A Token Gesture is an academic research project and an exhibition led by researchers at the Institute for Design Informatics, part of the UKRI funded DECaDE: Centre for a Decentralised Digital Economy. Through this, we plan to introduce, explore and critique new public interactions and ownership of digital art via ‘non-fungible tokens’ – more commonly known as NFTs.
In this project, members of the public in Edinburgh will be able to:
- Generate unique pieces of digital art through a street-level, walk-up interaction
- Register their artwork for display in the exhibition via the InSpace City Screen
- Mint, claim and own a non-transferable NFT, representing their piece of art, that will allow them to control how their piece is displayed
Two Scottish based generative artists Sasha Belitskaja and Cameron “Gingey” have worked with our researchers to create a system where anyone can generate a unique piece of digital art simply by presenting a colour to a fixed camera.
Participants are then carefully guided through setting up a crypto wallet to claim and mint an NFT representing their piece. This NFT – a unique, digital token – cannot be transferred, or exchanged. However, it serves to register the artwork, evidence an individual’s contribution, and will allow them to control when the artwork is displayed on the City Screen projectors.
For more information on this, please visit https://inspace.ed.ac.uk/
