Ask Me Anything: Recap

Last week, Sedition held an Ask Me Anything session with our Director Rory Blain. We discussed Sedition’s entry into the NFT space and our upcoming plans. In addition, we hosted two of the artists whose works have become NFT-mintable on Sedition — LIA and Can Büyükberber. Lots of questions were presubmitted and people were also asking questions live by tweeting as well as by joining the discussion.

In this article, we recap the most interesting insights by Rory, LIA and Can.

Vlad (AMA was hosted by Vladislav Alimpiev, Sedition’s community manager): Hi everyone, nice to see people tuning in despite it being the middle of the holiday season. This is Vlad hosting from Sedition’s side, and I would like to start by asking everyone to introduce themselves.

Rory: Hi, I am Rory Blain, I am the Director of Sedition. Sedition has been in business for about 11 years now, we’re the original digital art platform. My own background has always been in the arts in one form or another, I cut my teeth and started my life as a professional dancer. From there I graduated into working in galleries and visual arts and I have been in the fine art world for about the last 25 years, which has progressed into me working in the digital world, at Sedition, for the last 11 years.

LIA: Hi, I am LIA and I have been doing generative digital art since 1995. I’ve started quite early in the space, since then almost 27 years have passed and many things have changed over time and now I have ended up with NFTs. Who would have thought?

Can: Hello everyone, my name is Can Büyükberber, I was born in Turkey in 1987, 35 years ago. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been working in digital art, creating immersive experiences and exploring different types of new media like VR, AR, projection mapping on buildings, and different kinds of experiences. I have a background in physics and visual communication design, I did my grad studies in arts and technology.

Vlad: The first question is going to be for everyone — how can NFTs / smart contracts be subverted so that they can be used directly to support arts in the community, art development / education, and art policy to counter the negative get-rich-quick ponzi narratives that the NFT scene has attracted?

LIA: I think it’s already happening, to be honest, I can earn money now.

Rory: Yeah, the advent of NFTs is itself a subversion of a previous structure in place. I think in terms of using NFTs to directly support art and the community, as LIA said, there are hundreds of examples of this happening already.

LIA: And I think if you want to buy an NFT, you should buy it because you like the art, not because you want to become rich by resale at some point. If you’re doing it for the art, you will always be happy. If you’re doing it just to make money, you might not be happy.

Rory: Yes, thank you, this is what I tell everyone on the site. Buy the art you love and if it happens to appreciate in value, then great.

Can: I agree with LIA and Rory. I think like with anything else — these are the infancy days of this new technology and time will tell. What’s going to shape people’s perception is more education, better curation, more people aware of these technologies. As the culture grows around these variables, the final outcome will become more positive that everyone can benefit from.

Vlad: I’d like to throw the next question to Rory. Two fairly similar questions actually concerning Sedition’s NFT plans. Will Sedition work as a marketplace based on Ethereum and allow artists to make their own smart contracts? and Only Ethereum is implemented as the only cryptocurrency? …in the future, there may be others?

Rory: On Sedition, everyone is using a unified Sedition smart contract. This basic structure guarantees artists basic rights that we’re most interested in, it guarantees a fair resale value, it forever identifies the artist as the author and the originator of the work — but it is a standard Sedition smart contract. At the moment, we don’t have the ability to allow artists to make their own contracts — it’s not something I am ideologically opposed to, but in terms of building it to our platform and supporting it, it’s a whole separate thing down the line. It’s entirely possible we may do it in the future.

As for the second question, we’ve implemented Ethereum as the only cryptocurrency for the time being, in the future there may also be others, but there are no specific implementation plans at the moment. Before we’ve chosen Ethereum and announced it, behind the scenes at Sedition we’ve been discussing it for a couple of years. Ultimately, Ethereum does everything we need from it and want it to do better than most of its competitors, except for operating on the proof-of-work algorithm. We had faith that Ethereum would switch to proof-of-stake and that faith is being rewarded, the shift is due in about a month’s time and it should make the blockchain more sustainable. That’s why it’s Ethereum.

Vlad: LIA, the next question is for you. Do artists get caught up with FOMO like collectors?

LIA: A hundred per cent, yes. It’s always when you see someone doing something and you are thinking to yourself — “oh my god, why didn’t I think of that”. When it comes to NFTs, there are so many platforms, so you’re all the time thinking whether you’re on the right platform or not, if you should try another one and then you try that other one and the circle repeats… You can never know if what you’re doing is the right thing, so of course, there’s FOMO all the time, yes.

