NFTs: A new mediator standard for creative industries com' - Sasha Shilina (@sshshln) @ETHDubaiConf

Transcript

uh so today i will give a talk that will link all the topics i'm interested in such as art technology and mass communication the lack of concrete and systematic review and conceptual conceptualization of nft's communication model was a limitation that was a main driver for conducting this research that combines to a deep understanding of nft technology blockchain technology and gives an overview of their potential positive impact on the communication on the communication process in the creative industries so in particular here i try to address this by answering the following questions

uh what is the potential and the benefits of blockchain technology and nfts for creative industries uh how has nft's emergence in spread in the last couple of years transformed the principles of communication in creative industries first of all let's take a quick look at the creative industries concept originally creative industries were developed from cultural industries that are considered as though those that combine the creation production and commercialization of contents which are intangible and cultural in nature the term was coined in the late 1940s by

the german philosophers and critical theorists theodora adorno and max horkheimer who used the term in their book dialectic of enlightenment they were the leading members of frankfurt school and marxists so being leftists they criticized popular culture which is they thought akin to factory producing standardized goods like press music films and they thought that they manipulated my society into passivity and used the term in contrast with authentic culture later

on in the 1960s researchers started realizing that commodification did not constantly or essentially damage cultural expression and by the 1980s the cultural industries began to be used positively in academics and policy making in the 1990s policymakers converted the term cultural industry to the term creative industry one of the concepts that marked the beginning of the digital era so today cultural industries are best described as a cross sector with creative industries that is considered as a variety of economic activities which

involve the generation and use of knowledge and information and include art design music film fashion and others considering different approaches to defining creative industries the researchers usually used four groups you can see them on the slide the first approach is supported by researchers who put creative industries on par with other industries the second approach is reflected mainly to the concept of the creative class the term proposed by american theorists of urban studies richard florida who says that creative class is a key driving force for economic development

in post-industrial cities the third approach provides places is includes the concept of creative city and the fourth or last approach of us education industries as an important part of the broader economic system it is worth noting that modern researchers emphasize that creative industries shouldn't be viewed simply as a sector of economy or an isolated area because there are forms and practices with which creative industries are inextricably linked such as creative networks creative spaces and events

moreover today art design music video and other creative products as well as the process of their creation are often presented in digital forms and spaces that are greatly influenced by emerging technologies which transform the communication between industry actors but before talking about the current communication model that dominates today i will post from for a moment on the stages of its evolution that can be distinguished into three stages at the first stage the emphasis was clearly in linear one-way communication and the main term was manipulation

this type of communication is common in western culture aristotle was the first to take an initiative and designed the communication model and according to his model the sender is active member and plays a role in communication key role and the receiver is a passive one in its modern form this model was developed by the american mathematicians and scientists claude shannon and warren weber in the last 1940s in their book the mathematical theory of communication this model describes communication as a linear process and is called

as the mother of all models the communication models developed in the second phase were largely aimed at addressing some of the previous shortcomings conceptualizing communication as a two-way process the interaction between communicator and the receiver it was best described by the american theorist of mass communication wilbur schram most importantly this model accounts for how people interpret the message ashram argued that a person's background experience and knowledge of factors that impact interpretation and the first mod the third model sees communication as interaction in specific social cultural contents through shared

meanings this transactional model is the most dynamic of these communication models and implies that communication is achieved as people both send and receive messages there are also levels of problems of communication there technical problem how a channel causes a problem semantic problem is the meaning of message sentence received very different and effectiveness problem have effectively does the message cost reaction uh the invention of the internet and social media greatly simplified the interaction of creative industry actors however part of the interaction is still the shadow activity

established in recent decades the communication model remains beneficial only to third parties remaining problematic and dishonest to content creators and their audiences the ability to change this situation appears with the proliferation of new technologies such as blockchain and nfts so what is an nft i guess many of you know but i will briefly describe for those who are not completely familiar with them adjective non-funchable is usually used in economics by to denote the possession of unique items and to describe things that cannot be

replaced by others because they have a set of exceptional properties a token as a unit of account is a record on the distributed ledger that is controlled by a computer algorithm of a smart contract in which the values of the balances of token holders are recorded making it possible to transfer them from one wallet to another so the term nft refers to crypto assets that represent intangible digital files such as images audio video and game collectibles and other creative products in 2021 you all probably saw this nft hype as

the market and the ecosystem grow grew at an unprecedented rate and now the global nft market is expected to grow from 14 billion dollars in 2021 to 21 billion dollars in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate of 52 percent here you can see the main industry players by categories the main types of non-fungible tokens are art collectibles gaming meta versus sports utilities and others art is the most common use case for nfts sensational high profile auctions

of nfd's links to digital art have received considerable public attention recently the most expensive sales hit the headlines as they fetched millions in 2022 the most expensive art nft were the price for about 92 million dollars was the work merged by a pseudonymous digital artist named pak and the people's every day is now the second most expensive nft with a price of about 69 billion dollars the most visited and used platform for hosting nfts is opencm mass marketplace a universal platform that allows users to trade nfts create them view data on

