Mischief Making: The Visuals for “Loki”

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/mischief-making-the-visuals-for-loki/

Ironically, for a show about the multiplication of time, Loki cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw found the lack of it the biggest challenge. The DP had been chosen by director Kate Herron (Daybreak) and co-executive producer Kevin Wright on the strength of her work including the indie features Palo Alto and The Sun is Also A Star. She is currently shooting Black Panther II for director Ryan Coogler.

“I had previously interviewed for major episodic TV but I have a young son and have been very particular about not taking projects that would take time away from my family so I’d already passed on a few that were interesting.”

There was something about Loki which stars Tom Hiddleston and takes place in a parallel universe (multiverse?) of the Time Variant Authority that persuaded her to say ‘yes’ this time. “I was being asked to shoot the whole thing whereas some shows you are one of a number of DPs or you’re just doing the pilot. With Loki I could have vision that could be carried throughout.

“With six hours of content to deliver you certainly have to work a bit faster in than on a feature but when Covid hit (production halted from March to September 2020) it allowed me to take a break, go back home and continue doing prep from there.”

Time was also a factor in Durald’s camera movement and look for the Marvel show. It’s an aesthetic devised in concert with Herron and production designer Kasra Farahani (Captain Marvel).

When I interviewed for Kate she was also talking with Kasra and that he was already delving into that mid twentieth century modernity in terms of an architectural look for the TVA. I remember being in office looking at his pitch book and realized that his point of view aligned with Kate’s and mine.”

Herron’s references included Blade Runner, Zodiac and Seven as well as Terry Gilliam’s Orwellian classic Brazil.

“The bureaucratic feeling of the TVA and its ‘50s brutalist architecture are Gilliam references. I riffed off those. I enjoy a composed image. I’m a big fan of symmetry and color contrast and sometimes monochromatic worlds so I tried to keep everything very organized. That is kind of what the TVA is – it keeps track of everyone.”

The production leant heavily on physical sets rather than using a stage volume which suited Durald Arkapaw. “Kate drove the idea of doing as much in camera as we could to maintain the feeling of the TVA as an analogue world. Since the TVA is based on time you can feel the ceiling press down on the characters, you feel it because of the way the light falls in a particular way that you only feel because the ceilings are real.”

She adds. “I am very tactile and want to do as much as I can on set, to create texture to the image - meaning I like to shape light onset. If I do filtration I am doing it there not waiting to it in the DI.”

A graduate of the AFI, Durald Arkapaw got involved in skills including camera operation, gaffer, grip and 1st AC and believes lighting is “as essential as another character in a film. I’m very much interested in lighting that drives the story forward.”

Her camera movement in Loki mirrors the very organized TVA world. “Things move a little bit slower there,” she says. “You never have a sense of time in terms of being day or night, the framing is a little softer and more eerie. When we go to the void and our characters meet Alioth (the giant smoke monster in later episodes) we use crane work to make more sweeping moves because they are not sure what is going to happen. There’s a lot of bigger sequences where Alioth is above them so you want the perspective of highs and lows with tracking shots to generate more energy. When we’re in the Roxxcart (shopping mall) we use a lot of handheld to emphasise the mystery and suspense.”

She’d shot mostly with Alexa prior to this but went with Sony Venice after being introduced it by commercials director on a Samsung spot. Marvel execs were also on board with Venice, having just greenlit it for use on Black Widow.

“I think of camera as film stock essentially so while I love the depth of color and contrast and density that the cameras give me I’m always trying to make the digital image more filmic.”

This led to a selection of Panavision anamorphic T series lenses that Dan Sasaki had had expanded and de-tuned to her liking for flare quality, fall off, and focal length.

She also worked with Tom Poole at Company 3 to devise the LUT. “I like to do a lot of grading on set- so that the director is editing with an image that’s as close to final as possible,” she says. “When I am in my final DI it is about trying to make things consistent and fixing things I’m not able to do on set, but I would say our dailies looked very close to the final on Loki.

“Even though each episode introduces a new character or some episodes bring them into different worlds, I still wanted there to be a through line in the way the images are composed – that it looks like one vision. That is the opportunity we get when have the same creative team. We’re sharing it with a second block of people, we’re not handing over the ideas for someone else to continue. So, that’s a great responsibility but also an amazing opportunity because you get a chance to showcase something from start to finish.”

The DI was finished with Matt Watson at Technicolor even while Durald Arkapaw had moved on to Black Panther II.

