CODICE INTERVIEW
2021, Jul. 17th
Eleonora Brizi was the guest of Codice Beta, the podcast by Barbara Carfagna and Massimo Cerofolini
with the best innovation experts, aims precisely at this: to draw the map to orient oneself
in a world where everything is digital but where all hope remains irreducibly human.
EXCERPTS
Eleonora Brizi, a curator of digital and physical art, her galleries are both online and physical, she moves all over the world. In fact, she has lived in China, in the United States and she is now based in Italy.
During the pandemic, she implemented the use of NFTs in the digital works she curates as a gallery owner. How?
E: I have used them both natively in the digital, working with artists who start right from the digital means, create through the use of artificial intelligence or augmented reality and virtual reality or even applied to a physical work of art, not really to the physicality of the work but, for example, if we consider the canvases or paintings painted and drawn by Hackatao, an Italian artistic duo, they can be scanned by an app that shows on our screen the digital animation and it is this digital animation that is recorded, tokenized on blockchain.
Some people, however, are very critical of NFTs saying they are a bubble, some even say they are a scam. What critical issues do they present?
E: I think they will remain, the bubble will pass, but hopefully the projects that are more culturally relevant, the ones that have a deep cultural background, even if done with NFTs, will remain.
You said something that really struck me, which is that crypto art helps women because it’s anonymous, which is very sad, but it’s sadly true. What happened?
E: It’s so sad, however, as I always say, let’s take responsibility from this moment and carry it forward.
What happened is that we slowly realized as we met in real life, since now the crypto art world is expanding so we started doing physical events as well, we realized that there has never been such a high number of women involved in the art world as now.
What is a token and what is the difference between fungible and non-fungible?
E: Let’s say that: if I give you a €10 banknote and you give me another €10 banknote, these are interchangeable because every €10 banknote has the same value. Similarly a Bitcoin, an Ethereum, any cryptocurrency is fungible because if I give you an eth and you give me an eth, these have the same value. But if I have a work of Hackatao and you have a work of Beeple and the value of both is an eth, these are not interchangeable because they are works of art, they are very different and have a distinct background.
Why is Ethereum more widely used than Bitcoin?
E: Actually the crypto art movement was born on the bitcoin blockchain. The first crypto art project as we understand it today, which is gathering this community as a key part of the crypto art space, was born on the bitcoin blockchain with this frog that was digitalized from a paper comic and then the first transaction happens. An artist tried to sell the digital card and then it was actually bought by someone else, and this is what happens with bitcoin. This process takes place on the bitcoin blockchain, then it develops on the Ethereum blockchain. All the art platforms and all the artists prefer to work on the Ethereum blockchain because it provides all the services that the bitcoin blockchain, on the contrary, does not.
