NFTs land at Venice Biennale with Marc Leschelier’s digital brutalism

"Blocks of Blockchain" is a digital project by Marc Leschelier at the 17th. International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, part of the Italian Virtual Pavilion curated by Tom Kovacs. The Parisian designer transposes his superbrutalist constructive approach into digital form: Leschelier usually makes installations out of raw materials, using poor or primitive techniques. Based on this performative and almost ignorant approach, he has developed the concept of "cryptoplasm". 

  “The preliminary state of a cryptoplam is a piece of physical matter, a debris or a relic. Its transfer into a virtual reality is achieved by means of a 3D scan. The object, most often composed of several interlocking materials, is unified as a 3D mesh. This is one of the primary properties of a cryptoplasm, which is about uniformizing all the components of a physical object into a uniform surface,” explains the designer. Cryptoplasm is a formless entity with no useful function, formed by the superposition of raw and interconnected information.

His digital work brings NFTs into the context of the Venice Architecture Biennale. NFTs - acronym of "Non Fungible Token" - are electronic certificates of authenticity that make a given digital content unique. The title of the project, "Blocks of Blockchain", therefore refers to the technology that makes these operations possible, and that is known to most people thanks to cryptocurrencies, but is also used in many other contexts and in particular art, followed by design and architecture.