NFT art Archives - Sandra Filippucci

NFT Red Bishop from Chess Collection - ©Filippucci 2021

July 7, 2021

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Two

This was originally published on June 14th, 2021 on Vasari21.com

YOUR MOVE

After getting acquainted with the basic elements of NFTs (see PART ONE), my next move was to purchase some Ethereum cryptocurrency to pay for the “gas” fees to have each “minted” and put up for auction. That could run $50 to $100 per piece. I purchased some through Coinbank.com, and my initial buy tripled a week later. Cryptocurrency is highly volatile and rises and falls at disorienting speeds. Two weeks later it had fallen but I still had my initial purchase amount (as of this writing, it’s moving up again). Since I’m not focusing on cryptocurrency investments but rather, just preparing my NFT art, this did not upset me. I’ll reserve crypto investing for later, once I make money with NFTs. Sounds like an infinity loop, doesn’t it?

Next. I had to actually create the NFTs, and wanted to make pieces separate from the work I’m currently doing. I’m unable to tell you where the idea of chess came from – perhaps it lodged in my noodle after watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. I only know that I decided to have some fun. Fun during a pandemic? Was it even morally correct to actually have fun? Methinks so. Some levity against the terrifying backdrop of a global scourge. And that is the context in which one should put NFTs: fun art that also makes money. Once I could ingest that, I went and had some fun.

I’ve always been smitten by Japanese design—kimonos, Samurai gear, high-lacquer black furniture. Since my work has to do with cloth, I developed a Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Pawn and Rook for the Dark side and later, will develop versions of those for the Light side. Each piece will be animated with a morphing technique (meaning that different angles of each pieces were rendered and then each render will slowly move over the other), and ultimately, there will be six Darks, and six Lights, plus a chessboard for all of them. My Millennial son will score the music. That’s another great aspect of this new platform. Collaboration. More more NFT makers are collaborating with musicians, writers, other artists, etc.

There’s a tremendous amount of information online about how to prepare and submit artworks (some are in the links below). My particular submission will be mp4s – morphing images with music, and I will submit under the handle, “Cybernun.”

Here are four of the six Red (dark) Chess Collection pieces I’m working on:

NFT – The Red Queen (Chess Series) ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – The Red Queen – Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Bishop Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Knight Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red Bishop Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

NFT – Red King piece in Chess Series Collection ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

ENDGAME

There are numerous NFT platforms (websites) to submit you can submit your NFTs, but I’m going to choose Niftygateway.com because it’s better curated than the others. I have no idea how long the process of curation will take, but in my next post, I’ll describe what it was like to actually submit my NFTs, include the link to my Chess Collection, and tell you if I made money on this venture. If nothing else, I will have created a 32-piece art chess set that I can cast and actually turn into a physical object. But what about that money…what can I expect? How do I price each piece in the Collection?

It appears that every conceivable tier of pricing exists. This is based upon your Following, what platform you’re on, what work clicks with younger collectors (mostly male but that too will change) and, of course, the Goddess Serendipity. But let’s say each chess piece is part of an edition of 20 at $1,500 each in cryptocurrency (once sold, I can convert this to dollars) for a total of $30,000. All I had to do was pay the “gas” NFT Fees in the submission process, and I will let you know how much that comes to. I keep it all since there is no gallery to take 50 percent. I don’t know what the magic NFT pricing formula is, or where the sweet spot lies. Perhaps there will be only one sold for $12,000. It’s the Wild West of the art market.

STARVING ARTISTS GET TO EAT

As the New York Times reported “For decades, digital artists got little respect. To the tastemakers in the world of fine art, their work seemed more like a commercial craft — could something made with Photoshop, say, really be art?” This new concept of monetized graphics allows us all to sell directly to collectors and it comes at a time when so much privation exists among artists and creators. You decide what can be an NFT. That’s the point. Very few true creatives that I know – writers included – have escaped the wretchedness of being broke. We all want patrons, we all need patrons. Cryptoart is an opportunity to change that. The incessantly evolving world of cryptoart is an egalitarian one where you can sell what you create anywhere in the world so that you can continue creating, no degrees required. But it is also a huge opportunity for all practicing fine artists, especially those like myself who use software as part of their practice, artists who have had no place to house our electronic work.