Vlad: a comment submitted right now here on Twitter — “NFTs are not art. NFTs are just a tool for blockchain. There should be no NFT art, it’s just art”. What do you guys think?

LIA: I totally agree with the sentiment. You also don’t call it “pencil art” or “oil art”. NFTs per se are just a medium and not the art itself.

Rory: Absolutely. And that’s a song we’ve been singing at Sedition long before NFTs arrived.

Vlad: Another comment is for you Rory, if you could recap what’s going to happen with existing artworks on Sedition as far as our NFT plans?

Rory: It’s actually particularly apposite to this discussion because two artists taking part here and a third artist also, Doug Foster, are the first three artists on the site whose works we’ve made “mintable”. This is a new word we’ve started using on Sedition, but I think you get the idea — this means that the work can be minted as an NFT. That’s basically a plan we’re rolling out across the site — the idea that historical works across Sedition that are sitting in collectors’ Vault, collectors will be given a choice to mint those as NFTs if they wish to do so. However, you don’t have to — you can continue to enjoy the works primarily via players and apps we offer. We’re first and foremost an arts platform.

Vlad: I see a person who wants to ask a live question, Caitríona, the microphone is yours.

Caitríona: Hi, I didn’t really have a question, but a lot of this is actually tied up in money and it’s kind of dirty and the appreciation of art, something simple and beautiful, just seems to be very embedded in money. Is that good or bad?

Rory: I understand the general sort of feeling there, but actually, it’s based on a slightly wrong assumption. There’s an idea that art is a sanitised and a white cube thing that is to be appreciated. It can be, and it is, but the artists who made it are still human beings, they still have to eat and pay for their living — and that’s not just true now, it’s been true throughout history. You’re right, while NFTs have a lot of shadiness attached to them, that doesn’t mean that any art shown in that space is necessarily synonymous with that.

LIA: I had to teach all the time to make my base income and the art money that came in was some money from exhibitions. I also did a lot of live visualisations, on top of the teaching income. In 2017, I decided to stop teaching and even before NFTs I could live on being an artist, but it was really minimalistic. NFTs have been a big help, it’s the first time in history that artists are getting paid kind of normally. I mean, being an artist is hard work. It’s not just hanging out and having fun. It’s perhaps a lot more work than other businesses you can imagine, so I think it’s quite nice that artists are finally being rewarded.

Can: My perception is also similar to LIA’s. When NFTs first came to the public attention — this art sold for X million dollars, that art sold for Y million dollars — I was also really not a big fan of how it was marketed. But when you look at the bigger picture of things and the digital life of the upcoming era, I think it’s a cool thing to see creativity. I think art will be much more appreciated than many other professions that used to be put on the pedestal — the rock stars, the rappers, the models, the actors — these people were mostly talked about. I think for the next generations there’s a bit of encouragement as in the near future a lot of jobs are going to be extinct, but creativity is still going to matter. Maybe it’s a good time to be an artist and create art because you can make a living with it now. I am much more focused on positive aspects now.

Rory: I’d like to add that I can certainly sympathise with Caitríona’s point, the focus on NFTs when one reads the media is never on art nor artists. The focus is on one thing only — on the money, big figures with lots of zeros — all the stuff that makes headlines. So I understand the sentiment. In addition, despite the great benefits of decentralisation I feel that there are benefits to a certain degree of centralisation and a site like ours which curates and guides you through a forest of choices is exactly that thing — we’re imposing some traditional art world values on the free-for-all landscape. We’re on the same page — we want it not to be about the money, we want it to be about art. Like LIA mentioned, don’t buy something because it’s an investment, buy the art you like. And that’s what Sedition is all about.

Vlad: The next question goes to LIA and to Can. When you consider the future of getting your art to the public (and of monetization), can you describe what your distribution strategy might look like in, say, a year? Five years? A decade or more?

LIA: I need a crystal ball I think… You never know. I mean, you never know what your monetary plan will be in 5, 10, 15 years. Maybe NFTs will be so out of fashion in 6 months. Then I’ll go back to selling videos and doing live shows. I’ve done so many things you can’t imagine just trying to sell my art, maybe I have to go back to other models, but it’s really impossible to predict what’s going to be in the future. We don’t even know if there’s going to be a lot of positive future. Maybe it will be great, maybe horrible, we can’t tell. We live here and now.

Can: As a life philosophy, I am waiting for things to happen and that’s how everything worked out for me. In terms of media and distribution, I like to think about my digital works as media-free — that they can exist in any kind of media, and so far this kind of flexibility of medium was working out for me because one work can exist in so many different types of displays, and technologies, real-time, pre-rendered, screens, VR headsets, prints, physical and digital… So I’ve been really enjoying this flexibility of creativity through the use of different media. In the upcoming years, I just hope there’s going to be a novelty in technology, so we’re going to see some medium that we’ve never possibly imagined before and I think it will be really cool to implement our works in that and explore the potential of new technologies.

