«Ascend» reflects the decay of abandoned buildings that will be immortalized recorded in Bitcoin. The work switches between day and night modes, adding interactivity to the experience. In a new historic event for the Bitcoin ecosystem, the 250-year-old auction house Christie's will auction the digital artwork titled “Ascend” on October 10. This is a piece, recorded in the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, and which marks the first appearance in Christiés of non-fungible tokens (NFT) registered in the network developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. The work, created by artists Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexel, became an Ordinal on March 24, 2021 when recorded in Bitcoin at block height 861,310. It fuses photography with cutting-edge 3D technology to digitally regenerate abandoned buildings, as detailed on Christie's official site. «Ascend is the newest piece in their series The Wild Within and is based on a real-world space to which the artists traveled: a ruined sanatorium in Tskaltubo, Georgia, built between 1952 and 1962,» notes on the social network Christie's team. They add that «when explored on the blockchain, the artwork is alive and dynamic: it automatically switches between day and night modes at 7 am and 7 pm every day, synchronized to reflect the time zone of the location of abandoned building in Georgia. The auction house adds on its official site that whoever purchases the work from this lot «will have the option of receiving a custom-sized physical print sent directly by the artist.»
“Ascend” was listed in a mined satoshi on March 24, 2021, the same day it minted the first piece of “The Wild Within” on Ethereum. Source: X/ChristiesDigArt. In an interview earlier this year, Koopmans revealed that The Wild Within series, in which he works with his wife Alice Wexel, consists of photographing physical spaces in the real world, in countries that have gone through dramatic transitions such as Georgia, Lebanon, Armenia, Italy and Poland. After that they become conceptual works of art that are immortalized in the Bitcoin network.
«Our goal is for the work of art to outlive us, and the use of this technology provides a solid means to ensure the digital legacy of the work of art,» said Koopmans, describing his idea of preserving the physical decay of architectural buildings in the enduring nature of Bitcoin as part of its artistic process. Koopmans, who said he had primarily worked on Ethereum before, said that Bitcoin made a big difference for him: “We discovered that we can build an integral work of art by joining together several individual pieces that are all inscribed in the chain.” The largest and oldest auction houses in Europe joined the digital art movement since 2021 when the NFT market, on Ethereum, was booming. Then, in February of last year, there was a boom with Ordinals, after its launch in December 2022. Now, although the boom has cooled, It's time to see if the auctions of works of art registered in Bitcoin extend to other specialized housestaking into account that the British Sotheby's last year launched a collection in Ordinals inspired by Mario Bros., as reported by BitcoinDynamic.