Sacred Artificiality

Carlos Marcial is a crypto artist based in Mexico City. Carlos first discovered Bitcoin in 2012 and became a major proponent of the currency. It led him to eventually discover crypto art in 2009 and he has not looked back since. Today, he is one of the only crypto artists to fully support himself through sales of his rare digital artworks. Can digital art or crypto art made with the help of Artificial Intelligence be (or become) sacred? Does it help if the AI (Style Transfer GANs) is trained and informed with art from various ancestral indigenous communities of Mexico that saw art as a way of portraying the sacred, and as a gateway to the sacred? In a world evermore defined by our digital practices, the fact that these artworks were created using a mix of 3D animation, blockchain-based distributed GPU rendering, and Artificial Intelligence for the textures and materials, makes them certainly rare, unique and special, but can it make them "digitally sacred"? There are the questions that "Sacred Artificiality" is trying to raise and bring into the crypto art/digital art debate. All of the (4) animations presented in this collection were animated inside a 3D software, rendered out using the Render Token (created by Octane, one of the most important players in the CGI industry) and the blockchain, and then textured using Artificial Intelligence.