Bridging Cultural Heritage & Blockchain / William Rudolf Lobkowicz

Transcript

foreign hello everyone it is wonderful to be here with you today um I'm going to be taking us through a little bit more of a historic journey I know a lot of you are doing a lot of building at the moment you're coming up with new ways of changing the world utilizing blockchain I'm going to take a second to take us a little bit into the past so that we can look at some of this

history that we're now using as a source of inspiration to be doing some new and exciting things in the future and we as an organization had always try to think about how we can share the past so we can Inspire others to create the future so today I'm going to take you a little bit through the history of who this lapkovitz family is as well a little bit of the history in the context of this beautiful city of Prague that we're in for this lovely conference then we're going to talk a little bit about digitization and decentralization that we're seeing in our own organization some of our nft experiments and what's coming in the future but for our family we have we come from an old Bohemian Noble family that has 700 years of History that has been lost twice and

regained twice and I always like to begin here with this figure that we see of Europe This is Europa Regina and here we see where we are now in the city of Prague in Bohemia which has always been considered the heart of Europe and this is where our kind of our family story began where the first prince lopkovitz my direct ancestor served as Chancellor of bohemia to the Hops books we're managing the Holy Roman Empire at the time this meant that we were managing the kingdom of bohemia in this large large empire that existed of many nations and throughout the course of that history the family amassed an incredible collection of

paintings music decorative Arts arms and armor so you'll see some of the highlights of the collection in here including a painting by Peter bruegel the Elder showing haymaking painted in 1565 a painting by Antonio canaletto showing the wonderful city of London but we also have musical manuscripts that are hand annotated by Mozart and Beethoven they're twenty thousand movable objects in the collection a kilometer and a half of archival material two and a half kilometers of Library material and a lot of this is Virgin material just waiting to be discovered and shown and so these Collections and the castles that made up them the family had ten castles at their

Peak which was quite a bit to manage but they were lost twice and regained Twice first under the Nazi occupation in 1939 my great-grandfather who had helped establish the czechoslovak state here when it became the first Republic was also quite an outspoken critic of Adolf Hitler and for that reason was put on Hitler's Blacklist to be executed upon the annexation of Czechoslovakia fortunately that did not happen and throughout the course of the war my great-grandfather lived in Great Britain where he served as czechoslovak ambassador to Great Britain and when the blitz began my grandfather and his two brothers were sent by way of Canada to the United States now you're starting to see why I

speak with an American accent as well um but during that time period the collections were seized and they were put in uh various uh States of uh storage and disrepair Road Nitza Castle our dukel residence was turned into a napola school to train the next generation of ss officers the paintings themselves were seized you may have actually heard of this famous group known as The Monuments Men they were actually responsible for finding many of these stolen works of art at the end of the war reclaiming them and then returning them back to our family you may have seen the movie with George Clooney Matt Damon Jean Desjardin the heartthrobs that they are and there's a

great book by Robert edzel that talks a little bit more about this so this is the first restitution where we got back this collection of these many different objects and pieces and then eventually the Communists took over in 1948 so you had a three-year period of peace and then communism took over and uh during that time period the collections were completely dispersed they went into various places some were managed by the National Gallery others were just kept in different storage facilities um so they were all placed in all these different locations and this is where provenance history is so important it's because it allowed us to track where these things went over time and then of course we had the fall of Communism here in Czechoslovakia under the enlightened

leadership and vision of our poet playwright president vatslav Havel and we were greatly inspired to come back to this country when he was calling all checks to come here to be a part of the seismic changes that were happening here and here we see my father who was standing in front of Rodney Castle our dukel residence who led this process of restitution now this may sound like a fairy tale getting all of this back but the realities of restitution were quite complicated and here you can see what we were getting back so yes their beautiful painting things musical scores but getting back many of these castles that hadn't been taken care of for over 60 years posed a very difficult situation we also weren't

