NFTs provide the opportunity for artists to make significant money on their work, reach a broader audience all over the world and link a digital file to a creator, ensuring authenticity.
This panel discussion will discuss the impact of NFTs on traditional and digital artists alike, looking at their potential to fundamentally change the nature of an artist’s relationship with their work. Are NFT’s a fad or are they here to stay?
Panel Discussion with Culture Works Denise McDonagh and El Putnam, NUIG
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher working in performance art, video, sound, and digital media. Her practice focuses on borders and entanglements, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, she is interested in exploring hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of their un-representability as she takes the familiar and makes it strange. In particular, she probes our gestural relationship to digital technology using wearable electronics in live performance, through the creation of responsive multimedia installations, and the crafting of short moving images and sound pieces. Treating art as inherently participatory, her work opens intersubjective spaces that offer multiple conceptual and aesthetic points of entry for the audience through alchemical diffractions of experience, cultivating new modes of embodiment. In addition to creating works that are rich in cultural and political meaning, including the biopolitics of motherhood in Ireland and the landscape of the Irish Border, she is interested in how aesthetic pleasure can be used as a critical strategy, or as a means of captivating audiences in order to expose them to provocative ideas.
Denise has a professional background in visual art practices, film, animation and digital arts. Working as a creative producer and digital arts consultant with arts organisations and local authorities around Ireland, she has extensive experience in the areas of programming, producing, artistic development and policy. Her roles have included Creative Producer and Digital Arts Consultant – Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival, Tipperary and Wicklow Arts Offices, Creative Digital Programme Manager – Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture, Producer – TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, and Producer – Galway Simon Virtual Sleepout. She also has a keen interest in creativity in education having delivered creative learning applications, conferences, workshops and courses for the Professional Development Services for Teachers (PDST). Denise has received a number of artist bursaries from the Arts Council in support of her work as a visual artist and won an IFTA for the live TV event Fleadh TV 2013.
