From the press release: “Through a series of col­laged draw­ings, paint­ed ges­tures, and lay­ers of atmos­pher­ic col­or that recall dis­tant galax­ies, this video ani­ma­tion ebbs and flows like the nev­er-end­ing crowds that pass through the city and the bod­ies of water that sur­round it. The twist­ing shapes and lines spon­ta­neous­ly mov­ing and shift­ing across the giant cin­e­mat­ic screens will give the view­er the free­dom to be trans­port­ed to oth­er worlds of their own cre­ation. The project was pre­sent­ed by Times Square Adver­tis­ing Coali­tion and curat­ed by Sher­ry Dob­bin, Direc­tor of Times Square Arts, in part­ner­ship with the Cuban Artists Fund.”

Authenticate Digital Art Using SmartStamp’s Blockchain Technology

Emilio Perez took his famous Times Square piece and blockchained the dig­i­tal art file that was used to cre­ate the bill­boards. When an artist elec­tron­i­cal­ly sends a dig­i­tal art­work to anoth­er par­ty, that file already has a dig­i­tal twin and is at risk of being fur­ther dupli­cat­ed and manip­u­lat­ed. Perez’s authen­ti­cat­ed file of Dream Sea­son (2016) is now secure in his dig­i­tal cat­a­logue raison­né even as dupli­cates may exist in cyberspace.

These blockchain authen­ti­cat­ed files can also be dis­tin­guished from all ille­git­i­mate dig­i­tal twins. Should there ever be a ques­tion about the con­tent of that work, even long after Perez is alive, there is strong dig­i­tal foren­sics to prove it belongs to him, even if thou­sands of dupli­cates exist. If anoth­er artist copies parts of his cre­ation, he can also unequiv­o­cal­ly prove he owns every ele­ment of the intel­lec­tu­al property.

How does it work?

• In a sim­ple click, gen­er­ate a cryp­to­graph­i­cal­ly secure, dig­i­tal hash of your data — entire­ly on your own com­put­er with a hash­ing algo­rithm (SHA-256) and blockchain time­stamp your dig­i­tal art file, whether it’s an image, audio, or video. This is the ulti­mate in anonymi­ty, pri­va­cy, pro­tec­tion, and efficiency.
• Smart­Stamp doesn’t even know the con­tent of the file or who hashed it. There is no way to recon­struct the con­tent from any iden­ti­fi­er because we use one-way cryp­to­graph­ic func­tions. After you have trans­ferred the hash of your data to our servers, we embed the hash into the Bit­coin, Ethereum, and Aion blockchains using an eco-friend­ly bina­ry hash tree tech­nol­o­gy (we can col­lect bil­lions of time­stamps into one seed to upload once).
• The inher­ent fea­ture of blockchain tech­nol­o­gy means the hash num­ber will change even if a sin­gle ele­ment of the meta­da­ta in the file is altered.
• The hash num­ber stored on the blockchain ledger acts as a unique iden­ti­fi­er and can there­after be ver­i­fied by any autho­rized user. Even if Smart­Stamp dis­ap­pears, the data will not be wiped off and you can always access it using a third-par­ty ver­i­fi­er such as Chrome File­Hash. This decen­tral­ized nature of blockchain elim­i­nates the prob­lems caused by a ‘sin­gle point of fail­ure’ of data servers.
• No need to use a third-par­ty reg­istry, share your iden­ti­ty, or give details about your art­work for the world to see — espe­cial­ly impor­tant if it’s a work in progress (you can hash the final work and its IP pre­de­ces­sors). The hash is avail­able eter­nal­ly on the blockchain, but your con­tent is not pub­licly exposed unless you share it. Of course, if you want to allow your work to be pub­licly ver­i­fi­able with­out your per­mis­sion, you can add your objects to an art reg­istry, such as our non-prof­it part­ner Artive​.org.

Con­tact us to learn more!