@auraticclaysts

This project started with the appearance of NFTs and blockchain, and with questions about what will happen to the physical art forms with so much digital oriented art? How will the physical ones be represented in digital mediums? I eventually concluded that digital mediums lack a unique quality, a specific ingredient called 'aura' by Walter Benjamin. This absence resulted in a lower value perception of digitally created art forms. The NFT and blockchain are only introducing a sort of artificial scarcity to something that inherently lacks aura, a piece of art that is only made to be an original and to be tracked and acknowledged as an original. To surpass the usual purpose of NFTs, the concept of Clayst was created. A Clayst is the same piece of wild clay that keeps changing its form and use. When you get a Clayst, you get a part of each previous owner's story and a piece of their existence. You get all that it has become with each handling. Additionally, you get to explore the original through its documented digital copies of the past forms. The aura of the physical Claysts can exist because of the digital medium that the reincarnations live on. It's a symbiotic relationship between the physical Clayst and its digital copies. If one of them ceases to exist, the aura disappears. Because of this documentation, the very piece of clay becomes an NFT but superior. Its Instagram account is the blockchain on which the NFT exists. It's the blockchain of all the things it's been before. However, instead of just keeping track of who owns the original, instead of saying “this is the original block of clay”, it should be acknowledged that it grows aura because of its digitised reincarnations. Therefore, a Clayst acts like a complete summarisation and materialisation of aura.

@andreeamabel