A gigantic living painting where thousands of people from all over the world live and draw.
"Jazz plays; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of brief jolts. They know no rest; an inflexible order generates and destroys them; never leaving them time to recover, to exist by themselves. They run, huddle together, give me a sharp blow as they pass, and annihilate themselves. I would like to hold them back, but I know that if I were to stop one, all that would be left between my fingers would be a languishing, cannibalistic sound. I have to accept their death; I must even want this death; I know of few harsher or stronger impressions."
Jean Paul Sartre.
Postmodern art has expressed itself and expresses itself in many, many ways. Its continuous flirtation with the nascent technologies of each era has been the engine of great results that always pushed it a little beyond its limits. The irruption of blockchain in the contemporary technological agenda kicks the board and invites us to exploit our creativity again to seek those limits, transgress them, draw challenges and try to find new forms of expression. In short: to make art.
Myriadart plays with the concept of being a gigantic living painting that we could imagine as a city, a "Meta" space where thousands of people from different cultures and strata can share an economic ecosystem, show themselves, coexist, debate and cooperate to express themselves forcefully to the world through art.
From this point of view, when we say that the painting is alive, we try to escape from the reductionism in which we could fall into by focusing on the pictorial result of an image that continually mutates over time, or the anecdotal fact of bringing together many individuals to draw together.
On the contrary, the emphasis is on how, thanks to this technological revolution, it is possible to awaken intentionalities in the participants and achieve the long term necessary to be able to think of a new type of artist, an artist whose consciousness is the sum of thousands and thousands of coincidences. An artist within whom there is an economy? The possibility offered by the blockchain to create an ecosystem and experiment with concepts such as DAO opens doors that deserve to be crossed, enabling a whole set of questions that in other times would have been unimaginable: Could a collector of yesteryear have thought of acquiring the work of an artist who is a kind of entity arising from the sum of multiple consciousnesses? An artist with his own trajectory, his own apprenticeship. Would Barthes have dreamed of questions like these in his eagerness to "kill the author"? What artistic work could best express that liquid and acultural modernity that obsessed Bauman for so many years, this mixture of the ephemeral, the economic, the insignificance of being in the fluidity of the present?
This technological/artistic experiment intends to go deep down that road to see where these and other questions lead, with the perhaps pretentious idea of trying to push art again a bit beyond its limits.
But how does it work?
The gigantic image is divided into a grid of thousands of canvases. Each canvas is a 32x32 pixel drawing space that only the owner can draw. In turn, each canvas is an NFT and, therefore, can be bought and sold on a secondary market. The platform has its own token, which is used for various types of transactions, such as the one mentioned above. Myriad gives the owner of the canvas access to an editor to draw by observing in real time what their neighbors are doing. Each canvas also has a whole set of social network features, it can accumulate "likes", followers, has a history and a feed, which allows the owner creator to generate an identity about that space.
From the viewer's side, the great living work can be navigated both spatially and temporally. It is a painting that can be in a house as well as in a museum. The visitor can visualize in almost real time all the changes that the thousands of creators are making in real time on the work, or travel to the past and see what was the performance of a certain date.
As for the work as a "living artist", it will have a path, a learning process and from the cooperativism in the metaspace, it will generate a collection over time. A collection whose profits could be redistributed in a decentralized manner to each and every one of the content creators who participated.
In November 2023, Myriadart obra viva participated with its first performance in the prestigious art contest Premio B.Arte 2023 at Labitconf in Costa Salguero, winning the first prize and a special mention among more than 350 artistic expressions. To date, the community continues to grow, proposing a number of activities ranging from Drawathones and drawing competitions, participation in exhibitions or recitals, to formal programs such as the example of "Uniting Museums" a program that promotes the breaking of geographical barriers that separate museums around the world through artistic work on the living work. All this feeds a universe that continues to grow in which only imagination can be the limit.
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