The winner of the third Niftorian Art Jam contest has been announced as Colin Goldberg with his piece ‘This Owl Spent Too Much Time at the Club’. Colin is well known in art, design, and technology circles for his work and for helping form the Techspressionism community of artists.
The theme of this contest was owls, using the outline of the Niftorian profile photo (PFP) mascot. The announcement was made on Niftorian’s Discord channel on 6th December by co-founder Roger Kibbe. The runners-up were users ‘HOOpster4’ and ‘Niftorious Catarina Lover’ with their pieces ‘ Super HOOro’ and ‘Owl Beginning to Fly’.
The Art Jam contest was conceived as a way to showcase artists and help introduce them to NFTs. The top prize was 0.1111 ETH. The contest ran for four days with three finalists chosen by a jury of judges consisting of the Niftorious leadership and artists.
The Niftorian Project
The contest was the third Art Jam organised by the Niftorian NFT community. The project was set up as a community to bring together new NFT artists and collectors to, “turn NFT creation and collection into a team sport.” The project supports artists who want to create NFTs but don’t know how to go about it. They have just launched the sale of their Founder’s Collection Mint Pass NFTs which were created by fourteen accomplished artists, nine of whom had not produced an NFT previously. The Mint Passes will give access to the full range of Niftorian PFPs being announced later this month. Niftorian offers a wide range of support for artists, including:
- Artist NFT Accelerator, to help artists new to NFTs with the technology and other aspects of creating a collection
- 100 Artist NFT Show in 2022
- Art Jam contests
- Mint Passes
- Community for artists and collectors
- NFT University
- NFT research
- NFT news
The Winner – Techspressionism Pioneer
Goldberg says that the Art Jam contest presented him with an opportunity to have some fun with a creative assignment. He adds, “I never expected to win, and it’s a great surprise and honor. I used Adobe Illustrator to create two different digital drawings riffing on the original owl illustration and created a simple transition effect in Adobe Animate that was output as a looping GIF. I started creating vector-based digital drawings in the late 1990s with my Metagraph series. These works have become the basis for my first NFT releases on Foundation.”
Goldberg was born in the Bronx and grew up on Long Island, but now lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont with his wife and daughter. He created his first digital drawings and ASCII art animations as a high school student in the 1980’s. He was also into the BBS (Bulletin Board System) scene at that time, which he thinks informs a lot of the culture and aesthetic of today’s NFT scene. In 2005, he returned to school to complete an MFA in Computer Art from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
His studio practice bridges multiple disciplines, notably painting, printmaking, photography, and digital media. He says, “One of my undergraduate professors was a New York School Abstract Expressionist painter named Angelo Ippolito. He was a big influence on me and he got me interested in abstraction.”
Goldberg has formed a community of artists working with technology. He commented, “I coined the term “Techspressionism” as the title for a solo exhibition in 2011, and it has since developed into a project that I consider to be a decentralized social sculpture. Over the course of the pandemic, Techspressionism grew into an online community of over 250 artists working with technology from more than 35 countries. The working definition of Techspressionism is “An artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience.”
Bullish on NFTs
He has already produced several NFTs from his art and has released them on Foundation. He feels, “NFTs already have become an incredible agent of change for the art world; they present an opportunity for artists working with technology to connect directly with collectors and to become collectors themselves. Crypto in general has also opened up collecting to an entirely different demographic. I believe that the NFT phenomenon will fundamentally change the role and definition of the artist in today’s society moving forward.”
Goldberg will be bringing his experience of merging art and technology to the Niftorian project when he joins this week as an adviser. He is @colingoldberg on Instagram.