“At the weekend we’d arrange color sessions online just to catch up and see where the images were at and makde some final tweaks. I like to be on a project start to finish.

Having replaced Rachel Morrison (busy with her own directorial work) on Black Panther II, Durald Arkapaw appears unphased by the spotlight suddenly trained on her.

“The challenges on an indie film are similar to those on a big budget production. That’s something I know other DPs have found too. It’s the way you deal with them that matters. Having really supportive collaborative colleagues that trust you goes such a long way. Everyone on Loki really believed in us to help drive Kate’s vision forward and in turn we supported her. Kate cares so much for every detail and Tom’s attitude was tremendous, a true actor’s leader.

“Time was the only constraint.”

 

Are Voice Actors About To be Replaced by Machines?

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/are-voice-actors-about-to-be-replaced-by-machines/

Worries about digital actors replacing the real thing remain on the horizon but closer to home synthetic voices are already ‘playing’ video-game characters, and acting corporate videos. Could they put human voice talent out of a job? 

As Karen Hao puts it in an article for MIT, “AI voices are also cheap, scalable, and easy to work with.” 

We’re all used to having Alexa and Siri or the digital navigator in our cars talk to us. Often the dialogue is a little clunky. Getting them to sound any more natural has been a laborious manual task. 

Advances in deep learning have changed that. “Voice developers no longer needed to dictate the exact pacing, pronunciation, or intonation of the generated speech,” says Hao. “Instead, they could feed a few hours of audio into an algorithm and have the algorithm learn those patterns on its own.” 

A number of startups are leveraging this to create artificial voice actors for hire. 

Seatlle’s WellSaid Labs claims to create voiceover “with AI voices indistinguishable from real ones”. It invites you to audition different voices based on style, gender, and the type of production you’re working on. 

Capturing these nuances involves finding the right voice actors to supply the appropriate training data and fine-tune the deep-learning models. WellSaid tells MIT that the process requires at least an hour or two of audio and a few weeks of labor to develop a realistic-sounding synthetic replica. 

It also points out that every voice on it platform is built with the “written consent of the talent who lent us their voice to create an AI likeness.” We will never clone someone’s voice without their approval, WellSaid adds. 

Sonantic.io makes voices for video-game characters. “Reduce production timelines from months to minutes by rapidly transforming scripts into audio,” it claims. Users can create “highly expressive, nuanced performances” by “with full control over voice performance parameters.” 

It is also at pains to point out the ethical use of our technology. In accordance with the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, “we make sure our algorithms are never trained on publicly available data without the voice owner’s permission.” 

Unlike a recording of a human voice actor, AI voices can also update their script in real time, opening up new opportunities to personalize advertising.    

VocaliD, builds custom voices that match a company’s brand identity. “Brands have thought about their colors,” says Rupal Patel, founder and CEO. “They’ve thought about their fonts. Now they’ve got to start thinking about the way their voice sounds as well.” 

Sonantic says many of its clients use the synthesized voices only in pre-production and switch to real voice actors for the final production. But it also says a few have started using them throughout the process, perhaps for characters with fewer lines. Resemble.ai says it has worked with film and TV producers to patch up actors’ performances when words get garbled or mispronounced. 

“Our characters are all about emotional performance,” says Guy Gadney, CEO, Charisma AI, an interactive storytelling platform. “Siri, Alexa and other voices are monotonous, but Charisma characters come to life, get happy, sad, angry. Resemble’s capabilities in this regard are awesome and their markup language gave us the flexibility we needed to achieve our goals.” 

Hao reports actors union SAG-AFTRA, expressing concern some actors have grown increasingly worried about their livelihoods. They’re worried about being compensated unfairly or losing control over their voices, which constitute their brand and reputation. 

This is now the subject of a lawsuit against TikTok brought by the Canadian voice actor Bev Standing, who alleges that the app’s built-in voice-over feature uses a synthetic copy of her voice without her permission.  . 

Some companies are looking to be more accountable in how they engage with the voice-acting industry. The best ones, says SAG-AFTRA’s rep, have approached the union to figure out the best way to compensate and respect voice actors for their work. 

 

Creator Versus Influencer: What’s the Difference?

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/creator-versus-influencer-whats-the-difference/

We all know what we mean by the terms “influencer” and “content creator,” right? Content creators create. They are artistic, entrepreneurial and righteous. Whereas influencers have sold their soul but at least aren’t shy about it.

