The Signature: Exploring Time & Provenance in NFT Art.

“The Signature” is a conceptual art project that explores the importance of the provenance of an artwork in relation to it being used as an NFT.

It is simple: anyone can mint a “signature” piece at any time. All “The Signature” NFT pieces are exactly the same on-chain SVG. There is no capped supply. The premise is that, whomever mints the work at a specific time and what provenance a piece attracts, is in the longer term, a valuable signal. The blockchain captures both: time and provenance through cryptographic signatures. It’s not necessarily what the artwork is, but also its provenance. The hypothesis is that if a million thieves steal an image and mint it as a million NFTs, it’s not as valuable as the original creator minting it at a later time. Thus, “The Signature” focuses on time and provenance and seeks to emphasise that as a conceptual art project.

The only interface to mint it, is through EtherScan: https://etherscan.io/address/0xcd78b15a249edf0416F89e4BF131fe4416d94FF9#writeContract. To do so, connect your web3 wallet & call the mintSignature() function.

This is deliberate as it puts into context that embedded space in which the artwork exists: that of a blockchain. To see the history of a “signature”, one has to go to a blockchain explore to see who minted, when, and what its provenance is. The metadata is purposefully thin/empty to force a viewer to explore the blockchain. When viewing a “signature” through most NFT platforms or galleries one wouldn’t know how it differs from other pieces.

At the end of the day it seeks to prove and answer the point that the signature of an NFT (where it comes from and when it was minted) is just as important as the art itself in the metadata.

Enjoy.

Thank you to Celeste Zumwalt & Nathan Chen for encouragement & feedback on this project.