Titled “Sophia Instantiation,” the image was created in collaboration with Andrea Bonaceto, an artist and partner at blockchain investment firm Eterna Capital. Bonaceto began the process by unveiling a brightly colored image of Sophia, which was processed by the robot’s cloud networks. Sophia then painted an interpretation of the image.
Sophia, developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics, has gained a worldwide reputation for its conversational ability, factual gestures and complex facial expressions. Since its inception in 2016, it has appeared on talk shows and spoken at conferences, and even been granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, making it the first robot to have nationality.
The painting act was “based entirely on decisions she made without any human support,” according to Nifty Gateway, an NFT marketplace that facilitated the sale.
Meet Sophia: The robot that laughs and smiles just like us
Backed by blockchain technology, NFTs have taken the arts world by storm by offering a way to verify and validate the ownership of images and videos. The tokens are responsible for the explosion in the value of digital art, which, unlike corporate drawings or sculpture, is easily reproduced and redistributed.
Earlier this month, work with digital artist Beeple was the first NFT sold at an auction house. A collage of his digital paintings, titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” sold for more than $ 69 million to become the third most expensive work by a live artist ever to go under the hammer.
Nifty Gateway has already offered a number of high-profile “drops,” including a selection of art pieces by musician Grimes that generated $ 6.3 million in less than 20 minutes. The platform said its collaboration with Sophia marked the first “many collections” of NFT with the humanoid robot, which will be exhibiting its first art exhibition at Gallery IV in Los Angeles later in the day. year.
Million-dollar ‘drop’
While “Sophia Instantiation” was offered as an NFT – which confirms ownership of a 12-second video clip showing Bonaceto’s image going into Sophia’s interpretation – the original body image of the robot was taken into the single rope mast as well.
While the self-portrait was sold as one edition, other creations were sold in 30 editions, for $ 2,500 or $ 3,000 each. In total, the sale generated more than $ 1 million, a Nifty Gateway spokesman confirmed.
Speaking to CNN in 2018, Hanson described Sophia as “a tool for science in studying human-to-human interactions.”
“It was very important that she represented this intersection of humanity and technology, with the convenient idea that technology can contribute to humanity, helping us to reach higher states of being,” he said. “At the same time, (technology can) raise these questions: What does it mean to be human? What is true, what is not true? What is the reality of our future that does not yet exist? “