M2 TERRITORY TOKENIZED AS NFT FOR SALE AT CHRISTIE'S M2 territory, Tokenized parcel, Second Life/NFT

Creation date 2021 The creation of the tokenized M2 is a continuation of the original Territory concept, the logical development of the initial M2, created by Fred Forest in 1975 near the Swiss border in France, near Annemasse at the place called "Chez Mermier". It was established in 1979 under the name of Territoire du M2 by its implantation in Anserville, a small village in the Oise region. Accompanied on the spot, permanently, by a physical ground of 1000 M2 divided in plots and buildings. The M2 land being the surface devoted to actions of all kinds, realized in France as well as abroad, and the buildings representing the seat of its government composed of 11 rooms devoted to its State functions.

Seat of the government of the M2 Artistic territory, Anserville, Oise, France Each of these rooms being reserved for specific functions of this self-proclaimed fictional state, and created from scratch by the artist Fred Forest. The actions produced these last 50 years on this concept (that is to say half a century during...) contributed to give to this concept of art and to the produced works an existence and strong historical recognition. Theorized by many art critics, sociologists and philosophers.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=755rraQFi7o Above Video on M2 with Pierre Restany with English subtitles This recognition is now also established by numerous documents, testimonies, videos, writings, installations, various actions, conferences, and books that have been produced over the last 50 years, bringing together prestigious names such as Pierre Restany, Vilem Flusser, Mario Costa, Pierre Levy, Edgar Morin, Frank Popper, Marshall Mc Luhan, Derryck de Kerckhove, Michael Leruth, Sophie Lavaud, Pierre Moeglin, Harald Szeemann, Jean Deveze, Annick Bureaud, Vinton Cerf, Louis-José Lestocart, Priscila Arantes, François Rabate etc... Notoriety also acquired by the links established by the artist on the occasion of his participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennial, the Documenta of Kassel, the MAC and the Paco das Artes of Sao Paulo, the MoMa of New York, the Slought Foundation of Philadelphia, the CAYC of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts of Lausanne, the Jeu de Paume, among others, and finally the Pompidou Centre... A NEW ERA FOR THE M2 TERRITORY BEGINS WITH ITS TOKENIZATION AS NFT IN 2021

M2 territory on second life, 2008, Promenade des Anglais, Nice CONSECRATING ITS NEW FUTURE Indeed, today in 2021, in the era of the blokchain, the M2 Territory will be dematerialized even more. It must be said that Fred Forest had already anticipated in 1996 during a sale at Drouot on the process of tokenization by implementing during a sale the access code to the work and not the work itself for the sale of Parcel / Network, converted into NFT in 2021 with the support of the Cartier Foundation. Below are the links concerning the creation of this NFT https://nft-archeology.org/ https://bit.ly/3g8dJTy https://bit.ly/3g8dJTy The artist had chosen this new name of NFT-Archeolology to mark at the same time its origin, its anteriority and its novelty. The name of parcel-network and parcelization having always been a direct allusion to that of M2. This adaptation of the name followed in 2008 the great move of the M2 Territory from its physical space to that of the networks and the Internet. Borrowing at the time the brand new technique offered by Second Life to create metaverses (these immaterial places that substitute themselves to those of the physical world where, in the form of avatars, you can intervene at a distance, and in a way recreate the world by abolishing the distance) Fred Forest who immediately understood the unheard of aspects of this change for our civilization appropriated it, always ahead of time, to set up his Territory in the form of a laboratory of social and ethical reflection. Always with his formal concept of parcelling in M2, which lends itself particularly well, in a homothetic way, to that of the tokens in today's blockchain... Below, video of the inauguration in 2008 of the M2 Experimental Center and Territory Laboratory located on the Promenade des Anglais in Nic. (English subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmksP9NQCaw During the 2008 inauguration of his M2 Territory Laboratory, Fred Forest organizes real-time performances where artists from all over the world in the form of avatars meet, improvise dances, and then gather around a table in the Territory's buildings to reflect on ecology and the future of our planet.