LIA: I just wanted to add that in 1995, I would sell my work on CD-ROMs. They don’t exist anymore, people don’t have CD-ROM players anymore, but the work still exists because I put some of it online. The work is still there, the code is still there. There will be different mediums that we cannot even imagine yet, and it’s going to be great, hopefully.

Rory: Thanks Can, I am with LIA. When I grew up, I was going to be an astronaut. I thought Brexit was never going to happen. I can’t predict anything, I am staying way out of this.

Vlad: The next question is being submitted right here on Twitter. Can you tell us about your next exciting project or projects?

LIA: With these questions like “What’s your next big thing?” it’s always — you never know before… As an artist, I am currently working on many versions of many iterations. I have pieces simultaneously on my machine and something comes along and there’s an exhibition possibility and I think — I can further develop this one or this one, or this one fits better the theme of the exhibition and so on. There’s a lot of things going on all the time, but there’s no one big thing, I don’t think so.

Can: I can’t give a lot of detail because there are a lot of NDAs involved. A trend that I’ve been observing and that’s been underlying in a lot of recent projects is that digital art is being appreciated by larger masses more and more. People want to incorporate digital art in personal spaces. There are more and more cases where designers, architects, engineers are willing to incorporate digital art in their creations. There are multiple projects that approach me and want my digital art in them. That’s been exciting for me, these will be released in 3–6 months. I am excited about these new kinds of projects.

Rory: From my perspective with Sedition, we’re engaged very much down the same road and I agree completely with Can that the appreciation of art in digital media is at an inflection point. It’s more widely viewed than ever before and importantly digital art is seen as an actual asset, as something that can be a holder of value. In other words, digital art has achieved a certain degree of parity with physical art forms, which is what we’ve always wanted for it. So our mission continues. We have lots ahead of us in terms of developing our NFT entry, we’ll be making lots of announcements regarding that. We’re planning to hugely improve the experience of our apps and viewers available because our artworks — NFTs or not — ought to be enjoyed as artworks.

Vlad: a few pre-submitted questions for Can — Is music or code the first step to creating your generative art? And another question — Though your work is generative, much of it comes to the public in the form of jpegs or video. How would you feel about a code-centred platform that allows generative work to run native?

Can: I receive these types of questions a lot and to be frank, I use generative aesthetics but I am not a coder myself. I call myself a visual artist, so I create most work through the use of software and user interfaces, and working with different parameters and tools. So I don’t write code myself, instead, I use generative processes to create interesting results and to randomize some of the aesthetics of the works.

For the second question, it’s quite similar but I can take it from a real-time perspective of things, because I also use game engines to create VR experiences. The rise of interactive artworks has been really slow compared to our expectations. I have many artist friends who create interactive installations and are surprised that they can’t exhibit or sell their works everywhere in their true forms, as interactive works — they’re expected to create a video of that work or a photo of that work. I think it all comes down to technology, web technology and display technology.

All in all, I don’t have a clear answer, but hopefully, as new graphics cards, new technologies arrive, we’re going to be able to do this, because everything in the digital art world is going to be in this real-time world that we can explore and interact with. So far, the future hasn’t been coming that fast, interestingly.

Vlad: This final question I’d love to address to everyone. Fast forward to the NFT-rich future, what will be the predominant use case for NFTs for the public? Collectability? Fan engagement? Or more prosaic, business and commerce use?

LIA: I’ll say art, just because.

Rory: NFTs specifically, I think they’ve got a number of different uses, but realistically I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what NFTs are, and what they can be. The technology has an awful lot of potential applications, and we’re really just scratching the surface. I suspect that there will be a great many more applications for blockchain than I could possibly predict.

Within arts, related to previous comments, there is no such thing as NFT art. An NFT is just a tool, it’s just literally a token, it means you’re owning something. It’s a tag you’re putting on a digital asset that says “I own this, as of these details”. So that’s really what it is, flagging that to the world. So the NFT future could have thousands of different uses, certainly collectibility, fan engagements, lots of business and commerce use. From an art world perspective, the great benefits are the potential long term future cash benefits for artists, the route to market for artists, and most importantly, the ability to take ownership, copyright and authorship of a digital asset that wasn’t really in place before.

Can: I think if the near-future economic models embrace blockchain technology, anything you purchase can exist as an NFT and anything is possible.