Hermine Bourdin on Sculpture, Dance, and NFTs | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Sculptor Hermine Bourdin on giving physical sculpture a second life as NFTs, and the project that made one of her pieces dance.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Hermine Bourdin is a French sculptor whose abstract work takes women as its muse. Recorded in Paris in April 2022, she tells David Cash how she first came to the blockchain as a way to authenticate her physical work, and how NFTs let her make pieces bigger, change their colours, animate them, and place them in impossible settings. She explains how she and her partner 3D scan and rig her sculptures, and walks through her genesis drop, made by capturing the movement of a Paris Opera dancer in a motion tracking suit and transferring it to a sculpture, with music by a friend in Tel Aviv. She also talks about a planned second drop as a dynamic NFT that changes with the seasons, why artists should claim digital space, and a possible collaboration with the Paris Opera.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro: Hermine Bourdin, sculptor
2. 0:32 From physical sculpture to NFTs
3. 2:20 Scale without limits in the metaverse
4. 4:35 Scanning sculpture with her partner
5. 5:55 A sculpture that dances
6. 8:20 Dynamic NFTs that change with the seasons
7. 9:49 Why artists should claim digital space
8. 10:49 A possible Paris Opera collaboration
9. 11:19 Where to find Hermine

Speakers

• David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
• Hermine Bourdin, sculptor

Key topics

• Physical sculpture and digital art
• Authenticating physical work on the blockchain
• 3D scanning and rigging sculpture
• Motion capture and dance
• Algorithmic music in art NFTs
• Dynamic NFTs
• Art in public digital space
• Artist duos and collaboration

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Hermine Bourdin on sculpture, dance, and NFTs [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/N1hX1guLaV4

Chicago: Cash, David. "Hermine Bourdin on Sculpture, Dance, and NFTs." Recorded April 2022, Paris. YouTube video, 12:58. https://youtu.be/N1hX1guLaV4.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 in Paris, France, during Paris Blockchain Week. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:03] Hello everybody, welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, your editor-in-chief, and we are here live in Paris, France. We're here for Blockchain Summit, but we are at an undisclosed location right now with one of my favorite NFT artists, Hermine Bourdin, an amazing sculptor working in physical and digital realms. We want to talk a little bit today about that blend, about your practice, and let the people watching know a little bit more about you. So with all of that being said, do you want to just give people a little bit of a background on you and what brings you to the art world and now creating NFTs? Thank you, David. Thank you for the invitation. Yes, I'm a physical sculptress, so I make female-inspired shapes. Women are my muse, basically, and I make it physical.

[0:54] That's what I've been doing since several years now, and I've been interested by NFTs first as a way to put the authentication on the blockchain. So I used VerisArt at the beginning, you know, and after I heard about NFT and I thought it was a super cool way to give a second life to my physical work and to defy a physical universal law, you know, like you can make it bigger, you can change the color, you can animate it, and that's a new way, basically, to play with art. It's like giving a new chance, a new life to your work, which is very static. My physical work is static. I cannot do anything. It's done, it's baked, you know, it's there. And then when you 3D scan it and you remodel it after in 3D, you can make it move and you can have fun, basically.

[1:49] So that's why I'm interested in digital art and so NFT and it's super cool. I love it and I love that your process happens so organically and, you know, I believe that, you know, the blockchain is so empowering for so many artists like yourself in terms of, you know, recontextualizing your art, allowing you to provide your own provenance. And then also I think that, you know, as you mentioned, when you start exploring NFTs, you kind of explore this whole digital realm. So the fact that I love that you 3D scan your physical pieces and, you know, what I want to chat about just really briefly in terms of, you know, possibility. We've shared articles through this outlet, you know, on the idea of, you know, the metaverse allows anything to be possible, you know, especially in the realm of something like sculpture, which, you know, traditionally if you want to do a massive scale sculpture, it's prohibitively expensive and difficult and, you know,

