Decrypting the Medium: A Report on the NFT Market

Research Team: Suzanne Stein, Miriam Kramer, Crystal Melville, Amreen Ashraf, Eric Leo Blais 

OCAD University’s Cultural Policy Centre and Super Ordinary Lab have collaborated to develop a report for Canadian Heritage on non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The report, titled “Decrypting the Medium: A Report on the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Market,” is the product of a collaborative and structured approach to research that involved a literature review and strategic foresight methods including a horizon scan and an expert panel workshop with scenario planning. 

Guiding research questions, addressed in the report, included:  

  • How does the NFT art market work?  

  • How do artists, sellers and buyers access the market?  

  • Is the market an extension of an existing art market or something new?  

  • Do artists see NFTs as a new form of artistic creation, a new medium, or a new method to monetize existing artistic practices?  

  • What are the hurdles and advantages for Canadian artists entering the NFT market?  

  • Have other countries regulated in this space and how?  

  • What does the Government of Canada and Canadian Heritage need to consider as they strive to continue to support and protect creatives?  

What are Non-Fungible Tokens? 

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital files that have stirred up considerable interest from investors, artists and governments globally. The underlying technology of NFTs—more specifically cryptocurrency applications—challenge not only how art markets operate but how both the government and the sector provide support and protect creatives.   

This research highlighted that the NFT market is rapidly evolving, and that understanding NFTs, and their overall ecosystem will require ongoing research and study. The following key findings were highlighted:  

  1. NFTs change how the art market works  

  1. Blockchain and smart contracts support more equitable copyright legislation and protect creators  

  1. NFTs create new marketplaces for artists to present their work  

  1. NFTs both create barriers and reduce barriers  

  1. NFTs have the potential to increase diversity and inclusion in the Canadian art market 

The NFT art market poses an opportunity to rethink and reduce the inequities posed by the traditional art market. NFTs allow equity-identifying artists and artists marginalized by location a platform to monetize their work and to survive and advance as an artist. By regulating parts of the underlying NFT technology, Canadian artists are positioned better to securely, and equitably advance and thrive.  

Ongoing research will be critical to track drivers of change, ongoing associative drivers and new market pathways that will guide policy decision-making. Monitoring the media and industry resources for developments regularly will be central as will tracking legislation from countries around the world. 

This research and report were led collaboratively by the Cultural Policy Centre at OCAD University and Super Ordinary Laboratory.  

Cultural Policy Centre at OCAD University (CPC)  

The Cultural Policy Centre is Canada’s first national cultural policy centre working to expand the arts and culture sector’s capacity in policy research, program development and advocacy. Convening academics, industry experts and not for profits from across Canada, the Cultural Policy Centre at OCAD University will provide crucial direction and support for Canada’s arts and culture sector as we adapt to and thrive in the ever-changing environment that characterizes the twenty-first century.  

The Super Ordinary Laboratory  

Super Ordinary Lab at OCAD University looks at emerging technologies to understand their social significance and tracks broad-based trends for the purposes of meaningful innovation in technologies, ethnographic methods and cultures of production as well as potential users of these technologies. 

 

Funded by the Government of Canada.

Sponsor(s): 
A photograph of OCAD U with the report title overlaid in black text
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 - 2:30pm

Embodied Identity

Image: screen capture VR

Virtual Reality Project: Unreal Engine software

Embodied Identity is a virtual reality research-creation project that explores artistic interactions with digital modes of production, examining the interaction between spatial platforms that stimulate and challenge artists' perceptions and relationships to space, time, and materiality. 

Researchers Dr. Claire Brunet and Digital Futures Graduate Thoreau Bakker experiment with VR and 3D scanning technology to convey meaning inside a VR spatial context using digital sculptural referents. Sculpture/Installation undergrad Sam McGuire assisted with scan data post-processing through OCAD U Experiential Learning.

"Using body digitizing I aim to capture a person's inner strength and personality, to explore a sensory knowledge that brings life to the artwork inside a VR environment."

