For the Summer Semester of 2021 (April - July) a group of students at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK Hamburg) met weekly for an hour and a half to work through the phenomenon of NFTs – Non-Fungible-Tokens – and their sudden visibility in the art context. Local blockchain enthusiasts were enlisted to walk the group through the basics of blockchain, and the recent rise of NFTs as art. Topical issues related to this phenomenon were explored and discussed – from the basics of private currencies, digital money, claims to “decentralization”, the political affiliations and ideologies commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, the electricity usage of ‘Proof of Work’ consensys mechanisms and emergent alternatives like ‘Proof of Stake’ and ‘Proof of Spacetime’.

The session was concluded by a group exercise: minting a collective NFT on a ‘Proof of Stake’ blockchain. It was decided that a ‘time capsule’ format would be used, where all artists in the group submitted a file. These would be collectively compressed into a password-protected ZIP file, which would then be stored on a decentralized storage service. An HTML file was minted as an NFT, containing the links to this wordpress webpage. And in order to access the time capsule, a second page is timed to go live in 10 years – providing the key to unlock the ZIP, and reveal the aged files in 2031.

For the NFT, a fixed price was set for sale (1 Tezos for every participating artist), and a german GbR was set up to split proceeds in the future equally among the participants. Further, a 25% resale rate was saved into the Tezos smart contract, so that the minting wallet would receive this percentage whenever sold.

Participating Artists 2021

Belia Brückner
Merle Dammhayn
Simon Denny
Taisse Fromme
Leyan Li
Yi Li

Cleo Miao
Anna Pelz
Leon Roth
Jakob Sitter
Kuno Seltmann
Prateek Vijan
Insa Wagner

Facilitating Team

Leo Krampe
Max von Olfers

Hannes Wirtz