Since the dawn of humanity, we have looked for ways to explore new media to express our creativity. Our ancestors used their own fingerprints to leave marks in the caves in Dordogne, iron tools to carve sculptures out of stone in ancient Greece, and natural dyes to change the color of our hair and clothes in the renaissance. Our more recent innovations manipulate the physics of the world around us. We invented Vantablack and Black 3.0 to eliminate shadows in 3D objects, giving them a two-dimensional look in a three-dimensional space. These innovations have pushed what’s possible in the physical world, albeit to the extent and limits of the laws of physics.
In parallel to the physical art innovations, technology brought us the internet. Web 2.0 soon became an accelerator of sorts — creating a parallel universe in the creative industry and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Digital art transcends limits of physical reality. It defies laws of physics and enables us to produce sounds that human hands and voice simply could not before. This type of art, however, does not have a digital proof of ownership or scarcity attached to it.
Soon after the emergence of digital art came immersive experiences, introducing a cluster of communities organized in a merger between investing groups and visual identity on social media. They took over the world in 2021.
Yes, I’m talking about NFTs.
Whether NFTs have become a symptom of hypercapitalism, a new creative medium or just a fundraising tool, they have irreversibly changed the art world and society at large. It is a technology truly representative of our time — ever-changing, transactional and user-driven.
However, the NFT has barely changed since its inception in 2014. At first NFTs only provided a unique digital signature of their creator. Soon thereafter, the NFT metadata included links to files which described an image’s unique characteristics — their rarity. No cat is like the other in Crypto Kitties, but NFT projects, even in 2022, rarely go beyond a never-changing, static file. A few projects realized the vision of dynamic NFTs, such as OGCrystals, who exploited NFTs outside their current boundaries, but none of them have been able to push for a new generation of NFTs beyond reading a link to a file and especially make it easier for artists to create art that evolves over time.
World 3.0 — Introducing infinite NFTs
NFTs that change over time have been called dynamic or programmable. We coined our solution infinite NFTs (iNFTs for short).
What differentiates iNFTs?
A static NFT does not fully explore the capabilities of the blockchain. These NFTs are finite, they do not react to their owner and the (blockchain) environment, often relying on rarity to drive interest. We can fully exploit the blockchain to create art that is ever-changing and though-provoking, utilizing blockchain as a technology that can influence the way we perceive to art.
Art itself can react to us, its observer and owner, for the first time ever.
Infinite NFTs make it easy for artists to use data to enhance and manipulate their art piece over time, adding a new dimension to the creative process. Artists are able to create evolving pieces which they can easily transfer between each owner, and the art itself would change as a result of blockchain and off-chain (oracle) data. It is a true revolution in creativity.
Why infinite?
Because there are infinite possibilities — an artist can swap the visuals of their NFT one day after another, create an aging art piece, and for the first time — add the ownership as a variable that transforms the art itself.
What if we could use NFTs beyond reading a link? What if we could read links from an NFT in a certain order?
This is the most primitive version of iNFTs. We put a set of images into an NFT, and our renderer knows exactly how to read these files based on instructions written into the NFT. Here’s an example of an iNFT that is “aging” over the course of 35 days. There are 35 images, from the clean-looking sculpture to one completely covered in moss.
Beyond evolving art
iNFTs can go beyond art, they are essentially tokens that have instructions carved into them. Our renderer (or any program) can react to changes in wallet information or wallet address, the number of times an iNFT was transferred between wallets or the price at which the iNFT was bought. This can add interesting use cases to our interpretation of NFTs and the data they carry, beyond art and even into DeFi, insurance or classical fintech.
We can write transferable C2C and B2B instructions on how to change what will be written onto the blockchain in the future, or write code onto the blockchain that our computers can interpret when the token changes hands. Moreover, this solution doesn’t have to be an NFT, but any token, inducing fungible, that has a set of instructions in its metadata.
This is just the beginning of our journey, and exploring the blockchain as a new media of artistic expression and what is possible with tokens and DeFi in web 3.0.
If you’d like learn more about our project you can visit Artano or support our project by staking with ARTA pool.
