The New Digital Art Form

by Brontë Mansfield (MA 2017)

In 2021, a piece of artwork sold for $69.3 million dollars at Christie’s—the third-highest price ever realized by a living artist at auction. While other works would be whisked away from the auction block by white-gloved hands and packed by art handlers, this piece was different: it doesn’t exist in the physical world at all.

​​Everydays: The First 5000 Days by an artist known as Beeple is an NFT, or “non-fungible token.” In the simplest terms, an NFT is a way of making a digital object (e.g., an image, animated GIF, or video) unique on the internet. NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital assets purchased with cryptocurrency, and their ownership is tracked in an online record called the blockchain.

It’s rare to witness the birth of a new artistic medium—just think about the many centuries of distance between drawing, painting, or sculpting and the first grainy photograph of rooftops from a 19th-century French window—but it is extraordinary to watch an entire system of ownership and value emerge seemingly overnight.

For some School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alums who have been making in the digital space for years, NFTs are the latest development in a wild online world that has felt innovative from the start. Two alums shared their recent NFTs and thoughts on the future of digital art.

“It was like Paris circa 1920,” Kate Steciw remembered of her first encounters with artists online more than a decade ago. While working on a masters of fine art in photography at SAIC, Steciw stumbled across fellow artists on Tumblr. “We all started to find each other, doing funny stuff with images, and thinking about images and how they’re circulated, and how they’re consumed in this particular culture.”

It was Tumblr that brought together Steciw and her long-time collaborator, Rachel de Joode. Recently, the duo created four images to “mint” as NFTs. The inspiration behind pieces like Spaces with Atmosphere springs from Steciw and de Joode both being middle-aged women working in a digital art space dominated by younger men. 

The pair took “these filters that are used to make your [Instagram] Reels look extra sexy and extra whatever, and appl[ied] them to really weird stuff like a gross old slipper,” Steciw said. “We just thought it was kind of funny to start using these filters on our middle-aged female lives.”

To Steciw, the process of making and selling NFTs is surreal. “Generationally having bridged that gap between no internet and internet, there’s an access to the absurd that we’re always trying to exploit, where we’re like, Wait, that is just so dumb that we do this.” One of these NFTs recently sold for 0.25 Ethereum, a cryptocurrency amount that is equivalent to about $785 USD.