Interesting conference this week in Mozilla office in Paris. Chris Messina @chrismessina stopped by, invited by FivebyFive, to share his current hobby. Digital art.

“How do we support artists in a post-digital age?” “I don’t have all the answers” @chrismessina #scarcity

— Five by Five (@fivebyfiveio) May 20, 2014

He discussed several aspects of digital art : what is it, what does it look like, how could it be tomorrow, provided that the technology evolve. And the essential question behind : in the era of pixels and beats being multiplied in one click at no (visible) cost, how could digital artist survive and get paid for their creations.

Well. First it is a matter of faith and value. Either you don’t care, and you copy like hell. Or you believe that artists have a special role to play in our society, and deserve your support. Second, you need to have a place where digital artists are offering their work to a public. Reproducing the principles of commercial gallery. Third, to refrain the hacking, you may enable a versioning of the art pieces. Versioning will create scarcity, which is a fundamental for value creation for art.

Let’s say. I am a fan of unicorn drawing, I buy a digital drawing on the internet, I get a place to store it and a certificate. When I get bored owning it, I can sell it to another unicorn addict. Chris Messina presented to us a platform which enables that scenario. It is named Neonmob https://www.neonmob.com/ and is in beta version. With Neonmob, you acquire art piece, for free or for money, it comes with a certificate – limited editions are stamped, thanks to a bitcoin-like crypto operation. The platform allows you to track if your art piece is extremely rare, or very common, which helps you to define a value to your collection.

#scarcity for art in the digital world – love the symbols from @neonmob pic.twitter.com/ajY8LIqD6T

— Chloé Bonnet (@chhhloe) May 20, 2014

Note that @marklor reminded his friends that ‘deviant art’ http://www.deviantart.com/ is also a platform allowing to do more or less the same. I let you benchmarking both solutions.

That evening was really interesting cause it covered at the same time the question of what is digital art (a drawing, an animated GIF, a programmable image, a piece of music created with movement sensors, an image animated via wind sensor, …), why is it necessary to create scarcity in digital art, how to collect and enjoy your digital art… This is certainly just the beginning of the questions technologist and art lovers will have to think about and share.