Accelerate Art White Paper

By: Ben Roy & Claire Silver

Key Points:

• We are building a hybrid digital art gallery & artist accelerator program in a virtual world called CryptoVoxels
• The goal of the program is to highlight emerging artists by giving their work exposure
• Our gallery in the Gangnam district will exhibit 3–5 artists monthly, selected via an application process
• All pieces on display will be for sale through OpenSea
• Our compensation model involves collecting a single piece of art from each artist who participates in our gallery, then aggregating these works into the “Accelerate Vault,” which will grow into an asset over time
• We intend to eventually tokenize the vault of artwork as a way to offer community ownership over the work if the project gains traction after ~12 months
• In the lead up to our launch, we will be issuing 100 “Accelerate Art Founding Donor” NFTs to generate a meaningful amount of operating capital for the gallery

Preamble:

Society is going digital. As people spend growing amounts of time online, there will be a movement to recreate much of what we do in real life in digital spaces. A lot of this will take years and decades to emerge, but one category that is ripe for innovation today is art. There are three technologies that are on the cusp of mass adoption which, when taken together, make this the case: non-fungible tokens (NFTs), virtual worlds, and virtual reality (VR).

NFTs can be thought of as a new blockchain-based file type that allow artists to create unique digital goods. Before this technology, digital art pieces could be copied ad infinitum without any value accruing to the original piece. Now, specific pieces have a defined owner (the holder of the NFT) and when a work gets copied and shared the awareness that generates causes value to flow back to the original. In turn, these NFTs can be housed in virtual environments like CryptoVoxels (CV), which are globally accessible to people via internet browsers and virtual reality platforms. In effect, it’s now possible to create art galleries that anyone in the world can visit with just a few clicks.

While we are by no means the first people to make these observations, and while there has been a lot of ground-breaking work done at the intersection of NFTs and virtual worlds recently — the B20 gallery comes to mind — we think the space is still very early and full of possibility. Looking at this environment, we see the potential to create an art gallery focused on being a launchpad for emerging artists. As a relatively early mover, we also see the possibility to build a lasting brand as a boutique gallery that contributes to the wider digital art ecosystem.

Why CryptoVoxels?

We have decided to build in CryptoVoxels for several reasons. First, it is the most accessible virtual world, both to build in and to visit. People don’t require specialized knowledge of the crypto universe to jump in and explore. Second, CV has been adopted by a critical mass of crypto artists as a location to display their art. This community offers great opportunity for collaboration and partnerships. Third, the world has cross-platform access with VR and browser integrations, and since we expect VR to go mainstream and grow exponentially over the next few years, having this functionality will be important.

The Gallery:

The Accelerate Gallery will be located on two parcels in Gangnam beside the water: 1 Leonardo Track & 1 Quartz Passage. Combined dimensions include an area of 162 meters squared and a 10-meter build height. We purchased these properties because:

a) Gangnam is one of the most historic neighbourhoods in CV

b) this places us (and our artist’s work) in proximity to prominent galleries e.g. Async Art and Maker’s Place

c) there will be natural foot traffic from Gangnam Stadium and other builds in the area

d) the waterfront offers us greater creative latitude when designing gallery space

Our plan is to build a new gallery roughly every quarter or “season,” which will align with a theme or type of digital art. Within each Accelerate season there will be monthly shows of 3–5 artists where the artists in question will be able to sell their work to interested parties via OpenSea. We will also periodically do short exhibitions geared around a single artist as opposed to a specific theme.

Application Process:

Artists will be able to apply to have their work shown in the Accelerate Gallery on a rolling basis. As part of the application we will ask each artist to share the following:

• Basic information surrounding their background
• 3–4 pieces of their best work
• A list of any awards they have won in real life
• A paragraph on their basic process/genre
• Another short paragraph on one “known” artist that inspires them and one “unknown” artist we should know about

When we launch the gallery in late April, we will release a more in-depth guide to the application process and hold an AMA with interested artists to help answer any questions.

Our Vision of Success:

Ultimately, the aim of Accelerate is to be an art enterprise by artists and for artists. We want to showcase work by emerging artists and help launch their careers.

In compensation for building and running a platform like this, we are excited to experiment with a new approach to value accrual in the digital art space. The idea is as follows: each artist that participates in an Accelerate Gallery exhibition will show several pieces of work. We will select one work per artist for inclusion in the Accelerate Vault, which that artist will then sell to us for a flat rate of 100 DAI. The remainder of their displayed works will be available for purchase by anyone on OpenSea.

As these different artists progress in their careers, some of their early works will accrue value, turning the vault into both a meaningful marker of an era in art history as well as a meaningful asset. We intend to display the vault from day one in a secondary gallery location, which we hope will offer further exposure for these artists. We are pursuing this unorthodox monetization approach in order to spare artists any direct fees for exhibiting in our gallery. We also want to align ourselves with the success of our “alumni.”

If the gallery gets traction, we intend to tokenize the vault of work. Since there is currently nothing to tokenize, we will consult our community a year after the project goes live and revisit this conversation then with the intention of building something sustainable that can last for a decade or longer.

The Founding Donor NFT:

To fund our launch, we intend to sell a series of 100 “Accelerate Art Founding Donor’’ NFTs, designed by Claire Silver. The intent of this sale is to raise initial operating capital for the gallery. These funds will be used for buying work from artists, acquiring additional land in CryptoVoxels, running promotional campaigns, paying for professional gallery designs, and other needs as they arise.

While this project is more time than capital intensive, we want to generate a reserve to run Accelerate over the next 18 months — regardless of crypto market conditions — and we want to invite interested people to support us in this endeavour. If that sounds interesting to you, please look for an announcement on our Twitter account as to when we list these genesis NFTs for sale.

As a final note, we intend to build future functionality around our Founding Donor NFTs, but have not yet committed to particular details. Examples could include acknowledgement within the gallery via a permanent founder’s plaque, or seasonal NFT distribution from emerging artists to holders as a thanks for their support. In the event that funds are raised, we will be fully transparent with any expenditures.

Further Possibilities:

If a community forms around Accelerate and our core monthly art showings, there are several avenues we may pursue to expand our presence. Some initial ideas include:

• Gifting an Accelerate Alumni NFT to artists who have exhibited their work in our gallery
• Social events with the goal of connecting “graduates” of Accelerate to new artists for networking and mentorship
• Hosting Clubhouse chats or VR parties in CV to mark the opening night of new showings
• Offering artist advisory services in terms of personal marketing, social media use, etc.
• Potentially creating our own NFT minting process for Accelerate NFTs on an L2 like Polygon
• Offering appraisal services and collecting advice to art collectors as we expand our knowledge of the ecosystem
• Working with artists to create a custom auction offering on a unique parcel where they can help design the space their work is auctioned on

Closing Thoughts:

If you have made it this far down the white paper we want to extend a thank you for taking the time to read it. To pass along any feedback, or to note your interest in applying to show your work through our gallery in the future, please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or at accelerate.art@protonmail.com. We are incredibly excited at the potential of building Accelerate and look forward to meeting lots of interesting people along the way.

About Us:

Ben Roy is an entrepreneur, writer, and art enthusiast. He is currently Head of Growth for GYSR, which is an Ethereum developer tool. Ben has followed the NFT universe closely since 2019 and is excited about empowering new artists to use virtual spaces. He can be found on Twitter @benroy__.

Claire Silver is an AI collaborative artist and passionate believer in the NFT art movement. She can be found on Twitter @clairesilver12.