Serj Tankian, the Grammy Award-winning SYSTEM OF A DOWN frontman, musician, activist and painter, has brought his latest art exhibition, “Not For Touching – The Intangible Composition”, online with a unique mix of the virtual and terrestrial via a collection of animated NFTs and archival giclée prints.
Presented by CurioNFT, the 21 pieces will be unveiled, and on sale on December 6 via an online, interactive gallery with various simulated rooms, large scale animated graphics masterfully created by Roger Kupelian (“The Lord Of The Rings”, “Hugo”), and music scored by Tankian. A range of editions will be available including several one of one NFTs with an accompanying signed giclée print, four series of one of 25 NFTs with signed giclée prints as well as four one of 100 NFT only releases.
“I got into painting to see my music,” explains Tankian, who also discussed the collection in a newly published Rolling Stone piece. “By adding musical compositions to art, we’ve created a more powerful encompassing experience for lovers of art and music. NFTs are a natural progression allowing the art and music to move within the scopes of our retinas and our creative minds. I called it ‘Not For Touching’ (NFT) cause it’s a lot sexier than non-fungible tokens.”
Tankian and CurioNFT will offset any environmental impact from the showing with the use of “lazy minting,” a process that reduces emissions, minting NFTs at times of low Ethereum usage, generating 2% of the emissions of a typical NFT minted on Ethereum. For context, when CurioNFT mints an NFT it generates carbon emissions equivalent to sending approximately 17 e-mails with attachments. In another step towards carbon neutrality, CurioNFT has pledged to offset emissions by planting over 12,000, and counting, trees. As of September, CurioNFT‘s environmental efforts have offset over 300% of the carbon created by NFT sales.
The partnership has also pledged to donate 10% of sales to TUMO. The TUMO Center for Creative Technologies is a free-of-charge educational program that puts teens in charge of their own learning. With locations throughout Armenia, Lebanon, France, Russia, Germany and Albania, the program is made up of self-learning activities, workshops, and project labs that revolve around 14 learning targets, from animation to web development.
