SAFE CREATIVE:

ITS ALLIANCE WITH ARTISTS ON THE INTERNET

Safe Creative, the largest electronic registry of intellectual property online, renews its collaboration with Art Madrid. This time with Arte & Palabra. Conversations with Carlos del Amor, a series of interviews with artists that is part of the Parallel Programme of Art Madrid'24.

IThe Internet presents creators with both a competitive advantage and a number of significant challenges in terms of exposure, performance, discovery, infringement and plagiarism. In 2007, this technology-based copyright registry was created so that Safe Creative could work with artists on the Internet to protect their rights. Today, with generative AI and NFTs, the challenges multiply and we respond to creators and artists of all kinds.

REGISTERING COPYRIGHTS IN THE INTERNET AGE

With the popularization of the Internet over the past 20 years, we have seen the needs of creators shift. We have moved from a limited and local creation and production to a global and massive one with immediate needs for protection and recognition. Registering copyrights in the Internet age must be equally fast, convenient and inexpensive. Safe Creative was born with the goal of providing technology as a tool to create the proofs the artists need before showing their work.

Safe Creative offers a convenient and cost-effective online system that allows any creator to obtain the necessary evidence to prove their copyrights from the comfort of their own home, using their own computer, and instantly register all their works.

THE COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION PROCESS IN THE CONTEXT OF ARTIDICIAL INTELLIGENCES

The need for authorship verification is more important than ever with the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Registration in the context of AI is critical for two main reasons:

CERTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS

The first has to do with the future need for artists to be able to prove that they, and not a Generative Artificial Intelligence, created a particular work: We are only seeing the beginning of Generative Artificial Intelligences, and they will continue to improve over time. Being able to certify the creative process using Safe Creative will be critical to document that the work was, in fact, created by a human.

REGISTRATION OF WORK TO AVOID PLAGIARISM

Generative artificial intelligences are, in fact, fed by previous artistic creations. There is already controversy about the origin of the works that feed these algorithms, and some lawsuits have been filed, the outcome of which will be seen in the coming months and years. This is because they often use works not only from the public domain, but also from contemporary creators and artists, allegedly in violation of their rights.

Registering the work to defend against plagiarism provides an element to use in case it is used by one or more artificial intelligences in the future. Logically, informing of the fact of registration when the work is presented helps to deter traditional plagiarism by people who directly copy the work of other artists, and it helps to defend the copyright if the work is eventually used without the express authorization of the creator or owner.

ONLINE EXHIBITION AND SALE OF WORKS

Promoting yourself on the Internet and social networks is here to stay. Getting a name, setting up an online gallery, or combining physical presence in galleries and online are not questions of whether to do it, but how to do it as soon as possible and in the best possible way.

CONCLUSIONS

By law, rights exist when the work is created, and technological registers are the best tool to demonstrate the existence of these rights quickly and immediately, permanently and worldwide.

The artist can certify his creative process, register the work, show the work with its registration to discourage plagiarism and now also exhibit, sell and license his work. Each creator can use the tool as they wish and in combination with a physical presence in all types of galleries, whether virtual or physical, with the greatest security that technology can offer today worldwide.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.