Metaphors, Blockchain and Personal Demons: How Dima Shturm Turns Experience into Digital Art

Tell us about your art: why did you choose to build a practice specifically in digital art? What was your route into art?

I like digital art because you don’t have to spend money on paint. I’ve always been making something, in one form or another.

Are you still working with NFTs? And do you think they’re still relevant, given how demand has fallen on the global market?

I work with NFTs actively. Right now (as ever, really) the received wisdom is that NFTs are a scam, that they’ve gone downhill, and so on. And yes, right now (as ever, really) most NFT projects are prime, unadulterated junk. And the overwhelming majority of artists still don’t understand that their work won’t sell on the blockchain until they have clear utility — NFTs with real uses beyond just being unique collectibles. I give free lectures in Moscow from time to time to bring people up to speed on the basics of crypto art, but I don’t teach, I don’t run paid courses and I certainly don’t give away my secrets to a mass audience.

And I’m one of very few Russian-speaking artists who don’t just know the theory but actually make money from understanding the NFT market. That’s a big claim, so rather than leave it hanging, here are the numbers from one of my projects. The project Worlds of BOO earned 169 ETH (it’s on OpenSea). You can go to that digital art marketplace yourself and see the sales. And no, sales figures can’t be faked on the blockchain. You can also work out the total sales volume in roubles yourself; the ETH-to-rouble rate is always publicly available. So when an argument starts about whether NFTs are still relevant, I just send the link to my sales figures. To me that’s the strongest argument in any dispute about money — or rather, it isn’t an argument, it’s a fact. But to earn consistently from selling crypto art, you have to understand what the market actually is, its laws and its rules. The closest analogy is the stock market: yes, you can make good money there, but if you don’t understand any of it, don’t even try.

Can you give us your top five favourite NFT artists — the ones who inspire you?

It may sound strange, but I don’t really follow other NFT artists. It seems like a logical idea: find a commercially successful project, analyze it, take it apart, break it down and reproduce the result. But it doesn’t work like that. It’s like trying to repeat the path of any successful person by copying them mechanically. Too many factors feed into commercial success. NFTs are a speculative market. You need to understand that and not get sentimental about it.

Do you think digital art made in Russia is relevant to the international market? Why, or why not?

Digital art in Russia is still fairly undercooked. So if your goal is to sell, you should build a presence on platforms like X and Discord (both banned in Russia) from the outset. Because selling NFTs on VKontakte or Odnoklassniki will be, to put it mildly, hard going, especially without an established audience with money that transacts in crypto. The vast majority of users in Russia don’t even have a crypto wallet, so don’t kid yourself that you’re going to be the one to build the Russian NFT market. Of course sales happen on the Russian market, but as I see it they’re unsystematic — and that’s not what we want.

What are the biggest difficulties for artists who want to build a practice in digital art, or in NFTs specifically? What should they be ready for?

As for the difficulties — if your work doesn’t sell offline, selling it online, and especially for crypto, won’t be easier, it’ll be harder. An NFT is just a tool, a token, a smart contract. The biggest difficulty is that you can’t quickly build up a paying audience for your particular artistic style. You have to be ready for a run of 10,000 failed attempts (like Thomas Edison), and then possibly another 10,000, and another, and another. It’s a risky market. Nobody guarantees success. But if a project does succeed, the ceiling on what you can earn from it is effectively unfixed, because there’s a secondary market — the price often rises, and the original creator takes a percentage, a royalty, on every resale.

What is your art about? Could you introduce us to your favourite piece? Why that one?

As for my work — I like making metaphorical pieces, often about vices and addictions. Since I’m someone with serious problems with alcohol myself, I like turning that experience into art. In some sense it’s probably therapy.

How do you feel about art made with AI?

On art and AI: I have a lecture called “Is Contemporary Art Facing a Digital Apocalypse?”, where I spend an hour talking about today’s Luddites and answering that question in detail. The short version: I feel great about it. I’m waiting for neural networks to replace all of us. And for artificial intelligence to walk my dog instead of me.

How do you think the roles in human-AI co-creation will shift in the near future?

Opinions on this are polarised, from the utopian to the post-apocalyptic. I think that, as usual, the truth is somewhere in between. AI is a tool, no more and no less. It’s like a hammer: you can build a birdhouse with it, or you can hit your own thumb. What I can say for certain is that people who master even the basic neural networks will pull noticeably ahead on routine tasks. As the saying goes, AI won’t replace you — a specialist who knows how to work with AI will.

What are your immediate plans? What strategy did you settle on after the program?

My plans are simple and linear. First of all I want to lose 30 kg, because I’ve gone completely lazy since neural networks arrived. Right now I’m running several NFT projects that I’m not publicising, at least not until they succeed. And if they flop, nobody will ever know about my shame. Besides the commercial projects, I speak from time to time on NFTs, neural networks and artificial intelligence in creative work. And I’m constantly learning new AI tools myself.

Was our program useful to you, and if so, how?

And a final question: does this moment feel to you like a time of opportunity, or a time of sweeping change that will transform art dramatically and take away the artist’s familiar role?

Every era is an era of change. Artists always respond to change in society: either brilliantly, or by drinking. Sometimes both. I can’t claim to be on the front line of this question. I just like drawing strange creatures and toads. I’m also fond of the band Vlazhnye Vatrushki. That’s everything from me, and thank you for your attention.