coming with huge amounts of capital that we could just spend on all of these different Castles we were living in Boston my father was working in uh as kind of a in real estate at the time and came back on behalf of the family with his father's pension to hire a lawyer and drive around which are these tiny little cars to a hundred different locations across the country to find all these different pieces and so this this is what we were getting them back in and what the states were and so what we had to do was look for ways to actually take care of these things in the 21st century which was quite complicated and it's not us living in palaces and castles like our

predecessors but really it's actually quite involved work where we're trying to look at how do we restore facades how do we restore or the different paintings that have been completely damaged during this time period how do we do deal with ongoing maintenance costs to manage all of this and for us as a family when we came back we said what do we really want to be doing with all of this and we said we wanted to open them to the public for the first time in history with the mission of preserving studying and sharing them with the world and so that's what we do today so we sold off different real estate assets that we got back and invested them into the cultural buildings and created cultural tours and activities to support everything we're doing and today there's a variety of

public programming that we do I have to acknowledge my mother who we have over here she leads incredible educational programs where she's able to connect with students in a very special way she started something called the junior curator program where you give students an object in the collections they have to figure out what it is where they place it in the collections and then give a presentation in front of their parents so this was involving quite a bit of deductive and inductive reasoning really thinking about what we would be doing she herself as an educator grew up as one and then eventually I was always looking for ways to continue sharing with others and so how does how do we get into this whole so this is what we were doing for a long period of time and eventually the

pandemic hit and this is where we reached kind of a new stage of digitization and decentralization where we had to think what do we do when all of these different cultural properties are closed no income is able to be generated to support the collections we have to keep on a staff that have to continue maintenance and their upkeep and care of these pieces despite being in the middle of a global pandemic we started with doing virtual tours and this was uh quite difficult for me because I I hated speaking into a telephone the entire time and I can speak to you and see I never knew whether any of my jokes were Landing the entire time on my tours so it was quite a difficult time period but we had hundreds of thousands of people who actually were able to visit us during

this time period we had more digital visitors than we had physical visitors the previous year which was the record ties for tourism in this in the Czech Republic and this opened our eyes a little bit more to what could be done when we could actually utilize decentralization to bring more people into a room I was able to have a tour of 5 000 people watching live at the same time who normally could not physically go through those rooms while I was giving it so I was doing this on Zoom we were doing different company team building things as well we also did another initiative called yoga which was quite fun yoga and historic spaces and we were trying to find new and innovative ways to make culture relevant make it exciting for people I find a new

way for a younger audience to also reconnect and so now you must be wondering why are we here uh listening to this guy talk about history at a at an ethereum conference as well well we slowly started looking at nfts and blockchain back in uh it was February of 2021 and we were interested for a variety of different reasons firstly I was mentioning provenance accuracy as well provenance is the history of a different work of art or peace traveling over time and seeing where it has transferred throughout that course of that time period this is what allowed us actually to restitute all the different pieces that we got back and we got back about

95 of our collections which was quite incredible and what allowed us to do that was all of the accounting that and the bookkeeping that was done by both the Nazi and communist regimes which every time they took something away from you you got a receipt and that was your way you were able to track this entire history and find it and bring it back we were also thinking about a new patronage model a way to actually encourage people to support different cultural institutions through utilizing the Arts that exists we were also thinking about the ability of nfts and uh the the Arts that were coming out of it to move to different locations when we normally work as a museum institution we have to go through a lot of paperwork just to transfer a work of art to a different

location this means you have insurance protocols that you have to go through you have to also look ask permission from a central Authority from the Czech Ministry of culture before the piece can be transferred as well and the ease of movement is actually quite complicated and lastly um I think this is a word that is so overused at a lot of crypto conferences so I apologize but Community is uh also something that we were really thinking about but community in a new sense you have communities that are created around cultural institutions and museums but if I think about most of the people that are actually visiting our museums today these are people of an older generation for the most part um and people who most of our works of art actually date between the uh 16th