BUT IS IT ART?

I’ve always gotten pushback for using technology, as have many others. For gallery exhibitions, my work is a hybrid combination of 3d modeling combined with traditional drawing and painting, mounted on panels to get it on a wall. Until about six months ago, there was no way I could offer the thousands of digital works I’ve done to create an ongoing revenue stream. They sleep deep in my hard drives. Electronic or digital art—to the general public–was not considered art. Period.

NFT Heaven is Water II ©Sandra Filippucci 2021

HEAVEN IS WATER II. Part of a second NFT collection I’m developing – Joan of Arc protecting the oceans.

Museums like the Whitney and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, however, have been collecting digital art since the 1960s, but to the general public it still seemed too exotic or suspicious. You push a button and the art comes out, right? I won an award from the Austrian publication Ars Electronica in the ‘80s. Since the late ’70s, Ars Electronica has been holding competitions and festivals and publishing electronic art, all to elevate the perception of machine art. But it’s been a hard climb, byte by byte.

Decades ago, when I made the transition from being a New York illustrator to becoming an artist making my own work, I had to find ways to get that early bitmappy work off the screen and onto a wall. Gradually I developed ways to do that. I saw all software as a means to an end. Another tool. Then 3d printers started evolving as well as 3d clay extruders, which led me to the “Sisters of the Cloth” series that will be machine-built as porcelain sculpture (it still has to be fired and glazed).

From the “Sisters of the Cloth” porcelain series, 2020-21, 3d model ©Filippucci

BYTE BY BYTE

You’d think that I would have realized a revolution was happening right in front of me. I’d been working with technology since 1984, first with an early IBM PC, then later with a Commodore Amiga 1000—a PC home computer with a color monitor offering 4,096 colors. Commodore gave Amiga equipment to Warhol and a few others, including myself, after one of their executives saw my digital work in a show in New York, This was all to promote Amiga, and the company put me in the in-house magazine, Amiga World.

Remarkably, Commodore then funded my exhibition “Hybrids” at the Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan in 1991. The museum board tried to block the show but did not succeed because some were beginning to be curious about this new-fangled way of creating. That show led to another— an exhibition at the Verbum Magazine Gallery in California. An early and classy computer arts magazine, Verbum, like Ars Electronica, was more focused on the creativity of electronic art as opposed to the technical aspects. I managed to get large format, 40-by-60 inkjet prints made and then had to frame them all. At that time it was still all about “hard copy,” actual, tangible art. Who could guess what would happened decades later?

Thirty-seven years have now passed since I first sat in front of a computer and played with infinity. What happened next happened swiftly and globally, like Covid: art in the digital world became collectible. Artists got to eat.

From the book, The Enlightened Mind, by Stephen Mitchell

The interconnectedness of this new paradigm shift is profound. The Net of Indra, would be an excellent Buddhist metaphor: As Stephen Mitchell writes in his book The Enlightened Mind, “The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image into infinity. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.”

To me, NFTs are sparkly bits much needed in the unfriendly dark of now. And if a bouncing flamingo makes you smile, those smiles can travel to infinity.

Part Three will be published shortly.

Contemporary American artist Sandra Filippucci has recently returned to Connecticut to build out her three-dimensional porcelain work, “Sisters of the Cloth,” in a new studio. She is part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the 1980s, and was the first artist to have a digitally based solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan.

WEBSITE | https://sandrafilippucci.com
INSTAGRAM | https://instagram.com/filippucciart
LINKEDIN | ART BLOG

LINKS TO LEARN MORE
— https://www.businessinsider.com/nft-investing-crypto-art-what-is-a-gas-fee-explained-2021-3
—https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/magazine/nft-art-crypto.html
—https://builtin.com/blockchain/nft-cryptoart-guide
—https://www.coindesk.com/how-to-create-buy-sell-nfts
— https://consensys.net/blog/blockchain-explained/can-nfts-crack-royalties-and-give-more-value-to-artists/
—https://www.kapwing.com/resources/how-to-display-your-nft-crypto-art-collection

