Prism Arts & Other Fine Things opens with 'artificial life form' debut
Jun. 25—A creature made of code twisted and turned its long, polygonal body toward a field of stars, and merged into constellations.
Artist Ira Greenberg called the computer-generated critter a protobyte — an artificial life form born of computer codes and mathematical computations. It was one of series of nonfungible tokens — better known as NFTs — that made their debut Friday at Prism Arts & Other Fine Things, a contemporary gallery in the Design Center in downtown Santa Fe.
Greenberg, an art professor from Southern Methodist University who splits his time between Santa Fe and Dallas, called the series Petromyzonus.
NFTs are digital assets stored in a shared digital ledger known as a blockchain. They range from art to songs to tweets and are meant to be one-of-a-kind assets that can be traded or sold — usually in cryptocurrency transactions.
They have taken the art world by storm.
Galleries in Denver, Los Angeles and Chicago have featured NFT exhibits or have opened to exclusively display them. Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, Snoop Dogg, Madonna and other celebrities and influencers have purchased or created them, with some NFTs selling for millions of dollars.
Greenberg's series is the first launched and displayed at Prism Arts, and his price tag is far lower — about $90.
"It's a new thing that's challenging a really old, centralized, theory of art," gallery owner Spencer Rubin said.
Greenberg, originally a painter, started working with protobytes in 2004, long before the development of NFTs.
"Early on, I started playing with computers and then realized that the coding underneath the hood was sort of like the paint," he said. "I just taught myself to code over many years and started this project."
The new series, he said, "emerged in the last couple months within this NFT context, but it's built on a long body of work that I've been doing long before NFTs."
He projected the creature onto a wall at the gallery Friday and displayed still images.
While many popular NFTs are static images, Petromyzonus is complex. Greenberg's NFT creatures are constantly in motion, their computer generated movements calculated day in and day out.
As NFTs have grown in popularity, concerns have been raised about their environmental impact. Those that run on blockchains like Ethereum use massive amounts of energy when being minted or sold. A single transaction can use 132.35 kWh of energy — the amount it takes to power the average U.S. home for 4 1/2 days, according to the Ethereum Energy Consumption Index.
Greenberg said that's because they use a "proof-of-work" model, which requires specialized computers that can process complicated data.
He creates what he calls "green NFTs," using a platform that runs on the Tezos blockchain on a "proof-of-stake" model considered more sustainable because it takes the same amount of energy as a simple Google search.
"I'm really sort of ethically driven to do work that has value in terms of the engineering aesthetic, as opposed to pure meme or hype," Greenberg said.
NFTs have given artists a chance form a community and make some money from their work, he said.
"Many artists are now collecting other artists' [NFTs]. So, there's a sense of a little bit less hopelessness in the life of an artist — where you just put out your work and they say nice things, but nobody purchases and you never make any money."
Rubin views NFTs as a more accessible way to collect art by making digital versions of a physical piece.
He has been exploring the NFT marketplace to figure out how they might be used outside the online realm.
"We're thinking if you had a bar, you could have four or five NFTs displaying that people can watch and be like, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that,' " Rubin said. "This makes the experience unique."
