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In 2016, Swiss professional skier Nico Vuignier invented a new way to capture himself skiing, inspired by the cinematic technological innovation known as “bullet time”. Vuignier, who has creativity to spare but lacks access to the extremely complex camera equipment needed to film in real time, has designed something much lower: a kite-shaped wooden frame for an iPhone 6, which he held above his head by swinging the kite string in a lasso motion – while he skied. The resulting video, 360-degree angles of him carving through uncut powder and lapping up the terrain park called “Centriphone”, has been viewed 4.5 million times on YouTube because it’s totally awesome. His sponsors, Salomon and Oakley, were thrilled.

Fulfilling his obligations to sponsors was only part of his goal, however. Vuignier is not only smart; he is a thoughtful digital artist inspired by open-source projects. He cites Radiohead’s seminal 2008 music video “House of Cards” as a big influence. This video featured military radar technology in the service of wild (for its time) motion graphics, the data from which the group distributed it for free online. Following the success of “Centriphone”, Vuignier released another video detailing exactly how he made the contraption; then he put the 3D print files online for everyone to access.

Five years later, he has changed his mind, not because he no longer believes in open source creative projects, but because action camera maker Insta360 took his design and started selling it. “They tried to get me involved by offering me a free camera,” he explains. Vuignier refused; his goal in making Centriphone open source was to inspire creations, not commerce. Then the same company copied another one of his camera innovations: a polystyrene camera-carrying glider that he calls “the poor man’s selfie drone”.

Vuignier considered patents for future projects, but soon discovered the process was incredibly complex for anyone who didn’t have expensive lawyers to do the job. At that point, Vuignier asked himself an interesting question: “Maybe there is a way to NFT these things?”

NFTs are changing the game

NFTs – the emerging method of transferring ownership that relies on the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin – tend to divide people into one of three camps. Camp One is convinced that NFTs, and the promise of blockchain technology in general, will save the world and make everyone rich in the process. Camp Two is convinced that NFTs are a massive Ponzi scheme and built on environmentally destructive technology to boot. And camp three is mostly just, “Huh?”

Think of Vuignier as a representative of Camp Quatre. This camp recognizes that many NFT markets are virtual malls selling digital dormitory posters for aspiring techs on their first ayahuasca trips. But he also understands that NFTs will ultimately impact both artists and those who love art in ways that have only just emerged.

“People who call themselves ‘NFT artists’, that doesn’t make sense. It’s just a way of selling your art,” Vuignier explains. digital art, videos. Before there was no way to sell it, no place to display it. NFTs create a way to own my work that didn’t exist before. Everything is going crazy right now, but I can’t wait for this to calm down and become something more meaningful and interesting.

When he’s not creating new ways for the cameras to follow him on the snow, Vuignier creates sleek and captivating snippets of digital ski ephemera using a robust set of entirely self-taught animation, video editing, and animation skills. Her Instagram is a great following for gems like this.

And that:

In the spring of 2021, Vuignier took two of his most popular Instagram posts and “minted” them as NFTs on SuperRare, a heavily curated marketplace that’s more like an NFT gallery than popular (and chaotic) marketplaces like OpenSea. . The first, “The Ladder”, sold for 1.1 Ethereum (about $3,500 at the time); the second, “Bird Up”, sold for 1 Ethereum.

As is the norm with most NFTs, buyers have not obtained ownership of the intellectual property and therefore cannot use Vuignier’s work for commercial purposes. It’s no different from when a collector buys a Picasso; this collector can’t screen print the painting and start selling T-shirts from it. Vuignier has received thousands of dollars for the kind of social post that, over the past 10 years, has earned little more than Instagram likes and the ability to tickle products as ” influencer”. More valuable than all that was perspective.

“Look when Candide did Chad’s Gap,” he says, referring to the 120-foot gap jump in the Utah backcountry that helped put the French phenom on the map in 1999. “C It was a legendary moment. Imagine if he could have made an NFT of it and sold it, that’s significant.

Vuignier compares this point in time to the peak of the Dunning Kruger curve, an illustration of cognitive bias in which people overestimate their own knowledge or ability before realizing how wrong they are. “Once you start knowing more and learning more, you realize you don’t know anything. Right now, we’re all at the top of the curve.

A new frontier

Vuignier is perfectly comfortable knowing nothing – he would never achieve this level of artistic and digital effects magic if he didn’t care to learn from scratch. And his latest project is his most ambitious to date.

For years he envied the sophisticated motion graphics systems capable of capturing an athlete’s true movements and translating them into data – the so-called “ping-pong ball combinations” made famous by early sessions. motion capture for the video “Tony Hawk Pro Skater” Game. Remarkable technical development for the time, they were much too bulky and expensive to be used in the natural environment of Vuignier: the snow.

A few years ago, thanks to motion sensors developed for mobile phones, motion capture technology took a big leap. The “ping-pong balls” of the old suits were needed so that special cameras could follow and capture the movements of the athlete. Today, these suits have built-in sensors, which capture similar data without the need for a camera.

When Vuignier discovered these new suits, he partnered with a special effects house in Geneva that owned one. He spent a day riding around a terrain park while wearing the suit, with a small film crew in tow. Sensors are phenomenal at capturing and rendering the movements of the wearer, but they cannot move those movements through space. For this, Vuignier needed digital cameras and a drone to capture its surroundings to create a 3D scan of the park.

The resulting data is so powerful that Vuignier can digitally recreate himself doing any trick he can imagine. And because his team has faithfully captured the jumps he landed – and because Vuignier’s motion graphics skills are so strong – he can put his digital self into actual video of an actual terrain park to make them. .

That’s not even the coolest part. Do you remember the Radiohead video?

Vuignier intends to make its entire session data file freely available to anyone who wants it on its new site, Digital Stunts. His end goal… well, he has a lot of end goals, because the possibilities are literally endless. But the file he created could be turned into original art projects by animators and graphic designers, like this one, produced by Michael Marczewski:

Michael Marczewski – 01 from Digital Stunts on Vimeo.

And that’s just a test of what’s possible with the data Vuignier collects. Several artists could collaborate on different segments for an epic “movie” by Nico Vuignier. Vuignier himself could produce an entire season of social media montages of himself skiing for his sponsors without ever setting foot in the mountains.

However, there is a reason why you cannot yet upload the file to Digital Stunts.

Vuignier wants to make it available under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can use it for artistic but not commercial purposes. And, according to the attorney he spoke with, it’s unclear whether minting an NFT qualifies as commercial use. If it’s not, and anyone can monetize Vuignier’s creation without their knowledge – like the camera company did with its creations – that’s bad. But NFTs can be created with “smart contracts” that dictate nuanced terms of service, and that’s fine. Understanding all of this, however, is one more skill Vuignier must learn.

“I’m slowing down a bit [Digital Stunts] a bit so that I can understand that,” he says. “It’s a way to create open source content, but now people can do my work for me. And we’re in a time where brands want you to release something every week and you have to do something crazier each time. At the end of the day, will brands be able to settle for paying talent to save their data and use it for years without sponsoring anyone? This is opening Pandora’s box.

When Vuignier started posting his digital creations on Instagram, he was uncomfortable calling himself an artist. “I never considered it art. It seems pretentious to me. It was just internet stuff and GIFs and that kind of stuff,” he says.

But Digital Stunts has not only evolved its understanding of NFTs and blockchain technology; it evolved his understanding of his own work – and even of himself.

“I am an avid skier; so far what I was doing was just good skiing that looked good,” he says. “Art is about asking questions and making people think about something. This project is a bit more artistic. That’s why I’m more comfortable with the term.

This story was first published by SKI.