LG Display's transparent OLED serves as a canvas for digital NFT art
LG Display's transparent OLED serves as a canvas for digital NFT art
By Mike Wheatley - 26 May 2022

LG Display has showcased how its transparent OLED displays can be a platform for a new breed of digital, NFT artists. 

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At a special event, the company unveiled a new NFT collection from the Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol. The artificial intelligence-powered “An Important Memory for Humanity” collection was displayed on a number of transparent OLED displays. 

The transparent displays are uniquely suited to the artwork, creating a kind of holographic effect that makes the collection appear to be floating in mid-air. It certainly looks impressive. 

Anadol’s limited edition NFT collection took video, audio and health data from Inspiration, the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight, to create a series of expressive data visualizations. Basically, the artist imagined his creative work on a digital screen.

The collection was in huge demand from NFT art fans, being sold off for $6.2 million in an auction. The unnamed buyer also received a transparent OLED TV on which to display their new art. 

Anadol said the unique characteristics of transparent OLED allowed him to visualize telemetry, ultrasound and heartbeat data from civilians on the Inspiration flight and transform it into an aesthetic masterpiece. He had previously collaborated with LG Display before on a collection called “Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams”, where he used a transparent OLED display as a canvas to create imagery based on real-time environmental data. 

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"I understood how amazing the OLED can be for communicating data paintings and data sculptures," he said. “[Transparent OLED] is a very exciting medium because you can really see through the medium of data like a holographic experience while you are interacting with an AI.” 

LG said its transparent OLED panels are self-emissive, which allows them to provide exceptionally clear images and a transparency rate that’s so high it can even be used as a replacement for clear glass windows. 

The South Korean company is currently the world’s only manufacturer of large-sized transparent OLED displays and has shown off a number of innovative use cases for them. The displays have previously been installed in shopping malls, public transportation and also used as doors in office buidings. 

Art is a new area of interest for LG Display but it sees a lot of potential for transparent OLED to become a digital canvas. It said it will present further transparent OLED-based interactive digital art later this year, promising to appear at some major art exhibitions.