them and check statistics one of the reasons it is still it is so popular as it is self-service based and not created like for example nifty gateway or super rare the music nft also have a large devoted community and are on the way to adoption one of the biggest decentralized music platforms is audios with about a dozen of millions of million monthly users there are metaverses are networks of 3d virtual worlds focused on social connections where users can create content and interact with one another

some of them organize regular events for users for example crypto voxels the first blockchain based virtual world has several art galleries where users can buy art information of nfts so in a nutshell the main benefits of the blockchain technology are as follows each nft is unique and limited in quantity as well as not replaceable with similar tokens ownership records are stored on the blockchain every nft has an owner and this is of public record content creators can access global market easily reach to collect collectors

and the community of like-minded people and due to the advantages of the blockchain technology content creators can claim royalties directly are the advantages nfts proposed for changing the current communication paradigm and social fields and hands in creative industries have already manifested themselves a locally transforming and indirectly hierarchical model first and foremost nfts have created the possibility to eliminate intermediaries from the communication process allowing content creators to connect directly to their audience there are no more third parties in face

of large distributors labels art portals restricting the rights of content creators creators of digital goods artists just upload their content to the nft platform mean tokens and choose a selling method it could be a fixed price auction or an option or auction and nfts create the environment to direct communication between artists and their potential customers only nft marketplace plays the role of communication mediator also with nfts artists have now an opportunity to honestly monetize their work as it is now possible to automatically

pay royalties fairly distributed in accordance with the contribution to the creative process of each of the participants due to the blockchain technology each actor can now see the exact time of creation of each digital object and the number of interactions with it uh with what income it brings and who gets what percentage which makes communication across industries direct and potentially fair and if this opened up numerous monetization opportunities for artists even traditional art world content creators usually didn't receive a percentage of secondary sales thanks to nfts today and digital artists can receive them in

a fully automated way what's more uh blockchain platforms are designed to make the experience interactive and profitable not only for artists but for the audience as well buffering all kinds of incentives for example for compiling personalized collections contributing to increasing the database of artists venues or events these improvements are to lead to a more diverse and transparent industry however despite the apparent advantages of nft solutions it is still difficult not to pay attention to several problems as for the audience and consumers it is

still more common to use familiar major services as well as for the majority of non-techie artists for example to use spotify instead of audios to listen to music there are also still no official public registers of copyright and no global standards of licensing since different rules applies in different regions the problem of nft storage still remains it is expensive to store nft on the blockchain so they are usually stored in distributed file systems like airweave or ipfs or even on centralized ones so any any nft can be potentially manipulated

it is still difficult there is still difficulty in assessing the uniqueness and understanding how many corpus exists as well as difficulty in finding the original owner of the nft uh copyright protection issues are rising more and more often when uploading content to an open non-curated platform and i'm still wondering that absolutely any media file can be solved on your behalf no matter if it's a selfie taken a few seconds ago or a masterpiece of a well-known artist there are also some environmental concerns the majority of nft platforms are ethereum based which uses proof-of-work algorithm

and consumes a lot of energy and difficulty in determining the value of the nft all these problems still exist and researchers and engineers are puzzling over their solutions some known solutions are ethereum transition to proof of stake to eliminate sustainability problem and for example crypto biometrics to solve the originality on ownership problem by creating biometric identifiers that can be used as an option for user authorization which are developing by humanoid project for example that's it thank you

any questions like what exactly do you do with paradigm etc i'm a researcher at paradigm so in nfts i use nfd platforms as an artist so i was involved in the process of creating meeting nfts okay they're switching to space not only for paradigm but for like yeah yeah i see and are there any links to the stuff that you've created so maybe we can

links you can see me by this okay everywhere okay so we'll probably find a way to share uh the presentations of our speakers with you so that you've got access to all the materials and uh you can find the handle of sasha over there so please subscribe follow etc hi thanks for your talk alex here what's your take on nfts not only as an image but maybe audio video other mediums so are they harder to create where do you see the future there in not only images graphics but audio and yeah

animated okay thank you for your question so i think if you're an artist it is not hard for you to create an audio or inputry and to mentor token on nft platform it's really easy without any no experience in computing experience i shouldn't problem there are a few platforms that trade audio entities and the majority of the mass marketplaces also trade them thank you

okay uh so i was wondering you know thinking about what's next in nft is um what are your thoughts on dynamic and fds sorry can you repeat the question uh like dynamic nft is i was wondering like what do you think about where dynamic nfts are going and like what's adoption looking like there oh i think it's the point of further research but i guess there will have a big future okay thank you thank you yeah one moment please because we need the people on the live stream to be able to hear the

questions are you touched upon the topic of nft fingerprinting to go through the problems and all of that can you elaborate a bit more on that sorry can you repeat this oh sorry you touched upon the topic of nft fingerprinting like to look at the provenance of an nft to identify who owns it who does it and how does it go or watermarking or something like that sorry thank you very much uh for the presentation and the next one yep

so you