market
capital. They certainly get more than 1% of the attention. And I suspect one of the reasons they
get that type of attention is unit bias. So when Ethereum trades from 800 to 5000 or
Solana from three to 100, these all sound like small numbers, and you don't think about what
Dogecoin trades underneath a dollar. And so they're like, okay, well, plus the dollar,
I mean, maybe that's sensible, or it's 50 bucks, maybe that's sensible. That sounds like the price
of a stock. And people don't think that the market cap for those in the tens of billions of dollars
through most of, through most of 2021, Doge had a larger market captain, the whole NFT space.
But because NFTs have attention getting sales, this one NFT sold for 8 million,
69 million, 1 million, half a million. It catches people's attention for good and for bad,
that's why I'd like to learn more of this, or it catches people attention and say, oh, well,
this must be fake. It must be a scam. It must not be real. How can someone pay that amount of money?
But it's not really the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is on a
total market perspective. And the right way to look at it is
how much intangible cultural value are we representing with NFTs in general, with one of
ones in general, and this is a large number or a small number. And then it absolutely turns,
it's so very small number. And so what that means is that we're arranged to be seen,
but it's clearly a small number and total absolute value.
Yeah, this is also interesting, right? Again, for an, this goes nicely with my PowerPoint,
per all of the, oh my gosh, NFTs are very, very expensive in popular press type logic.
The average NFT sold on super, super air being the quote unquote elite site behind
what's highly curated, the most expensive artist looks to have spent most of the last year and a half
below 5 ETH. And at some point 5 ETH might have been $15,000. Today 5 ETH is, you know,
six or seven thousand dollars. Okay, I mean, these are not unusual numbers
for work coming from, you know, serious artists. If you go and say, oh, I bought a piece of
art from a serious artist and I paid $6,000 for it, when people are obviously going to be
shocked with us, but because you do have these power law outlier sales, I think they do create
perhaps a misunderstanding of how the space in general is structured.
Now, as I've been done in a body mirror, which I am, I'm going to go very quickly,
just to give you a little bit of background on the guests coming in this week. People,
I did not repeat in the slides. Oh, as I do have a slide here, but we discussed, we don't need
to discuss again. Claire Silver is an amazing artist who focuses on AI art. So in addition to
all the general one-on-one art things we already discussed, we'll also discuss the AI controversy,
you know, of the general type is AI art art. As we said, it happens with every single new movement
so it will happen with this one. Sam Spratt is a classic one-of-one artist, makes these very
tight, very evocative series. We'll talk about him. He's a pre-NFT artist as well, so I think
we can talk about that and transition pre-post NFTs. Sasha does some very interesting things
with poetry. I love this quote on the left, I'm going to just read it out loud.
Oral language and written text were invented as time machines, data storage systems.
Poetry is the original blockchain, a way to save ideas using devices, meter, rhyme,
accidents, et cetera, that make them easier to remember and almost impossible to forget.
I think it was my favorite quote in this whole presentation, but that was amazing.
I believe that the whole is an incredible photographer. It does,
you know, his most iconic work, I think, in the NFT space are the Aeroglyphs, where he has drones
create light art over national landscapes, but he's done amazing things he did the National
Geographic cover recently for Stonehenge. We can talk with him about NFT photography. Isaac Wright
Drift has another incredible story. Drift has climbed a lot of very high buildings and taken
incredible photographs of those buildings and was put in jail for this and then was released.
And so I think it was going to be a lot of things to discuss, not just about NFTs itself,
but about non-conventionality and society, and we'll see how those things all come together.
Blessing, that was very interesting.
And so it's a different constraint. Constraint to a phone for the photography and then it's also
been today's NFTs. Priyanka is going to tell us about the borough. The borough is a Southeast Asian
collective who are in the NFT space. And so, I think it's a really interesting topic,
both with Blessing and with Priyanka. What do NFTs mean for internationalization, right? I mean,
would the artists, let's say, in the borough or in South Asia? Would they have had access to
a collector like me? I don't live in India, travel to India, but I don't live in India.
If they were in a gallery in India, I'd almost certainly not know about them.
