Introducción: En este texto se aborda la inclusión de personas con discapacidad visual en diversos grados en el ámbito del museo (físico y virtual), destacando la necesidad del diseño de espacios que permitan una mejor experiencia estética por parte de este colectivo haciendo uso de tecnologías hápticas, realidad virtual e integrando 3D/NFT’s en la creación de experiencias inmersivas y táctiles. Metodología: Se propone el uso de fotogrametría digital para la generación de gemelos digitales, así como Unreal Engine para su programación con retroalimentación háptica, y su posterior conversión a NFT (Non Fungible Tokens) e inclusión en plataforma digital. Resultados y discusión: de manera prospectiva se plantea una mejora significativa en cuanto a accesibilidad y experiencia estético-formal por parte de personas con discapacidad visual, justificada en fuentes que muestran que esta integración tecnológica facilita una conexión emocional y cognitiva más profunda con la obra de arte. Conclusiones: se recalca la necesidad de abordar políticas culturales inclusivas desde el ámbito de la museografía de contenidos, en colaboración con organizaciones especializadas para asegurar su implementación efectiva, impulsando la innovación tecnológica y fomentando una sociedad más equitativa.
Omer Aziz, Muhammad Shoaib Farooq, Adel Khelifi, Mahdia Shoaib
Abstract The rapid evolution of the digital landscape has catalyzed the integration of blockchain technology within the domain of cultural heritage, particularly in virtual museums within the Metaverse. This study introduces ArchaeoMeta, a novel framework designed to leverage blockchain technology to enhance security, authenticity, and visitor interaction in a virtual museum environment. Utilizing smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, the framework manages visitor interactions and secures digital artifacts, addressing challenges associated with scalability and user experience under varying loads. The performance evaluation involved simulating user interactions, scaling up to ten thousand concurrent users, to assess the impact on transaction latency, gas usage, and blockchain size. Findings reveal significant scalability challenges, as transaction latency and blockchain size increased with the number of users, highlighting areas for optimization in managing high user traffic within the blockchain infrastructure. This study contributes to the understanding of blockchain applications in cultural heritage, suggesting that while ArchaeoMeta offers a robust platform for virtual museums, enhancements in scalability through layer-2 solutions or alternative blockchain platforms are essential for its practical implementation. The framework sets a precedent for future research in the convergence of blockchain technology and cultural heritage preservation, promising a transformative impact on how digital cultural experiences are curated and consumed.
Abstract The paper examines the possibilities offered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for supporting audience participation in the museum sector . DAOs, a type of digital infrastructure underpinned by blockchains and smart contracts, have been seen as informing a more autonomous, self-managing, transparent, and more efficient online organization, one capable of shaping how users participate and communicate with one another. At the same time significant questions have been raised over how DAO technologies complicate the human issues of democracy and shared authority. This paper explores and evaluates the impact of DAO structures in the context of museum participation, specifically viewing them through the lens of shared authority and democracy. It argues that these technologies are capable of offering evidence-based participation, but that this is contingent on access and trust.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) significantly contribute to the establishment of VIP culture by embodying exclusivity, uniqueness, and privileged access, inherent to their nature. They enable creators and brands to offer exclusive ownership or access to digital or physical assets, aligning with the VIP ethos of rarity and status. Through NFTs, experiences, artworks, or digital collectibles become status symbols, fostering a new dimension of exclusivity in digital spaces. This intersection of technology, art, and exclusivity amplifies VIP culture, allowing it to extend beyond traditional boundaries into the realm of digital collectability and virtual experiences, thus redefining what it means to be part of the "in-crowd" in the digital age.
This document explores the existence of art within and outside of the market and institutions. It provides a historical overview of the art market, highlighting the emergence of commercial art galleries and the current $60 billion art industry. The impact of digital art and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the art market is discussed, including their growing popularity and challenges. The role of art outside the market is emphasized, focusing on its potential for social change and activism. The document concludes by questioning the value of art and the interplay between art and commerce. It highlights the fluidity between art within and beyond the market, showcasing artists like Bansky who challenge the traditional art market and use their art for political activism. The document also delves into the influence of online platforms and digital arts on the art market, including the rise of NFTs and their impact on valuation. Overall, the document provides a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted nature of art and its relationship with the market and institutions.
