Non-Fungible Tokens: Authenticity and Connoisseurship in 21st-Century Digital Art.

 

Presenter: Irina Lyubchenko
Registration Number: 051
Institution: Independent Scholar, Toronto, Canada
Abstract: Authenticity of a work of art has always been a major concern for art dealers, collectors, museums, and art historical scholarship. Historically, authentication involved art experts, such as art historians, scholars, museum curators, and art dealers, to attribute a work of art to a particular artist, culture, or era. Despite common assumptions among the members of the public, attribution is rarely based on scientific tests of works of art and mainly relies on connoisseurship, or “sensitivity of visual perception, historical training, technical awareness, and empirical experience needed by the expert to attribute the object.” This paper looks into the history of connoisseurship and attribution of artworks, focusing on the latest chapter of this development, the non-fungible tokens or NFTs. The latter fully replaced the need for expert advice and “sensitivity of visual perception” and substituted the often-contested author signature for the computed digital signature or token, authenticating a work of art. Crypto-art and crypto-collectibles have flooded digital markets, offering authentic and unique art. Recently, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days, the first digital artwork fitted with a non-fungible token offered by the major auction house Christie’s, sold for $69,346,250 on March 11, 2021. It is the third most expensive artwork sold by a living artist, following Jeff Koon’s sculpture Rabbit (1986) and David Hockney’s painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). While Jeff Koons and David Hockney are the artists, whose theoretical perspectives are well known and have a secured place in an art historical canon, Beeple’s work and that of other digital NFT artists has not been fully investigated to be positioned in relation to art history, seemingly existing in a theoretical vacuum. The absence of artistic statements that usually accompany artworks contributes to this effect. Is it possible to think of the 21st century NFT-backed digital artists as the avant-gardes, who, like their 20th - century predecessors, confronted and condemned the art historical tradition? This paper claims that the transformation of the attribution process from that which relies on connoisseurship to the one dependent on computation alone may shed light on this question. Using historical and textual analyses, this essay provides a critical response to the recent artworld trends driven by the decentralized networks and currencies existing in fully digital ecosystems.

Bio: Irina Lyubchenko holds a PhD in Communication and Culture, an MFA in Visual Arts, a Bachelor of Technological Education, and an Honors BFA in Photography Studies. Her research investigates intersections between theories of historical avant-garde and digital culture. She is an educator, a researcher, and a practicing artist, who creates and theorizes digital media experiences. Throughout her career as a media artist, Lyubchenko worked with a range of creative tools, analog and digital. Currently, she investigates creative potentials of Virtual Reality and game development, using Unity and Oculus VR system. She is on her way to receive certification in Game Development from George Brown College. Lyubchenko is an avid proponent of experiential learning, which she practices daily in her own work and her classrooms.

From Animality to Immortality. The conquest of the Human in The City and the Stars.

(password: AnaCFiuzaIFM2021)

Presenter: Ana Carolina Fiuza Fernandes

Registration Number: 038
Institution: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract: This work discusses the notions of corporeality presented by the novel The City and the Stars (Arthur C. Clarke, 1956). It is a part of the research in development in the PhD program in Communication Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which constructs a genealogy of artificial bodies using science fiction narratives as an analytical lens and thought experiment. It problematizes how technology, transfigured in the machine's image, redefines representations of the body and plays a leading role in contemporary processes of subjectivation. In this sense, Clarke's narrative anticipates issues that would emerge in the decades following its publication; namely, the impacts of cybernetics, computer networks, and Artificial Intelligence advent, on representations of corporeality—its limits and transmutations. Also, it forebodes the philosophical implications arising from "technological immortality," expressed in the mind upload theory and its ideal body transcendence, in a singular junction between metaphysics and computer sciences. It tells the story of Diaspar, a hyper-technological city millions of years into the future, completely isolated—the last stand of humanity on Earth. According to legend, humanity has conquered the galaxy but lost its stellar glory to a race of alien invaders. The condition for human survival was isolation inside the city walls, making it its founding myth of confinement for fear of extinction. Diaspar is controlled by a central computer, which regulates the material existence of its inhabitants and manages their lives, that is, administrates birth and death. People from Diaspar have a practically immortal existence: after a prolonged life, their consciences fall asleep to be reborn in new bodies, using personal data stored in the memory databases. Thus, the mind continues existing after the death of its biological support — a kind of digital survival. An expansion of temporal experience is observed, but the counterpart is a reduction of how space is experienced—in which the inhabitants of Diaspar move, and the one occupied by their own bodies, now reduced to informational patterns. In the light of Clarke's cybernetic prototype, it will be established that there is a link between corporeality, time and space, and the current context of virtualized experience, clearly accentuated during the current pandemic and the challenges of confinement. There was precisely a confinement in space and a feeling of enlargement and cyclical repetition of time, and the use of cyberspace and hyperconnectivity as an “antidote” for boredom or loneliness. Simultaneously, there was a return to the body: as a concern and fear of disease, that is, of body’s fragilities and limits. Over and above that, the experience of the flesh, the body-to-body relation, proved to be perhaps not unavoidable, but fundamentally necessary for what Spinoza called “joy in the flesh.” It is within this tension that the problem of the body, technologically produced/mediated, must be formulated: not understanding the body as excess, as opposed to immortality aspirations, but perceiving how [potential incorporations of] emerging technologies can, in some contexts, even save the flesh. 

