OUTERGROUND's Journey to infinity and BEYOND - spoiler: this article contains references to #nft's NASA and tezos
I've been waiting for NFT's my whole life
During the writing of this article, Outerground made a small breakthrough in the #NFT space, selling out a very reasonably priced edition from the HOME collection; an ongoing series of space travel and NASA inspired photocollages, capturing the adventure and tension of the space race. A selection of images from the series are available on kalamint.io & opensea.io Skin in the game and on the scoreboard. It's very exciting.
As a digital primary (and full spectrum electronic artist) with a special interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain, this is an area of the new digital web3.0 landscape which has me fascinated. As some readers will know, I've been producing electronic media by the terraflop for some years now and for most of those years, the only really viable income stream was in service production. Client based production work is collaborative by nature and is usually carried out to a strict brief. It has to be just so and often involves complicated messaging with sophisticated symbolisation. It may eventiually be seen by millions, so it's quite specific, often involving tight scripting and music cues.
Some great paid work producing for broadcast, film, music and live events kept me busy day and night for most of my adult life. Eventually the glamour wears off but the shelves are still full of electronic joy from collage to digital painting, music and animation, both hand drawn and generative. What to do with all this stuff ? The gallery installations content & the endless machinations via the productive conduit of a tired wacom pen? The gazillion pixels which you couldn't ever sell because nobody cared about jpgs or mp4 based work. You couldn't touch or taste pixels so they were never real enough for the art world. Profit potential was distinctly lacking.
Have a look at OUTERGROUND.co.uk where you'll find the music to accompany the images and a selection of Outerground #nft artwork.
We know the blockchain revolution was always going to touch every part of life in some way or another, (eventually and).. actually cryptokitties was a pioneer for the nonfungible token space many, (not many) years ago but, just look at them now ! Everyone's in on it from Snoop to Andy Warhodl. There are virtual pizza slices, endless football cards, meta-worlds and meta-verses full of just about anything collectible (anyone) can dream up. There are memes, gifs, generative madness and all kinds of abstracts being sold as nonfungible tokens and like a perfect use case for blockchain, if it can be tokenised, it will be.
Dragonfly Shimmer (still frame from animation) by OUTERGROUND available on hicetnunc.xyz
The Inexorable Rise of Ethereum & smart contract platforms
Various platforms are being utilised by the NFT community and as we move forward, energy consumption and gas fees become more of a discussion point. The traditional art world is not so slowly becoming involved in the space and they are largely unaware of (what ?) crypto is, how blockchain works and even less aware of the blockchain landscape which exists. They'll quickly catch up.
Where there's money, expertise soon follows. Ethereum is a main source of gravity for NFT shops / auction houses at the moment but there are blockchain competitors in the sphere who stand to benefit from lower footprints and MUCH CHEAPER minting. This also provides an entry point for younger artists who often lacking capital to promote themselves are locked out from the market. On tezos based hicetnunc artists can mint their work for pennies and it's a similar story with beta's like kalamint. I'm all in favour of these platforms and as Ethereum moves into v2.0 with projects like polygon's MATIC coming to it's rescue, we should soon see a more fluid and easy to access infrastructure for the NFT space. One which is rapidly becoming a new form of art internet markeptplace or ARTNETSHOP as I'm callling it. Let's face it, one of the early pioneers of web3.0 the steemit platform was already using the web3.0 content hosting capabilities of the legendary IPFS
long before the glut of #nft shops sprang up. We have the interplantery file system dudes to thank for providing the necessary repository for the world's entire imagination :)
Understandably Ethereum was the original smart contract platform and you kind of need smart contracts for collecting royalties into the forever, but it's now 2021 and as the excitement of bitcoins second rise to the stratosphere recedes, the NFT space is just picking up, expanding and offering more and more opportunities across different blockchains from cardano to tezos and beyond.
The NFT Collector
The opposite and often intertwined side of the coin is the collector. People have been collecting art since forever and the new craze for #NFT's is no different. Those with big money seek to invest heavily in the pursuit of kudos and profit, borrowing culture from creators and all the way down the line to those with twitchy fingers and big eyes looking for some colour in their lives (me included.) The attractiveness of collecting art is not difficult to decode.
We like to surround ourselves with things which we feel represent our inner lives. It's a way of showing the world how we think and I have a growing collection of nft art by a selection of artists I've come across on hicetnunc where (like myself) artists are selling their work off in editions, starting at low or zero price, price-tubing upwards. The real breakthrough for NFT art is the perpetual royalty enabled by smart contracts. Often set by the artist, any onward sale is shared with a percentage. It's kind of amazing really as if one of your works was bought and resold for $1million dollars, you'd be in for a share of the profit.. each time it's sold (FOREVER ?) or as long as the smart contract which minted it exists.. which brings us to another tricky question. what happens when / if the platform you selected disappears, ceases to exist ?
https://twitter.com/chithart/status/1402615651936653320
Truly interoperable and platform agnostic tokens will be the #NFT saviour (and simplified email address wallets), it's possible / is happening / will develop. Until then, choose carefully and be prepared to start all over from scratch (minting fees, uploads, copy, the lot.) So as long as you've got a few e-coins in a suitable wallet and can make a jpg, gif or mov, then you too could be the next Beeple. you never know ? until you try.
this article is for entertainment purposes only