An NFT is a token on a blockchain. It acts as a contract, the blockchain is a ledger. A blockchain is very difficult to manipulate, and actions are publicly recorded. As such, an NFT can provide a transparent way to make secure transactions, and to transfer or authorise ownership. Blockchain trades are paid for in cryptocurrencies. The best known is arguably Bitcoin – which is notorious for its extremely high energy use.

Since the spring of 2021, I have been experimenting with NFTs as a partial solution to the distribution, authorisation, and monetisation of digital media. I work with Tezos, a blockchain with a very small energy footprint.

Learning about cryptocurrencies and blockchains presented quite a learning curve, especially for someone like me with an antipathy to numbers. In April 2021, I wrote down my impressions of the process in a reflection piece for one of my blogs: ‘First notes on NFTs’. The text following the image below is a slightly revised version.

First Notes on NFTs

To be honest, I had never heard of cryptoart or NFTs until two months ago. For someone who spends an awful lot of time in the digital realm, thinking about screen culture, this feels like a bit of a blamage. I attribute my blind spot to Twitter, where the crypto action seems to be happening.

What are NFTs?
There is no shortage of explanations online, which saves me the trouble of defining them in detail. Here’s one from The Verge, for example.

Anyway, NFTs came to my attention – and no doubt many others’ – when Beeple’s compilation Everydays: The First 5,000 Days was auctioned at Christie’s for the equivalent of 50 million euros in the cryptocurrency Ether. It was bought by someone who defies all conventional notions of ultra-wealthy art collectors.

The media frenzy that followed – fuelled, as always, by the obsession with money –brought NFTs into the mainstream.

Understanding NFTs: A challenge
Cryptocurrency is abstract enough, but NFTs make it even harder to explain their meaning, mechanics and problems to those unfamiliar with digital economies. It took me more than two weeks of intensive reading just to get a rough grasp of the subject, which is still evolving rapidly.

Depending on who you ask, NFTs are either a Ponzi scheme or a revolutionary shift in the art market. As usual, they are a mixture of both, and everything in between.

For me, and for many visual artists whose work is inherently digital, NFTs offer a partial solution to a problem that has existed since computers became artistic tools: in what form can a digitally born work exist in the physical world?

Making Digital Work Tangible

Some media lend themselves naturally to physical translation. Immersive video installations work well because projection is in keeping with the inherent immateriality of digital images. Other cases require more creative solutions, such as the privately commissioned digital video piece Chisel (2017), or the Three Motions of Loom tapestries (2019), which successfully bridged the digital and physical thanks to the jacquard weaving process, itself closely related to computing. The vinyl record The Compositor/Composing (2020) is another example.

But as much as I love paper, printing a digital image has always felt like too much of a compromise. The work transforms into something completely different, often losing its intangible integrity. While projection can be an appropriate way to present digital work, not all animation is meant to be immersive or suitable for a screen in an exhibition space.

A relevant example is Fundamental Mechanics, a series of ultra-short animations I created using Instagram Stories. For me, this was a way to experiment with animation at the level of everyday consumer technology. It meant working within the constraints of a mediocre smartphone, limited file sizes and the available emoji and GIPHY stickers.

The series was made on a mobile device screen, using it as a canvas. It made sense to keep it in the same ecosystem, rather than polishing it up an installation, or for a professional screen. The animation series works best in its native environment: displayed on a computer device. But how does that translate to exhibitions and what does that mean for the presentation of animations as objects in physical spaces?

Writing these words in 2025, the insanity of the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022 luckily came to an end. There were – and still are – problems with overproduction of NFTs, especially since artificial intelligence was added to the ‘generative art’ mix.

NFTs are suffering from a rather bad reputation, in part due to the low quality ‘art’ associated with the field, but also because of the rampant amateurism and lack of art expertise of both ‘creators’ and platforms.

On the other hand, I – and others – believe in the potential of the technology; it has proven itself as a useful tool for authorising and monetizing born-digital works. They present the only way I can ‘sell’ digital sculptures, for instance.

I use NFTs as an archival storefront, and as a way to distribute parts of the output of my research to new audiences.

Visit a virtual exhibition with some of my minted works here, and an exhibition with a selection of my collected works here (featuring Addie Wagenknecht, Jodi, Jonathan Monaghan, Kelly Richardson, Kevin Abosch, Kenny Schachter, Mario Klingemann, Sasha Stiles, John Gerrard, Lorna Mills, Sara Ludy, Auriea Harvey, and others).

My works have been shown at events such as Art Basel Miami and NFT Paris as part of the a\terHEN platform, and the exhibition ‘Who is online?‘, curated by Anika Meier for VirtualHEK by Haus der Elektronische Künste, Basel.

For Belgian magazine Apache I was interviewed by journalist Frank Olbrechts alongside Jeroen Baert, Ben Caudron and Nina Hendrickx (Zeno X Gallery). In 2022 I published a limited series of columns on the website of Belgian art magazine HART (now GLEAN), highlighting a digital art genre through a work in my collection. I am occasionally taking part in panels, for instance at Oddstream, Nijmegen (NL) with blockchain researcher Inte Gloerich.

I am particularly proud of my partaking in the ‘Unsigned‘ project by Operator and Anika Meier:

“the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned.” – Dr. Helen Gorrill in The Guardian.

Unsigned is a collection of 100 signatures from women and non-binary artists created to reverse the current negative value of the signatures through their transformation into artworks themselves.

Creator address: tz1hHkndmCoSd7LNNK9QZwDJbaWnBmjpQeQX / alexandracrouwers.tez

Creator address: tz2AEvAAomCbAATtt7rBHuXuWXXgs1cAzLwD