Why ‘Real’ Art is 🌱living🌱 on the blockchain

Blockchain's tumultuous relationship with Art & what's special about Steward

Aug 08, 2023

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The Blockchain’s relationship with Art has been a tumultuous one, one of shade, hype, credit, greed, cash. Visually, NFT’s have always been kinda tragic, almost actively janky, we recall PFP’s of monkeys, minecraft lookalike punks, Vee doodles, redacted shapes built to aesthetically mock us with their seeming overt lack of ‘craft’. No wonder artists have struggled to see the salience of blockchain for the future of their discipline. Fair play, it’s hard to see the potential in its power to elevate and empower their vision through its technical ability. Rising out of the pastiche and the bubbling tension, we welcome in a new era for Art’s tender relationship with Web3, one of elevation, consideration and artistic appreciation.

At STEWARD, we centre the mission above all, and the mission centres our planet, our NGO partners and our artists. We worked with 8 incredible artists from across the globe, chosen for their stories and their connection to the ecosystem they depicted. And we leveraged the infinite potential of the technology available to us to unlock new ways for their art to live, grow and be reimagined, beyond what even they felt possible when we started sketching and visualising a year ago. What if a painted scene could depict the weather patterns in that coordinate live? Imagine if rarity was connected to our connectedness to the species that inhibit the depicted ecosystem, celebrating their beauty and their resilience? The craft of STEWARD’s digital art all seeks to deepen our relationship with nature, surely that's the best possible use of this technology? If it’s raining in the forest, at that exact moment your digital art should have a downpour too, right? Riding off the hottest summer on record (so essentially ever), our digital artefacts should aid our connection to these realities and topics, make it tangible and visceral.

STEWARD’s digital art embodies the potential that Web3 has to unlock new realms of imagination and autonomy for artists, and our collection is a celebration of that potential.

I get the sceptics, as a person who spent over a decade in image creation, I too felt Web3 was devaluing our craft, centering a quick buck, transience, trivialising the artists. But through good old infiltrating from within, STEWARD proves that the machine is only as ugly as we are, and when the input is pure creative expression for the betterment of community and planet, the output is truly beautiful. The tech is truly useful and empowering for artists and beyond.

Steward Lydia

Let’s hear from our STEWARD artists

We asked them, has this process changed how you perceive NFTs? And why?

Yes! definitely, I understand them more. I used to think it was quite technical and sort of takes the soul out of an Art piece, but now I believe the Artist is valued, and I perceive NFT''s as something that can be useful toward a better future. (Maryam, Chaparral artist)

Yes Industrialisation encourages consumption before citizenship or care. With the internet constantly evolving, we’re able to control our usage better: more user-centric or, at best, creator-centric, instead of platform business-centric. Thus we can now inject a more humanist approach to things – from consumers to citizens, filling the internet with care, love and light instead of white noise and greed. (Reza, Tundra artist)

Absolutely. I used to think of NFTs in a rather negative way, thinking that their mere existence is harmful to the environment and I saw them as some kind of a threat to the art world. Since doing this project, I have learned that NFTs can be hosted on carbon neutral platform, or even in a carbon negative way, as Steward is doing. This offers a much less damaging alternative in terms of CO2 emissions, something that Steward really supports and I appreciated that when signing onto the project. I was also positively impressed to learn about NFT's records of ownership and how these are protected and encrypted in the blockchain. As an artist who creates a lot of digital work, I've come across so many copyright issues, which are increasing in this copy/paste and screenshot culture. NFTs seem to have found an interesting solution to this issue, (Lena, Grasslands artist)

What's special about STEWARD artwork?

🍃🌧️☔︎︎ We have sourced coordinates from every ecosystem and integrated them into the code of each piece of digital artwork, meaning the digital art will be able to reflect the real time weather of the chosen ecosystem!
🌿💐🌳 The artists have created four different growth stages of a plant, which will grow within the digital artwork, changing every season. Meaning the artwork will continue to change until it’s a fully grown plant. (See below)
💚 Steward is a first of its kind on the Celo blockchain (which will soon to be integrated onto Ethereum)
🕒 A lesson in patience, the pacing of the dynamic elements of our collection reflects the seasons and encourages holding onto the artwork, investing love and time into it, a direct counter to the greedy flip behaviour of tired crypto bro era’s past. Like nature, this takes its time and is worth it.

STEWARD’s Substack

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