NFTs and Web3 take over Miami during Art Week

Burgeoning digital technologies like NFTs and Web3 took center stage in Miami during the city’s Art Week this year, set to coincide with the annual Art Basel Miami art fair. At the Center for Visual Communication in Miami, a group of Argentinean artists presented a new machine for the scanning and creation of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) based on physical artworks. Their invention, called the Sublimart Machine, creates a high-resolution digital scan of an artwork with an array of lights at varying angles, before cutting it with a laser in a specific pattern that is used to prove that the subsequently created digital image of the artwork, or NFT, is based on the original unique artwork. “We cut the physical artwork with a specific cryptographic trace that shows that the physical artwork does not exist anymore,” says Sebastian Wain, cofounder of Sublimart. “And then we create an NFT connected with these traces, so the owner of the NFT knows that he or she has a unique artwork.” The team went further to showcase the technology by providing visitors with virtual reality headsets to observe the scanned artworks in a virtual gallery after they were destroyed.