UCLA Art|Sci: Value(s) of NFT-ART
· talk
Alex May joined Christiane Paul, Tamiko Thiel, Victoria Vesna, and Anuradha Vikram for a UCLA Art|Sci panel on NFTs, digital preservation, and environmental impact.
Alex May joined Christiane Paul, Tamiko Thiel, Victoria Vesna, and Anuradha Vikram for UCLA Art|Sci: Value(s) of NFT-ART on Thursday 20 May 2021. The online discussion brought together artists, curators, and writers to examine the rapid rise of NFTs at a moment when excitement, uncertainty, and criticism were colliding across the digital art world.
The panel addressed questions that were especially central to May’s practice: how NFTs relate to the longer history of digital art, what they mean for preservation and archiving, and how artists might respond to the environmental implications of blockchain-based systems. Rather than treating NFTs as a passing hype cycle, the discussion framed them as a site where technical, economic, and cultural questions were becoming newly visible.
For Alex May, the event provided a public context for discussing digital art as something shaped not only by images and interfaces, but by the systems that store, circulate, and legitimise it. That emphasis connects directly to his wider practice, which repeatedly asks how technology changes what we keep, what we lose, and what we think is real.
The event took place at 9:00am PST, 12:00pm EST, and 5:00pm BST. A recording remains available on Vimeo.