Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility: Blue Paper

<p><em>Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility</em> is a non-fungible token artwork, first minted on August 30, 2017 at InterAccess in Toronto.</p> <p>The artwork is significant not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a legacy art gallery, but also for imagining, in 2017, the ways that non-fungible tokens could advance the conceptualist project of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form. It also explored the ways the separation changes a collector’s relationship to art.</p> <p>The <em>Digital Zones</em> tell a story about how different concepts of <em>ownership</em> are fundamental to the <em>experience</em> of an artwork. The artwork—and the 33-page essay which accompanied it—speculated that <em>if</em>, at some point in the future, artworks were owned and transacted through immaterial blockchain tokens, that shift in the commodity form of the artwork <em>could</em> also precipitate a shift in the material (or immaterial form) of the artwork.</p> <p>The best way to tell this story, I decided, was to start with another story drawn from art history. And so the project is modelled after Yves Klein’s <em>Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility</em>, a conceptual artwork that presented itself as a pure expression of an idea that needed no physical aspect, but which <em>did</em> need to be transacted through a non-fungible token (albeit a paper one) to be fully experienced…</p>