Let’s pause and rewind because the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Both influencers and creators involve the independent, serial production of content for social media platforms. They are both renumerated in similar ways, through a mix of platform revenue-sharing schemes, sponsorships, and fan-funded models. Why, then, are they made to sound like different things?

Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, has written a brilliant article for tech mag Real Life challenging our preconceptions of influencer culture.

Within digital culture, she writes, the term influencer typically connotes someone specializing in advertorial, with an ability to persuade audiences to buy things. Creator, by contrast, evokes someone making art, motivated by their vocation rather than the likelihood that their content will attract sponsorship.

This distinction is also sexist. Bishop quotes a 2019 Wired article by Emma Grey Ellis, who argued that women are more likely to be called influencers and men are more likely to be called creators.

Influencers, Ellis argues, are often derided in popular culture and dismissed as frivolous because they use self-representations in part to sell products; detractors thus accuse them of being vain and narcissistic. They sit below creators within the value hierarchy of online culture, yet creators too feature themselves in their work and make money through advertorial content.

“Influencers are seen as trading in the calculated depiction of an ‘authentic lifestyle,’ while ‘creators’ are held to a different standard of realness in representations, affording them flexibility and more opportunities,” Bishop says.

In the history of the consumer and consumption, it is women who have been seen as more commercially aligned — less rational and taken less seriously as proper economic actors. This may be where the gendered distinction between influencers and creators first comes from.

Another commentator takes issue with this arguing that the gender division is too simplistic. In an article for The Atlantic, Taylor Lorenz says the influencer/creator divide is not political but a matter of corporate branding.

Lorenz points out that it was YouTube which grew its “partner program” a decade ago by calling its user generated content producers “creators.” It led to a Creator Support Team, as well as a Creator Monthly newsletter that spotlights Creators on the Rise.

YouTube’s astonishing success led other platforms to co-opt the term creator to describe the burgeoning group of bloggers who were gathering scores of followers on the sites.

In Lorenz’s view influencer stands against creator as a “platform agnostic” term that is applied to newer, up-and-coming content producers with less experience, less early-adopter cache, and thus less legitimacy. That is, it helps “creators” distinguish themselves from their emerging competitors even as it ties them to platforms and separates them from celebrities in film, music, and television.

Social media platforms also avoid the term influencer and are heavily invested in the creator label. Instagram features a Creators tab on its support page, TikTok runs a “creator marketplace,” Twitter offers a “Twitter pro tips for creators” page.

“On none of these platforms is there any official mention of ‘influencers.’ It’s as if they don’t exist,” Bishop says.

“In many ways, the distinction between influencer and creator is the product of longstanding critical divisions between art (seen as organically created) and mass culture (seen as manufactured and dangerous). Influencer suggests a mode of distracting and sedating the public, creating generations of docile consumers. Creator reaches into a different tradition.”

Bishop is not blind to the fact that certain types of company revel in the term influencer. Talent agents, for one. Bishop notes that M&C Saatchi’s talent management arm manage “social influencers.” The United Talent Agency doesn’t distinguish between talent/creators or celebrities/influencers in its latest reports — aware perhaps that star talent likes to be seen as influential (and in many ways their opinions do swing votes).

Ultimately, different people invested in these industries choose to use terms like influencer or creator because they are trying to say something about the work that they do or the work that they hope to do.

“Monopolistic social media hope to obfuscate their exploitative reputations through celebrating the productive creativity of those whom they ‘platform,’” Bishop says. “Producers avoid terms like influencer in audience-facing content because they want to be considered authentic and unsponsored. Talent agencies and marketers manage the commercial relationships that influencers want to avoid publicly managing.”

Influencer and creator are two sides of the same coin. Which term appears depends on which face they want to show us.

 

VR’s Field of Dreams Fail

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The gateway to the Metaverse for the masses is widely thought to be Virtual Reality, with the promise of its lift-off always just around the corner.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/vrs-field-of-dreams-fail/

Well, maybe it’s time for a reappraisal of whether we want VR at all. That at least is the polemic from David Karpf at Wired who asks if we’re ever going to start judging VR on its performance instead of its pedigree.

“VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents,” Karpf contends. “It never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its ‘potential’ rather than its results.”

Karpf’s argument is that Silicon Valley tech leaders have been seduced by the sci-fi they read growing up. Snowcrash and Neuromancer are to blame, apparently, for inculcating an ambition in the young Mark Zuckerberg or anyone who invested in Magic Leap to create the immersive internet.