But online in the NFT space, I've collected from some
members of the borough and this global environment and seeing people from around the world,
different cultures, different approaches. I think it's one of my favorite things about the NFT
space and just I also feel very new. I think at the very, very, very elite level of collectors
and artists, the people who can hop on a plane and go to a show in Hong Kong and Singapore and
New Delhi and New York and the artists who have enough of a following that people will get them
into those shows. Yeah, sure, you could collect internationally before, but that's a very elite
environment, a more normal environment. For even people who, you know, take this type of stuff
seriously, it's much more plausible to collect from around the world, to see different perspectives
from around the world in the NFT space than it is in the traditional art system. And Ena,
you know, we're going to talk about a couple of things.
Yes, her art has some really interesting ideas on how NFT art and one-on-one art can also be used
for social change and so we'll see how those things play out. So, I mean, it's going to be
an incredible set of folks. We also have Art None, who I think is very relevant to the topic.
So, hopefully, what we managed to accomplish today is you and me will go into these other
interviews or panels or see how it serves them with a common initial framework.
And then, hopefully, through the course of the next two or three, because we will enhance our
framework. We will learn some things. We'll come back and see how we can enrich it.
And then kind of pull this together. So, I think, yeah, that's it for me in this session.
I guess I could take some questions. I have a little bit of time. I can take some questions.
Let me just check if the team wants to feed me any questions that have come up. Give me one second.
Some questions. If there are, we'll go for there.
Okay, I'm seeing a few questions. One question was,
to get my view on digital collectibles versus NFTs as a term, I ended up discussing that.
Anyway, same thing, Reddit, and why they feared the word NFT. Oh, they feared the word NFT because
NFTs got a lot of very aggressive, bad publicity in the mainstream press.
To me, shockingly so. The general approach was end-to-end negative on every dimension.
And for no particularly obvious reason. It's just the type of reason that people don't like
new things. They were possibly some legitimate questions about environmentalism, which again,
I don't want to get into this. It's a complicated topic. I'm not convinced the proof of work isn't
that is positive also. But in any case, you had non proof of work, blockchain is the whole time.
And either on an absolutely well-communicated pathway to proof of stake. So anyone who was saying,
oh, well, NFTs are going to destroy the environment at best not well-educated in the topic,
and at worst, you know, misleading. Now that either is proof of stake,
if it was on a proof of stake system, obviously traditional art is worse from the environment than
NFTs by a gigantic marsh. Making something physically, taking it to an art convention,
flying people there to see it, running a gigantic concrete building, a museum with
HVAC and security and people in order to see it, flying to New York to go to the moment.
All of these things are like orders of magnitude, more carbon intensive than NFTs.
And so people who, in theory, a month ago, were super, super upset about the environmental
impact of NFTs. If they really, really, that was the real issue, one would assume today they'd
be promoting all artists to use NFTs and be trying to shut down or limit physical art.
I haven't seen a single person say this. And so it makes me wonder if the real reason was
environmentalism in this case, or something else. You know, the rest of the rest of
the criticism was, I don't know, just wild. Mostly it was over the bucket of, oh, I don't know,
there's a, there's the normal crypto bucket. It must be money laundering. I mean, this,
it's the answer to everything planned. People don't know why something's happening. And
in other words, effectively it's, they're too expensive. But if they're too expensive,
it just means collectors are overpaying artists.
But it struck me as a very strange thing for the mainstream press and the art press to be
really upset that artists are now getting paid more money. I mean, it was not obviously the case
to me two or three years ago that the world of large was concerned that artists were making
too much money and we had to cut down on their money. The world of large has always been concerned
that art and culture tends to be underfunded and artists tend to be underfunded. And suddenly
there's a mechanism where they're being very well funded. And somehow this is also a problem.
Even though, unlike traditional art, right, the, the funding is creating at a minimum,
a visual public good, you can see the art everywhere. And in the case of CC zero, an actual public good.
