The APENFT Foundation announces an open call for digital creators – a fund of USD$100 million will support a series of artist grants, residencies and open call programmes
The APENFT Foundation aims to collect meaningful stories and promote the fusion of finance, culture and art across the metaverse. It aims to do so via three strands: the acquisition of culturally significant NFT artworks, investment in and incubation of NFT projects, and the fostering of an NFT marketplace.
Recently, the APENFT Foundation and TRON have announced the formal establishment of the Art Dream Fund with the aim to explore, cultivate, and support talented NFT and digital artists. The fund size is $100 million. In the future, support will be launched on a regular basis through open calls, art grants and artist-in-residence programmes. In addition to financing artistic creations, the Art Dream Fund will also provide support and professional guidance to selected artists and artworks in various aspects – such as marketing and PR, community building and copyright protection in the NFT space. ‘Our goal is to introduce a group of incredible creators to the world of NFTs, empower them to explore new methods of creation, and share that opportunity to their communities,’ says Sydney Xiong, APENFT Art director and curator.
The open call invites artists and creators to explore the theme of ‘Second Life’ in the metaverse in order to access the Art Dream Fund. For decades, both utopian and dystopian visions of the Internet have been put forth, capturing the emergence of the increasing complexities and variability of human life and hybrid experiences. We are now living in a digital golden age, enjoying tremendous technological and scientific progress with the accelerating development of blockchain, NFT and chain games bringing the vision of the metaverse closer to reality than ever before. When our lives and social relationships have become ever more closely intertwined with technology, what kind of new religious worship, artistic origins, literary inspirations, and subversive scientific discoveries will be brought forth?
There are three awards in this themed call, including a grant prize award of $20,000, best creativity awards of $10,000 and best category awards of $5000. In addition, artists will receive publicity and exposure on TRON and APENFT social media, and will have the opportunity to be featured in the APENFT marketplace launch event and participate in the APENFT virtual exhibition. This open call encourages the exploration and interpretation of any art form for the theme of ‘Second Life’, and any digital art media and styles are accepted. The open call is open to artists and creators working in all disciplines with no restrictions on age, region, or occupation. Entries can be submitted individually or as a group or community. Collective work is highly encouraged in the NFT space where people value community spirit.
Artists are welcome to submit their artworks before 27 November 2021. The award announcement will be made on 10 December. Justin Sun, founder of Tron, Sydney Xiong, APENFT art director and curator, and 3 anonymous NFT art experts will select winning pieces based on five key criteria: aesthetic & creativity, ideas & concepts, technical skills, relevance and the artist’s statement. ‘I hope that the establishment of our Art Dream Foundation can bring about a paradigm shift in the creator economy by giving all-round support to creators who wish to contribute to the NFT art ecosystem with creative thinking,’ says TRON CEO and Founder Justin Sun.
About APENFT
Formally registered and established on 29 March 2021, APENFT is backed by the underlying technology of blockchains Ethereum and TRON with support from the world’s largest distributed storage system Bittorrent File System (BTFS) to deliver the mission of registering world-class artworks as NFTs on the blockchain. The collection of the APENFT Foundation includes artworks by Picasso, Andy Warhol, and crypto-artists Beeple, Pak, as well as other high-end NFT collectibles of various categories such as Punks avatars and EtherRock, with a total value of more than $46 million. APENFT Foundation has successfully sponsored the ‘Art + Technology’ Summit at Christie’s in New York. In the future, it will curate a series of online and offline exhibitions with world-renowned artists and facilitate high-end IP collaboration. Find out more here.
About Tron
Founded by Justin Sun in 2017, TRON is an ambitious project dedicated to building the infrastructure for a truly decentralized Internet. The TRON Protocol, one of the largest blockchain operating systems in the world, adopts an energy efficient dPoS consensus mechanism to provide high throughput, high scalability, and high availability for decentralized applications in the TRON ecosystem through collaboration with key business partners including global tech giant Samsung, Opera, Poloniex, Swisscom Blockchain, and many more. With over 58 million registered users and over 2.5 billion transactions, Tron is the world’s fastest-growing public chain and it is now among the world’s three major public chains. Find out more here.