Below, Video of the Metaverse of the M2 Territory's Experimental Laboratory where artists of different nationalities (Canadians, Lebanese, Brazilians, Belgians, Germans, French etc.) met to indulge in the form of their avatars in the original dance created by one of them Ferdinand Corte, before going to the meeting room of the Territory's headquarters adjoining, in order to deal with various social issues including those related to ecology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUQDtWG7lJY The "metaverse" promises so to push back the limits of the physical world until the real and virtual universe end up merging. It is well for that that Forest is interested since always in this notion. Notion that for him connects him directly, not only to those of art and imaginary, but also to those of game, critical and creative reflection in a social, humanistic and quasi spiritual perspective. The artist's aim in the M2 Territory project has always been to critically question reality, including the notions of political and financial power. Staging himself, not without irony, in the role of debonair potentate that he attributes to himself by the distancing that art allows him. THE TOKENISE TERRITORY NOW DIVIDED IN 100 PARCELS WHICH THE ARTIST HERSELVES IN TRANCHES, IN THE FORM OF NFTs Today he puts on sale a slice of 10 parcels of the M2 Territory, numbered in the M2 Territory cadastre from 1 to 10, in the form of NFTs. Since 1978 he had never sold any of these plots, refusing to put his work into the commercial system. Today, at the age of 88, he has changed his mind, having understood in a very pragmatic way that this was the only way to complete his life's work by freeing up the financial means necessary for the creation of a Foundation destined to perpetuate his convictions which have animated him throughout his life, touching in art on social, justice and ethical matters. To achieve this goal, he is counting on direct contacts through social networks, as well as on online sales and the appearance of new tools such as those of the blokchain, eliminating trusted third parties and giving artists the opportunity to seize them and democratize the existing system somewhat. He also counts on the arrival of a generation of younger people in positions of power, experienced since their childhood in the use of these same tools. People of a different mentality, not embarrassed by old clichés and looking for new models in art that are in line with who they are, what they feel and what they practice in their daily life. This generational change is only just beginning today, and attitudes are still steeped in a culture that is no longer their own. The M2 Territory, which originally consisted of 1000 parcels, is reducing its size. To achieve this, Forest is going through an experimental phase of selling the first 10 M2 by tokenizing them in the form of 10 NFT tokens. At its beginning it was composed of 1000 M2 and their symbolic attribution, non-commercial, essentially created for friends, was offered gracefully without numbering and without designation of a given surface. Only by pure friendship or for rendering a service with a title of artistic property, that is to say a fictitious and purely artistic title, as one gives to the game of Monopoly. Now the artist, who enters the art market for the first time in his life after having refused to do so during his whole life, will proceed to the sale of a new slice of the M2 Territory in the form of 10 NFT numbered from 1 to 10.

This new slice that he opens benefiting from a new status is opened from now on in order to ensure the creation in Anserville of a foundation with humanitarian and associative goals having for finality to defend the artists by putting at their disposal technical and legal tools with their qualified personnel. We believe that many artists of his generation, being deprived of these means, remained stuck in traditional pictorial practices that did not give them the possibility to express themselves to the extent of all their imaginative capacities. Artists of vocation and training often replaced by technicians who claimed to be artists, remaining too often, with rare exceptions, only good technicians... M2 TERRITORY CREATED IN THE FORM OF PARCELS IN 2008 THAT REPRESENT AS MANY TOKENS IN ITS TOKENIZATION IN 2021

(Video Fred Forest realization 2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-X1Xg6A97k The President of the M2 Territory seen here, below, in the so-called Power Room with his red telephone on his right allowing him to communicate with his counterparts through direct lines and which has more than once avoided major international conflicts. On his left we can see a permanent television equipment that allowed him to contact his subjects (sorry, his citizens...) day and night according to what he had to tell them about the promised reforms but of course never realized, the increase of the purchasing power or the advancement of the retirement age, myths that nobody believed anymore. So life went on in the M2 Territory without anyone complaining about it, except for a few snarling trade unionists who were no longer even used as extras on the days of the big demonstrations.

The President of the Territory, sitting in the Power Room, scrutinizes with his exceptional gift of clairvoyance the prospects of winning the next elections that are now before him. His tactics of indecision, now theorized by his Advisors in communication has succeeded him a lot to this day by his natural faculty to affirm a thing and the next day its opposite. One day black as night, the next day white as linen, this is her only rhetoric, which has kept her in power for so long. Knowing from experience that it is the assurance with which the most questionable and implausible things are said, without necessarily raising one's voice, that are finally heard...

