Mitchell F Chan

Minted by RoguePhantom

Acquired from above

AN EARLY CRYPTO ART PROJECT ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE ARTWORK-AS-A-TOKEN

Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility is a non-fungible token artwork, first minted on August 30, 2017, at InterAccess in Toronto.

The artwork is significant not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a legacy art gallery, but also for imagining, in 2017, the ways that non-fungible tokens could advance the conceptualist project of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form. It also explored the ways the separation changes a collector's relationship to art.

The Digital Zones tell a story about how different concepts of ownership are fundamental to the experience of an artwork. The artwork—and the 33-page essay which accompanied it—speculated that if, at some point in the future, artworks were owned and transacted through immaterial blockchain tokens, that shift in the commodity form of the artwork could also precipitate a shift in the material (or immaterial form) of the artwork.

The project is modeled after Yves Klein's Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, a conceptual artwork that presented itself as a pure expression of an idea that needed no physical aspect, but which did need to be transacted through a non-fungible token (albeit a paper one) to be fully experienced.

This story, and the details of the process through which the Digital Zones advances Yves Klein's ideas, are described in great detail in The Blue Paper, and also in a later video essay that the artist created.

“Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of ‘abstract’ art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier?”

Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, 1994 p.3