The text with the author’s voice is now an audio-work, a unique piece certified by technology (NFT): Our life is changing, I want to see what’s beyond
I wanted to cross the hill into a new valley, a place where there is already something that is destined to change our lives. So I went to see. Alessandro Baricco starts from here to explain what lies behind his new project: Novecento. The Source Code. That is, the audio of his reading aloud of the famous theatrical monologue – recorded on New Year’s Day – that the writer has decided to make into a unique digital piece. A work certified by an act of authenticity (Nft, Non-fungible token) through technology blockchain, which uses cryptography, as happens in the world of crypto art.
Collaborating with a team of experts, Baricco is the first Italian author to perform an operation of this type for a literary work. The audio file of Twentieth century you can already listen to it for free on a dedicated platform (opensea.io/nvcnt) and will then go on sale in March as a collector’s item, a unique and unrepeatable number zero. As if it were the original canvas of a painting.
Baricco, in 2018 you published the essay The Game (Einaudi Stile Libero), calling the digital civilization in which we find ourselves with this name. It indicated rhythm, dynamism, and spectacularity among the characteristics of this civilization, borrowed from video games and in contrast with the blocked and closed systems of the twentieth century. How the NFT and its twentieth century fit in. The Source Code in this path?
In the meantime, my project is a NFT. Still not everyone knows what this abbreviation means but this digital object represents the development of Game which, together with artificial intelligence, will probably change our habits more. A bit like what apps were ten years ago. NFTs are digital works available for free, of which only one copy is certified, as could be done for a coin. In fact we use the term “coin”, to mint in English. This original is then sold to collectors, to people who wish to own it. It has been happening for about four years and mostly it deals with contemporary digital art objects, often visual. So I thought: “I want to understand this world, I want to enter it”, and a literary NFT came to mind. For me it was like writing another chapter of The Game.
Why did you create a voice-only file and why did you choose Novecento?
I could have filmed myself writing the first page of my new novel. You can do anything, but for this product I thought the ideal would be some sort of Twentieth century, period and end. The text is in fact almost thirty years old and has inspired everything: in addition to the theatrical monologue, it is read as a book (Feltrinelli, 1994), it has been transposed to the cinema, it has even become a puppet show … for some time I felt the desire to recover the sound originally from Twentieth century, the music from when I wrote it. For the past two or three years, Covid permitting, I have been going to read it myself in theaters. I did shows, a video that will come out in a few months. So when the idea of the NFT came up I said to myself: “I want to record my voice without any effect”. Recover, in fact, the Source Code of a text which is basically the “source code” of all my work. The result is an audio file of 80 megabytes that lasts 85 minutes. And I like that, when it came to giving it a name, what most represented it was a computer expression. My souls and my works of years were united.
What will be the fate of your NFT now?
On the OpenSea platform you can listen to it, duplicate it, send it to friends. It will then be sold at auction in March. But even if there is an owner, everyone will be able to continue listening to him. A new idea of work, business, author.
What types of works embody the NFT canon? Do they change the concept of beauty and taste?
Indeed, there are different aesthetic logics and even ethics. Let’s say that the progenitor of these works could be conceptual art. Often among the NFT there is a sense of deformed reality, a certain taste for the maniacal and the obsessive, for the neurotic, for example the same character remade in all colors. This does not mean that there are no interesting art projects.
The work Everydays: the first 5000 days by digital artist Beeple exceeded $ 69 million at auction.
a very nice job. But this is a record figure, there are also those who spend 40-50 euros having fun investing in art. Everything is then bought in cryptocurrency. So we can say that we are faced with an integral experience of metaverse, what in The Game I called the underworld: a second digital universe that rotates with the first, physical one. The phenomenon had already begun with social networks, but now we are transferring entire portions of life to this overworld: money, art, cultural consumption. And the two worlds, by now, only together constitute reality.
What impact will it have on today’s digital civilization?
The NFT perspective allows us to see a trajectory. If already certain digital objects, such as a coin or a work of art, can be authenticated, minted, thanks to the system blockchain, the latter – in perspective – can be used for everything. In time, it is likely that we ourselves as individuals will “conjoin” and then we will be able to start buying and selling things, making contracts, voting digitally but absolutely certified. Many also see into the system blockchain above all the possibility of reducing mediations and mediators. An ambition that was on top of the utopias of Game, which we can say essentially failed in the 10s of the 2000s, but which is now returning.
Disintermediation has failed, for example, for social networks.
That first phase did not bring the freedom and quality of life we expected. But now the world of blockchain disintegrates everything. My work, for example, will come into contact with the entire blood system of the world with very few and very light mediations. The most significant aspect of all that is technology blockchain not owned by anyone but shared by those who use it. Cryptocurrencies are not validated by banking institutions, on the contrary they were born after the 2008 crisis precisely to cut them out. I don’t know if this road will lead us to a better or worse world, but it helps to understand where we are going.
Does a certain technological complexity make this understanding difficult?
There are cultural obstacles, of mental logic, of habit. But inevitably everything will simplify: technology works to make itself accessible to as many people as possible. That said, a guy can invest in cryptocurrencies without too much difficulty today.
The digital push. And then the pandemic that shows the flaws in the current capitalist system. Will the model change?
While twentieth-century institutions continue to be exasperatingly slow, digital civilization has yet to express itself at its best. It is therefore there that those seeking change must probably look. The direction of the blockchain one of the most fraught with possible consequences. Just think of the so-called Dao companies, which already exist.
Decentralized autonomous organizations, also based on the blockchain.
They are companies organized in a completely different way from our joint stock companies or srl. A lot of money is already moving into the quadrilateral blockchain-cryptocurrencies-Nft-Dao. this is the valley to know: surely one of the promised lands, even if we don’t know yet if it will be heaven or hell.
January 15, 2022 (change January 15, 2022 | 12:10)
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