How Can The New Technology Of Blockchain Broaden The Boundary Of Experimental Art Reshape Modern Aesthetic Imagination?

      In the history of human art, the birth of a new media is always accompanied by the emergence of new schools. Since Christie's first auction of artist beeple's NFT art in March and sold for nearly $70 million, the small but imaginative NFT art market is also heating up with the arrival of the summer. According to the data, as of the first three months of 2021, the total trading volume of NFT market exceeded US $1.5 billion, with a month on month increase of more than 2627%.

The rise of crypto art is one of the driving forces behind the record high trading volume of NFT. What is encryption art? In addition to the eye-catching transaction price, what is the art of encryption? Will encryption art have an impact on traditional art? On May 29, the solo exhibition "cookie cookie" with the theme of blockchain art and encryption art opened in Beijing Jiade Art Center. From his cross-border practice, artist cryptozr (Liu Jiaying) showed the aesthetic and interesting pursuit symbolized by encryption art beyond the representation of money and value.

What is encryption art exhibition

To understand the art of encryption exhibition, we must first understand what encryption art is.

The birth of encryption art is closely related to NFT. In the Internet age, the duplication and dissemination of digital works become rampant, and it is often very difficult to verify and trace the identity of the creator of a work. NFT (non homogeneity token) has the characteristics of indivisibility, irreplaceable and uniqueness. In addition, it can be any kind of media or object - music, art, video, expression pack. Therefore, it can well represent the ownership of basic assets, especially digital assets. Therefore, NFT can be simply understood as a digital collection using blockchain technology as authentication. According to coingecko, the total market value of NFT issued (including all kinds of art, games, collectable items, etc.) has reached 4.7 billion US dollars.

And encryption art is undoubtedly the most robust one in NFT. Through the use of blockchain technology to service or create digital art works, it realizes the display and transaction of artworks in virtual space, which makes art investment beyond the traditional material form and makes it possible to collect digital art.

For Liu Jiaying, it is purely accidental to pay attention to and break through the seemingly unrelated plates of blockchain and art. According to reports, she has been working in the Internet industry for a long time and has tried the entrepreneurial practice in the blockchain industry. She is not an art major. In 2016, she was admitted to Yangmei for a master's degree in experimental art. In the process of reading, she found that she could use blockchain as her unique creative means and media, so she began to pay attention to the inspiration and technical means generated in the daily practice of blockchain, and tried to transform it into art.

In Liu Jiaying's opinion, there are two types of real encryption Art: one is digital art that marks ownership through blockchain technology; the other is to create some accidental events full of "artistry" in the blockchain world by writing the code of smart contract, transforming the original attribute of token, It is just like conducting a performance art experiment or game in a virtual space. By making specific rules of the game, artists can observe the spontaneous behavior of the participants after entering the game, thus triggering the public to think about the existing social relations and rules.

"Blockchain art should exist in both worlds and complement each other," curator Li Zhenhua told 21st century economic reporter The online part of the exhibition mainly records a series of encryption art events released by Liu Jiaying on the blockchain platform since 2017; The 11 offline works are in traditional art forms that can be understood by the public, such as oil painting, sculpture, animation, installation, etc., which correspondingly reproduce the slices or miniature of these fresh events that have happened on the blockchain, turning "intangible" into "tangible".

New technology and new aesthetics

Although there is a certain technical threshold, encryption art is still an art in the final analysis. Through the blessing of science and technology and new concepts, the important proposition of encryption art exhibition is to let the audience feel the exploration and breakthrough of artists in the aesthetic sense. Curator Li Jianhua told 21st century economic reporter: "in doing this exhibition, we have added almost all kinds of media in the history of contemporary art. There are traditional paintings and videos, as well as especially radical performance and archaeological works. We hope that all the technical conditions will be hidden in this environment. You can find it, or you can not find it, but still think the exhibition is good-looking. "