Zuckerberg recently told Facebook employees that over the next five years he expects to transition “from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Yet as Wired observes, in the seven years since spending $2 billion on Oculus and upwards of $18 billion a year into an R&D lab, Facebook’s return on investment “have been pretty lackluster. The headsets are spiffier and the games are more lucrative, but our minds nevertheless remain collectively un-blown.”

Yet we — rather the media tech industry and a lot of its pundits — continue to get drawn into a hyper-digital fantasy future which will transform everything from employment to inequality.

There may be some grounding to this. The most surprising finding of a recent PwC report was that VR revenues were due to rocket (albeit from a low base over the next few years leaving all other media on the ground.

“The VR arms race is premised on an assumption that mass adoption is inevitable — the only question is when that future will arrive, and which company will get phenomenally wealthy when it does.”

One repeat argument from VR and AR practitioners is that the gear just needs modification — lighter, more comfortable, not-tethered, higher fidelity screens. When these come to pass, AR, VR, XR (Extended Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality) will take off, they say.

Yet right now, “VR’s technical problems have all basically been sorted out,” Karpf says. “The headsets are lightweight and affordable. As a technical matter, we could pretty much cobble together a 1.0 version of the Metaverse or the Oasis next week. VR’s limiting flaw might instead be on the demand side — the “Field of Dreams Fallacy,” which contends, “If you build it, they will come.”

Immersive VR gaming sounds neat, but it turns out that swinging a virtual sword gets tiring pretty quickly.

“It’s tempting to think that if Magic Leap didn’t live up to the hype, some other competitor surely will. But the underlying problem is that, there just aren’t many situations in your daily routine where the MR goggles would make it off the shelf.”

That’s the nagging problem. What is the killer app for VR? Will it ever have one? Perhaps it’s time to bust the hype cycle.

Of course, the rigs and goggles in five to ten years will be better than the ones we have today. The problem isn’t the technology — it’s the vision.

“The trouble with imagining the future through sci-fi action adventures is that it obscures the mundane everyday uses of technology.”

As if to prove the point made by Wired that VR/AR will find niche industrial/business not mass media usage, a blog at digital infrastructure company, Equinix illustrates the potential of emerging technologies to impact healthcare, logistics and retail e-commerce.

Chiaren Cushing, director of mobile services & IoT at Equinix, thinks that “AR and VR will become pervasive in our digitally dominated world… lives are being saved, manual tasks are being automated and shopping experiences are being enhanced.”

A team at Washington University in St. Louis created the Enhanced Electrophysiology Visualization and Interaction System (ELVIS) to help physicians visualize the interior of the heart during ablation procedures. ELVIS combines AR software with Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to convert commercially electroanatomic and catheter data into a 3D holographic image of the patient’s heart with real-time catheter locations.

“The physician optimizes the real-time visualization by gesturing to control the headset and move around the inside of 3D heart image — all while keeping hands sterile during the procedure,” Cushing writes.

Potential benefits include a decreased need for repeat procedures and reduced procedure duration, resulting in a projected savings of $370 million annually.

Other “real world” applications using AR and VR include apps and googles to help companies overcome logistical challenges, resulting in improved effectiveness and lower expenditures and Amazon’s launch of a hair salon in London which will use AR to show customers how their hair could look after using various products, which customers can then purchase via QR code.

“The emergence of AR and VR across an array of industries in widely diverse settings illustrates how our world is becoming increasingly data-dependent and interconnected,” says Cushing.

It may be part of the Metaverse, but it’s hardly the fun part.

Beyond gaming (and, I suppose, porn — there’s always porn), it isn’t clear what other thirsts Virtual Reality are meant to quench. Immersive virtual gatherings could be a slight step above endless Zoom meetings. But, after this pandemic year, does anyone really want their Zoom meetings to occupy more of their attention? VR enthusiasts often talk about virtual vacations to exotic locales — strap on a headset and you can experience a visit to the Grand Canyon with your family. But this misdiagnoses the whole point of a vacation. A VR trip to the Grand Canyon is not a vacation. It isn’t even a trip!

VR will surely be useful to fields like flight simulation, medical imaging, and architectural design — but that seems a lot less revolutionary once you realize that the first VR boom successfully broke into most of these industries thirty years ago. Magic Leap and Oculus for Business aren’t so much radically disrupting outdated industries as they are profitably upgrading the outdated VR systems for longstanding client bases.

