ABSTRACT

Imagine a giant painting that is drawn by thousands of people at once!

Myriad Art is a blockchain-powered graphic art project. Within its platform, users participate by cooperatively drawing an immense thematic composition while trying to stand out for their individual work.

The artwork is a painting that is subdivided into thousands of canvases and can be seen by any visitor who accesses the platform. Each canvas is a small artistic workspace that can be edited, hoarded, or monetized in a store. Only the owner of the canvas is considered an “artist” with the power to draw or sell it.

Both the artwork (container of all the canvases), and each individual canvas, are non-fungible, transferable and scarce digital assets. They are backed by standard ERC-721 smart contracts type on the blockchain. The canvases are identifiable from each other by their Cartesian position (x,y) within the total composition. Both the canvases and the general work can be obtained using Oleum, which is the fungible token of the project and is backed by a standard ERC-20 type contract.

Postmodern art has expressed and expresses itself in various ways. The continuous flirtation over time with the emerging technologies of each era has always been the engine of great results. The benefits of decentralized technologies and the blockchain combined with creativity allow us once again to explore the limits, transgress and try to find new forms of expression. In short: make art.

Unlike other artistic expressions, this project aims to make the most of the technological historical context to achieve things that were unimaginable in other times. Could anyone have imagined the possibility of acquiring a work of art that was the result of the collective labor of a community of thousands and thousands of people, a work in which artists “lived” and in which an economy worked? Could anyone have imagined that this work would be “alive”, that it would be fluid over time and that each artist could own a fraction of it while the author of the whole was diluted to nothing? Could Barthes have dreamed of questions like these in his eagerness to “kill the author”? What artistic work could better express that liquid modernity that obsessed Bauman for so many years, this mixture of the ephemeral, the economic, the insignificance of being in the fluidity of the present?

The purpose of this document is to declare the technical keys and the philosophical intentions through which Myriad Art will try to follow the path to which questions such as the previous ones lead, with the perhaps pretentious idea of pushing art a little beyond its limits again.