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Decentralized Futures

Decentralized Futures, DDW 2024 — © Carosello Lab and Baltan Laboratories

The 'Decentralized Futures' exhibition will present the creative possibilities, technologies such as blockchain and NFTs offer in digital art. The works of 8 international artists and designers present the possibilities for the future development of the decentralised technologies and (art) market.

Contextualising the Urgency

The art and design works presented at the exhibition are outcomes of the ARTeCHĂ“ project, co-funded by the European Union. Traditionally, digital art and design works faced challenges in entering the market because they did not meet a fundamental requirement for creating value chains in art: the uniqueness of the work and the exclusivity of ownership. This requirement disappeared when mechanical reproduction became possible. However, the emergence of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) has altered this landscape by providing artificial scarcity and adding uniqueness to naturally multiply digital creations.

Beyond the NFT's

The ARTeCHÓ project’s starting point is the NFT’s, but the creations go beyond this framework. The works speak to us about contemporary society from the perspective of extension and network, pointing out what other things we can do with this technology. The artists and designers delved into decentralisation and redistribution, uniqueness and horizontality. These distributed futures allow us to modify the nature of the relationships between different agents when making decisions, distributing assets, involving participants in a collective project or considering ecosystems. The artists' and designers' works apply new technologies to respond to the environmental, political, social, and economic issues we face today. They explored new, decentralised modes of socio-political organization and resource management, hoping to help the audience imagine more equitable and inclusive futures.

ARTeCHĂ“ - Art, Economy & Technology - Unleashing the potential of Crypto Art and other tech tools for European creative industry, regions and society is a European initiative created by five European institutions: SERN - Startup Europe Regions Network, Baltan Laboratories (Netherlands), FZC-Etopia Center for Art & Technology (Spain), Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (Germany) and MEET Digital Cultural Center (Italy). ARTeCHĂ“ is funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme.

About Baltan Laboratories

Baltan Laboratories is a cultural indisciplinary lab based in Eindhoven. We focus on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise. We believe that the increasing complexity of our world and of the challenges we have to face no longer allow for a strictly disciplinary, reductionist and western-based approach. We can no longer divide a problem into its parts, deal with those in separate disciplines and then recompose them in a solution.

Maíz, Cristóbal Ascencio Ramos — © Julian Fallas

Lithium republic XYZ, Merlina Rañi — © Julian Fallas

Hash Breakdown v2, Silvia Binda Heiserova — © Julian Fallas

Bubble, OPN Studio — © Julian Fallas

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