- Dr. Claire Brunet

Through an exploratory approach to VR the research team presents a repositioning of the ways artistic knowledge is transmitted. Most interestingly and importantly, in sculpture-installation art practice, artists' interactions with mediums and digital modes of production go beyond technical and technological characteristics to bring light to a sensory knowledge with limitless creative boundaries in view to open up to new intellectural territories and an artistic vision inspired by mutable spatial-temporal platforms.

Embodied Identity was featured as part of OCAD U's inaugural Gallery Crawl on May 10, 2018.

This project was also presented at VRTO 2018 by Dr. Claire Brunet, as a conference titled "3D Scanning to VR: Embodied Identity".
The Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference and Expo is a unique, international exhibition, professional conference and solutions-focused symposium exploring arts, culture, society, humanities, ethics and sciences through immersive technologies.

Creator: 
Image from VR screen capture: white humanoid figures surround a kneeling individual
Photograph of audience attending Claire Brunet's presentation on her VR research.
Screen shot of Dr. Claire Brunet's profile on the VRTO website.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018 - 3:45pm

Taste Graph: A narrative visualization tool for massive media data

Traditional newspapers are moving dramatically to digital publishing and data analytics in order to better understand their users’ behaviors, build their subscriber base, maintain their online readers, determine advertising placements. The goal is to deepen and diversify their revenue streams. For this purpose, VAL's Taste Graph research analyzes and synthesis the Globe and Mail data about their subscribers and their web-browsing habits, indicating connections between tastes.

Discovering affinities across different categories is a promising method of segmenting the audience within the context of media planning and potential advertising campaigns. For example, if someone shops for organic vegetables they might be more likely to shop to organic tea. Also, if data indicates close affinities between the categories of organic clothes and organic foods, it is reasonable that a purchaser of both organic vegetable and tea packs will be interested in shopping for an organic cotton shirt if they are provided with a choice to pick a shirt. As well, the people within the taste category  ‘organic’ could also be interested in certain types of drinks, types of shoes, and a sports travel lifestyle.

To establish similar taste correlations within Globe and Mail data, we follow a “narrative approach” that helps tell stories with the data by providing a smooth transition from raw data to communicating through data visualization. The tool we are developing supports the Globe and Mail marketing teams. Firstly, it provides an easy way to filter multiple sources of data and find relationships. Secondly, it shows patterns regarding Globe and Mail audience tastes in customized narrative visualizations. From these, the marketing teams could gain holistic knowledge about their audience tastes and see the impact of certain taste correlations or become aware of some hidden insights of interest regarding relationships between tastes. Thirdly, it allows Globe and Mail people to remain continuously knowledgeable about their business performance measures.

Our organization of the design space involves two types of narrative tactics: visual and structural. For visual tactics, we deploy several visual mechanisms that assist and facilitate the narrative. We chose a bubble chart, and grouped bar chart to illustrate, evaluate, and compare tastes, scores and engagement levels. Colour is then applied to different categories of advertisements to indicate degrees of divergence in tastes. We depend on navigation strategies as a structural tactic to assist the narrative. For example, we arrange the paths the viewer might take through the visualizations, and we make the visualizations interactive by including filtering, selecting, searching, and navigating of advertisement data. These strategies are tested and refined with Globe and Mail design and marketing teams and will then be audience tested.

Our visualization tool, in general, respects secure web application standards. Our goal is to provide the Globe and Mail with intuitive reports about the overall and manifold correlations of tastes of their readership and advertising audiences. Our proposed tool handles the complexity of massive and heterogeneous marketing data records and translates it into a communicative interface.

See a preview of TasteGraph from the IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee VIS2018 here.

Click here to see Ahmad Karawash presenting this research at the Ontario OAR Conference, May 16 2018.
Click here to view this project on SOSCIP's page.

This research was presented by Dr. Ahmad Karawash, Postdoctoral Fellow and Team Lead, and Sana Shepko at the Ontario Centres of Excellence annual Discovery conference on May 1st, 2018 (see below).
 

