Now the pair has produced a product with a US$25,000 (about $32,300) price tag to raise money for charity, the result of combining Mr Gravina’s technical skills with Berlin-based Mr Murphy’s abstract creative output.
Mr Gravina said he and Mr Murphy were the first from Shepparton to embrace the crypto art craze by taking NFT art to market.
Working in the tech industry, Mr Gravina said he was interested in cryptocurrency, a digital currency that can be used to pay for a digital piece of art, an NFT.
NFTs are best described as a unit of data stored on a digital ledger called a blockchain, and can be used to represent photos, videos, audio and other digital files.
The blockchain certifies that an NFT is unique, there is only one copy, and it can only have one owner. “I think one day cryptocurrency will be in everyone's life,” Mr Gravina said.
“Then I saw that a new craze was the NFTs, which all these artists and other crypto guys were talking about, because it's a new phase.”
Mr Gravina said NFTs were initially used jokingly, to sell “random fun ideas”, silly images and rare footage.
For example, one of YouTube’s most well-known funny home videos, Charlie bit my finger, last fortnight sold as an NFT for almost $1 million.
Now NFTs have taken a serious turn in the international art world and are embraced by musicians, visual artists and their collectors; the first NFT sold at esteemed British auction house Christie’s reportedly went for about $89 million.
“I liked the concept, so I got into it and dove a little bit deeper,” Mr Gravina said.
For the past five years Mr Gravina has worked full-time on his small business, MHG Development, offering website design to customers in Shepparton and beyond, and he sees plenty of room to expand his services into the “crypto space”.
“I'm finding I can help artists get online, and it would be good to get more artists online and in the NFT space,” he said.
In Mr Gravina’s experience, people without working knowledge of the technology industry can find it difficult to navigate the complexities of cryptocurrency, blockchain and NFTs — words which hold little to no meaning for much of the general public.
“It’s hard to understand if you’re not in that space,” he said.
A mutual friend connected Mr Gravina and Mr Murphy via WhatsApp six months ago, and since then the duo has collaborated digitally to transform a physical artwork, produced on canvas with the ashes of Australian bushfires, into a digital asset.
Mr Murphy said the artwork for sale, After All the Forests Have Burned, was produced in the “searing heat” of the Australian summer in 2020, when he ventured “deep into the bushfire-burned Australian landscape”.
“The charcoal of burnt eucalyptus bark, the ash of burned leaves, the bush soil, as wellas the water from dams were the physical elements I used to create a homage to these burned bush lands,” he said.
Mr Murphy said the work addressed contemporary issues of climate change, and “the universal, ever-cycling process of fire and rebirth — the regenerative power of nature”.
For the Shepparton-raised artist, an NFT was more than a file, it was “a relic of the action” and “the aesthetic remnant of something earnest, intuitive, idiosyncratic and free”.
The lucky buyer will be the new owner of the NFT and the original, physical artwork produced by Mr Murphy in the wake of the fires.
All profits raised from the sale will be donated to environmental charity Greenpeace Australia.
Addressing concerns that NFTs were not environmentally friendly because of the immense energy output required to produce them, Mr Gravina said he expected to see cryptocurrencies become more sustainable.
“And as a whole, (cryptocurrency) is very, very new,” he said.
“Given a few years, the technology is going to be even better.”
Looking to the future of crypto art in Shepparton, Mr Gravina said he would one day love to see an NFT exhibition including his creative partner’s work at Shepparton Art Museum.
“Overseas there’s a few of them, digital art galleries and art museums — they’re just big screens in an art museum,” he said.
“I would like to see that, and I think it will happen at some stage.”
