MyBottega: An Environment for the Innovative Production and Distribution of Digital Art

Recent years have seen a number of innovations that have set the stage for a radical expansion of digital art, from the point of view of both the production and the distribution of works, On the one hand, in fact, the advent of generative capabilities in Artificial Intelligence based on Deep Learning methodologies, such as in particular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), make radically innovative tools available to support artistic production; on the other hand, the processes of authentication of works of art made possible by blockchain technologies, such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), have seen the emergence on a large scale of digital art markets on the Web. These new modes of production and distribution need to be tightly integrated to fully express their potential for adoption. Drawing inspiration from the Italian Renaissance workshop (the "bottega"), which was a hugely successful environment for the production and distribution of art, we designed and implemented the MyBottega software architecture, in order to bring these innovations to the stakeholders (artists, curators, exhibitors, etc.) of today's digital art.