And so this, this, I think is the general question of coping mechanism when something new happens
and you don't understand it, you'll complain that you're, I think all the things is like,
I don't like this. I'm starting there emotionally. I don't like this. And now I'm going to think
about the reasons that I don't like it. The one that I should probably find this article before
it vanishes, right around the people's sale, there was a newspaper article being New York
Times art editor, which went on and on and on of like crypto art isn't any good and maybe it's not
real art. It's like you've kind of been kidding me. How come when you're having this discussion
in 2021? The whole art movement you're going to decide is not actually art because,
I don't know, it's too key. It's too man of the people. It's something, something like that was
the argument, which is obviously absurd, right? Sothe net effect of all this
was that for a lot of civilians and if he's got a bad name?
And the reason I got a bad name, I think is not hugely necessarily something that if
T space the wrong thing, there are people who did wrong things in the space, but the press on NFTs
was unrelentingly bad, a relentless leader. And so I didn't understand it. I didn't.
I couldn't imagine someone feeling this way about Bitcoin, where the, because Bitcoin had a bunch
of assumptions that you should have a deflationary currency or a fixed currency or a gold standard
based currency. And I can imagine someone in from a traditional macroeconomic perspective saying,
no, this will be very bad for society, because we need to be able to use national sovereign
currencies to manage the business cycle and we could for employment have the very sophisticated
counterargument that most people don't make, but at least some sophisticated people made it.
Why there was a very negative reaction to a bunch of people want to give a bunch of artists a lot of
ether. This seems like an unambiguous societal good, and it should have been celebrate. But
this is where we are. I think we're going to go through a phase where a lot of companies want to
say it's digital collectibles, it's digital assets, it's all of these things. I think it's fine. I
think it's natural. It's how they get their feet wet. I'll make a prediction. I'll make your
prediction in front of hundreds of thousands of people. In the end, we will use the term NFTs.
I remember this phase with cryptocurrencies at large when was out of 2014 to 2018
where everyone said, okay, well, we like this idea. It's good. But we need to talk about blockchains,
not crypto assets. Crypto assets are scary. I talk about blockchains. Blockchains are not scary.
And if it's an enterprise blockchain from IBM, even better, that sounds very not scary at all.
And this happened in the 1990s when there was the internet, and it was uncontrolled and
uncontrollable and scary. Was it okay? We like these ideas about the internet. We like them. They're
nice. But we're going to make us the big telcos, the information superhighway, which will be this
controlled network, and that's going to be better. And this can go on for several years, and I think
it will go for several years, where people will want to use more comforting terms, less perceived
scary terms, so that people can feel more comfortable with them. I think in the end,
none of the terms that I have seen actually accurately describe NFTs. What they describe is
a specific application of NFTs that could also be implemented in many cases, not as an NFT.
And so it's fine. I don't mind people using them. I think it might be a necessary phase
in the development and adoption cycle. But I don't think that's where we end up in the long run,
because every one of them is incorrect. And the correct term for the technology,
that is a non-fungible token traded on a decentralized blockchain, is NFT. It's not
digital collectibles, it's not digital assets. It's not digital art, it's not any of these things.
It's NFT. So we'll see. I mean, I don't mind either way, however, it ends up in the long run,
is okay. But it's my prediction. But this prediction will be true in, I don't know,
three to five years, not in three to five months. We're going to go through a long phase for a
bunch of big companies and governments are going to want to take some of the ideas and theories about
NFTs, sometimes implement them in something with not an NFT at all, sometimes actually do an NFT,
but hide the NFT part, because they're going to feel it's less scary. And that's fine. But I do
think it then will end up with NFTs. It is certainly the case that I'm going to keep talking about
NFTs. You will not see me switch to digital collectibles. I don't think it's scary. I think
people are grown adults. I think people can learn new things. And I do think the press does have kind
of a reflexive negative reaction to technology. And they tend to delay a little bit the developer
to go into this way, but eventually inevitable things are inevitable. So I think that's what's
going to happen here as well. Okay, I need to wrap up here. I think we got to the questions.
Thank you everyone again for joining. Keep an eye on the UNIC metaverse Twitter account
for when the new sessions are when they're able to release course materials. And they are working
on ultimately a website where all this stuff will be found in one place. And so hopefully
two or three weeks from now, this is going to get even easier. And you can just go to a web page
and see all these things. But for the time being, I think Twitter and Discord are the places to go.
So as always, thank you and I'll see you back in the metaverse.