The APENFT Foundation aims to collect meaningful stories and promote the fusion of finance and culture and art in the metaverse, and will do so by building three main pillars: acquisition of culturally significant NFT artworks, investment and incubation of NFT projects and creation of NFT marketplace. Recently, APENFT Foundation and TRON announced the formal establishment of the . In the future, support will be launched on a regular basis through open call, art grants and artist in Residence programmes. In addition to financing artistic creations, the Art Dream Fund will also provide support and professional guidance to selected artists and artworks in various aspects such as marketing and PR, community building and copyright protection in the NFT space. “Our goal is to introduce a group of incredible creators to the world of NFTs, empower them to explore new methods of creation, and share that opportunity to their communities,” siad Sydney Xiong, APENFT Art director and curator.
Second Life” is a concept closely related to the metaverse and NFT is seen as the “ticket to the metaverse”. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, both utopian and dystopian visions of Web3.0 the Internet have been put forth, capturing the emergence of increasing complexities and variability of human life and hybrid experiences. We are now living in the digital golden age, enjoying tremendous technological and scientific progress with accelerating development of blockchain, NFT and chain games bringing people’s vision of the metaverse closer to reality than ever before.
When our lives and social relationships have become more closely intertwined with technology as social mediation, what kind of religious worship, new artistic origins, literary inspirations, and subversive scientific discoveries will be brought by mankind’s vision of the Metaverse? What is the nature of reality? What is the purpose and meaning of Second Life? What does this mean for human consciousness, including all experiences, feelings and emotions? What will the future look like when you, as artists, participate in the construction of the Metaverse through digital art? We invite artists to portray their dream lives and futures through digital media. As technology profoundly changes the way we play, learn, organize, socialize, and create, there is an urgent need to explore what a highly intelligent and networked society requires us to be and what a high-tech, but humanized world would look like. Art Dream Fund hopes to unleash and resource bold and unbridled creativity by inspiring artists to present their Second Life — a story that has yet to unfold.
There are three awards in this themed call, including grant prize award of $20,000, best creativity awards of $10,000 and best category awards of $5000. In addition, artists will receive publicity and exposure on TRON and APENFT social media, and will have the opportunity to be featured in the APENFT’s marketplace launch event and participate in the APENFT virtual exhibition.
Digital art is an open field full of unknown possibilities, with inclusive and borderless artistic characteristics. This themed call encourages the exploration and interpretation of any art form on the theme “Second Life”，and any digital art media and styles are accepted. How digital art and crypto art become a new, independent and self-consistent art form? How do they facilitate creative thinking and challenge uncharted territories? Those are the new questions APENFT hopes creators will answer through their works. The themed open is open to artists and creators working in all disciplines with no restrictions on age, region, or occupation. Entries can be submitted individually or as a group or community. Group work is highly encouraged in the NFT space where people value community spirit.
Artists have one month to submit their artworks before November 27th. The award announcement will be made on December 10th. Justin Sun, founder of Tron, Sydney Xiong, APENFT art director and curator, and 3 anonymous NFT art experts will select winning pieces based on five key criteria: aesthetic & creativity, ideas & concepts, technical skills, relevance and artist’s statement. “I hope that the establishment of our Art Dream Foundation can bring about a paradigm shift in the creator economy by giving all-round support to creators who wish to contribute to the NFT art ecosystem with creative thinking,” said TRON CEO and Founder Justin Sun.
About APENFT
Formally registered and established on March 29, 2021, APENFT is backed by the underlying technology of top-notch blockchains Ethereum and TRON with support from the world’s largest distributed storage system Bittorrent File System (BTFS) to deliver the mission of registering world-class artworks as NFTs on the blockchain. The collection of the APENFT Foundation includes artworks by Picasso, Andy Warhol, and crypto artists Beeple, Pak, etc., as well as other high-end NFT collectibles of various categories such as Punks avatars and EtherRock, with a total value of more than $46 million. APENFT Foundation has successfully sponsored the “Art + Technology’’ Summit at Christie’s in New York. In the future, it will curate a series of online and offline exhibitions with world-renowned artists and facilitate high-end IP collaboration.
About TRON
Founded by Justin Sun in 2017, TRON is an ambitious project dedicated to building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet. The TRON Protocol, one of the largest blockchain operating systems in the world, adopts an energy efficient dPoS consensus mechanism to provide high throughput, high scalability, and high availability for decentralized applications in the TRON ecosystem through collaboration with key business partners including global tech giant Samsung, Opera, Poloniex, Swisscom Blockchain, and many more. With over 58 million registered users and over 2.5 billion transactions, TRON is the world’s fastest-growing public chain and it is now among the world’s three major public chains.