[2:33] you have to transport, it's almost impossible, right? So I think that I would love to hear a little bit of your thoughts on some of your work because I know you've taken some of your pieces which are not tiny but they're, you know, they're small, they're maybe a handheld size, something that you can, you know, kind of hold or pick up and take these pieces and bring them into these kind of fantastical environments, either making them super huge or I've seen you, you know, put them in bodies of water or other places where typically it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to kind of, you know, create these types of experiences. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on, yeah, the digital manipulation and how that's exciting for you. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Exactly. I had some fun about making a virtual world, which is a kind of, the idea was to do like the Easter Island, you know, and to

[3:21] take my pieces and make it huge, huge, huge, you couldn't make it ERL, you know, because you can make outdoor sculpture very big but this big, big way, it was a bit, it's a bit impossible but virtually you can do it and it's a lot of fun. Actually it's liberating as a, you know, physical artist to play with your mind and I'm sure like the surrealist artists, you know, Dali and all the Magritte, they would have, they would have had a lot of fun, I think, playing with digital and so yes, that's very interesting to me to put them in new environments. So here it was on this island that's visible on my website, this island basically, and also like to play, like I made also a series called Metamorphosis and it's sliced and we've got a patent code, it changes the shapes, so it's kind of something you cannot really do, you know, tangible, static, so it's a lot of fun and you can also, it's a GLB format, so you can see it in AR or so,

[4:26] whatever you want and it's fun, yeah. Amazing. When did you start exploring these technologies? Is it recently, were you always interested in these kinds of augmentations? I'm curious, maybe as a starting point, when's the first time you've scanned one of your pieces? Oh well, you know, my partner is a geek, so basically he was the one who convinced me to do it and at the beginning I was like no, why, I would do that, I'm not interested, you know, and actually that's kind of the merge of our two universes because he's super geek and he's like a developer and so I'm not at all, I was not so much into computers and stuff and he was in crypto, so he convinced me, you know, and now we are working together a bit because he's playing with the 3D for me, you know, and I'm doing the artistic direction but he's doing the 3D Learn Blender, you know, and so we started about in 2020, something like that. Amazing. Having fun, yeah, so we are a team basically.

[5:22] I love that and I feel that happens a lot, you know, in this space, you know, I work with my partner, I know a bunch of other, you know, duos just because when you kind of get in, when you go down the rabbit hole, the NFC rabbit hole, it's kind of difficult to relate to some other people in the ecosystem because, especially from the traditional art world, you know, it's super different but obviously, you know, things are working out quite well now, there's so many projects, you're doing so many things for people watching, you know, I know you've done a series of NFTs, you've done several NFTs before but now you have a new drop that's recently come out. Do you want to let people know how maybe that's developed from your collaborative practice and now what you're putting out into the world in the NFT space? Yeah, definitely, you know, the magic about digital work and NFT is that you can make dream you had now happen, for example, before I heard about

[6:11] digital or NFT or anything like that, I wanted, I had a dream to make one of my sculptures dance, this was like a fantastic, what do you say, a fantastic, that I had, you know, and with the, I could have done it before, I mean 3D was always there but it's different now because you can make the project and you can have people collecting it so it's totally different and so I asked, before it would just be for fun, yeah, for fun, like that, you know, but it's, yeah, exactly, now it's like a piece of art, digital, you know, so it's very interesting and so I decided, okay, so let's do the project, you know, and so I asked a French dancer of the Paris Opera to dance for me with a suit, like a mocap, motion tracking suit, you know, and she danced for me and we were many people on the set because we had people having to take care of the suit and people doing the 3D and it was great because I became kind of a

[7:10] realizator, director, you know, yeah, and it was really, really fun and then we took one of my pieces that I made specially for that project, we 3D scanned it with my partner and then we had a rig, we rigged it, you know, and we took the dance of the dancer, Eugénie Drillon, and we re-transcribed it to the piece animated. I love this phrasing, the re-transcribe. Yeah, exactly, exactly, right, and it's a merge of the sculpture and dance and I love it because I had this idea in mind, I wanted to see how my sculpture would be dancing because my sculptures are very abstract so I was wondering and I had also a friend who is making music with EI, he made some algorithm, he's from Tel Aviv and he made that, you know, from me so I sent him the animation and he made really nice music and so it's really a merge of different realm like sculpture, dance, EI, music and new technology, you know, and so

