Andrea Bonaceto and Robot Sophia to Drop Collaborative NFT Art on Nifty Gateway

Italian visual artist Andrea Bonaceto is teaming up with Sophia, one of the world's most advanced humanoid robots, to create and sell digital artworks as NFTs. The collaboration, curated by IV Gallery in Los Angeles, will be the first between a human intelligence and a humanoid. Each digital work will be linked to a unique token and sold on the leading NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway on March 23, 2021, at 1:30 PM Italian time. The drop follows the record $69 million sale of Beeple's digital work at Christie's, which Bonaceto calls a 'propitious coincidence.' Bonaceto, a partner at blockchain investment firm Eterna Capital and a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, began exploring NFTs after a 2019 encounter with entrepreneur Brock Pierce in Rome, which led him to read Kandinsky's 'Spiritual and Art.' He was later contacted by Marcello Mari, communications director of SingularityNET (which produces Sophia's AI), and together with David Hanson (founder of Hanson Robotics) and AI visionary Ben Goertzel, they developed the project. Sophia's AI, while not autonomous, uses an open-source algorithm to respond to and reinterpret images. Hanson describes Sophia as 'an artwork herself,' and plans to launch Sophia Collective, a collaboration between Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET. IV Gallery founder Vincent Harrison, who discovered Beeple, notes that contemporary art values original ideas over mechanical skill, suggesting AI artists may be the next turning point.