As part of its efforts to protect Poland’s cultural heritage, Pekao Bank, Poland’s second largest bank, launched the innovative project Archiv3. The initiative is partnering with blockchain platform Aleph Zero to digitize and tokenize important Polish works of art, preserving the code for future generations by storing it in a vault in the Arctic. That’s what I’m aiming for.
This novel project shows how modern cryptographic techniques can intersect with traditional cultural preservation. Through the process of digitization and tokenization, physical assets such as art are linked to digital tokens on the blockchain, ensuring secure storage and ease of access while providing an additional layer of protection.
Pekao Bank’s efforts to preserve Poland’s artistic heritage include the digitization of the works of famous artists such as Jan Matejko and Stanisław Wyspiandskim, which will be installed in environmentally friendly Aleph Securely stored on the Zero Blockchain.
The digitization process includes state-of-the-art 3D scanning technology to create museum-quality digital replicas of famous Polish paintings. These scans are stored in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), ensuring transparency, immutability, and durability, which are the fundamental qualities of blockchain architecture. This means that these digital works of art are preserved unaltered for future generations to study and appreciate.
Anna Wałdzińczak Parinichak, Vice President of the Bank’s Management Board, emphasized the importance of combining tradition with cutting-edge technology. “Pekao Bank has been associated with the arts almost from the beginning of its activity and has in its assets the works of the most outstanding Polish artists. As a patron of the arts, we make them available and promote them. ” she said.
Wawrzynczak-Palynyczak noted that the move toward blockchain technology in art preservation is consistent with Pekao’s broader objectives. “At the same time, we are looking to the future, focusing on young artists and new technologies. We combine the bank’s 95-year history of security guarantees with the latest solutions to provide our customers with the highest quality of service. “Tokenization is an opportunity for investment market development,” she added.
One particularly original aspect of the Archiv3 project is that these digital artworks are housed at the Arctic World Archive (AWA) in Svalbard, Norway. AWA is a facility designed to protect important cultural and scientific data from natural disasters and cyberattacks. Among the treasures held are manuscripts from the Vatican Library and digital versions of UNESCO documents, which will soon be joined by tokenized works of art by Polish masters.
“A profound new way to preserve art”: Leah Kimura, Mirror of the Soul, 2024. Kimura is one of the artists whose works are being tokenized by Pekao Bank and Aleph Zero as part of a program to preserve Poland’s cultural heritage.
For Pekao Bank, the combination of blockchain technology and secure archiving in a remote Arctic vault represents a unique way to keep Poland’s cultural heritage alive into the future. Wawrzynczak-Palynyczak said: “Through ARCHIV3, we will demonstrate the synergy between traditional art and modern technological solutions and the potential to protect valuable data based on modern solutions.”
Artist Leah Kimura, whose work Mirror of the Soul is one of the works being tokenized by Bank Pekao, shared her thoughts on the project with Art Newspaper. “As an artist who often explores existential themes such as the impermanence of life and the connections between different times and eras, I believe that the advent of blockchain is a way to preserve art that transcends traditional notions of time. “We offer profound new ways of understanding,” she said. “The immutability of blockchain allows digital works to remain untouched and unaltered, allowing them to exist in the same state as they were created long after we are gone.”
Kimura also mentioned concerns about the potential barriers blockchain could create to art preservation. “To those who argue that blockchain and digital scarcity create new barriers, I would say that any storage medium has its own challenges.The key is continuity and memory. How do we adapt and use these technologies to achieve broader goals?”
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