Decentralized Futures

Contextualising the Urgency

The art and design works presented at the exhibition are outcomes of the ARTeCHÓ 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.