Auction details for the first-ever NFT (non-fungible token) of Automobili Lamborghini are now confirmed. Lamborghini has partnered with NFT PRO and RM Sotheby’s and will receive bids on the five pairs of physical and digital artworks by the renowned artist Fabian Oefner between February 1st, the first day of the new lunar year, and February 4th. The auction for the first of the five NFTs will take place on nft.lamborghini.com starting at 4:00 pm CET, while each of the other auctions will start and end 15 minutes later then their preceding one. Every auction will last for 75 hours and 50 minutes, the exact time it took Apollo 11 to leave Earth and enter the moon’s orbit – not the only reference to human space exploration.
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The physical artwork, the Space Key, contains carbon fiber pieces that Lamborghini sent to the International Space Station back in 2020, as a part of a joint research project. Engraved with a unique QR code, these carbon fiber parts link the digital element, are a series of five photographs of a Lamborghini Ultimae, lifting off toward the stars. Its parts, the engine, the transmission, the suspension and hundreds of nuts and bolts are shooting away from the chassis like the exhaust flame of a rocket. What may look like a computer-generated image is in fact entirely created from elements of the real world: The artist captured more than 1500 individual parts of a real car. The photograph of the earth`s curvature was made by sending a weather balloon equipped with a camera to the edge of the stratosphere. The artist then carefully assembled all of these images into an artificial moment in time.
The artist, Fabian Oefner, on the idea behind his creation: “For me, ‘Space Time Memory’ is an analogy to the memories we make in life. Memories are rooted in the physical world; we make them in reality. We then store them in our brains, what could be considered the digital world. I often wonder, what is more precious to me, the actual moment or the memory of that moment? Analog to that, I wonder with the ever-increasing amount of digital realities around us, what is more precious, reality itself or the copies and derivatives of it, that exist in the digital universe.”
At the start of the project, Oefner meticulously studied the engineering plans of the Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae and created an accurate sketch of what the final photograph will look like. Based on that sketch, Lamborghini prepared all the necessary parts and components of a production ready Ultimae. The pieces were then photographed by Oefner and his team in a makeshift photo studio right next to the production line at the Lamborghini Factory in Sant`Agata Bolognese. Upon his return to his studio in the US, where the artist works and lives near New York City, he combined the countless images into the composition envisioned in the sketch. It took Oefner and his team more than 2 months to create a moment, which is shorter than the blink of an eye.