NFT Red Queen from Chess Collection - ©Filippucci 2021

July 6, 2021

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part One

(image above) Red Queen from Filippucci's NFT Chess Series ©2021

PART ONE

This was originally published on May 26th, 2021 on the art journal, Vasari21.com

I’m about to enter a new and revolutionary digital art market. A traditionally trained artist of the Boomer generation, I’ve been working with technology since the mid-1980s. Yet the world of NFTs (short for “non-fungible token”) has been as confusing to me as the Vietnam War. Please, somebody explain it to me! After fits and starts, I now view this new platform, also known as crypto-art, as an extension of my studio life. I did not understand crypto-anything until recently, and that journey is what this story is about.

I truly believed that this was all just leakage from adolescent male geeks umbilically attached to their play stations.

The adults in the room would surely unplug it all. A crazy fad…which is exactly what people said when Ford cars showed up on American streets and frightened all the horses in 1903. I was wrong. We are in a Promethean moment where the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods to give to humanity is now a new online entity called, “NFT’s”or “blockchain art,” supported by another new entity called “cryptocurrency.”

Although it emerged in 2009, the first time I heard the word “bitcoin” was around 2015. I was dismissive, vaguely associating it with online gaming or maybe it was online gambling. Zero interest. Six years later, I’m only just beginning to grasp that it’s part of a fast-moving, fire-breathing, inclusive power-to-the-people movement that is now inextricably linked to NFTs. It operates with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency money is different: it’s controlled by the activities of the users, not bankers, making it a volatile medium but an egalitarian one. That alone is a revolution, but there was another right around the corner.

It was five months ago that NFTs really caught my attention. My Millennial son hammered me because his friend was successful at NFTs and why wasn’t I making some? What the hell, Mom? Suddenly, I actually knew someone actually making NFTs. Game on.

Screenshot of Gavin Shapiro’s popular signature bouncing-flamingoes animated NFT with music by Yung Bae

My Millennial son’s Millennial friend Gavin Shapiro – a kind, smart, friendly motion-graphics artist – spoke in expert Elvish, or was it Klingon? Now you need to understand that Gen Xers and Millennials are the impetus behind this revolution because they were raised with animated toys, play stations, computer games, arcades, Tron, and every iteration of technology. Everything moved or lit up. They had their own language then, and they have their own language now.

I’m a bit unusual. I’m an older dame who has been involved with technology since it went from code into cafés during the early 1980s. But here I was in 2021 feeling like a blockhead trying to understand the blockchain.

When I spoke with Shapiro, his conversation was peppered with terms like nonfungible tokens, cryptocurrency, minting, Ethereum, Nifty platform, Nifties, digital ledger, drops, paying gas, blockchain art and Coinbank. My Millennial friend heard my Baby Boomer confusion but also my resistance and concluded that perhaps this was not for me. I know he did not intend to patronize me but that’s how it felt. For me, that is a hot button, though inadvertently pushed, and it galvanized me to figure this out. I was pissed off. I will join this cultural revolution, you damn whippersnappers.

First, I tried to interpret all of the prodigious explanatory material that was appearing online daily (links are below). What is Crypto? What are NFTs, the NFT Gold Rush, Millionaire NFTers, the New Art Collecting, ad nauseam? In order to understand a revolution, you need to understand the language. I struggled. I turned away, I turned back. It gradually became obvious that the confluence of Covid-19, the world driven online, the urge to be entertained, generational computer literacy, and financial desperation had fed a perfect firestorm called, “crypto-art.” I know…it sounds creepy, like the Matrix. It also sounds like opportunity. Starving artists could now eat.

Please explain what an NFT is.

Before I do that, the big question I had was this: If the art lived in the computer, how does the buyer – the art collector – display it? Just on their computer screen? Their iPad? Nope. Turns out numerous companies are now making all kinds of electronic display screens specifically for NFTs. You would hang the screen on your wall just as you would a painting. Problem solved.

The minimalist MonoX7 is an internet-connected digital art display

So back to explaining what an NFT or “nonfungible token” is. Go slow.