and the 19th century so these are actually pieces that appeal typically to older audiences so we wanted to look for ways to connect to a younger audience but also think of people who will have a sustained interest in preserving and protecting it and so we saw a great opportunity for cultural institutions here and this is at the time peak of the pandemic when we were really looking at this cultural institution our institutions are asset rich and cash poor the nft market at the at the time and still is as I'd say today was I think cash rich not asset poor necessarily there are a lot of wonderful things that you're seeing there but what we wanted to do was look for new sources of inspiration and that are built off of

our cultural heritage that we could connect to um and so we were observing this and seeing what was happening just to give a couple of examples with what people from an Arts institution were thinking about they were going absolutely crazy thinking that the head of a bear done by Da Vinci was selling at the pre same price as the crypto punk in a Sotheby's auction I mean this is unbelievable to people who were studying art history for a long period of time and are thinking how is this possible what is happening and this uh was I'll admit as well completely unfathomable to me as well I was so uh I actually myself was frustrated I said this is this is driving me crazy because I don't

understand what's happening here and eventually as I started learning more I started understanding the value of actually not this isn't I I wouldn't call this is maybe a controversial statement but a crypto Punk is far more it goes far beyond the Artistry that actually goes into putting it together and I wouldn't talk uh refer to it as much as a work of art but more as a collectible that is able to create a community around something that gets people excited but imagine if you can create that same sense of community around a da Vinci and get people excited who love Da Vinci too in the same way that they're excited about a punk or an ape at the same time so this was really quite

exciting to see and then we're watching as well as you're seeing classic Arts institutions beginning to bid in crypto this is a historic event this has never happened in the history of many of these institutions and we're seeing a great uh change I think where you're seeing a bidding in eth when it's not in the National currency of what's happening there um and it there's a I think we're seeing kind of we're on the precipice of something happening quite soon the other thing that was quite interesting to see was an observation of something that happened I think it was this past four or five months ago I don't know if anyone here has heard about Constitution Dao as well

um great so a couple of hands I'm seeing perfect this is good Constitution Dao uh was fascinating to me from a community building perspective and what it could mean for a change in the art world just to give an idea of what happened with Constitution Dao there's there's only one copy of the real constant U.S Constitution that exists in the world there are uh two copies in private ownership and one which was going to sale that was a private copy actually of three there are 13 copies that exist in the world and one of those private copies was going to auction so this was a big deal and it was uh there are not many that are in private ownership so it was a great opportunity to see that happen and

so you saw this community that was created online mostly from Twitter with a whole bunch of Founders who put it together there were 13 different people like the 13 different colonies of the United States who came together who said we are going to try to buy the Constitution we the people are going to purchase the Constitution that's quite an amazing statement that's quite exciting typically when you think about where most of these things are going to say when they're going to sail at these major auction houses they're going typically to people with deeper Pockets who are able to spend a lot more capital and now you're seeing a crowdfunding campaign to purchase a work of art use the governance token that comes from it to actually dictate what

museum is going to hold on to that in the future that's a game changer absolute Game Changer and uh it was amazing what was starting to happen it was one of the biggest there was 40 million dollars raised in seven days there were 2 300 participants who had zero eth experience beforehand and that was in their wallet and there were 17 000 people who contributed to it um and just this was another thing I just wanted to add there was there are issues that were surrounding it a lot of people refer to the gas 1.5 million dollars spent on gas but the median donation was about 206 uh dollars that you saw so you and people there were some issues with the marketing I would say as well some

people thought they were actually purchasing a part of the Constitution some people bought it just as a donation because it was an experiment as well so there were there were various motivations behind doing this but what could come out of it was actually a really exciting moment um and for me I I used to I spent a short time period as well working in at Sotheby's in the old Master paintings Department as a researcher grunt not really being important at all but one of my roles was to when something was consigned I I was given that work of art and I had to figure out what it is I had to look at the exhibition history I had to go to the library and study every single book where it was ever mentioned that one piece piece or work of art and