 

Data is the Key to Learning From COVID-19

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It’s already clear that the pandemic has sped up the arrival of the future along several dimensions. A group of economists and social scientists have looked for the upsides of what has been a traumatic time for many. Drawing on lessons learned from societal shocks throughout history, academics from Cambridge, Oxford and Melbourne Universities, as well as the IMF, outline four paths out of disruption that may benefit us all.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/data-the-key-to-learning-from-covid-19/

Habit disruption – this occurs when a shock forces agents to reconsider their behavior. The pandemic has certainly forced M&E to revise established yet inefficient workflows.

Selection – this involves the destruction of weaker firms so that only the more productive ones survive. Resources then move from the weaker to stronger entities, and average productivity increases.

Weakening of inertia – this occurs when a shock frees a system from the grip of forces that have until now kept it in stasis. This is sometimes called path dependence, the authors explain, as it involves a way of doing things that evolved along a particular path, under the influence of economic or technological factors. On-site outside broadcast production could be considered one of those which has now been reverse engineered into distributed production in the cloud.

Coordination – this can play a role when a shock resets a playing field to such an extent that a system governed by opposing forces can settle at a new equilibrium point. One example of coordination is the Great Boston Fire of 1872, which saw artificially depressed real estate values rise following reconstruction.

The authors argue that to ensure that better ways of doing things are discovered in future shocks, we need policies to help the likely losers share in any upside.

Chiefly, they point to the need to gather data in order to give nation states and organizations alike more resilience when faced with the next crisis, whether another pandemic, a different natural disaster, or an unexpected major infrastructural fault.

Most organizations delete data after a certain period. Nevertheless, Article 89 of the EU’s data protection act GDPR allows for the retention of data “for scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes” in “the public interest.”

To manage the transition to a world with more resilient institutions, “we need high-quality data, of all types and from various sources, including measures of individual human productivity, education, innovation, health, and well-being.

“There seems little doubt that pandemic-era data, even when it’s of the most ordinary sort, will remain more valuable to society than that gathered in normal times.”

In sum, if we can learn the lessons of Covid-19, we will emerge from the challenge more resilient and better prepared for whatever may come next.

 

Distributed Production Is the New Norm. Now About Those Lingering Questions…

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/distributed-production-is-the-new-norm/

The production ecology has definitely shifted from on-premises to remote in the space of 18 months. Distributed workflows for live events in particular are the new norm. Avid’s contention is that production environments have also relocated irreversibly to the cloud.

The basis of its technology is Edit on Demand, the company’s first SaaS offering for turn-key editorial in the cloud. This allows users to add capacity quickly on a pay-as-you-go basis, taking advantage of the elasticity and scalability of the cloud for allowing distributed teams to work on the same project from anywhere there is an internet connection. Specifically, Avid works with the Microsoft Azure cloud and is currently supporting NBC in its Olympics coverage.

As broadcasters migrate toward models that leverage IP (4G and 5G LTE, or Wi-Fi), they can cover far more with significantly less. What used to require a truck with multiple people, a satellite connection, a camera crew, and a reporter can now be accomplished by a lone reporter equipped with just a tablet.

The transition to remote workflows has understandably raised numerous questions across the industry, which until recently relied heavily on well-equipped, expensive studio setups and on-site collaboration across large teams. One of the big questions now becomes “How do you get 40-50 TBs of content out to users working on home internet connections while enabling them to maintain the same collaborative, effective production?”

In a white paper written with PCoIP vendor Teradici, Avid explains how it can distribute cloud host content from an existing on-prem studio environment, to an at-home office, to out in the field.

It claims to provide an exceptional experience even from home-based internet, without the need for a massive data pipeline and with minimal latency — a mere 40-50 milliseconds.

For scenarios that utilize UHD content at higher bit rates and resolutions, users can leverage Microsoft’s ExpressRoute, which provides a direct connection to the cloud to speed up the connection process. It will soon be possible for personal devices to contribute to cloud environments leveraging standard internet connections (and SRT and other industry standard protocols), converting and delivering content in a broadcast-quality stream that can be accessed in an Avid cloud production environment.

Avid also knocks the idea of content security on the head. Despite cloud gaining traction pre-COVID, the fear lingered that non-prem environments were not secure. “But the truth is, cloud environments are now as secure — if not more so — than traditional on-prem environments,” Avid states. “Microsoft Azure provide security capabilities that mimic or improve upon on-prem environments.”

