Whenever possible, I try to bring the outside world into my teaching. At this stage in the year, my photography students’ end-of-year assignment is due in. Since September last year, our digital photography course at Edge Hill University (code 1434) has been building towards the assignment, to produce a photo project. I have always drawn the definition of ‘digital’ as widely as possible. More than just the digital file produced by a camera, I have taken digital photography to include scanning old pictures, and the wider digital context of how images are consumed.
For the students, producing a photography project within the university context presents huge opportunities but also certain drawbacks. It offers the emergent artist the opportunity for collaborative working, a mentor, a space to exhibit and an audience, and on a lucky day, cameras to borrow and funds to exhibit. But on the flip side, there is nothing worse than a photo project seeking to meet assessment criteria or one trying to please the teacher. Even worse, is a project dripping with disinterest. And so I try to lead my students towards the visual telling of stories that mean something to them.
As I write, interest around non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, is rattling around online and finding its way into our media anthropocene . Back in March, the distinguished and distinctly offline auction house Christies, lent its credibility to this emergent innovation, but first a little background. NFTs rely on blockchain technology to function as digital certificates of guarantee to all kinds of digital artefact. Digital’s quality of infinite reproducibility has long been both its strength and its achilles heel, at least in the art world. If a digital file can be infinitely reproduced, how can an individual piece of digital art or a photograph be considered and crucially, sold, as a unique artwork? Well, the non-fungible token has arrived with a technical solution, and Christies, by bringing their prestige and heft to the digital auction, via an artist called Beeple, have just blown the bloody doors off. Beeple’s huge collage of individual artworks Everydays, has just sold for $69 million dollars catapulting the artist into the top three most valuable living artists with the buyer quoted as saying the work may be sold on at some profit. And so NFTs suddenly became noticeable just as I was due to receive sixteen photography projects by sixteen different photographers.
And so I set about building one big digital collage that contained 258 separate image files and sixteen artist’s statements. The idea of selling everyone’s project as one NFT brought this digital innovation into our collective practice but I underestimated the size of the project. The image had to be small enough to upload to the OneSea digital auction site but big enough to show each individual image at a clear resolution. Oh, and for good measure, it had to be printable to about 5 metres in length, just in case we ever print it on the university’s big beautiful Canon printer that I’ve been gagging to play with for years. Myself and some great students, Megan, Trinity, Simon and Tegan then started a series of online meetings and declared ourselves a photography collective called Fourteen Thirty Four after the course code. It just seemed appropriate, as the digital world had been the wonderfully enabling and emotionally stifling portal though which all of our workshops and interactions had taken place this year, that at the end, we might try and have some digital fun and ride the wave of who knows, the next Tulipomania? If we do make any money, I will be amazed. And if we lose money (it costs to put artworks up for auction) we don’t really mind. Every one of my students will be able to say that their work was sold as an NFT and we’ve had digitized fun doing it all. Our reserve price, the minimum amount we will accept for the work, is the crypto-equivalent of £14.34. That is, 0.0051 Ether.
To spend time with the various projects is to find sixteen views of the world over a year that none of us will ever forget. With these projects all jostling for space on one big canvas, taken together, they form an intensely ordinary but revealing record of our times.