I'd kind of fall in love with this thing as well I'd get incredibly connected to it add a picture of it by my bedside table I was really infatuated by this piece and then eventually what you see when it goes to auction is that it goes to auction the there's a private seller who purchases it and you never see it again sometimes a lot of the times art is used as an investment it's not you don't know who it goes to as well if it's Anonymous there's not full transparency what's in what's happening and very often they will be away from public eye so there are some issues with the Art Market which can be changed I think in the future just to give a little some light things as well this is kind of what we were seeing on Twitter as people were getting excited by um by a dow

purchasing the U.S Constitution I just want to throw up some of these uh people were trying to find eth uh I thought you'd like this Ethan We the People um so there there's a lot and the amount of excitement that this gathered around this thing was amazing even crypto Twitter took over the Sotheby's live auction thing where you were just seeing GM GM GM uh walk me uh all this on the side and there are all these classic art patrons who are seeing this girl being like what's actually happening I have no understanding of what these different acronyms mean but it was amazing how excited these people could get around this historic document and they were going to choose where it was actually

going to go um so this was an exciting moment I thought we also have seen a lot of museums enter this space where they have actually looked at uh what I we've been kind of calling a scan and ship model where they scan a different work of art sell off different editions of it and then uh turn those into nfts and we've seen the avantage do this as well there's the British museum that was doing uh taking Hawkeyes Prince and setting different levels of Rarity to them and then selling them on their website um and recently the Belvedere Museum in Vienna they also did uh a thing something with their uh the Kiss by Gustav Klimt on Valentine's Day they

sold off 10 000 different pixels of uh the kiss nft and you can see this would be one of your pixels and they'd give you the exact coordinates of where that is um and so this is one model we've seen I think most Museum institutions explore um there are some questions I have about that as well as in terms of what what are you actually purchasing when you're buying many of these nfts is it similar to a print that you would have typically if you bought a print in a museum are you buying ownership in it and this is something that I think is actually waiting to be defined a little bit in the space actually um and I think even in the case of constitution Dao which I mentioned earlier I think a lot

of people actually thought that they were purchasing part of the Constitution and if you look at the memes that I was showing you earlier it made it sound like you were actually doing that so I think there's a lot there's a lot that is um sort of being defined at this moment in time and what what whether these digital pieces have the value that's associated with the pieces but are you uh are you relating digital value to physical value of the pieces side by side these are some of the things that are being explored and so we um ourselves are also looking at what that means and then there's another model which I'd say is also interesting is looking at how do we take works of art that already exist and then find new

ways to actually interact with them and I wanted to bring up an example here which was put on display at the Guggenheim Museum which was quite amazing uh you can see Las meninas by Diego Velasquez which is in the product Museum in Madrid and then another piece that was created by Eve Sussman which was called uh 89 seconds at Alcazar and this piece shows it's a video piece actually that shows kind of the creation of uh this actual work of art in the video form and this is one of the more popular displays in the Guggenheim and it actually sold as an nft a little bit later on as a as a copy of it but this is quite an interesting model I

think because it's finding a way to build off of our cultural heritage to create something new but this also isn't anything new this has been done in art history for thousands of years that we have this is a painting in our own collection by Diego Velasquez which shows the infanta margarita and uh you have two other editions of this that have been put together by Picasso and Dali as well now these two pieces when they were first made people thought this was Blasphemous you can possibly take the work of an old master and try to recreate it in this form and many of these pieces are now selling if you were to put them at auction would sell for millions of dollars and immediately um so there you are seeing uh this model

you've seen it this model in the past for sure and this is sort of the area where we started thinking about okay what would we do if we sold off an nft as a museum institution what what would that look like and we started by uh with one piece that we called unseen gays this is a painting we have in the collection by um by Paolo veronese which shows David and the head of Goliath and we animated on top of it the X-ray and infrared Imaging of the piece which shows another ghostly head in the background that was done in the underpainting of the canvas this is an example of something you can only see in the digital world that you can't see in the physical world the idea of having