This article delves into the intersection of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), the art world, and the instrumental role of social media in advancing the proliferation of digital collections. NFTs, unique digital assets built on blockchain technology, have sparked a revolution in art ownership, identity verification, and creative expression. Through comprehensive exploration of its significance, challenges, and opportunities, this study demonstrates how NFTs have democratized art ownership, provided global recognition to artists of diverse backgrounds, and simultaneously granted direct access to collectors. A significant driving force behind the success of this blockchain technology lies in its investment potential. Social media platforms have transformed into virtual galleries, effectively amplifying artists' voices, enhancing societal insights and cultural levels, and shedding light on the global visibility of NFT projects. Case studies of successful NFT collaborations underscore the coexistence between NFTs and social media, highlighting the potential of both mediums in shaping the future of art and creativity. While acknowledging concerns such as copyright issues and environmental impacts, this article underscores the need for responsible actions and ongoing research to ensure a sustainable and pervasive future for NFTs in the art world.
Gérald Estadieu, Ka Man Ng, Filipa Martins de Abreu, Daniel Filipe Farinha
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged individuals and all international collaborations, including research and academic international conferences. Most conferences had to adapt to an online or hybrid mode at best, if not cancelled or postponed. During this period, we were invited to organise the third edition of an international conference on Arts, Technology and Society. At its core, it is an academic conference, but it also offers a platform for an art exhibition and forum for artists to share and exhibit. Due to Macao's physical constraints and its inaccessibility for outside visitors, the Local Organising Committee took the challenge to organise the first virtual art exhibition in an academic conference, including Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) for artists willing to sell their digital artwork. This paper presents the creative process as well as the technical issues faced during the conference and exhibition preparation time. As NFT-based virtual exhibition is a new offer within an academic international conference and a new tool to permanently promote artists’ work, we are also proposing some possible future works to develop further this approach and give it a larger visibility. We believe such type of exhibition can play an important role on a world seeking for more sustainable communication.
This study delves into the burgeoning intersection of NFTs and the museum sector. It examines the transformative potential of NFTs in redefining art curation, ownership, and accessibility. The paper presents a comprehensive background on the rise of NFTs, their technological underpinnings, and their cultural and economic impact on museums. A Decision Matrix Mechanism is proposed to assist museums in evaluating the strategic fit of NFT initiatives. The paper discusses the multifaceted factors influencing NFT adoption, including technological readiness, legal frameworks, ethical considerations, and market dynamics. It underscores the importance of a nuanced approach that aligns with each museum's mission and the evolving digital landscape.
The growing outrage over the continued stewardship of artefacts acquired through nefarious means has compelled cultural institutions to explore their role in marginalising cultures through misrepresentation. Indigenous communities around the globe are seeking the repatriation of sacred objects often collected through colonial violence. Though many museums have collaborated with communities to repatriate these artefacts, many have also avoided or refused repatriation requests, leaving communities without recourse. This paper will explore repatriation in the digital world through the lens of Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise's (CATPC) the quest for the return of an important Balot Pende sculpture from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and whether creating a digital iteration, like an Non-Fungible Token (NFT) of a sacred object, offers a potential activist tool to reclaim an alternate form of ownership when physical repatriation is not available.
Andreia Nogueira, Célio Gonçalo Marques, António Manso, Paula Almeida
This research contributes to the discussion around the importance of the long-term preservation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and minted digital artworks. The paper is based on a review of the literature on blockchain in art and heritage management and conservation, with particular attention to references related to the production, marketing, maintenance, and distribution of NFT-based digital art. The aims of this paper involve anticipating potential problems in the oversight of NFTs and setting out good long-term management principles and practices as well as specific preservation strategies. Despite the fact that it also discusses issues over authorship, copyright, creative commons, and open access, the paper is particularly devoted to raising concerns about the high energy consumption associated with blockchain technology and its impact on climate change. It also highlights how the preservation of NFTs cannot be neglected, despite the belief that they last forever. Most studies dedicated to analysing the impact of blockchain technology on the cultural heritage sector ignore the most important issue: preserving not only the minted digital artworks themselves but also the respective blockchain networks. Overall, this paper seeks to foster a collective awareness of the need to reflect on blockchain-related art practices and their implications for the long-term protection of cultural property.
A museum is the destination of the crystallization of history and culture, and a museum is the center for the development of heritage culture. The display and exhibition of historical relics can promote the harmonious development of society. However, there are many defects in traditional museums. The collection in the museum is scattered. The exhibition needs a specific time and place to open, and the exhibition mode is boring and lacks entertainment, which seriously limits the museum’s dissemination of history and culture. In order to improve the public’s number of visits, museums need to keep pace with the times. Using augmented reality technology can digitize the information in the museum and integrate it with the user’s real environment, which solves the limitation of time and space for most users to visit the museum, and greatly increases the entertainment of users to visit the museum. In addition, the application of blockchain technology in digital museums can effectively ensure the security of museum cultural relics data and quickly restore the lost cultural relics information. The digital museum can help tourists realize cross-region viewing. Through multimedia software and hardware, it can greatly stimulate tourists’ interest and attract tourists of different ages to visit. This article uses digital technology to present physical museums in a digital form on the network, but it is difficult for digital museums to conduct targeted analysis on tourists of different ages. This article will analyze the attraction ability of digital museums to tourists of different ages, thereby attracting tourists of different ages to visit. This paper compared traditional museums with digital museums based on augmented reality technology and blockchain technology. The experimental results showed that from the perspective of young people, the average interactivity of traditional museums and digital museums was 47.20% and 78.20%, respectively; from the perspective of the elderly, the average interactivity of traditional museums and digital museums was 59.04% and 70.36%, respectively. Therefore, the digital museum built by using augmented reality technology and blockchain technology can effectively improve the interaction with users. The digital museum can improve the interaction with tourists of different ages, attract a large number of tourists for virtual visits, and improve the cultural transmission and economic development of the digital museum.
