Nevermined was part of Boom Festival’s journey into NFTs and Web3

At Nevermined, we leverage the power of NFT tech to add utility to digital assets. That’s a broad vision, with massive applicability, we know.

So, sometimes we ask our in-house teams to hook up with interesting partners to connect with the Web3 community and explore the possibilities of our tech stack. The below article tells the team’s experience of this year’s Boom Festival.

Boom Festival psychedelia culture is now closer to decentralization, thanks to its experimentation with Web3 and NFTs that took over the festival’s art space.

• First of all, we were excited that Boom Festival featured a gallery, purely dedicated to NFT art.
• Secondly, there were truly impressive immersive performances, culminating into first-ever performance NFTs.
• And finally, we were impressed by the program of talks and workshops that provided Boomers with insights and education around topics of decentralization and crypto art.

We once more teamed up with Art Progression Now, alongside Loominate and Arroz Estudios to create a mini version of Rare Effect (twitter, instagram).

Fine Art NFTs

Based on this year’s festival theme, The Anthropocene, the NFT gallery was infused with the festival’s historic relationship to visionary psychedelic art as well as to elements of an era that is marked by the human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

The exhibition included 40+ works by 37 artists, including Mueu, Eloh, Camila Nogueira, Sean Mick, and photographer José Ramos. Burst_ displayed his new Ｒａｉｎｂｏｗ Ｐｏｒｔａｌ physical piece, which is AR enabled. And Filippo Fiumani exhibited Inner Eye, which has both a physical installation and a digital twin.

The artworks on display were minted as NFTs and sold on chains and marketplaces that the artists themselves selected. The entire collection was aggregated on rareeffect.io for easy viewing and was available to visit remotely during 1 month after the festival started at the virtual NFT museum Musee Dezentral.

The NFT sales agreement reflected Boom’s commitment to environmental and social-economic sustainability. Every NFT sold at Boom had a split revenue embedded to redirect funds to the Reforestation and Boom Karuna projects.

Envisionary Art Lounge Highlights

Besides the permanent screen-based exhibition, the Envisionary Art Lounge featured performances, live painting and auctions, providing a stage for various collectives to display their work and conduct experiments in front of a live audience.

Phantazonia presented their cutting-edge, interactive performance Ancient Cyborgs. This simulated the upload of a soul into the metaverse by ancient cyborg creatures. MuLabs created The Voxel Cube, which projected the performer’s brain waves into a 2,5-meter translucid cube.

This led to the first-ever performance NFTs at Boom Festival, which were made from footage that was edited and then minted.

Digital artist Android Jones, who has been supporting Boom Festival since its debut edition in 1998, used this space to hold daily auctions. These featured artwork created for previous Boom editions, had no reserve price and were ruled by a ‘’pay now — take as is’’ policy, raising the interest of many visionary art lovers.

As a process it was interesting to see this Lounge benefiting from the support of the Rare Effect community. Decentralization was the guiding principle throughout the entire process, from curation to production, allowing everyone who wanted to contribute, regardless of their position or assigned duties, to impromptu offer their knowledge.

Building Meaningful Tools

With Nevermined, we have been assisting various cultural and social organizations in their transition to the decentralized technology stack.

Supporting artistic activities like this has been a key component of our community-centric design, in which we learn on the ground what the real needs of creatives are. This allows us to experiment with ways to address them in a meaningful way while ensuring that we are building relevant tools and meeting our company goals.

So, representing Nevermined, Dimitri De Jonghe and myself spoke at the Main and NGO stages about what this new entry to Web3 meant to Boom Festival and how Web3 is kicking off the age of self-agency for visionary creatives.

What’s Coming Next?

Rare Effect 3 is happening in October 2022 around the same time as ETH Lisbon. This edition is expanding to other cultural venues in the city that are embracing Web3 and NFTs, maintaining Arroz Estudios as the main venue and cultural programmer.

Nevermined will focus on exhibiting experimental content, taking the opportunity to show off all of the cool results of the work we’ve been doing over the last few months with pristine artists we greatly admire. Expect some artificial intelligence-powered interactive installations.

If you want to stay up to date about Rare Effect 3, the Twitter account is the place to be.

Article written by Cintia Aguiar Pinto for Nevermined in close collaboration with Dimitri De Jonghe. Grateful for the support from Keyko, Gianluca Boccadifuoco, Loominate, Jesse Steele, Patrick Caire, Arroz Estudios, Steven MacKay, Cátia Ciriaco, Gaylord Warner.

Huge shoutout to BOOM festival, Android Jones, Phantazonia, Phoenix Strauss & Stevie, Rivka Dette, Gene Kogan, Mulabs, Francisco Marques-Teixeira, Carlotta Premazzi, Musee-Dezentral, Fabu Chao, Because Art Matters and all members of Art Progression Now

About Nevermined

Nevermined builds developer tools and templates to unlock the next-level utility behind NFT technology and turn anything and everything into a Web3-ready asset.

If you would like to know more about our products or want to have a chat, please reach out to us via the website or in our Discord.

If you enjoyed this article let us know by clapping or leaving your comment below!

Want to read more about Rare Effect & Art Progression Now?

1. The RareEffect exhibition
   https://medium.com/keyko/the-rare-effect-exhibition-50c1b3fb77d0
2. Rare Effect: Empowering creatives with NFTs & Experiences https://medium.com/keyko/rare-effect-empowering-creatives-with-nfts-experiences-94b65ee6bb27
3. Introducing Arts 3.0
   https://medium.com/keyko/building-rare-effect-decentralized-virtual-and-interactive-c61e68d1e787
4. Rethinking Provenance, Ownership and the Distribution of Art https://medium.com/keyko/rethinking-provenance-ownership-and-the-distribution-of-art-d3191bbfa01f

Originally posted on 2022-09-29 on Medium.