Image of interactive tool, showing a graphical comparison of universe vs. specific category's engagement with taste groups
Photograph of Ahmad Karawash and Sana Shepko attending Discovery 2018 conference to present research.
Friday, May 18, 2018 - 10:45am

Welcome: Digital Media Resident, Lillevan

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 1:30pm to 3:30pm

OCAD, with support from the Goethe-Institut Toronto welcomes Digital Media Resident Lillevan with a breakfast with faculty and students.

Venue & Address: 
Faculty & Student Lounge 205 Richmond St West, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Graduate Workshop with Digital Media Resident Lillevan

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 5:30pm to 8:30pm

Digital Media Resident Lillevan presents a graduate workshop on advanced digital editing.

Venue & Address: 
Advanced Editing Suite (Level 2) 205 Richmond St West, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Masters in Digital Media Information Session

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - 4:00pm

Alison Robb from the Great Northern Way Campus (a consortium of UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, and BCIT) in Vancouver, BC will be here to inform our students of their Masters of Digital Media. This is the third year Alison has visited us. She says, "We would love to have more stars like . . . (OCAD Alumni) . . . come here."
Students, Alumni, Faculty are welcome!

Venue & Address: 
Room 284 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
tfairbairn@ocad.ca
Cost: 
Free

Hybridlab Show

Hybridlab exhibition
Friday, April 18, 2008 - 4:00pm to 8:00pm

OCAD Integrated Media students showcase projects combining online and electronic programming elements.
Students under the guidance of Professors Judith Doyle and Jim Ruxton and visiting Instructor Fei Jun from the Digital Media Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

Join HYBRIDLAB w audiopost at the portal between online and local situations - at the OCAD Integrated Media wing, Level 3, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto and online at the Art Metropole studio, Second Life coordinates: Odyssey 194 - 178 - 22.

Venue & Address: 
Integrated Media Wing, Level 3 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Vancouver’s Masters of Digital Media Program at Great Northern Way Campus

Friday, April 11, 2008 - 5:00pm

The Masters of Digital Media Program (MDM) is an innovative, full-time professional graduate degree offering students team-based experiences focused on project learning in close collaboration with the international games and digital media industry. Graduates will develop the professional skills required to be effective creators, practitioners and senior managers in this rapidly growing industry. The program is offered at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, and graduates of the program will receive a Masters Degree bearing the seals of BC's top post-secondary institutions: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design and British Columbia Institute of Technology.

MDM Executive Director, Dr. Gerri Sinclair will be visiting OCAD on Friday, April 11th to host an information session about this exciting. Get your questions answered and win prizes just by attending!

Prizes: iPod and iTunes certificates

Venue & Address: 
Rm 284, Level 2 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
rdickenson@ocad.ca
Cost: 
Free

Master's of Digital Media Information Session

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

The Masters of Digital Media Program (MDM) is an innovative, full-time professional graduate degree offering students team-based experiences focused on project learning in close collaboration with the international games and digital media industry. Graduates will develop the professional skills required to be effective creators, practitioners and senior managers in this rapidly growing industry. The program is offered at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, and graduates of the program will receive a Masters Degree bearing the seals of BC's top post-secondary institutions: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design and British Columbia Institute of Technology. To find out more information, you are invited to attend this information session.

Venue & Address: 
284 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Thursday, July 28, 2016 - 6:15pm

The work of seven OCAD U students has been selected among 5,304 entrants as semifinalists in the 2016 Adobe Design Achievement Awards, the global digital media competition for student creators.

- Yisu Yu, La Famille

- Francesca Chan, Twins

- Francesca Chan, Lost In Paradise. Dies In Paradise

- Aqil Raharjo, Invitation: Raising awareness of the mexican wolves through film screening

- Maiam Raya, Remember Me

- Mariam Raya, Remember Them

- Salwa Majoka, Biological Preservation

- Fasai Sivieng, Sleepy

- Aqil Raharjo, Kültür Magazine

Finalists in all categories will be announced in September and selected work is available in the ADAA Live gallery

Congratulations!

 

 

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