The IDAF 2019 the start of the future of art

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The International Digital Arts Festival

This year on the 26^th-27^th of June the UK saw its first blockchain art dedicated festival (international digital arts festival). Held in central Manchester, the event hosted some fantastic and original art all centred around the digital format. Manny blockchain art projects contributed art to the event. the skill displayed by the artists on the show was truly phenomenal. the average art exhibition shows the lack of originality that runs rampant in the art industry today. But at the IDAF truly inspired and unique was the theme.

26 June • SPEAKER line-up +
DIGITAL Art Gallery Private viewing
17:00 —

Simona Pop (@Sim_Pop) Co-Founder & CMO @ethBounties

James Morgan (@jimbob_87) Co founder of @BlockRocketTech

Sascha Bailey CEO & Co-Founder @Blockchainartex

Begoña Garrido Market Manager @auctionity pic.twitter.com/tP2xcs9w1H

— iDAF_Mcr (@IdafMcr) June 21, 2019

Some of the highlights other than our own artists included the Giff art produced by Hackatao https://twitter.com/Hackatao . Hackatao even went so far as to produce a work celebrating the IDAF in an edition of 23.

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Last night's talk went fantastic. Talked about art and how we got to where we are and where we are heading featured work by the amazing @Zyralynn_art and @leonardovincent.art ... will post the whole thing to YouTube soon! Can you guess the relevance of the Napoleon painting? #art #cryptoart #crypto #Bitcoin #CryptoNews #ethereum #talk #btc #artwork #presents #elonmusk #pewdiepie

A post shared by Blockchain Art Exchange ? (@blockchainartex) on Jun 27, 2019 at 6:21am PDT

With all blockchain events, the Talks were an important part of the event. Speakers from all sectors of art took part and some truly out of the box ideas presented. An immersive art installation with the primary goal of expanding the everyday experience we have with social media and the internet from micro to macro. I really don’t think I can do the full explanation of this work justice but please check out https://twitter.com/dejhati and https://twitter.com/aniacatherine the visionary artists behind this work.

On the first day of talks, I spoke about the art industry and how it has become more about rocks in a box than real art will realise a full video on this soon. The real event happened on the second day. When a speaker pulled out last minute and Sarah Martin an artist on our platform put together a speech in 40 minutes and spoke about how process of creation in art.

Auctionity https://www.auctionity.com/ held a live stream auction of crypto art after the first night’s talks. This culminated in the sale of 4 crypto artworks all for highly respectable prices.

The final talk of the two days was from DADA NYC up until now I haven’t understood what DADA’s platform is about. However, this talk gave a real view into how blockchain can be used to create micro-economies within a greater economic structure that are totally voluntary to engage with. Being a pretty big free market fan myself I’m not much of a fan of systems based on redistribution and total equity. But DADA’s platform and mission are respectable, and I would even say the best way I’ve heard of any sort of system based on these kinds of economics. The main reason for me saying this is it based entirely on voluntary participation, which is something I talked about in an old YouTube video I posted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI-6C6JF8Eo

Overall the IDAF event was fantastic but a real reminder that this space needs to expand. We felt a little like an echo chamber but that is the challenge we all face in this industry the onboarding process.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting the videos of mine and Sarah’s talks and sending the rest to the other speakers for them to decide what to do with them.

Now for some of the featured artworks, we included in our part of the expo