Nfts
This Arizona artist is selling NFTs to help save endangered axolotls in Mexico
Meet an artist at the forefront of technology and environmentalism, at least when it comes to a small and rare salamander that lives in Mexico’s only lake.
You’ve probably heard of the axolotl or seen various depictions of it everywhere, from Mexican folk art to Japanese anime to the video game Minecraft. But even though these adorable creatures are iconic in art and culture, they are endangered. The lake where the axolotls live is polluted and their numbers are decreasing.
This is where Matt Martinez comes in. Martinez is called “Scum” and uses his artwork to raise funds and awareness about the plight of axolotls.
His art is not found on the walls of galleries or homes. It is bought and sold only online as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. It’s a new world of virtual art trading that he says is the wave of the future. The Show sat down with him recently to talk more.
Complete conversation
MATT MARTINEZ: An NFT is an entry on a blockchain. I sell NFTs specifically on the Solana blockchain, but there are a lot of them. You have Ethereum, AVAX, Bitcoin, Tezos. They all have thriving art markets. But before NFTs, it was impossible to sell a piece of digital art and prove ownership. Today, art has done it, and the kind of buzzword is “digital provenance.”
So if I create a piece of digital art and I have followers and collectors and they want to be able to buy, own and eventually sell a piece of digital art, they can through NFTs. It’s a bit like the view from 10,000 feet.
But the real and exciting part of NFTs in the beginning was that royalties could be written into the smart contract. So, if my collector buys a piece of art and resells it more or less later – it doesn’t matter – a percentage of that sale will automatically go to my wallet, the wallet that created the NFT in the first place.
Many people joked that they could just right-click to save a piece of art because it was digital. And sure, you can, but you can’t actually own it or sell it. And there is a market for both of those things in the NFT space.
LAUREN GILGER: So interesting. So it’s like a kind of digital version of Christie’s or something, like an auction house.
MARTINEZ: Well, Christie’s is auctioning off NFTs.
GILGER: And for crazy amounts of money, right?
MARTINEZ: Mmmhmm.
GILGER: Wild. OK, so there’s this interesting idea, a sort of connection between digital art and physical art. Are there physical versions of much of your digital art or none at all?
MARTINEZ: So in my case, no. In the future perhaps. But in my case, no. Everything is created digitally, either with Photoshop, Procreate, iPad or computer. But there are plenty of artists who create physical works, take high-resolution photos of them, sell the NFT as a sort of proof of authenticity, and then they can ship the physical artwork to whoever the owner is. .
But what we are currently working on, and which no one has really succeeded in yet, is the integration of NFC chips or chips specifically related to NFT, and then an escrow service. So if someone sells the physical artwork, the NFT is transferred with it and then royalties are also applied.
GILGER: It’s fascinating because it raises a whole other set of questions about ownership and what that means, sort of in a digital landscape. How did you get there?
MARTINEZ: So I was kind of a closeted artist for a long, long time. I have been doing branding, graphic design, web design and photography for a very long time. In a past life, I was also in the restaurant industry here in Arizona.
But one of my mentors said to me, “you should look into NFTs.” I think it was late 2021. And he said, “I think we might actually be ahead of something for once.” » I was like, “Okay.” And he was also one of my biggest customers. I was a freelance graphic designer. I managed some of his brands, photography, etc.
And about two months after he told me to look into NFTs, I stopped. All. I left all my clients and worked full time at Web3, I guess that’s the kind of placeholder name for this space.
GILGER: I saw that. I didn’t know what that meant.
MARTINEZ: I have been a full-time artist for a little over two years now.
GILGER: Wow. So that’s a whole different area for you. It’s really cool.
MARTINEZ: It’s all new.
GILGER: How do you make NFT art? What is your process?
MARTINEZ: So, like I said, I’m a digital artist. Some things may start as a sketch. Some things might start with a little painting, a sketch on a napkin, whatever. Conceptually, it all starts in my head. And then I most often use a program called Procreate. And then you export your digital art, you make it at a high enough resolution that the quality is good, so it can be displayed. Ideally, in the future, people will display digital art in their homes.
