Paintboxed Party
Join the evening to celebrate the inaugural debut of Paintboxed at PepeFest's Fake Basel 2024!
“Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour,” is an upcoming series of interactive events presented by Artmeta that will offer visitors a unique chance to experience one of the earliest digital art tools—the original legendary Quantel Paintbox, which defined the visual landscape of the 1980s and was used to create both the iconic MTV logo and the first CGI music video, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, released in June 1985.
______
Live perfomance: RARE SCRILLA afka DJ J-Scrilla & DJ Qbert
Screenings: Tezpepe
Art Newspaper article
______
Launched to potential buyers in a hotel suite at the National Association of Broadcasters show in New York in 1981, the Quantel Paintbox was an innovative digital painting tool from the early 1980s that predated Adobe Photoshop by almost a decade.
At Paintbox’s peak popularity, major broadcasters like ABC, NBC, and BBC adopted the Paintbox despite its enormous $250,000 price tag, equivalent to approximately $868,000 today. The Paintbox’s cultural significance reached new heights in 1987 when the BBC commissioned renowned artists such as David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, and Richard Hamilton to create digital artworks for the “Painting with Light” documentary series. This marked Hockney’s first use of a digital tool, predating his celebrated iPad drawings by more than a decade. Keith Haring also experimented with the Paintbox in 1985, captured in a short ABC TV segment in New York.
After Miami, the World Tour will take the Paintbox to global cities and invite selected artists to create new digital artworks using the Paintbox. Artworks created on the Paintbox during the World Tour will subsequently be minted as NFTs on objkt.com