.ART

We have noticed that many companies are making unprecedented moves in the merging of Art & Tech! .ART are proud to announce the following nominees for the DIIA award: TOKENIN and ArtEconomy. These two companies represent out of the ordinary uses of art and tech. One has a creative idea to use NFTs to save the planet, while the other uses digital art to shake up the art world’s value system.

Grand! Let’s meet them. 

TOKENIN

TOKENIN is an NFT platform presenting us with their innovative ‘BUMI’ initiative. Bumi, which translates to ‘Earth’ in Indonesian, is an NFT minted to support the environment. An NFT whose purpose is to protect the environment and support environmental movements?!  – That’s grand! But how does it work and what’s the focus? 

The NFT Bumi forest is a crowdfunding collaboration between TOKENIN and the environmental NGO in Indonesia called LindungiHutan. Together, their mission is to use innovative technology and initiatives like these collectible tokens to plant trees across the forests of Indonesia. How? Through a transaction that would allow action. When users buy these NFTs, they are contributing to the conservation of Indonesian rainforests through digital art because each token brings up a tree. 

TOKENIN is also encouraging and using environmentally-friendly technologies to reach their goals. The company makes Bumi work using Distributed Ledger Technology systems which is an effective tool to reduce environmental harm, and is a key proponent of The Paris Agreement. These systems can be used to address the risk of double counting of emissions reductions within market-based frameworks as one of the overarching measures to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change. TOKENIN therefore encourages active environmental activists to expedite adopting NFT technologies as a potential solution in the digital era. 

NFT Bumi has the potential to serve as an efficient solution for those responsible for developing and implementing climate change strategies to meet jurisdictional or national targets. They are also big proponents of transparency and security. By using these smart contracts to mint the token in the Polygon network, NFT Bumi prioritizes and ensures safety. The Polygon Network is equipped with tracking tools that can trace every transaction publicly on the internet, which ensures that the transactions are tracked in a way that cannot be modified, and if in the highly unlikely instance data was altered, any modification would be obvious and traceable. 

TOKENIN also believes this transparency and tokenization can revolutionize how art can be created, distributed and bought from a digital gallery. It will help potential collectors feel more safe completing a transaction and help the artist build a strong identity with their art. TOKENIN’s platform is able to combine crypto wallets that could help artists to collaborate with more stakeholders. This means whereas an artist would normally have to work with an agent, a curator, or a marketer to help in the selling of their work, the artists would be able to split the profit in real time without the hassle of settlement dates upon sales. Moreover, if you buy these NFTS you get hidden digital assets that can be accessed through their servers – and resell them at your convenience!

Stephanus Kuntarto, founder of TOKENIN explains:

‘’We are very interested in joining the event. Tokenin Digital has just started to focus on digital art and to combine it with blockchain technology. Art is one of the real use cases for the blockchain technology that could potentially reshape art by implementing blockchain technology by registering the ownership and the transaction. Blockchain offers transparency in every transaction and the ledger would not allow anyone to change the past record of the ownership, therefore it will revolutionize how art can be created, distributed and bought from a digital gallery. Using tokenization to process an art as a digital asset would help the artist to build a strong fundamental identity of the art itself. It will help the collectors to feel more safe to complete a transaction. Since the ledger would keep all the past transactions from time to time, it would also let the collector understand the past owner, the amount that was transacted, and when the transaction took place.

We hope we can collaborate with more artists to use blockchain to register their arts and to do transactions using blockchain.’’

We hope so too! TOKENIN is indeed a bold platform with sustainability in mind. An encouragement to all climate-activists to engage in secure transactions on the web for the betterment of our environment. The next step for them is to empower artists the same way they do the living ecosystem.

Now, for a funky, and even provocative use of art online, we welcome our nominee :

ARTECONOMY. 

From the get go, Giuseppe Roatti, ARTƎCONOMY® International Brand Manager & ARTƎCONOMIST says:

“Art has always been provocation: ARTƎCONOMY®, the art without the artist, is the ultimate provocation.”

“I’ve always thought that real innovation must start with the artwork itself. Not with the processes that run the art world. the ‘Wow factor’ has to be at the base”

ArtEconomy’s concept and mission is summed up in their motto which says : “Art has always been provocation: Arteconomy is the ultimate provocation.” When they call themselves ‘the ultimate provocation’, you must believe it has something to do with disrupting both the artist and the market that engulfs them.  

The company believes the financial component of the art world has gained a disproportionate relevance in face of the art itself: In fairs, exhibitions, and the media, the focus seems to be more on how much money is generated rather than on the artistic and creative value the artist presents. ArtEconomy then have taken it upon themselves to bring artistic value back to the forefront – ironically, by removing the figure of the  artist. 

Using blockchain authentication, Arteconomy eliminates the artist from their platform and paradoxically uses the jargon and concepts of the financial industry as a means to to expose the imbalance between art and economics. But how ?

Arteconomy finds its first expression in the work “Continuity”. Continuity is a set of progressively numbered works composed of a piece of carbon fiber recycled using an innovative industrial process. The recycled fiber piece is then placed within a frame and sold. But at what price? And can we choose which specific piece to buy?

Pricing is an integral part of the work itself, called “the incremental emotion”: starting with an assigned price of 500 Sfr to “Continuity 1” , the price steadily increases by 100 Sfr with every piece sold. These increases will have a double emotional role to play, as the 100 Sfr is donated to a charity cause creating additional emotions and a link to those who need it the most. The value of “Continuity 2” is 600 Sfr for example, “Continuity 3” 700 Sfr and so on. This constant mark-up is not due to the increasing demand but a set of continued purchasing – changing the way art is valued. Arteconomy is now at its 41st Continuity, and if you want to buy a piece, you must buy this 41st – all purchases are locked on that one piece in the continuity. 

Other than centralizing on one continual chain of a carbon fiber, Arteconomy makes sure their collectors benefit from the company’s growth. Arteconomy distributes a dividend, or “an emotional co-dividend” as they call it, a 10% of the net price paid for each new Continuity sold, to all the previous buyers. This is an innovative formula which allows all the collectors of the “Continuity” series to profit directly from ARTECONOMY’s success, wherever they are in the world. 

For their innovation, TOKENIN and ARTECONOMY are nominated for the DIIA. We can’t wait to see how things unfold in this upcoming Fall. Stay tuned!