Opinions

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Recently, Sotheby’s made history by auctioning what it called ‘phygital’ artworks for a record price. CryptoPunk pixel-art pieces sold for $11.8 million in a ground-breaking move by the auction house. “These five fantastically rare ‘phygital’ punks form a very important bridge between the physical and the digital… This is where the digital artworld meets the traditional.” – Sotheby’s, 2021 But […]
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The replica

Until the development of the first technologies, humanity’s encounters with the replica were restricted to the organic. Even then, true replicas they were not. A blade of grass, growing next to a thousand others of the same kind that share some key characteristics (but are never identical) have what Wittgenstein would refer to as family resemblance. Choose any acorn and […]
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The puzzle of digital art

Let me ask a vexing question, that appears to have a simple answer: why has digital art struggled to flourish until now? One problem has always been uniqueness: the copying of a JPEG or Bitmap could never be prevented, for what is being copied is the actual thing itself. Digital copies are not prints; they are literal copies of the […]
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