From his privileged position he observes, as well among his subjects those who are in principle acquired by him, as among his most fierce enemies, the most secret states of mind. Knowing by experience that some and others can alternately change sides. To avoid any eventuality, he has to be constantly on the lookout. Forced to monitor the temperature, the direction and the strength of the wind from day to day. And above all, he must know how to anticipate and take the necessary measures in time. Flatter some, admonish others, smile or frown. If ever he makes a mistake, never acknowledge it and rather justify it as a well thought-out measure, even if it only came to mind at the last moment.

In order to set his personal authority in stone, he takes all measures to accuse his closest circle of personal failings, and to condemn the person responsible before the latter has even had the time to open his mouth to defend himself with a word. Having drawn all his philosophy of action from the fine observation of the behaviors of the men and women of power, his contemporaries, whom he knew and approached during his numerous trips around the world. But fortunately his field of action being limited to art and fiction, he could not have the opportunity to practice in real life all the turpitudes of this world, and this gives him on the contrary the opportunity and the advantage to denounce them today.

His readings of Machaviel and Comtesse de Ségur, later tempered by those of Mahatma Gandhi, have given him since his adolescence a taste for observing the mechanics of power and the game of competing ambitions, which he puts to good use alternately according to the circumstances. Thus goes life in the M2 Territory, where all citizens are finally comfortable with their way of life and do not particularly want to change it, either out of laziness or cowardice, considering that what is shown to be better is never assured and that on the contrary, when tested, it is often much worse...

Below the seat of the Territory Government of M2 Installed in an outbuilding of the Anserville castle, which consists of 15 rooms all equipped with the attributes and technologies necessary for the functions of any constituted state. Where are taken all the big decisions that condition our existences without we can never know neither their range, nor their rigor of application, and to which we will have only the freedom to conform with the smile. Those who would not do so would be immediately banished, considered and treated as reprobates for life.

Below is the new M2 Territory cadastre created in Anserville, France. The latter showing the first slice of tokenized M2 that will be offered for sale for sale soon at Christie's, in the form of 20 NFT registered on the OpenSea platform A first slice numbered from 1 to 10, marked with a red logo, will be offered to collectors. A second tranche will follow immediately if a demand arises. The reserve price of each parcel is set at 300.000 euros

The division of a whole in parcels has always been the privilege of the concept privileged by Fred Forest for the total surface of the Territory. That for the good reason, according to him, that the whole of this last is composed of parts, of sections, of pieces... whose totality constitutes its whole and its identity. The individual Parcels of M2, identified as such, are called upon, depending on the situation, to appear either as a single perceived identity, or as elements added to each other indistinctly, and finally as a whole.

English speakers have only one word, "globalization", to designate what we call "globalization". Globalization refers to the advent of the world as a space, as a society, and as a relevant scale of analysis in many fields. Its history is intertwined with that of the emergence of human exchange and circulation. Globalization is also a narrative of the linking of the world's places, through the influence of metropolises, the worldwide generalization of neoliberalism, the financialization of the world economy, and the instantaneous connection of the actors of capitalism. Between microcosm and macrocosm we are confronted today with another infinity, that of the infinitely complex... We are confused by the number and the prodigious variety of the elements, the relations, the interactions or the combinations on which rests the functioning of the great systems of which we are the cells, not to say the cogs... We need a new tool... A tool which is a symbolic instrument, made of a set of methods and techniques borrowed from very different disciplines... A tool that filters the details, amplifies what connects them, brings out what brings them together. It is not used to see bigger or further. But to observe what is at the same time too big, too slow and too complex for our eyes (like the human society), this gigantic organism which is totally invisible to us... The systemic approach is a new approach symbolized by this artistic tool... It is based on a global approach of the problems or systems that we study and focuses on the interplay of their elements. It is this tool that the artist tries by the means of the art to approach. By fixing as measure to this tool represented here by a square of 1 meter of side. Because what he wishes to put in scene, in truth, it is the theater of the life and its actors in the plurality of the roles which are theirs, by allotting them in a fictional and parodic way of the additional elements. A role that each of the holders will play in spite of himself by the function that is already his in the real life, and that he can correct if he wants and has some time by annotations on the booklet of the M2 Territory that will be given to him at the time of his purchase.

This purchase makes him more than a simple art collector but also a man or a woman, unless it is also an Institution, responsible before the community of Humans for a part of the Territory of our current civilization. That he will always have to protect symbolically against its destruction, until the moment when the last human being will have, it seems... left the Earth to join the planet Mars. Helped by some billionaire converted into a tour operator.