NFTs have given digital artists new ways to earn money by earning their work by introducing scarcity to the market, but other creative fields can also benefit, Operator told the performance of the performance, told Decrypt.
The performing arts have a “similar problem” as digital artists, explained Ania Catherine, who collaborates with employee Dejha Ti as an operator. Prior to the arrival of NFTsCatherine said: “Digital artists were in a position to be in a service industry, to work for advertising companies, the film industry, for entertainment – and then they would have their digital art on the side.”
Performance artists are in an even more challenging position thanks to the short -term nature of their work, she said. “You have an expensive medium to work in performance, because your body, time, space, people, dancers need – and in the end there is nothing to sell.”
That is historically limited implementing artists to “dance in commercials, dance or go on tour and dance behind a musician,” Catherine explained to pay the bills.
Collecting movement
NFTs change the game by enabling performance artists to make permanent, collectable pieces. “What does it look like when someone can have movement as an art object?” she said. That, in turn, makes a form of patronage of people who use movement as an art form possible, who do not want to use it for entertainment, but as a real personal expression. How can we create an infrastructure where it can actually be received in money? “
Operator has applied that thinking on his illustrations ‘Human Unreadable’, a piece with three acts that combines choreography, generative art, blockchain And cryptography that builds into a live performance that must be presented at the end of 2026.
A human unreadable piece. Courtesy: Operator
“What we felt when we first started diving into crypto art was that we missed the presence of the human body,” said Catherine, adding that “we could scroll through platforms early for 20, 30 pages and never see the human form.”
Accordingly, the human illegible form places the human form “in the core” of the artwork, where each of the 400 pieces in the collection represents an “underlying unique dance” that is generated by an algorithm. The work is based on the ‘rich and interesting history’ of Computational Choreography, which extends to the earliest exhibitions for digital art in the ICA in 1967, she explained.
Data storage of human movement data on the Ethereum Blockchain also presented his own challenges, she added. “We definitely had the feeling that we should not use blockchain and artificial blocks in this way,” she said, but was “a little delusion enough” to push through the roadblocks from a technology that was “not meant to communicate the body and dance.”
The end result investigates and interrogates the technology behind generative art, she explained. “In the way in which something spatial location -specific or location, location -specific, can be human illegible, location -specific to long form, generative art on the chain is.”
The perseverance of the operator has paid off, whereby the human unreadable yields the Experiential Award with the recent Digital Art Awards. It joins a bracket of gongs on their shelf with two lumens prices, an S+T+Arts Prize and an ADC price – “those technical design prizes,” said Catherine, “but we won them for experience design and things.”
Out of the market
And although the NFT art market may be in the Goldrums, with trade volumes that crash from $ 2.9 billion to just $ 23.8 million in the first quarter of 2025 in 2021, artists still want to explore the possibilities of the underlying technology, Catherine said.
“Artists don’t create a market,” she said Decrypt. “They create because they have a curiosity or a question or a drive, or something touches them out.”
And although it is still important for artists to “make money with the value they bring to the world through their field,” she said, it should not be a surprise that they continue to push the limits. “Most artists don’t do it for the money or for the market. They often do it despite the bad conditions of those things,” she said. “Artists will always make art.”
Published by Andrew Hayward