After having lived for a few years on the edge of the art market, the world of digital works based on NFTs has exploded in recent months. On the one hand, this has brought to the surface a theme dear to those who deal with the intersections between art, technology, meme and philosophy, that on the possession of a digital asset that can be replicated thousands of times with a single click, and on the other hand it has multiplied the attempts to profit from this artistic / speculative bubble.
For example, Jason Rohrer, an independent video game developer, auctioned off some paintings that were contained in one of his 2012 video games, images that were commissioned to people who are not very happy with his choice today.
A few hours ago a section called “The Castle Doctrine”, the game to which the images refer, appeared on the site of “The Castle Doctrine”The Crypto Doctrine”Which is to all intents and purposes a market exhibition of the virtual paintings included in the game. Some are by Rohrer himself, others instead belong to artists and artists including developers of the caliber of Jenova Chen, author of Journey, American McGee, historical modder of Doom and author of the dark video games dedicated to Alice and even the director and screenwriter David Goyer .
In this house the auction is of the Dutch type, therefore downward, it means that the initial price is very high and decreases over time, at the moment 145 works are on sale, but some have already been removed because those who created them asked to remove them. Kotaku has in fact collected some testimonies of the people involved in the auction who discovered Roher’s move only after the fact, also because, according to the developer, it would have been too complicated to contact more than 50 people via email to get his decision approved.
Rohrer was also quick to clarify that at the time those works were donated without any kind of contract, in friendship, and that he was willing to share the proceeds of the auction with the artists, but for many the issue goes beyond money. and rights of use. NFTs and more generally blockchains and cryptocurrencies are not just a gray area of monetary exchanges and a speculative bubble, but pose a serious problem from the point of view of environmental sustainability. For many, participating in that auction means making an irresponsible gesture for the pure taste of an artistic performance.
A recent study estimated that in the United States, every dollar of Bitcoin equals 0.49 cents of environmental damage, while total energy consumption is estimated to be the same as in Chile or Norway and in countries with a fragile energy infrastructure the creation of Bitcoin can cause temporary blackouts. The real problem, however, is not so much the consumption of electricity, but the fact that often that energy, in order to be economically advantageous from the point of view of the “miners”, must be produced where it is cheap, thus exploiting coal and other sources more pollutants.
“Is it worth spending Iceland’s equivalent on electricity to have a non-falsifiable monetary system that no one controls? Does a verification system for unique objects make sense? – Rohrer asks Kotaku – I don’t think we should decide collectively. Personally I am not fond of baseball cards, but there are those who have made it a reason for living. I love thorny philosophical debates and I want to create projects that move in the middle of them ”.