CHENNAI: The Friends cast in Indian outfits, the Marvel team celebrating Vishu, Bollywood actors’ childhood photos in the vintage era, billionaires looking poor — A series of AI-generated images, re-imagining certain characters in different scenarios have been flooding the Internet for the past few weeks.
Since art like these and terms like AI, NFT, cryptocurrency and so on have been put to use widely in today’s digital age, nothing is new to the audience. But the world beyond such artworks where a community exists to create content and make money through more complex thoughts and ideas is only known to a few.
To expand this knowledge of digital art and artists, Nammaweb3, the first Web3 event in Chennai, was held at Off The Record on Sunday organised by the Namma Tribe and Colours of India. “Almost 15 artists from different parts of the country have assembled for Chennai’s first digital and experiential art gallery. We have organised panel discussions, and legal workshops to understand more about Web3 with entertainment as background. When I went to NFT Kochi, where a lot of NFT artists had gathered to talk about the latest developments in digital art, a community bonding happened. They are like family now. Through this event, I wanted to bring the same thing to Chennai,” said Charan, co-founder of Namma Tribe.
Welcome to Web3
Giving an introduction to Web3, Varun Desai, Tezos lead and creative coder, shared, “Web3 integrates a lot of new concepts like blockchain technology, NFT, decentralisation, and so on. In social media platforms when you generate an art, that platform will have an ownership right on the content which you have created.
But in Web3, the ownership is in the hands of the artists. They can control their art; as a result, many traditional artists have also shifted to Web3. It is now a platform where artists congregate to bring new genres to art. There is a genre of art called generative art where coders can create their work. They can share it with different people and each of them gets a different variation of the art form. Web3 also concentrates on bringing digital art to the real world.”
With interactive games, an NFT gallery, live music and quizzes, the artists brought the online world to the offline setting. Through their mini quiz, everyone participated and understood the definition of basic Web3 terms like crypto, P2P, node, cold storage and so on.
For people who wanted to start their journey as digital artists and make an income from that, the journey of NFT artist and influencer Deepakshi Agarwal’s experience was educational. “I have been making art for the past 10 years and I deal with both digital and traditional art. Web3 was initially an experiment, but slowly it gave the liberty to do anything. The platform is more about creators and the community. People are so accepting of Web3, they value the concept of creators way more than anything else,” she said.
While Deepakshi’s experience was a guidebook for budding artists, celebrity NFT artist and caricaturist Prasadbhatart’s opinions were assurances for all the creators already on the platform. “When I got into the Web3 community in 2021, I was already established in the Web2 community. Everything happens so fast in the Web3 world as everyone is updated with the latest technology. You should constantly update yourself,” he said.
Is AI the future?
Apart from artists, there were also NFT collectors who buy and store famous artworks. Since they have to rely on artists, the increasing demand for artists in the visual art world was addressed. When the base of every new innovation is AI, the fear of it governing humankind also re-surfaced in one of the discussions. Prasadbhatart said, “You shouldn’t be scared of AI but be scared of the person who knows AI. For growth, you have to come up with more complicated thoughts.”
A live music session, real-time visual coding, Rubik’s cube solving, graffiti wall of virtual reality and augmented reality paintings, and pop-up T-shirts that show a visual image on scanning — with such interactive entertainment stops, the event was packed with activities that guaranteed both fun and learning. Highlighting that experimenting is always a good option for all the tech world’s newbies, Varun signed off telling, “My suggestion is to learn more about Web3 and look into it. This is where the art world is currently focussing on.”