Additionally, not all studios or broadcasters have the same needs. While some want to free editors from constraints while working remotely, on the flip side are those that want to constrain editors from freely taking and potentially distributing content. Avid says it provides flexible security that can be dialed up or dialed down depending on the individual requirements.

The paper includes an example of remote distributed post in action at Gorilla TV, a UK-based full-service post house with three separate locations running more than 100 Avid systems. Prior to the pandemic, Gorilla TV had already been testing a demo of Avid Edit on Demand. Yet the rapid shift to work-from-home accelerated the need to adopt a full implementation that would enable all editors to work remotely without disruption.

“In Wales and the UK, in general we don’t have great connectivity at home, yet everything works very well with the technology that we’re using,” says Richard Moss, Gorilla’s MD. Apparently many editors often don’t even realize they are working in the cloud — they feel as though they are still remote accessing the on-prem system. One of them, Alun Edwards, says, “You forget that it’s a virtual PC, you forget that you’re streaming media from the cloud.”

 

NFTs: Content Strategy or Digital Craze?

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With everyone desperate to find a way of making money selling digital content, recent talk of non-fungible tokens has landed on fertile soil. But will NFT crypto become a common part of digital content strategy, or is it just another passing craze?

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/will-nfts-achieve-wider-currency/

There is certainly a lot of hype, but NFTs — and the blockchain itself — can create limited runs, leading to manufactured scarcity. That means creating demand in a digital world, where there has traditionally been too much product and not enough buyers.

Collin Müller a Hamburg-based IT and digital media consultant says that NFTs are ultimately a certificate of authenticity, and the uniqueness they confer on an asset is to some extent illusory.

“One big misconception about non-fungible tokens is that they do not prevent the creation of exact copies,” Müller tells FEED.

“I can buy a piece of digital art and also own the non-fungible token associated with it, but as soon as it’s on my computer screen, I can create an exact copy. Now, if I want to sell that copy, people will also ask me to transfer the specific certificate — the non-fungible token.”

Müller is sceptical that NFTs will have wide, universal value in the short term.

“There is application for NFTs, but only within certain niche circles. I don’t understand why people pay millions of euros for a piece of art — digital or non-digital. If I like the image, I’m happy having a copy hanging on my wall. I don’t care whether it’s the original Picasso, or not. But, obviously, there’s an international art scene where it matters, and this is exactly the same with the digital world. As long as people are willing to pay, there will be a market. When they suddenly don’t want to pay for it, the market will crash.”

This use of the blockchain to publicly certify ownership is being utilized by Brussels-based company Arteïa. As reported by FEED, Arteïa used the blockchain to create what may be the first digital catalogue raisonné anchored in the blockchain. This is a comprehensive catalogue of an artist’s works. Traditionally, these have been printed in volumes — they’re costly to produce, difficult to update and subject to gaps and errors.

“Picasso’s catalogue raisonné is 33 books, with 16,000 black-and-white pictures of paintings,” explains Arteïa co-founder and CSO Olivier Marian. “It was done during his life by a friend of his, Christian Zervos, coming to an end in 1978, when Picasso died. We know there are still a lot of paintings not in the catalogue.”

Arteïa offers a full inventory of an artist’s vetted and confirmed pieces, plus its showing history. Blockchain is used as supply chain management technology. The artist — or assigned executor — is the only person who can alter each work’s data, which is stored securely on the blockchain.

French artist Hélène Delprat is the first to be completely catalogued by Arteïa. Along with her gallerist, Christophe Gaillard, she has catalogued around 3,000 pieces from 40 years of work, including films, paintings, photos, drawings and sculptures.

Even digital artwork is not protected by blockchain, since it doesn’t lend itself to storing large files. The data that makes up one of Arteïa’s records, or an NFT, can point to an original artwork that exists online, but the current technology — essentially a secured URL with a certificate of ownership — doesn’t give the content any more security. It’s the early stages, but Marian expects great promise for a new generation of artists.

“NFT technology is still at the beginning,” she says. “It’s very interesting and secure. The most important thing now is the community’s excitement — new artists and collectors who are showing how much the art ecosystem has to evolve.”

Yet the bubble may already have collapsed.

Bloomberg reported in April that prices for digital collectibles were already “sliding,” with average prices for NFTs tumbling almost 70% from a peak in February to about $1,400, according to NFT exchange NonFungible.

“Time will tell if the boom deflates, or whether the volatility indicates a new market going through a period of price discovery.”