NFTs in Tokyo Shibuya

In Tokyo, Federico Clapis brought his crypto art out of galleries and marketplaces and onto the LED walls of Shibuya, around the station and its crossing, one of the most crowded and screen-saturated places in the world.

The footage shows his animated work Babydrone in Space playing on a large curved screen wrapped around the corner of a building, above an illuminated SONY sign, with the credit @FEDERICO CLAPIS in the lower corner. Against a black, starless space and the curve of the Earth seen from orbit, a drone carries a heavy cloth bundle hanging from its frame, like a stork delivering a newborn. Around it float a fire hydrant, a small aircraft, a phone-like slab and other fragments, all rendered in the same pale, worn, almost marble-like material that recalls Clapis' earlier physical sculpture.

The image condenses themes that run through his work: the meeting of the human and the technological, everyday objects turned into relics, and the question of what generation and care mean when they are handed over to machines. Seen at the scale of a building facade in one of Tokyo's busiest districts, the work stops being a file in a wallet and becomes public imagery, addressed to passers-by who may know nothing about NFTs. The presentation belongs to the period in which Clapis moved his practice fully into digital and tokenized art and sought audiences outside the crypto community.

Sources

• NFTs in Tokyo Shibuya — Federico Clapis