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Get to meet our Project & Event Manager, Sofia Gkinko, who has been working closely supporting our team for the past 6 months. Sofia is an international professional that shares great interest for art, language, and technology. Find out more about the team behind the platform that only offers you NFTs by pioneers of generative art.
Q: What was your first NFT? Sofia Gkinko: CryptoMutts by Kenny Schachter and I cannot help but keep getting super excited and nuts about it!
Q: What is your favourite NFT drop by elementum? Sofia: Frieder Nake's Genesis NFT "Homage to Gerhard Richter" is a historical drop and an homage to generative art that has been patiently waiting for this moment. Meeting him in person at the opening of the group show "Liebe Maschine, male mir", in which he came with the motto: "Leave it all behind for a life of Sundays", makes this experience even more precious and unique.
Q: Who is your favourite NFT artist and why? Sofia: Sasha Stiles is a pioneer of generative literature and blockchain poetics, whose practice adds a lot regarding the impact and significance of NFTs in the context of traditional and emerging art markets, and brings poetry out of the shadows. Her AI generated poem "Completion. When It's Just you" (2022) was performed at the Gateway during Art Basel Miami and auctioned at Christie's (video below).
Q: What did you do before you joined elementum? Sofia: A few words about my background: I have a PhD in Literature and Periodical Press and a MAS in Curating; I have worked as a researcher in projects with emphasis on literature and translation, and in cultural organisations and institutions in Greece, Albania, and Switzerland. My interests encompass art, language and technology, and their performativity.
Q: What attracted you to the space and why is that? Sofia: The NFT phenomenon is complex with a fast rhythm of evolution, that is enabling new modes and reshaping our ways of thinking, and promising profound innovation. Fascinated by its dynamics and unprecedented possibilities, I am passionate about the space and highly motivated to deepen my understanding on how blockchain technology is unlocking new realms and is leading to new directions and paradigm shifts in the art world.
Q: What is your favourite quote/observation about the NFT space? Sofia: I couldn't find a more figurative and fierier example that vividly bridges the transition to the NFT space and illustrates its transformative power, while reflecting, at the same time, on the concepts of ownership and collecting. In 2016, Hirst made 10,000 of his signature "dot" paintings, signing each unique work and franking it with a hologram of his face, as though it were a banknote issued by his own personal mint. For every one of these paintings, the artist also created a corresponding NFT which led to "The Currency", a project and collection exploring the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art; while marking also his entrance into the NFT world. Purchasers then were given the power to decide whether to keep their non-fungible token or exchange it for its paper counterpart. The rejected artwork would be destroyed, either with the click of a mouse or, more dramatically, in one of six minimalist incinerators set into the walls of Newport Street Gallery, in London, where the artist performatively burnt thousands of his own works: "I’m completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions. The value of art digital or physical which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost. It will be transferred to the NFT as soon as they are burnt," he writes.
Image below: Damien Hirst, "The Currency" 2022, performance documentation. Courtesy: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2022
PFP CryptoMutts By Kenny Schachter
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