I tried to think about a subject I recalled recently listening to the first video chat of the 
I guess everyone knows the amazing Sndbox Project (->website) created and managed by 
Steem Park is the first - the pilot - design project developed by the team. It is The First Public Design Project Funded By Cryptocurrency
What is the peculiarity of this project in the Steemverse? Yes. It is a physical place with material objects.
(I thought about building a Land Art Park of my own, and put in it some digitally created-connected sculpture. Maybe in the future)
Now, what I'm thinking about is: what does it means for Art, in the Digital Age, to have a physical place or a physical installation connected to the network of people who can appreciate it (or hate it: what matters is the influence)?
Most of the images we have in our memory or we see every day are reproductions of something - digital photographs, screenshots, video. It is not always easy to understand if something you see on your monitor is a photograph or a digital creation/elaboration. And, of course, there are a lot of amazing digital images created by artists every day on their computer/tablet. The point is not the distinction between digital and physical art.
The point is the awareness of a physical, concrete object and place existing somewhere, gravity-bound and exposed to the weather (or maybe under a good roof): what does it change in the way you see and read an image of an artwork the awareness that it is a physical thing that stays somewhere, beyond borders and under a flag, in the actual human society? How is it different if you instead know that what are looking at is a virtual object - a cabin from Avatar world, a statue in Stormwind, a digital 3D rendering?
Up to this point, we are not so far, somehow, from the distinction between original artwork and its reproduction that Walter Benjamin discussed in his famous essay: the original, one-of-the-kind artwork has something more, something the reproductions haven't. Benjamin calls it "aura", meaning an almost spiritual veracity and originality - a kind of primordial legacy, somehow.
But what I'm trying to think about now is not just the couple original-reproduction. I think that this scenario changes if we consider not just an "original", physical artwork, but an artwork created in a physical place specifically to be the root and the "ground" of a content shared and communicated around the world, on the web, beyond any borders.
I think that if something is created and built like that - in an italian square, in a park in New York City, in a somewhere bamboo wood - we can see it as it was somehow in a newborn place, but still a physical place. It is something like an artificial isle built in international waters.
In my opinion, this is another of the subjects Art will have to deal with.
What do you think?
