The Oklahoma City Zoo is selling the first digital art NFT made by an orangutan

by James · August 19, 2022

From sea lions and elephants to snow leopards and even stingrays, the Oklahoma City Zoo has equipped a veritable menagerie of residents to become painters over the years.

Popular with animals and people alike, the zoo’s Art Gone Wild program now goes global, digitally and cryptographically, thanks to an orangutan named Elok—and on behalf of other great apes of his kind.

On Friday – which is International Orangutan Day – the zoo is putting up for international auction what is believed to be the world’s first digital art non-fungible token designed by an orangutan – and possibly even the first NFT of any animal.

“It’s a way to connect people internationally, to maybe spark an interest in wildlife and learn about this particular species and then dive in a little bit more and learn more about other species that they can help,” Candice Rennels, Public Relations Director for Oklahoma City Zoo and Botanical Garden, told The Oklahoman.

“The NFT world itself, it’s just a whole new audience of collectors who might not even know that animals have these qualities and can paint.”

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What are NFTs and why does the OKC Zoo sell them?

An NFT is essentially a piece of data that verifies your ownership of a digital object, from a piece of art to a clip of an NBA star’s game-winning shot.

While fungible items can be easily exchanged – for example, if two people each have a $20 bill, they can exchange them without any change in value – non-fungible tokens are single and cannot be directly exchanged for another. They are digital assets that mean unique collectibles that cannot be copied or replaced, and they are usually bought and sold with cryptocurrency.

Since NFTs first appeared in 2014, interest in them has grown rapidly, especially in the art world. Last year, the first purely digital artwork offered by a major auction house — “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” a collage of digital images created by South Carolina artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple — sold for more than $69 million in an online auction by Christie’s.

Oklahoma City Zoo staff are hopeful that the uniqueness of a digital art NFT created by an orangutan will attract a lot of interest and a significant award for a good cause – conservation work on behalf of the great apes.

Meet Elok, OKC Zoo orangutan and artist

A Sumatran orangutan, Elok, 21, has lived at the Oklahoma City Zoo since 2008, and he has become quite the painter over the years.

“He’s very curious. He’s very interactive … So if he can be interactive with his environment, and he can be interactive with his caretakers, that’s the best form of enrichment for him. So, painting ticks both of those boxes the boxes,” said Tracey Dolphin, the zoo’s curator of primates.

“He actually gets to physically manipulate something, a brush, he gets to look at the colors when he’s painting, and he gets to manipulate the canvas … And then the third part of that is he actually gets a reward — his reinforcement is his favorite snack — so I would say painting is definitely one of his favorite enrichment activities.”

Part of the array of enrichment programs developed by the creatures’ caretakers, painting is an optional activity offered periodically to many animals at the Oklahoma City Zoo. Each species creates works of art with non-toxic paint using techniques specific to their natural behavior and body: while some animals hold brushes in their paws or mouths, others apply paint directly to the canvas with their trunk, snout or entire body.

Through the Art Gone Wild program, the zoo sells the animal artwork at its Guest Relations office, and the proceeds go to various conservation efforts.

“We can’t get them in there fast enough,” Rennels said. “It’s been the community, frankly, that’s grown that program … It’s really been a success and is a great, great fundraising model for us here.”

Curious monkey gets the chance to become a digital artist

Known for their distinctive red fur, orangutans are intelligent apes native to the rainforests of the Southeast Asian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. In the wild, they spend almost their entire lives in trees, so they are quite nimble.

When Becky Scheel and Mathieu Kuhne, the design team at Megafauna Studios, approached the zoo to propose a new form of digital enrichment, Elok was a natural choice to become the zoo’s first digital artist.

“With his personality, how curious he is, how much he likes cognitive challenges – when we present him with something new, he’s not necessarily going to just get frustrated and walk away. He’s going to try to understand what we want. And he’s just very easy going and very interactive with our care staff. So we knew he would be the perfect candidate,” said Dolphin.

Instead of a traditional paint and canvas, Elok was given a 2-foot digital brush to go with the 3-foot-by-4-foot screen just outside his indoor habitat. When the orangutan moved the digital brush, a motion detection device made from a modified Xbox captured the movement and projected the design onto the digital screen. Both the finished creative product and the act of creation were recorded.

“When we do the regular painting, there’s contact. He can see it, he understands it. So it was a learning curve to understand what we were asking him to do and how to make that connection. It was a quick learning curve. .. He got it pretty quickly,” Dolphin said.

Of course, serving his favorite snacks—popcorn, prunes, and animal crackers—helped the process.

How can people buy Elok’s digital art NFTs?

Since becoming a digital artist, Elok has created 21 NFT designs. The zoo will keep one and plans to sell two of his digital artwork NFTs starting Friday on the online NFT auction site OpenSea.io.

One of the NFTs will be auctioned off between 12:00 Friday and 12:00 Monday. The other will be up for sale during those three days at the set price of three Ethereum, a type of cryptocurrency that varies in dollar value based on the market.

“We’re learning with this, too,” Rennels said. — We start with the two this weekend … then we’ll just see how the interest goes.

Since Elok designed the zoo’s first digital art NFTs, proceeds from sales will go to a conservation organization working to help orangutans in North Sumatra.

“There are three species of orangutans, and they are all critically endangered, mostly due to habitat loss from a variety of human activities … There is the conversion of their habitat for agriculture – especially for the production of palm oil – and there are roads being built into those areas to get things like palm oil into the market. Then it’s just logging and illegal hunting going on in those areas,” said Rebecca Snyder, the Oklahoma City Zoo’s director of conservation science.