Please understand that it is still real no matter how real it may look from the outside.

This word was added when issued the "Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note" created by Japanese avant-garde artist Genpei Akasegawa in 1967. During his lifetime, Akasegawa questioned the fact that all banknotes that were reproductions were originals, and created a work of paper money "Model 1,000-Yen Note" etc. Digital data can be reproduced in the same way as paper money, but it was difficult to prove that the data was original. However, in 2017, 50 years after the issuance of the "Greater Japan Zero-Yen Note" what would later be called "Crypto Art" appeared on the Ethereum blockchain. Crypto art is a new art form that uses blockchain technology to mint non-fungible original into digital data. This art will allow us to reconsider the questions that Akasegawa once had from a contemporary perspective.

In this age of the most advanced information technology, our society has become a decentralized society where activities are conducted only in closed communities, where one's thoughts and beliefs (which can be replaced with justice) can be comfortably understood. This is a society where it is possible to live without having to deal with others who do not agree with you. This is a kind of worldview where a huge amount of secret societies are running wild. It is difficult for any community to observe what is going on in the outside community. As a result, a huge cloud of conspiracy theories are covering the world, similar to the deep web, where no one can search for the source. Ironically, our excessive search for information has drowned us in a tidal wave of information, and we have become less informed than people of previous eras. This is like the world is shrouded in a lot of cryptography.
In the 2000s, "Alternate Reality Game" emerged in the U.S. as a form of experiential play intersecting the real and the virtual. It is incorporated with the everyday world as part of the game. This culture became popular in Japan in the 2010s as a "Real Riddle Solving Game". In both games, players solve cryptic fragments of information to advance the game in the everyday world in real time. This Alternate Reality Game (Real Riddle Solving Game) seems to have died out in the 2020s, but in fact it has not. In the present age of the coronavirus crisis, where the real and the virtual have intersected too much, the entire everyday world that has caused an information overflow becomes a society of Alternate Reality Games where is full of cryptic fragments of information. This is the true nature of the "New Normal" in today's society. We are living in an age of non-contact in a coronavirus crisis society. The fact is that it is not physical non-contact but information non-contact. We are traveling in a world where we are no longer in touch with true information.

We live in an alternative information society full of conspiracy theories and post-truths. In the 2020s, we began to seek real information in the "Non-Fungible Token" circulating in the Ethereum blockchain. Non-Fungible Token can add unique value to digital data because they are the only and cannot be substituted for other information. This Non-Fungible Token is mainly used to buy and sell items in blockchain games, but it is also used for rare digital art, which is called "Crypto Art". "CryptoPunks" created in 2017 by American game studio "Larva Labs" is believed to be the world's first crypto art minted in the Ethereum blockchain. The fact that "CryptoPunks" is a pixel art as an art form is very suggestive, because in the extreme all arts are pixel arts. In other words, not only all arts created in this world such as paintings and sculptures, but also the primordial originals of all mass are the smallest information called elementary particles. The containers that store the originals make up this material world in various forms. A single pixel is also the smallest piece of information, which increases the resolution and complicates the information to create various kinds of arts. It is similar to the situation in today's society where we are flooded with a huge amount of information. We need to write a new story for the next stage moving from that complex non-contact alternative information to touchable real information. Japanese art studio "EXCALIBUR" is actively working to solve the touchable true information by pixel art, in which Japanese myths and folklores are drawn. It feels natural that contemporary artists, who have had a deep interest in the original of digital data for a long time, moved on to the stage of crypto art. Pixel art functions critically to touch the primordial originals, the true information in today's society that is too alternated with information.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, any kind of that information are replicable and will all be replaced in 15 minutes. From the era of vast Alternate Reality Game quantities to the era of unique Non-Fungible Token qualities, crypto art becomes the new narrative of today's decentralized crypto society. "Ann Lee" was started in 1999 by French artists Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the original copyright to the character from a Japanese animation company and commissioned various artists to create works that would serve as her containers. The series of projects was called "No Ghost Just a Shell" and was a very empty story reflecting the millennium society. Crypto art gives digital data a unique original. For the first time in history, images that had previously been nothing more than containers to be replicated got "ghosts". The whisper of crypto art has only just begun.