Tezos India has announced the launch of its new vertical named – ‘Tezos India Arts & Culture (TIAC). TIAC has been instituted by Tezos India as a separate vertical for its arts and culture-centric programs and initiatives, wherein all-around technical as well as educational and community-building support will be provided to the budding artists looking to make a mark in the Web3 space. TIAC also over the long-term has plans to facilitate collaborations and co-curations with renowned art and culture festivals and galleries, thereby taking the work of artists from India into real-life spaces through co-curated exhibitions and showcases.
The process of building communities starts with education, and hence, the first and foremost phase of the TIAC would involve bringing high-quality Web3 education to artists and creative professionals in the form of highly-focused talks and workshops. Beginning with the city of Kolkata – a city known for cultivating some of the most prominent arts and culture personalities, TIAC will develop a laser-sharp focus on conducting a plethora of talk sessions and workshops across several Indian cities in a bid to generate awareness. With a high concentration of students pursuing the creative arts as well as being creative professionals today, along with artist workshops, TIAC also plans to develop collector workshops to introduce the Web3 technology to young professionals and showcase to them the benefits of collecting NFTs on marketplaces built on Tezos.
Speaking on the launch, Tezos India Arts & Culture head Varun Desai said, “We are delighted to roll-out TIAC – which is not representative of a specific marketplace but of the technology driving the marketplaces, galleries and metaverses. The idea behind TIAC is to educate artists into all the possible options of expressing themselves digitally in this space, whether they are generative artists coding on Fxhash, poets publishing their poetry in typed.art, game designers publishing their pixel art on 8bidou, artists and animators putting their work out on Teia, Objkt and Versum or those looking to use the technology to manifest bespoke digital experiences. There are new types of technologies being created on Tezos on a regular basis, and with TIAC, we are enabling artists from India to be able to harness them.”
In order to increase the onboarding of interested art and culture enthusiasts, TIAC has built a Discord server that contains a Tezos Fountain (Tezos Artist Faucet) aimed to give first-time Indian artists a small amount of Tez (XTZ) to create their first works on the platform without going through the process of purchasing Tez (XTZ). This process has been previously implemented with great success in Indonesia for artists and globally for developers.
Speaking about the development, Tezos India president Om Malviya said, “NFTs have been one of the largest use-case on Tezos so far with some of the biggest marketplaces in the entire crypto and Web3 ecosystem existing on it. Tezos NFTs have been off late featured in various renowned art festivals like Art Basel and India Art Fair, and now with the roll-out of TIAC, we intend to harness the power of Tezos blockchain technology in India by providing a platform where aspiring artists can scale new heights, while being actively present as a distinct Arts and Culture entity.”
The next phase of the TIAC growth roadmap involves working with arts institutions, galleries and universities to develop programs starting with education and building towards festival projects and gallery exhibitions. In this phase, TIAC also plans to conduct Artist Fellowship Programmes with selected artists from the onboarding phase to help develop bigger projects within the ecosystem. Thereafter, selected artists from the fellowship programmes will be accelerated by the Developer Assistance Programme where their projects will be developed by Tezos India for deployment on the Tezos blockchain.
Furthermore, TIAC is set to launch a campaign #Objkt4India on India’s 76th Independence Day to make the general public aware of the immense potential in art and culture and to help onboard them to the NFT platforms on Tezos. Collector workshops are also being planned along with the artist workshops with the aim of teaching the masses about utilising the Tezos ecosystem and strategically building personal NFT art collections both as an investment and as a means to support their favourite artists and local culture.
“There has been a rich history of artists starting off on Tezos and then becoming globally-renowned. We see this as an opportunity for artists to mint NFTs with a very low economic barrier of entry and also with no major issues related to carbon footprint, as Tezos emits 2.5 g CO2 eq. per transaction which is significantly less than that of an email,” added Varun Desai.
Tezos India’s novel initiative intends to gamify and incentivize the NFT process for an artist towards easy and stress-free participation in the global transition to Web3 and utilize the technology to create newer avenues for the arts and culture sector of our country. Notably, over the years, Tezos has emerged as one of the world’s most popular blockchains of choice for artists, on which NFT creators till date have sold over millions of dollars’ worth of their artworks and creations.
