A few years ago, like a lot of people on the internet, documentary filmmaker Dan Sickles got turned onto the blockchain. Or, more specifically, cryptocurrency, digital art, and NFTs.
As Sickles tells it, the connection happened somewhat randomly. When his apartment was broken into, Sickles tried to stay out of the way of investigating police by chatting with online acquaintances he met while researching how to survive as an independent artist and filmmaker. “My house got robbed, but all this digital art is safe,” Sickles joked with them. Then someone offered to send him and his wife a box of kombucha, simply because they’d been through a hard time. Sickles told ARTnews that he suddenly realized the authenticity of the community he’d found.
“I was somebody who probably scoffed at the question of what your online community looks like, only a few years ago,” Sickles said. “But this was somebody actually turning out for me in a moment. And they were a stranger.”
In some respects, the crypto world is a perfect subject for Sickles, who has made a career of fixing his lens on often neglected or misunderstood communities. His 2014 debut, Mala Mala tells the stories of several members of the Puerto Rican transgender community. His 2017 follow-up, Dina, which won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, followed a couple on the autism spectrum in a “real-life romantic comedy.” Crypto Art, as he terms it, is similarly left out of the mainstream—except for the brief NFT boom in 2022—with conversations around the topic burdened by stereotypes and generalizations.
“It’s hard to discern genius from grifter,” Sickles said, especially when a new form of technology is involved. “A lot of the criticisms are absolutely valid … But not everybody is a grifter or making $69 million.”
It was the “middle-class artists” working in the Crypto Art space that Sickles and his partner Shane Boris—who produced Oscar-winning documentary Navalny in 2023—sought to highlight in his latest multimedia documentary, New Here, which is set to release this spring and features an original soundtrack by Imogen Heap. Part oral history, part “desktop dreamscape,” the film features interviews with art historians, Web3 pioneers, and digital artists like Claire Silver, who discuss the past, present and future of this new art world for those unfamiliar. Casey, a fictional character that falls down a literal, virtual rabbit hole, serves as a narrative guide, learning about the historical foundations of the blockchain.
Ultimately, “the film is about artists making money,” Sickles said, “which is fundamentally controversial.” For him, the blockchain, NFTs, and other uses of new technology give middle-class artists the ability to support themselves autonomously. That is, without the middlemen.
Dan Sickles
Courtesy of Dan Sickles/DPOP Studios
It isn’t just art world middlemen that Sickles wants to do away with, but those in other creative industries too.
When Sickles and his team began to make New Here, other creatives asked to get involved. His newly formed production company, DPOP Studios, was an answer to that demand for a supportive network. The studio’s offshoot projects—like a music video for a K-Pop group, and the creation and sale of NFTs related to New Here, with 15 percent of the revenue going directly to the cast in perpetuity—helped grow the film’s budget. Grants, fundraisers and other support from the same groups that sent Sickles and his wife that kombucha added to the pot, with Sickles estimating that he was able to raise about $650,000 last year for the film.
“We are holistically trying to figure out better models for collaborative artmaking,” Sickles said.
For digital artist and writer Rhea Myers, the attraction to participating in New Here lay in Sickles’s defiant, patchwork independence and tthe opportunity to correct long-standing misconceptions of NFTs as, in her words, “a strange, crypto-bro, VC-backed incursion into the art world.”
“That’s not where the history starts,” Myers told ARTnews.
In Myers’ telling, Blockchain technologies date back to the 1990s, while digital art has gone through multiple generations of practitioners even before that. Myers herself has been part of the Crypto Art space since the early 2000s and watched as the community was eyed warily and then dismissed by the traditional, fine art world. Her work, she added, is largely about trying to “poke people in the direction of having a look at these things they wouldn’t ordinarily.” On both sides.
And, like Sickles, Myers sees blockchain as a tool to provide artists and marginalized groups economic autonomy.
“You get to encounter people who are making NFTs and they’re using the money to pay their rent, or pay for their meds, or to do other things within a capitalist society one needs money for,” she said. “They get incredible disapproval from their peers for this one way of making a living within capitalist society. And I just find that incredible.”
To Sickles, that disapproval—the annoyance or agitated anger towards artists who have tapped into crypto—is what remains most interesting to him as finishes New Here.
“Some of the most interesting art that has lodged itself in my films—sometimes it pisses me off. Sometimes it really makes me angry. Sometimes I don’t get it. And I don’t understand why it was made. And maybe that reaction is the thing,” Sickles said.
Yes, it’s true that artists and other parties involved in the crypto community are “alchemizing value out of nothing.” But, Sickles added, “if all that pisses you off, that’s at least an emotion that was engendered by somebody and the community.”
“That happens less and less in the galleries in Chelsea,” he said.