And then you list it on the channel. I use, notably on Solana, a platform called Exchange.Art. They upload your artwork and then write a smart contract that represents your artwork. And then on their platform you can buy, sell and trade art. You can also do things privately – OTC, as it’s called, or over-the-counter, off-chain. And as an NFT artist, you do the marketing. So you log into Twitter, Instagram, or Discord and share your art with collectors.
GILGER: It’s like putting it on a gallery wall, but it’s your own personal gallery that’s everywhere.
MARTINEZ: Yeah, 100%.
An art exhibition by Matt “Scum” Martinez in Mexico to save the axolotls.
GILGER: It’s fascinating. OK, let’s talk about some of the projects you’ve been involved with. You’re involved in a very interesting project right now outside of Mexico City that’s sort of trying to save these adorable folkloric creatures called axolotls, which are salamanders. But you’ve seen the pictures. It’s been sort of mythologized at this point.
And the idea here is to create sculptures that will then help raise money to save their environment, essentially. Tell us about that.
MARTINEZ: Dude, you can make me go now. so initially, when I started my most recent collection – it’s called Slimes – I promised to donate 10% of every sale for the duration of the series. There will be 50, so it’s not over yet. But to date, we’ve raised about $40,000. The initial goal was just to try to donate money.
And then I took a trip to Mexico last year to meet some partners with whom they were working on this project. When we went there, we discovered that it was a really, really delicate ecosystem.
So they’re iconic, right? Axolotls. They are in Japan. They are in the United States. They are kept as pets, but most people don’t know that they are actually endemic to this lake in Mexico, which is the remains of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan.
They still use ancient agricultural techniques, called chinampas. Chinampas are essentially floating gardens. It’s really very cool.
Currently, the lake is very polluted due to runoff from the city. The lake is therefore unfortunately polluted once a year when it rains. Additionally, at some point during the 1960s, they introduced tilapia and carp into the lake. They are predatory fish. They ate the axolotl population.
So you take all of those factors into consideration, and I think over the last five months, pretty much everyone who works on the lake and tries to preserve it, the axolotl population has come to terms with the fact that they don’t no longer exists in the wild. So we are now working with many people who are trying to create an environment within the lake in which they can survive.
GILGER: So tell me a little bit about the why of this project. There is a history of artists using their art for the common good or for certain causes, etc. But why this one for you and why so?
MARTINEZ: So I grew up in the United States. Dad is Mexican, mom is from Canada. And that’s just a big part of my personal tradition. But I felt like I was always a little too Mexican for my white friends, too white for my Mexican friends. And I never really had a good outlet to explore these topics.
So, through art, I decided to immerse myself in what being Mexican meant to me. So my art, a lot of it is, it’s the characters themselves who are luchadores, exploring both Chicano and ancient Mexican aesthetics and mythology and trying to combine that thing that gives me the feeling of learning, of growing a little. .
Likewise, I use a lot of axolotl imagery after discovering that they were endemic to this little place in Mexico City. So I wanted to do something to try to help the axolotls. And throughout the process, I became more and more in love with the animal and the place itself. And now I feel like I don’t know what else I would do with my time other than that. It’s pretty cool.
GILGER: What’s next? This is only the beginning, it seems.
MARTINEZ: It’s just the beginning. So we recently organized our first exhibition: 11 sculptures, 11 artists spread across Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, the United States and Canada. We are working to bring a set of sculptures to COP16 (the United Nations Biodiversity Conference) in Colombia. We are working to submit, hopefully, a significant portion to the United Nations General Assembly. We have contacts. We hope that all this will come true.
Things have worked great so far, so no reason to believe that won’t be the case. The sculptures are placed specifically in areas or chinampas where people are working on the lake, whether reintroducing native plants, removing invasive species, or trying to specifically help the axolotl. So we’re working with Embarcadero Cuemanco to ideally host tours specific to the location of the sculptures themselves, so people can learn more about what’s happening in the lake and also support the people who are actively working on the lake.
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