NFTS offers digital artists a new way to monetize their jobs by introducing scarcity to the market, but other creative areas can also benefit. Decryption.
Performing arts have “similar issues” with digital artists, explained collaborator Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine, who works as an operator. Before the appearance of NFTS“Digital artists were in the service industry, working in the advertising and film industry, and were on their side for entertainment,” Katherine said.
Performance artists are in an even more challenging position thanks to the temporary nature of their work, she said. “There’s an expensive medium to work in performance because you need your body, time, space, people, dancers. Ultimately, there’s nothing to sell.”
It is a historically limited performance artist, Katherine explained to pay the bill by “dancing in commercials, teaching dance, going on tours and dancing behind musicians.”
Collecting movements
NFT changes the game by allowing performance artists to create permanent, collectible pieces. “If someone can own the movement as an art object, what does it look like?” she said. This makes it a form of sponsorship of people who use movement as an art form, and I don’t want to use it for entertainment, but I use it as an actual personal expression. How do I create an infrastructure that can actually be monetized?
The operator applied the idea to the artwork “Unreadable for Humans,” a combination of three-act choreography and generated art. Blockchain Encryption built into live performances presented at the end of 2026.
A work that cannot be read by humans. Courtesy: Operator
“The first thing I felt when I first started diving into cryptographic art was that I missed out on the human body,” Katherine said.
Therefore, humans place human shapes that are difficult to read in the “center” of the artwork, each of the 400 pieces in the collection representing a “radical unique dance” generated by an algorithm. The work dates back to the early digital art exhibition held at ICA in 1967 and is based on Computational Choreography’s “a rich and interesting history.”
Stores human movement data Ethereum Blockchain also presented its own set of challenges, she added. “We definitely felt that using blockchain and artblocks like this was not intended,” she said, but was “a bit paranoid” to push the obstacles of technology “that’s not intended to communicate and dance.”
She explained that the final result explores and interrogates the techniques behind the art of origin. “What is spatially site-specific or positionally site-specific human unread is the generation art of chains, a long site-specific form.”
The perseverance of operators is rewarded, and humans are scooping up experienced awards at the recent Digital Art Awards. Catherine will take part in Gongs’ braces on the shelf, including two Lumen Awards, the S+T+Arts Award, two Lumen Awards, including the ADC Award, the S+T+ Arts Award and the ADC Award.
Beyond the market
Also, with the NFT art market likely to be sluggish and trading volumes have crashed to just $23.8 million from $2.9 billion in 2021, artists are still keen to explore the possibilities of the underlying technology.
“Artists don’t create for the market,” she said. Decryption. “They bump into curiosity, questions, drives, or anything that needs to come up, so they create.”
And while it’s still important that artists make money from the value they bring to the world through their technology, she should not be surprised that they continue to push boundaries. “Most artists don’t do that for money or the market. They often do that despite the bad state of those things,” she said. “Artists are always going to make art.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward