Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility: Blue Paper

Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility is a non-fungible token artwork, first minted on August 30, 2017 at InterAccess in Toronto. The artwork is significant not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a legacy art gallery, but also for imagining, in 2017, the ways that non-fungible tokens could advance the conceptualist project of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form. It also explored the ways the separation changes a collector’s relationship to art. The Digital Zones tell a story about how different concepts of ownership are fundamental to the experience of an artwork. The artwork—and the 33-page essay which accompanied it—speculated that if, at some point in the future, artworks were owned and transacted through immaterial blockchain tokens, that shift in the commodity form of the artwork could also precipitate a shift in the material (or immaterial form) of the artwork. The best way to tell this story, I decided, was to start with another story drawn from art history. And so the project is modelled after Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, a conceptual artwork that presented itself as a pure expression of an idea that needed no physical aspect, but which did need to be transacted through a non-fungible token (albeit a paper one) to be fully experienced…