an additional painting that you're able to bring out out into the foreground where we're able to share and connect with people so that was an example of something we had shown as an nft and we sold in October then on top of that we had another minuet that was written by one of my ancestors Anna villamina from Altan who was the wife of the fourth princelockovitz and she was a quite an accomplished luteinist but was not recognized for a lot of her musical abilities in the 18th century by virtue of just being a woman and so what we thought it would be quite interesting would be to take that piece of music record it for the first time in history and play it and create an animated piece that shows her handwriting and play over

the music that uh for the first time in over 250 years so that was a really exciting moment for us because not only uh were we able to retell some of these very important stories in history and this is what we're trying to do in our curation as well but it was also a great way to Showcase uh the music of someone who had really put something together that was quite special but hadn't gotten the acknowledgment that it deserves and today that peace is in a museum in the metaverse insomnium space which I find I have no idea how she'd feel about that but I think it's quite exciting conceptually because anyone can go from all around the world to see that piece and connect with it and the last piece

we did uh which were part of these digital Explorations was a piece of uh this shows piece of scrafito that's on the outside of one of the castles we operate and it shows it degrading over time due to different weather and things that hit that piece and we wanted to Showcase what happens to cultural monuments over time if they're not cared for and the example of this Castle which is just 35 minutes north of Prague scrafito which is the technique of scratching into stone slowly degrades after about 30 to 50 years just to restore all this graffiti on the outside of that facade of the castle costs about a million euros just to give you an idea and this is something we haven't been able to

fundraise for so the idea here was to create a piece that would fundraise for that project but what's also interesting about this nft conceptually is that by putting it on blockchain we are creating an immutable record of this digital artwork and it will stay in perpetuity on blockchain just like this issue of the with this graffito will exist in perpetuity so any secondary royalties that come from that will continue to go to supporting that project as well um we also explored something we call proof of patronage this is where we did the kind of scan and ship uh model it's a little bit more similar to that where we took a picture of an unrestored work of art that has a hole in it that's

damaged in some way and we set the price of that nft at the cost of the restoration meaning that when you buy that nft you are paying to restore that work of art and then so what we did is they bought the piece and then six months later we air dropped that piece and you can see the before and after of your work so that is a game changer for just philanthropy as well how often do people donate to things where they're not taking on the journey where they see where their funds are going and this is a great way of tracking that and for people to take pride in it say look at what I've done I've helped these people we are able to share this culture and they can now see it on the walls in the physical locations and then we worked

with other artists as well uh who created pieces that were inspired by the collections this is by Matthew Stone over here who was responding to a Cabinet of Curiosities that we had a painting of we also had artist collective in Paris called obvious who took a series of 250 maps that we had in a book that are very hard to display actually because you have to flip the page so that they're not exposed to light too much so what we did is we took those Maps we put it into their algorithm and they created a gan piece two Gan pieces that you see right over here you're now able to see all those 250 maps in this piece which normally is not on public display and that's a new way of exhibiting pieces and so we

showcased this at an event called non-fungible castle where we put on an exhibition I might acknowledge we have Jake alafafar here if you can just wave your hand Jake worked on all the curation of this piece and the creation of the nft so we can give a round of applause here as well and we put together an exhibition in 26 hours where we brought in a work crew from zelen who brought with them if you've experienced Slivovitz as well it's a wonderful check beverage as well but they brought this along the way and they did an excellent job installing this entire thing so we put on this wonderful exhibition which we then opened to the public and we just told people come in and look at these nfts see what they look like look at the real

works of art next to it and tell us what you think um and so that was a great opportunity we then held an event a forum at the lobkevitz palace where called non-fungible castle where we invited people from the crypto world and the art world to talk about what uh what does the crossover of blockchain and the Arts mean how can we work with one another to build off of our cultural heritage and to do different things together we had the crypto punks next to portraits a discussion of what that means what is a pfp how does that compare to uh portraiture as well and we had a discussion around the art that we saw there but also the nfts that were being created so it was a great moment it was very difficult organizing some of this