Can an auction be a work of art? For Liu Jiaying, the answer to this question is yes. Her work topbidder is a work in the form of multiple people participating in real-time online auction. At the scene of the exhibition, the reporter saw that the scene of topbidder's offline display was no different from that of an ordinary auction: a professional auctioneer, audience ready to bid, and two LED screens on the left and right that displayed the auction and bid in real time. However, different from the ordinary high price winner, the auctioneer standing on the stage will not really "drop the hammer". This is because Liu Jiaying's topbinder uses the theory of radical market to modify the underlying protocol of NFT to realize the production and auction mechanism of non permanent possession encryption assets (rnft). In other words, in the topbidder protocol, as there is no auction termination time, as long as any bidder bids more than 10% of the previous bidder, the system will enforce the automatic ownership transfer of the rnft. This design makes all rnfts have a natural automatic bidding mechanism, which improves the liquidity of assets and realizes the autonomy of value. Liu Jiaying said that topbidder is a "artwork" created by herself and her team. It has changed the control of artworks, making encrypted artworks independent of platform dependence, and also has the possibility of being used as public goods. "I want to record the era of power given by this technology.".

In the center of the exhibition site, a huge round gray green stone is placed upright. The middle part of the stone is hollowed out and looks like ancient coins. Liu Jiaying told reporters that the work, named "yap721", was inspired by the stone coins on Yapu island. The Yapu islanders like to record the transfer of each account on the surface of the huge stone coins, thus forming the rudiment of the human consensus account book. Liu Jiaying made the stone coin into NFT and put it on topbidder for auction. Every time she bid, she collected the public key address of the bidder and recorded it on the other side of the stone coin. Liu Jiaying said: "at present, there are a total of 53 bidding records on topbidder. Topbidder uses the permanent auction mode. In the future, the address of the auctioneer may be added, and we will engrave it on the stone coins. These bidding records will be permanently saved on the blockchain, and I engrave the addresses on these chains on the stone coins, which has a sense of connecting the virtual world and the real world. "

In addition, the most popular VR technology elements are also cleverly applied to Liu Jiaying's encryption art project. As early as June 2020, she and many friends built a virtual gallery space called "red gold" in cryptovoxels' blockchain platform. Just like living in another space parallel to the real world, people can buy and sell land, create buildings, hold parties, auction and display art works in cryptovoxels. Liu Jiaying said that the project was started after the outbreak of the epidemic last year. As there was no way to do offline exhibitions for epidemic prevention and control, she and her classmates and friends set up this "Chinese style" virtual art gallery, which is a multi person online editor and is constantly changing. According to reports, at present, Chijin art museum will hold a new exhibition every month or so. Visitors can enter the virtual world by wearing VR equipment, as a substitute and supplement in the period when offline gathering is impossible.

Break the circle and build a new pattern of Art

For the art circle, as blockchain technology is more and more deeply involved in art creation, what it can provide is not only new creative objects or creative tools, but also may bring new ecological order and pattern to the art circle. Li Zhenhua believes that compared with traditional art forms, the emergence of encryption art is more like an expansion of art circle. "I always feel that this is not a substitute relationship. There are things under the logic of new technology. Traditional technology will not disappear. There will still be people who will keep it, and there will still be people who are still testing its possibility," he said

Wu Jian'an, professor and artist of the experimental art college of the Central Academy of fine arts, also said in an interview with the 21st century economic report that there are various interactions and connections between the traditional materialized art form and the virtual world, so there is no opposite relationship between black and white. However, he pointed out that at present, the people who accept the blockchain encryption art are mainly those who have a long time of practice and experience in the Internet industry. They come from the "currency circle". They have generated strong enough trust in the virtual world, so there is no obstacle in consuming the blockchain Art; However, for collectors who are used to consuming traditional art such as oil paintings and sculptures, it may take a certain process and time for them to accept new art forms from the "art circle".

"The current blockchain art is connected with the traditional art in the creation of images, but people who appreciate and consume blockchain art and those who consume traditional art now seem to have a big difference and less intersection." As for the crypto art exhibition, Professor Wu Jian'an thinks that this is an important "test" to open up the coin circle and the art circle: "this exhibition tries to connect the two groups and establish a connection between the two groups. The two groups of people who did not originally meet because of such an event connected, I think it is the most unique significance of encrypted art works in this exhibition