[8:22] the project is out, the genesis is out but it's the first drop, it's on non-origin and then the idea is to make a second drop which will be a dynamic NFT meaning the dance will change with the season so the music will change and also a bit the background so the idea is that the dance will evaluate, with the season and I think it's very important to push the boundaries of digital art and see what we can do in dynamic NFTs because I think it's pretty interesting and that's where I want to go and so we, yeah, we are working on that and... No, that's incredible, yeah, I mean dynamic NFTs are really now the bleeding edge I think forefront of what's going on now in the space and I think it's really exciting and hopefully empowering to other artists watching that, you know, yourself coming from a traditional art practice as physical sculpture, how, you know, through the power of NFTs and through the power of, you know, digital art

[9:15] you're able to explore so many different mediums with your practice and still keep it authentic to yourself without, without, you know, straying from your practice or your style or your intention. Absolutely. That's really important. Yeah, exactly, it's important to stay in your realm and but it's also fun to touch other stuff, you know. You still need to explore. Exactly because anything is possible with digital art so, you know, you just need to do it, to have the... it's hard. It's intimidating for some people though but if you actually just take advantage of it and just are open to it you can actually do anything. Exactly and I think it's very important that the artists they take the space of digital, you know, otherwise and because in the future we will have more and more AR things popping in with the AR, you know, glasses and all that stuff and I think it's important that the artists take the space and start to make art

[10:05] digitally because we live in a world that is becoming more and more digital and, for example, what did Krista Kim is impressive. Like, you know, Times Square, all their art for several minutes, really it's just commercial, you know, and now it's art and it's like Zen art in addition to that, you know, I love her work and I think it's really nice to, yeah, to put art in digital so it's not just commercial, basically. Absolutely. Yeah and the fact that we can lend these worlds of art and commerce now in a more authentic way I think is really amazing. Also, yeah, exactly, I love the collaboration like when some brands they make collaboration with artists it's like super cool because it makes it more interesting and more fun and more beautiful and, you know. Speaking of, just in case it comes out, do you want to mention a potential collaboration that you have coming up and say as if it's happening?

[10:53] Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we spoke about the project to the Paris Opera and they are very interesting and we might do the second drop in collaboration with the French Paris Opera so that's very exciting, so yeah. Wow, I'm sure that everything will progress beautifully in that case. Yeah, it would be really nice. Just, you know, obviously some folks here are already familiar with your work, it's been written about your work before, but I'm sure there's some folks and collectors out there who might be interested in you and your practice and might not be familiar. Where can people find your work or what do you suggest as the first starting point if somebody wants to delve into the world of hermen? Well, you can find me on Twitter and you can find me my my Genesis drop that I just dropped with the ballerina, with the dancer.

[11:41] He's on non-origin so you can find me there but everything is on my Twitter. You can also find me on Instagram. Actually, I show more my physical work on Instagram and more my digital work on Twitter. I'm kind of, yeah, yeah, you know, exactly, I had to, I kind of do both now, it's funny but now I am like collector of NFT asking me physical piece and, you know, collector of physical piece asking me like NFT, so it's funny. So you can find me there, you can also find me on my website, I'm in Bourdon, like normal, normal or yeah, and you can write me an email or anything. Beautiful, and we'll link all the links below. Oh man, it's always such a pleasure to hang out with you and chat. I love your practice, I love your work, I'm excited to hopefully buy one of your pieces, always full disclosure, and yeah, I hope that everybody takes a moment to check out your new collection and I hope everything continues to just grow for you and I look forward to seeing, you

[12:33] know, these generative aspects of your work, these dynamic aspects of your work and the integration of music, you know, dance, oh it's just, it's just so beautiful. So thank you so much, thank you, and thank you all so much for watching. We appreciate it. As always, this is NFTS.WTF, my name is David Cash, and we'll see you in the next episode.