The conception of post-abstraction is taking place through the exposition of numbers in the project. This aesthetic turn is examining the contemporary notion of post-humanity, a post-human who radically and decisively believes in numbers. Questioning the exponentially growing trust in numbers and data, its inclusion in everyday life, abstraction, and unification of everything what is around us, also through what is digitalized, coded and quantified: through clock-time, media archeology, algorithmic procedures, digital occurrences, computation, quantified-self movement, ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp), Internet of Things (IoT), and Big Data.
Distributed applications over blockchain technology or “Dapps” have recently emerged as an innovative area with respect to privacy and security. This project is grounded in the field of ArtTech where we are investigating a more general ownership of digital assets in the digital milieu as well as with legitimizing digital and physical artwork online and through the blockchain. Our solution is bringing the best experiences in this world together by constructing a platform for auctioneers and gallerists to augment and evolve their interests.
In a first step, we build on our recent online project, where we worked for creativity development by engaging users in novel creative and co-creative processes and experiences. This has led us to the point where we now need to design an online auction prototype based on smart contracts. Some of the challenges involved are related to transaction synchronization and end-user experience with digital assets.
Deep Tech: Our project is based on technology called Ethereum which is an open-source platform for developers to build decentralized applications. It started in 2015 due to the development of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency. The standard behind this project are ERC-20 and ERC721 from Ethereum.
ERC-20, it is the Ethereum standard for fungible tokens as well as the smart contract implementation. We use it for our internal use for execute the acquiring function of artworks along with a standard payment (bank card) system. The users can acquire artworks with both cryptocurrency and ordinary currency.
ERC721, it is the standard for NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). This helps us to make crypto tokens unique and collectable as well as of almost unlimited edition. In the Art Value App the NFT token is an artwork, it contains its own value.
