Art Authenticity on the Blockchain
As a practicing artist working in the tech industry, I have always been fascinated with the combining of physical and digital art concepts. And this time, I think I’ve stumbled onto something very compelling.
In 2015 I founded a company called Yoshirt Inc., the company was a digital clothing design application. The app allowed users to compose real clothing design, using images and stickers from their mobile devices. After receiving a seed round of investment, we built the distribution channels and manufacturing pipelines. And bam, Yoshirt became a machine.
The idea of merging digital experiences and concepts with physical goods has always resonated with me. As an artist I’ve always tried to push the edge by developing and designing technical ways to blur the lines between when and what is digital or physical.
In 2016 I had the chance to meet some killer Facebook marketers who specialized in drop-ship Art Marketing. In pure curiosity of understanding the “Art World” from this approach, I joined forces with them to completely rebranding and building a technical art pipeline to handle their massive catalog of art.
The website Canvas Cultures is a physical art platform, that gives digital artists a distribution method. By utilizing Facebook and Instagram ads, Canvas Cultures has successfully distributed tens of 1000s of physical canvas prints (a lot of which are my original designs).
Scalability is everything in my world. With Canvas Cultures, I built an automated staging pipeline, that takes static images and poses them into real world scenes, even skewing the artwork to appear 3D using highlights and beveled shadows.
In 2017 during the Cryptokitties craze, I started working in the blockchain space. I knew instantly that the idea of unique tokenized assets secured by a blockchain was something powerful. A recipe for validating authenticity and originality.
While living in London, I had a chance to meet with the company Known Origin, a decentralized art distribution platform for digital artists. I uploaded a few digital paintings and saw myself generating passive income in ETH when users purchased my art. I had never sold digital work in this capacity, where this exchange of artwork is treated like physical art pieces. My highest selling piece “Glitchy Rich” sold for 0.407 ETH ($237.19 USD at the time).
Fast forward to 2019, living here in downtown Las Vegas, I’ve finally started “Doing Art Again”.
My current focus is on mastering my skills and manipulating the materials and media. I have recently been painting large-scale gallery pieces with subject matter involving pop art, childhood nostalgia and anything I consider culturally rad. But for the past three weeks, while developing my inventory, I have been saying to myself,
“I want to put Certificates of Authenticity on the Blockchain”
So I figured out how!
For each painting I do, I film the process in a timelapse. This represents the PROOF of WORK. This time-lapse is archived and uploaded to Instagram and Youtube.
When the painting is complete, I upload high resolution images to my website and create a product SKU number, which can be used for sorting and storage.
Once my SKU has been generated, I mint a Certificate of Authenticity (100–250 ETH) on Known Origin.
This certificate acts as a Certificate of Ownership. Who ever owns this unique token, owns my painting. Once the certificate has been minted, I manually write the TX Hash number onto the canvas. This directly links this body of work to the NFT token.
People can purchase my work by physical or digital means. Meaning if the COA is purchased on Opensea or Known Origin, I will make my best attempts to verify the purchaser and ship them the piece of art.
If someone purchases one of my pieces by direct contact (cash) I will transfer the token to their wallet or generate a wallet for them.
So where am I going and what is next?
My goal by middle of next year (summer 2020) is to have 1 million dollars worth of Art, minted on the blockchain. Each certificate for this art project will be minted at 100–250 ETH per piece. I will complete nearly 50 pieces of work to acomplish this. All work will be purchasable on Known Origin and or in person by direct contact.
This body of work will be one of my largest projects to date. As always I am looking to push the edge of physical to digital application, and this time I will be eternalizing my physical works of art on the blockchain.