because I was dealing with Museum directors but I was also dealing with Anon people as well so here we see g-money we had to put uh his uh his crypto Punk over him um but I was also calling up hotels and said you know I have a person who's coming to stay with us can we have his first and last name and I said g money which was quite complicated but we'd put them next to a museum director we also had the head of the Salvador Dali foundation on a panel too who were having a discussion with these people so it was really a wonderful opportunity to connect with them and we learned a lot from it and we auctioned off a lot of the pieces that I showed you before and today what we're doing is working on

restoring all of those pieces so you can see a very special collection actually could we cut the sound on this maybe if possible thank you so this is an example of some of these offices that uh we're now restoring as a result of the nft sales we through this proof of patronage series we talked about managed to restore 52 different uh pieces and so now we're working hard to restore all of this we're trying to show people the journey that they've gone on along the way and then we're going to be air dropping these nfts to everyone as we're finishing off and that's such a wonderful experience because they're taken through that so this is the restorer who's been working specifically on this series of officers um and then we're also looking at how

that can be done with physical spaces too uh there's one room in the lobkovitz palace called the Chinese Belvedere which we are now restoring uh to as a result of a nft proof of patronage sale we sold a 3D version of an nft that showed the space so you were able to see it um and you we will do a before and after of that space too and that'll be completed in the next two months or so so this is really an exciting moment so what's next really with what we're thinking about where thinking these were all experiments I wanted to add as well and we had no idea whether any of these would work some have worked well some we have learned from as well

and we're uh working day by day to think about ways we where we can become more tech savvy ways where we can work with smart contract technology to implement new things that we can add to the metadata uh ways of imprinting people's contributions until the end of time on blockchain um so there's lots we're learning and developing but we're also thinking about how we can get people excited around different New Media incorporate gaming ecosystems into what we're doing uh community-owned Dow projects we've been talking about as well how you can use Dow infrastructure to actually be centered around a museum setting where you can get people excited behind what um what what can be done uh get people excited behind the different pieces in

the collection too and get them having a conversation and engaging with our cultural heritage and building off of it and next we'll be doing another iteration of non-functual Castle as well where we'll have an exhibition that'll be running at the lobkevitz palace you're all more than welcome to come and visit that we'll be doing a lot more the new things that we'll be putting on display working with new artists we're also working on an interactive cultural experience which sounds like a strange thing but hear me out there a lot of conferences I've been seeing on the crypto circuit and what we've been trying to think about in that experience that we're creating at Nella Jose vs are different ways where people can interact with this technology whether that be

done I I know everyone has been talking about nft ticketing for a long period of time but I there need to be I think there's some applications of it that could be enhanced in some ways different co-ops that you can create when you interact with different cultural experiences token gated experiences where you can connect with others so we're trying to create kind of a a crypto castle playground at Nella Hills where you can try out different use cases of this technology and then at the conference the day after we're going to be talking a little bit more about what the applications of that technology is with panels with people who disagree with the use of blockchain as well people who see issues with it being alongside other people who might agree

with it where we critically explore how we move forward in the space not a just a padding on the backs of one another saying this is so wonderful what we're doing but I think we do really have to think about what is the best way moving forward so I wanted to end with a little quote here by Ernst Fisher art must Show the World As changeable and help to change it and that's what we'd like to be doing today thank you all for your time [Applause] I'm quite sure after that there must be some questions I mean that was pretty well who from the yeah we've got uh there should be a microphone going

around a gentleman in the middle thank you very much for the presentation I was wondering you called crypto pan collectible I sort of agree with that that we have kind of to sites where there is a real art from real from from artists and they are Collectibles and there are somehow mingling in together um in my opinion uh the profile pictures have great utility we can use it on Twitter it connects people around but we are sort of missing a way how to consume the digital art uh from um from artists like photography uh what

changes in your opinion needs to be made to make them as appealing as monkeys and and punks and so what kind of instruments are we missing I think we're missing a definition of terms uh very often we're seeing different a term I hear thrown around quite a bit is crypto art for instance um which uh I think there is definitely a new kind of artistic movement that we're seeing where exactly the mediums that you were just describing whether they be uh graphic design um incorporating digital tools to do animation uh these things that have typically not been really explored as

