an original NFT

Initially created during the height of the digital art frenzy, An Original NFT offers a quiet, analogue counterpoint. It is a hybrid work — a painting set into gentle animation — that seeks to reclaim a loaded term. A meditation on value, memory, and our most fundamental connections, it was born from a personal encounter with a chimpanzee tribe in Tanzania’s Mahale Mountains.
The scene depicts a mother teaching her infant the art of tennis. I think. Or perhaps it depicts something else entirely: the value of family, the pursuit of health, a life in harmony with nature. These are the pillars of my memory of that moment, and they form the work’s hidden signature — Nature, Family, Tennis. This is my NFT.
While the world chased digital tokens, this work was conceived as a different kind of asset. Its worth is not speculative but intrinsic. A physical photograph holds a hand-painted moment, brought to life as I remember it through animation — a record of something real: a genuine connection, and a loving joke. Hidden within the decorative pattern of its frame, a QR code waited — and you found it.

This work asks what we truly value: the fleeting digital promise, or the enduring, irreplaceable treasures of the natural and social world. And if that world — its stillness, its connections, its unhurried rhythms — is also what restores us, what does it mean if we rarely connect to nature?