History of Land Art and Digital Land Art

The history of digital art is a long and diverse one, spanning decades and continents. Digital land art, however, is much newer. In 2013, a digital artist combined light perception with real landscapes to create a kind of “digital land art.” Soon after, other artists joined in those techniques. These various art forms were united by their focus on creating new ways to explore traditional concepts of landscape through sculpture, performance art, installation art, photography, video art, and more.     However, as with any other digitized art at the time, it would be impossible to verify ownership in a trustless manner. That all changed with the advent of the blockchain, enabling trustless, decentralized ownership of any digital asset, including digital art. Next Earth is pioneering decentralized, digital land art (DLA) through the form of “pixel art” on a blockchain replica of the Earth. DLA is an exciting evolution that uses computer graphics and blockchain to create decentralized art that would otherwise be impossible to realize. While DLA has yet to achieve the level of mainstream recognition of its traditional digital art counterpart, it is still very much alive and growing. Traditional land-based works Traditional land-based artworks placed a lot of focus on finding the right landscape, whether it’s a natural element in an urban environment or an extreme wild location. Once a location was selected, vari...