artistic mediums for a long period of time because they haven't been understand have actually come to the Forefront as a result of nfts and you're seeing a new type of art that's developing too which uh is in line with a lot of Internet culture that you see too where different things are being created and then what happens so often though is that because uh there are so many new people that are entering this space whether they be from the artistic world or the crypto world trying to get into the art world as well I think all of the terms are are being thrown around in different ways so when I think about uh even the Collectibles that we were describing you know I I don't have an issue with Collectibles I think they're

fantastic I think they're great ways of people connecting with one another the idea of someone being able to connect with another person because they have a similar trait because of a crypto Punk and having a meet-up in Paris because of that that's incredibly cool um it's incredibly exciting but I think it's key that we don't conflate some of those things we we call it a collectible and then we call other things works of art and I think it'll also help the new emerging artists that are coming out there as well I didn't even talk about that in my presentation I focused on cultural institutions and philanthropy but I'm incredibly excited by new artists who are actually able to represent themselves using a decentralized format where they're able they're actually getting the

acknowledgment for their work that they deserve which they haven't for a long period of time so I think a definition of terms would be helpful and I think with time it'll come um it's it's all quite new at the moment I think I hope I answered your question correctly as well absolutely I was more focusing like on how to enjoy it because right now we're gonna have a look on open C and that's it you got a photography we can buy a TV and and ensure that you're at your home but would it be um if Instagram kind of create the gallery of yourself that the nft you are holding that this

is the way how how we can enjoy that you can kind of show your taste and um that's kind of speculation what kind of uh way we we will how we will consume this this art in digital space so if I understand your question correctly it was about different ways of being able to view all of these different works of art in a digital space consume it's I think we are able to consume art so much more because of what's happening with this space the idea of having a record of where art is moving over time where ownership is transferring you can always refer back to the original piece in some way shape or form because blockchain allows you to do that that is

creating more exposure to the pieces on top of that you're seeing new digital viewing experiences that are getting better there are some are jankier as well and they're developing but they're I've seen so many different examples of gallery spaces that are being created where people are able to share their pieces in a decentralized form where normally if I have a work of art in my own home it's incredibly difficult to share that work of art sometimes unless I send a quick photo but digital uh digital Gallery spaces are being created every day um and it's I've had a I got a question in an interview once where somebody asked me um you know how do you feel about this crypto world uh getting interested in the Arts is it hurting the art world and

I said no it's the opposite because you're getting in you're getting a huge influx of people who are now getting excited by different forms of art that can be displayed shared with one another you're finding new ways for artists to be able to share these pieces and display their work you're seeing examples like Instagram where they're looking at ways of incorporating nfts into Instagram as well Facebook is making a huge step in that direction so I think the viewing experiences are only going to get better the hardware that exists to display those pieces will get better and you'll be able to explore it in much better ways I think too okay I think another question here in the middle who I am thank you for for the amazing

presentation I would like to ask uh exactly about the The Dilemma uh between between actually destroying some art or making it better or innovation because I heard a nice definition that um that Innovation put in longer time becomes tradition and also the second thing is uh sorry I had to write it down and just to keep the um yeah and the the second thing is that the the art is just a way to express the same as writing or talking or just another way to express so actually uh making this innovation in in the art you are trying to express something that somebody who who is or unfortunately has

been 250 years old dead you are trying to express it for herself or for himself so I would like just to ask actually it's quite personal uh how do you feel about that about this dilemma if you are actually able to express it because you might know that it's impossible to actually Express that so so how is it for you to actually restore it is it more like Innovation or make a new tradition or how do you feel about that I mean I've most artistic movements have been a form of innovation that have completely changed the way things have operated photography for example was considered for a far more mechanic practice that captured a moment in time there was Artistry that was added on top of it later on on