An integral part of our daily lives, the digital has been an essential part in new strategies formulated by museums and cultural institutions around the world in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. On numerous occasions, various studies have analyzed the impact that the pandemic had on the digital transformation of museums and other cultural spaces. A vector of democratization and inclusion, the digital offers unique aesthetic experiences, and technology is the spearhead launched by many museums to outreach new audiences. However, the acceleration of digital content opens up new issues and raises multiple questions, especially on the environmental and social impact. The digital is responsible for about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These issues are more relevant now that some museums are actively reflecting on whether to integrate or not NFTs (non-fungible tokens) or explore the metaverse. Can digital development be combined with the ecological responsibility approach in the case of cultural institutions? How can we build environmentally friendly digital strategies? What measures can museums take, in terms of digital impact, to plan for a sustainable future and limit global warming to 2° C? This article provides an introduction to the notion of digital sobriety and some practical ideas on how it can be adapted to museums, gathering reflections and examples of good practice, developed by cultural organizations around the world.
With the development of blockchain technology and non-fungible token (NFT), digital collections have ushered in a golden age. In the field of cultural and museums, the digital collection has also been given a new mission, i.e., to migrate cultural relics from offline places to online digital platforms, thus broadening the application areas and ways of offline collection. However, in the actual implementation, it presents a multifaceted ecology of pros and cons. Beginning from the current situation of displaying and utilizing digital collections, this paper comprehensively discusses the opportunities and risks faced by digital collections in terms of venue breakout, market-based valuation, cultural and tourism integration, illegal finance, digital banditry, and property rights based on the application cases of digital collections in museums, and provides an outlook on the future model of museum digital collection ecology.
Non-fungible token was a buzzword throughout 2021 and continues to thrive. NFTs are uniquely identifiable digital representations of structured metadata referring to physical or digital items. They are predominantly used to transfer certain interests and rights (including intellectual property) over the fandom, profile pictures or born-digital artworks. While NFTs might be primarily used in for-profit settings, with numerous artists and brands reaping the benefits of marketing their creations on NFT platforms, they have profound relevance for organisations active in the field of the digital preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. This chapter discusses how NFTs might be approached by the GLAM sector. It especially focuses on the possible changes to the financing and the professional role of galleries and museums, the potential of NFTs to revolutionise access to digitised or born-digital artworks from a much wider audience, the fate of ownership of ‘real-world’ artworks, the possible collaborations of cultural organisations and NFT platforms, and whether NFTs can serve as an optimal solution for the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage hosted by cultural organisations. It also presents the findings of a survey-based empirical analysis of the perceptions of people interested in NFTs related to the relevance of NFTs in the galleries and museums sector.
Este breve estudio de situación demuestra cómo Brasil ha intentado en las últimas dos décadas actuar en el área de la cultura digital mediante la implantación de infraestructuras y la formación de agentes e instituciones. Sin embargo, la asimetría educativa, financiera y cultural del país y la singularidad de la producción de la cultura y la formación del patrimonio en una sociedad posdigital implican complejidades que requieren nuevas actualizaciones de las prácticas, regímenes, habilidades y políticas de información, junto con la comprensión y el dominio de las tecnologías emergentes como web3, blockchain, “tokenización”, OADs e IA. El estudio pretende presentar este escenario y sus retos en el contexto de los acervos y colecciones, basadas en modelos tradicionales y nuevas colecciones artístico-científicas mediadas por estas tecnologías. Palabras clave: Cultura digital; acervos; colecciones; Blockchain; IA; Brasil. Technologies and digital culture in the redefinition of digital collections and heritage: a look to the future in the context of Brazil and its challenges Abstract: This brief survey demonstrates how Brazil has tried over the last two decades to act in the area of digital culture through the implementation of infrastructures and the training of agents and institutions. However, the educational, financial and cultural asymmetry of the country and the uniqueness of culture production and heritage formation in a post-digital society imply complexities that require new updates of information practices, regimes, skills and policies, along with the understanding and mastery of emerging technologies such as web3, blockchain, tokenisation, OADs and AI. The study aims to present this scenario and its challenges in the context of collections and collections based on traditional models and new art-science collections mediated by these technologies. Keywords: Digital culture; collections; collections; Blockchain; AI; Brazil. Artículo recibido: 18/10/2023. Revisado: 22/10/2023. Aceptado: 03/11/2023
The following paper reflects on how web3 contributes to audience engagement practices through the lens of 'access', 'interaction', 'collaboration', 'participation'.
