Historic tennis tournament Wimbledon and past champion Andy Murray teamed up with digital artist Refik Anadol to launch an official Wimbledon art NFT on Ethereum.
The data-driven digital art project, “The Exposition,” was created using 18 years of data from Andy Murray’s Wimbledon—including his two Grand Slam victories at the prestigious tennis tournament in 2013 and 2016—along with incredible motion- capture sessions. The project is billed as a “world first combination of digital art, sport and data science.”
The open edition NFT was traded earlier today via manifold.xyz which coincides with Murray’s second-round match at Wimbledon 2023, and will be available until July 16. The NFTs, created with Web3 consultancy FAN3, are priced at $147 each. Murray was finally eliminated from the tournament on Friday.
For “The Exposition,” the developers created a unique algorithm that uses millions of inputs from statistics along with motion, audio, and visual data. The resulting bursts of color represent the “drama, rivalries, and Championship victories” of Murray’s ongoing Wimbledon career, according to the project’s description.
According to the drop page, the artwork “reimagines how to understand and enjoy high-performance sport data in a visually stunning way.”
“Excited to collaborate with Wimbledon and Refik Anadol Studio on a data-driven digital art project involving every match I’ve played at Wimbledon,” Murray wrote in Twitter.
Holders of The Exposition will be able to unlock “future opportunities,” including exclusive access to purchase a physical print edition of the NFT produced by Avant Arte as a means of further mixing in the physical and digital world.
It was also confirmed that more collaborations between Murray, Wimbledon, and Anadol should be released in the coming months. The creators took Murray’s data from his most recent Wimbledon run with the goal of using it for future work.
Anadol, the creator of the award-winning “Unsupervised” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with algorithmic art on a large video wall, will act as an advisor for the inaugural Wimbledon NFT collection before collaborating on the next phase of the project.
Murray used to be the subject of NFTs with a Wimbledon theme in 2021, with some tied to physical video appearances showing footage of one of his tournament victories. NFTs are created by WENEW, a startup founded by NFT artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, who have the most unique NFTs. sold for around $178,000.