um and it was there was Artistry that went into it but people didn't understand it as well different artistic movements have also developed but what um I would like to see is a respect for some of the things that have come from the past um I think it was there's a great quote and I think it was Isaac Newton who said it I can only see as far as the shoulders I stand on and what I'm trying to encourage entering this space is is that we look back to our cultural heritage to how we can build off of it to innovate and move things forward and it's a hard thing to do and I I've been criticized a lot by colleagues who work in the traditional Museum space for

some of the things that I've been doing because they're experiments and and uh there's a certain level of respect that you also have to have for the original makers of the works of art for instance the Gan piece that I showed upstairs before on the um on the presentation which showed the transforming of those different Maps I had someone from another Museum or Gallery saying this is completely disrespectful to the original maker of this work and how can you call this art if it was made by an algorithm and so that's a whole other debate is uh um is the talking about the Artistry that goes into algorithms whether you can make I know I think with this audience it'll resonate but a code can

be sexy a lot of times as well with the way that you can write things there's poetry that can be written into it and I think with time and openness and that's the whole idea behind this event we're doing is you just need to have a conversation between these two groups together and if we find ways uh that we where we connect people who might not be entirely similar I think will build wonderful things that will make history that we'll remember in the future so when I talked we talked I talked about a definition of terms and crypto art I think that will be a new new art form that will be recognized in history that developed from something that with the progress of Technology it's the same with paint brushes when they were used

different types of gilding that was being used they're all art has progressed as a result of Technology making it possible for people to do more and more things it's nothing new sentence okay I think we might have time for one more question so yeah we can switch to another Okay add a sentence so thank you so much because I completely agree with you I just wanted to know the reaction to the criticism so I wanted to encourage you because it's amazing thank you thank you great and I think we've got maybe time for one more if you yeah no worries yeah so first of all I just um really moved by what you're doing so much of what we've been doing in the crypto

world has been digitizing the real and you're taking the digital and putting it back into the real physical world and one of the things that we've seen around money is that it often devalues Beauty and so I'm just incredibly moved first of all by what you're doing my question is about sharing and you talked a little bit about the critique from other things I mean we we are in this open source Community how does that look in the art World both in terms of people copying your ideas and in terms of sharing some of the code that you're using in order to do these things I'm very interested in how how sharing is working in your industry absolutely so I everything that we do I hope can be an

inspiration to other institutions as well immediately after our conference we held a second conference just for local Museum institutions where we shared what we did uh what were some of our concerns from a legal perspective this was something that was quite uh scary to a lot of Institutions as well the handling of cryptocurrencies and how we did that as a non-profit institution we shared that as well and so we've been quite open with Museum institutions about how we're doing that and me speaking at these conferences I hope that it's a new thing that can be replicated by other institutions in the future because when I look at the current system that

is set up to preserve cultural heritage at the moment it is uh not sustainable and we when we look at cultural institutions around the world on average about 60 percent of their funding comes either through private donations in the United States or for public institutions uh mostly here in Europe you also see 60 the National Gallery here in Prague for instance is heavily Reliant upon a grant that they get from the check state which pays for 67 of their budget that's not a sustainable business model and so if we can look at ways to not not only be inward looking institutions but outward-looking institutions where we think about how

museums can be gathering places for people from all around the world uh where it's not intimidating to people where they can find a way to identify some with a story or something inside um that's going to have a much more profound effect on the people that they work with in terms of the code that you had mentioned as well we've worked with different partners that have made that possible so initially we did some minting on different platforms we slowly worked to a little bit of smart contract customization that was possible through a company called manifold as well which is uh actually made it very they've been very helpful to a lot of artists in terms of onboarding and pers and having them take ownership of their smart

contracts which is also important so we've learned about that along the way too the coding we need help with I have to say so I'm not an incredibly technical person as well my background is my more in the museum space but we have a fantastic team of people that have been working really hard to help us and support us in that way it may interest you to know there's quite a lot of software developers at this event it's a hackathon so talk to hackers and tell them what you want them to build and maybe they'll just go build it good eat frog really is the place where universes are colliding so thank you so much for being here today thank you let's have a round of applause for William Rudolph thank you foreign