Bio: Ana Carolina Fiuza is Portuguese-Brazilian, based in Lisbon. She holds a Bacharel’s degree in History from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and a Master’s degree in Communication Sciences from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA-FCSH). For almost ten years, she dedicated herself to the production of content for cinema and television in the areas of entertainment and dramaturgy, especially in the Brazilian audiovisual sector. Since 2019, she is following the PhD program in Communication Sciences/Contemporary Culture and New Technologies, also at NOVA-FCSH. She integrates, as a PhD student, the NOVA Institute of Communication (ICNOVA), and the research group "Culture, Mediation and Arts." Her research project, supervised by Professor José A. Bragança de Miranda and co-supervised by Professor Maria Lucília Marcos, seeks to construct a genealogy of artificial bodies, using science fiction narratives as an analytical lens and methodological tool, as a privileged way of representing current technoscientific changes, as well as the notions of corporeality that result from them.

Dropping Art: Mapping Controversies Around the 2021 NFT Craze.

 

Presenter: Frederico Barros
Registration Number: 041
Institution: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract: This paper discusses some of the controversies around the recent spike in interest for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) concerning the visual arts and music. NFTs have been around since the mid-2010s and played a key role in the development of Crypto Art, but since the second half of 2020 have been sparking interest beyond its borders, leading to a generalized feeling of “gold rush,” according to many of those engaged in and around the now called NFT Community. This presentation deals with four deeply intertwined themes and how they give form to the controversies under investigation (Callon; Latour; Boltanski and Thévenot): copyright and scarcity in the digital world; blockchain technology, economics, and environmental issues; artists, gatekeepers, and platforms; artist income during the COVID-19 pandemic. NFTs are being heralded as a means to create scarcity in the digital world, which historically has been regarded as an economy of abundance due to the capacity of infinitely producing exact copies of digital assets (Fricker; Doctorow; Rifkin). This touches on copyright issues, bypassing gatekeepers such as galleries and record labels, but also putting digital platforms such as Rarible, The Foundation, OpenSea, etc. front and center, even if the theme of decentralization often plays a key role in the actors' discourses. Since NFTs rely on blockchain technology, the controversy also touches on problems associated with cryptocurrencies, though with a twist due to the specificities of the art market and artistic labor itself. Charges of it "not being about the art," but sheer speculation instead and, most notably, matters related to energy consumption and the environment come to the fore here. This leads us, finally, to the need of opening other income streams in a time marked by a pandemic and social distancing, when concerts, art fairs, and conferences have been canceled, galleries were closed, and artists see the internet as their sole venue for showing and selling their output. The research is being made through ethnography in virtual spaces (Postill and Pink), especially on Twitter and Clubhouse, dealing with musicians and visual artists from a comparative perspective. The rapidly growing debate around NFTs (media articles, op-eds, podcasts, blog posts, etc.) also plays an important part in it, for there is a marked difference between the ideas expressed in these pieces and how the community behaves. Some themes are all but silenced, dismissed, or simply glossed over among the community, while figuring as central issues in other accounts that attempt to historicize and deal with the phenomenon in a more comprehensive fashion. Though not by any means a novelty in ethnographic research, these discrepancies receive attention in order to propose some broader lines of interpretation about the controversy at hand.

Bio: Frederico Barros is Music History professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His current research interests include decorative and applied arts, music for film, TV and games, musical and artistic labor, and technology. His past work deals with popular and concert music in the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Modernism, nationalism, and electroacoustic music.

Making a Digital Human: Will Smith, Visual Effects, and Post-Racial Ideology.

Presenter: Tanine Allison
Registration Number: 026
Institution: Emory University, Georgia, USA
Abstract: Gemini Man, a 2019 action film directed by Ang Lee and starring Will Smith, arguably created the most sophisticated fully computer-generated digital human to date. Notably—and for the first time—this CG main character is Black. The film tells the story of an assassin (played by Smith) confronting his own younger self, a clone who has been raised as an ultimate killing machine. To create the clone, the production pioneered new digital visual effects processes, including new techniques for the subsurface shading of skin, the procedural generation of pores, and the naturalistic simulation of eyes (specifically the conjunctiva) and lips (to produce a slight stickiness as they open). Although Gemini Man’s production and promotional materials do not explicitly address Will Smith’s racial identity—and the producers had originally imagined a white actor in the main role—it is clear that race was something that they had to address in the creation of Will Smith’s digital double. As the most famous and well-paid actors in Hollywood are white, so too are the digital doubles created for them, whether for CG stunt work or for de-aged flashback scenes. A few examples of digitally created/altered African Americans precede Will Smith in Gemini Man—such as the de-aging work done for Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel (2019)—but this marks the most extensive visual effects work to create a Black digital human to date (discounting CG aliens played by Black actors, such as some Na’vi characters in Avatar). As such, the production confronted new technical issues, like needing to calculate the impact of melanin on the reflection of light in various layers of the skin and the way that digital facial hair, such as the clone’s peach fuzz, would look on an African American digital face. This paper contextualizes Gemini Man in our present moment amidst a national uprising about racial injustice. The production of a young, digital Will Smith begun several years ago, reflects post-racial ideology, following a longstanding practice of choosing to ignore or downplay Will Smith’s racial identity. Accordingly, the production literature, reviews, and audience responses typically do not address race directly. Yet, the themes of the film mirror the behind-the-scenes technologies in interesting ways, opening up the possibility of a timely reflection on the value of Black life and its digital simulation.

Bio: Tanine Allison is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Emory University, where she teaches courses on film, video games, television, and digital media. Dr. Allison is the author of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media (Rutgers University Press, 2018), which explores the aesthetics of combat sequences in WWII films and video games. Her essays on motion capture, race, war media, and digital visual effects have appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and a number of other journals and anthologies. She is currently writing a book about motion capture and digital performance in film, animation, and video games.