NFT: The Story in History

What: The Art in Artifact

A new market emerged during the pandemic of 2020-21: digital collectibles. Across many themes and categories, these are akin to digital versions of Beanie Babies, sports cards, sneakers, rare coins, etc. Today, you can collect a digital item to use, save or resell.

What caused this boom? A relatively new technology called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). These are like digital Certificates of Authenticity (COA). The tokens record the informational and transactional trail of a digital collectible online, using blockchain technology. The use of blockchain technology secures these records forever. The artist and/or brand who produced the artwork, the date of creation, the first sale and every subsequent sale are all recorded. Together, this information forms the metadata, or literally all of the data of these collectibles.

The authentication of a digital collectible on the blockchain not only provides trust and security for current buyers and sellers, but also provides future verification about historical activity for researchers, academics, archaeologists and anthropologists. The artworks of today become the artifacts of tomorrow. ‍

Why: The Fact in Artifact

Imagine a digital archaeologist in the year 2122. Imagine she was on the search for the most popular digital artwork 100 years earlier, in the year 2022. NFT technology enables her to do so, with all of the transactional & ownership history permanently saved on the blockchain for all to view.  

Scouring through blockchain history, the archaeologist would also be able to piece together the information about artists, brands and artwork collections. The important themes of our contemporary times then emerge upon the discovery of this information. Not just the financial value of assets, but also their social value. Not just the collectibles, collections and collectors, but also the communities. Not just the transactional data, but also their interactional meanings. These findings form the stories in histories; the histories of artists and brands; the histories of their artworks and products; the histories of the technologies; the histories of markets; the histories of different times and generations.

How: The AR in Avatar

Avatar House is first and foremost a storytelling startup.

A venture of visual adventures. As such, the use of NFT technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to achieve these narrative goals.

We use NFT technology to authenticate digital collectibles, identifying their origin and their travels through the blockchain thereafter. Our augmented collectibles are multifaceted and multilayered; the augmented reality layer lives on top of the digital art layer; the NFT layer lives on top of the blockchain layer. When we connect the collectibles to their corresponding NFTs, we establish trusted verification.

To reinforce these verifiable connections, we use AR technology for both functional and narrative purposes. Along with the narrative layers of motion art, music and virtual tours, we include an authentication layer to ensure that the digital artwork is in fact a verifiable artifact. This authentication layer reveals the associated blockchain data of the digital collectible, so that all of its viewers can trust its provenance. ‍

The art & fact in artifact come together in beautiful harmony.

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