Beyond Physical Boundaries - Organising a Virtual Exhibiton with NFTs for an International Conference

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged individuals and all international collaborations, including research and academic international conferences. Most conferences had to adapt to an online or hybrid mode at best, if not cancelled or postponed. During this period, we were invited to organise the third edition of an international conference on Arts, Technology and Society. At its core, it is an academic conference, but it also offers a platform for an art exhibition and forum for artists to share and exhibit. Due to Macao’s physical constraints and its inaccessibility for outside visitors, the Local Organisation Committee took the challenge to organise the first virtual art exhibition in an academic conference, including Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) for artists willing to sell their digital artwork. This paper presents the creative process as well as the technical issues faced during the conference and exhibition preparation time. As NFT-based virtual exhibition is a new offer within an academic international conference and a new tool to permanently promote artists’ work, we are also proposing some possible future works to develop further this approach and give it a larger visibility. We believe such type of exhibition can play an important role on a world seeking for more sustainable communication.