“An NFT is a unit of data representing a unique asset—such as an art, music, or video file—that can be traded like any other piece of property, only in this case, they’re bought and sold in a non-tangible form. The seller puts a single, original piece up for sale in a process called minting, and the buyer gets exclusive proof of ownership through the NFT. Anyone could take screenshots, download or create copies of the item, but the original file remains the only valuable piece, because it’s represented by the non-fungible token that can be tracked on a digital ledger known as the blockchain.”–NFT Cryptoart Guide

So an NFT is a smart contract asserting that this digital piece is the original and all the others are just copies (or “digital prints,” if we were to use a real-life analogue). You can then sell this digital original (the NFT), and it will be noted on the blockchain, which is essentially a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack or cheat the system. If the collector resells it, that transaction is also noted on the blockchainYou have access to the entire transaction history and can see how your work lives on the secondary market.

And what about that resale? Royalties? We never get any money when a collector resells our painting or our sculpture, do we? In the crypto world, however, you can manually set up a fee (usually between 10 to 30 percent) that you get each time someone resells your work. if you sell your original work for a dollar and then someone resells it for $1 million in 10 years, you can still get $100,000 from it.

I like this kind of craziness.

That feature alone is the single best reason why NFTs are great for content creators. It allows them to focus on making art without as much concern for its initial sale price. If their works become popular, they can start earning significant sums just from the secondary market in the future.

Is Everybody on LSD?

Now that I thought I kinda sorta understood this, I started actually looking at NFTs. I went to Niftygateway.com because that’s where my son’s friend Shapiro’s NFTs are for sale, but a recent list of top NFT platforms does not include it. No idea why. Perhaps because it’s better curated than the others hence not as big as the others? I definitely want to be on a well-curated platform so that will take a bit more digging. An NFT platform is where you would submit your NFT collection for sale; however, like musical chairs, NFT lists change quite a bit as this emerging technology develops. Judge for yourself. Here are some of the top places to which you can submit your NFTs:

1. OpenSea
2. Rarible
3. SuperRare
4. Foundation
5. AtomicMarket
6. Myth Market
7. BakerySwap
8. KnownOrigin

So I studied some of those platforms and cussed. Transparent pastel Gummy Bears in a Candyland landscape. Crystal demon cats with tennis shoes. This is not art, it is lunacy.

Lucky #18/125 by Goldweard on Nifty Gateway

Why was so much of it like infantile short-attention span animations in garish colors with soundtracks? Shapiro was charming and almost reassuring with repetitive loops of his trademark lighthearted flamingos, but so much of what I saw out there appeared to be awful tourist art for nitwits, including a nasty-looking Whitney Houston with engorged silicone breasts. There oughta be a law. Wait, there is. I told you this was all so new, no-one can catch their breath to catch up to the juvenile jerks out there.

What if you don’t work digitally?

You don’t have to. If you’re a sculptor, you can iPhone video your work on a slow turntable rotation and that can become an NFT. Here’s a screenshot of Year 1000 – Refurbished by the NFT artist known as “NFN Kalyan,” a sculpture that simply rotates.

Year 1000 – Refurbished by the NFT artist known as NFN Kalyan

Hour by hour, day by day, week by week more and more artists have gone “nifty,” especially after December 2020, when Beeple’s piece, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold for almost $69 million at Christie’s, which is Incomprehensible. Click the link above, learn more. It’s still incomprehensible. The Promethean NFT fire had lit up the world with excitement and opportunity, but where did I fit into all of this?

My ambivalence faded once I began seeing the likes of Brendan Dawes on Nifty Gateway. Brendan Dawes is a UK-based generative artist. Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, a computer program, a machine, or other methodology, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. Yep. He’s making art. That happens to be how he’s doing it. A winner of both the Lumen and Aesthetica art prizes, Dawes makes work that has been featured in many exhibitions around the world, including “Big Bang Data” in 13 cities and three MoMA shows in New York. This is Brendon Dawes, Satellites, from an edition of 10 at $1,500 each. Sold out. Others go for $8,000 and are also sold out.

NFTs Brendan Dawes