In 2021, emerging concepts such as metaverse and Non-Fungible Token, which are supported by blockchain technology, became the hot words of the year in <italic>Collins Dictionary</italic>. They not only enrich the development mode of the digital economy, but also inject a blood of energy into the innovative development of China's cultural and creative industry. While it has potential value, it also has some hidden dangers. With the continuous encouragement of innovation, the boundary of innovation is rarely put forward. Therefore, it is of certain practical significance to discuss the innovation boundary of cultural and creative cultural relics digital collections in museums.
Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated “of being art” in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of “introducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'” (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, “numerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variants” (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as “the most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other games” (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTs” (Wilson et al.). “Given NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for like” (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoin’s “Colored Coins”, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset “such as real estate properties, cars and bonds” (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh painting’s data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, “unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites” (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with “proper” art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishment’s disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of “high art” to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdington’s claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artist’s work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWitt’s certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirst’s The Currency “is composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paper” (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT “or ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork” (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that “Hirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal media” (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as “Thatcher’s Warhol” (Lemmey), range from indicating “greater fool theory” (Hawkins) to the questioning of a “responsibility to other NFT artists in the market” (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirst’s artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that “NFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownership” (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirst’s physical creations, where the legal tender’s conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selli
Der digitale Wandel hat auch auf die Schule große Auswirkungen. Im Beitrag wird das anhand des Kunstunterrichts gezeigt. Für die rezeptive Praxis bedeutet das neben dem Einsatz digitaler Lehrmaterialien wie Digitalisate von Kunstwerken auch Bezugnahmen auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in der Kunstwelt wie beispielsweise den Hype um NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens, nicht austauschbare digitale Dateneinheiten). Auf beides wird eingegangen und ausgeführt, dass Digitalität und Virtualität den Abgleich mit der physischen Realität verlangen. Deshalb ist es wichtig, im Kunstunterricht nicht nur die Betrachtung von digitalen Reproduktionen, sondern auch die direkte Begegnung mit Originalen zu ermöglichen.
Abstract Ubiquitous digitization enables promising options for cultural heritage preservation. Therefore, a new approach is presented that considers deployment scenarios by linking heritage science to tourism. Such an approach is necessary because neither technology nor society views can be treated separately to obtain deployable solutions of a wider social, and even national importance. Clearly, while the traditional approaches to cultural heritage preservation will remain a gold standard, they will be increasingly complemented by digital preservation techniques. Thus, based on practical implementations and lessons learnt in other areas, this multidisciplinary framework paper analyses existing disruptive information technologies deployments. In line with the findings it presents a novel technological architecture tailored to the needs of cultural heritage preservation that deploys an open blockchain architecture. The architecture preserves the advantages of traditional blockchains, which made this technology so important, while enabling energy efficient implementations that can be deployed in mobile applications. By additionally using the contribution-ware principle it links it to tourism, where the identification of users focused incentives and business models play a central role. It is obvious that tourism is a good candidate in such preservation efforts due to the organic links between it and cultural heritage and can support further developments in the heritage preservation domain.
NFTs have boomed in the recent past and have implications in several fields of science. In this article, I delve into the implications and potential advantage and challenges in the use of NFTs in the field of conservation science.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections? Although NFTs in their current format were first invented in 2017 as a means for game players to trade virtual goods, they reached the mainstream in 2021, when the auction house Christie’s held their first-ever sale exclusively for an NFT of a digital image, that was eventually sold for a record 69 million USD. The potential of NFTs to generate significant revenue for artists and museums by selling effectively a cryptographically signed copy of a digital image (similar to real-world limited editions, which are signed and numbered copies of a given artwork), has sparked the interest of the financially deprived museum and heritage sector with world-renowned institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Hermitage Museum, having already employed NFTs in order to raise funds. Concerns surrounding the environmental impact of blockchain technology and the rise of malicious projects, exploiting previously digitised heritage content made available through OpenGLAM licensing, have attracted criticism over the speculative use of the technology. In this paper, we present the current state of affairs in relation to NFTs and the cultural heritage sector, identifying challenges, whilst highlighting opportunities that they create for revenue generation, in order to help address the ever-increasing financial challenges of galleries and museums.
This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.