One of the most common associations with digital collectibles is the platform Opensea - an online marketplace for the buying and selling of digital collectible art. Marketplaces such as Opensea are important not only for supporting this exchange but also, in a broader sense, for supporting digital artists and the digital art market. When it comes to applying these tokens to museums and other cultural institutions, however, there is an opportunity to experiment beyond simply the exchange value.
For example, since the ‘earlier days’ of web3 (2011-onwards), there has been a flourishing movement of experimentation in using blockchain as an extended artform. One such example is Max Dovey’s Respiratory Mining in which Dovey uses human breath to mine cryptocurrencies on the Monero blockchain - an exploration of the entwinement of human and computational labor and financial profit.
And not only are there individuals such as Dovey capitalizing on blockchain technology (and other digital media) as a medium, there are also new media cultural organizations and digital labs such as the Furtherfield gallery, the Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), and Alt-w LAB developing as spaces that facilitate the exploration of this work.
This use of blockchain as a medium highlights an important step towards adding cultural value to digital collectibles. Likewise, cultural institutions can be inspired by this idea when considering the use of digital collectibles as a fundraising or sales tool.
Cultural institutions have always tended to be risk averse when it comes to digital technologies. According to Trends Watch from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), museums take a more conservative approach to digital technologies, using the luxury of time to watch and learn about which technology is worthwhile before engaging with it. This is unsurprising considering many cultural institutions are resource, time, and financially strained and consequently lack the opportunities to be spaces for high-risk innovation.
But, in early 2021, there was a sudden change in perspective around digital collectibles. The hype and excitement around these tokens brought an influx of interest from museums and galleries. For example, larger institutions such as the British Museum and the Uffizi Galleries engaged in using digital collectibles as a sales device to sell tokenized versions of their collections.
Similarly, smaller institutions also joined the excitement. Galleries such as the Whitworth created a reconceptualisation of their piece Ancient of Days by William Blake using multi-spectral software and expertise from the gallery. Then they sold this new work as a digital collectible to fund projects for their local communities.
Each of these cases use digital collectibles as a sales device. However, the Whitworth applied its mission statement into its process by engaging with academic expertise and using art in a social and community-driven way. This can be defined as the starting point of a digital collectible museological practice - an approach to developing digital collectibles that considers the values of a cultural institution and aims to embody them in a digital collectible campaign. The museological practice toward digital collectibles does not necessarily mean organizations should simply apply their profits from campaigns to fund social causes. It means they need to innovatively think about the ways digital collectibles can play a role in carrying out their mission.
Values differ from institution to institution; so this museological digital collectible approach will be unique to each project, and will require internal reflection on the part of the organization as well as strategic partnerships with web3 collaborators who share their values.
As the emerging field of digital collectibles starts to grow, this values-based museological digital collectible practice will become increasingly significant for cultural institutions if they want to create a project that is unique and reflective of the institution’s identity. After all, cultural institutions are producers of cultural value, and digital collectibles should be an extension of this idea.
