Bridging Art & Utility… with a bridge ?
What you should know about the stunning project We Lock Love
Resurrecting the 40,000 lost-forever lovelocks of the Pont des Arts (aka the Bridge of Love) in Paris
Recreating a symbolic Parisian monument at the halfway between the physical and virtual worlds, from memory to present.
Collecting fractions of History and Architecture through an original NFT collection
Building the largest lovelock database and search engine of the world
Gathering artists and lovers from all over the world in an NFT marketplace dedicated to digital-to-physical lovelocks collections
Building the Bridge of the Future…
In few words, the ongoing roadmap of We Lock Love…
0. Introduction ✨
The best NFT projects are those carrying a vision. If NFTs have brought new dimensions to traditional ways of creating, sharing, and more generally “making” Art, they reach their full sense when they are used for what they are : a medium for experiences, not an end in itself.
✨ A tool, not a format.
✨ A support of intrinsic value, not an object of speculative one.
This being said, in the ocean of thousands of artists and creators who have launched their NFT collection since let’s say 2017, some golden nuggets have become key use cases of the revolution they brought, highlighting in particular their capacity to build or federate communities around art, in opposition to the traditional transactional ownership model, to bring utility for these community and create new experiences, thanks to tech innovation and accessibility (that gave birth to new styles and movements that we can qualify as a genuine Creative Spring), and new possible models. 💫
Modeling and involving, thinking and making, creating and building : this is where the notion of Project has become central in tech art and more generally in the creator economy, enabling it to be evolutive, experiential, utilitarian - on individual as well as collective/community level, and, in one world, meaningful.
Let’s start by the starting point : what do NFT bring in their structure ? 3 main axes:
Opportunities to artists to reach large and/or new audiences, independence & reduced censorship ; reciprocally, democratized access to art and culture for people, possibility to collect with less or without entry barriers
Thanks to the blockchain technology that powers NFTs, the possibility to own and trade secured and traceable digital assets ; in particular, those being the fruit of human creation using tech tools to create.
The ability for creators to build large-scale projects beyond simple artworks and to create value from the community : modeling and creation of collections, story-telling, utility and rights,...
We Lock Love is a perfect combination of these 3 axes, a masterclass illustration of value creation in the real world powered by NFT & community, where tech and art are at the service of the most common good : Public heritage. And at the same time, the most personal one : Love…
We are proud and excited at Lezar to work on the most romantic NFT project of the world, with the talentful and visionary photographer Alexis Bourdillat. A project born in 2013, finally ready to deploy its full magic, that we invite you to discover here.
1. The Bridge of Love 🌉
Le Pont des Arts is a historic pedestrian bridge in Paris that spans the Seine River. The bridge is famous for the thousands of "lovelocks" that used to adorn its metal grills.
These locks were placed by couples as a symbol of their eternal love for each other. However, due to the weight of the locks and concerns for the safety of the bridge, the city of Paris began to remove them in 2015. Today, the bridge remains a popular tourist destination and a romantic spot for couples to take a stroll and enjoy the views of the Seine.
2. The work🔒
A crazy urban archeological dig to save forever thousands of lost memories
In 2013, Alexis Bourdillat, french artist, started a photography project, as crazy as ambitious, aiming at bringing to light every individual lovelocks of the bridge. In 6 months, he captured them all, and forever. Inspired by the invisible under the visible, the secrets of the elements that compose the whole, obsessed with the mystery hidden in and revealed by the details, he honors the beauty of these thousands of anonymous’ stories engraved and hooked on a scene, the Seine, that one single glance can contain…
The photographer offers beholders a deep-dive into a blue ocean like an invitation to discover the world of under, an exploration of a forest that had been already immortalized from every part of the sky but never from the bottom of each of its trees. If lovelocks were the trees of this forest, he would have narrated the life of them all. Each would have been the portrait of a forgotten individual, for the reason that each lovelock is a testimony of a human story, a story of humans.
The work resulted in 36 979 lovelocks that would survive forever, even after their “uprooting” in 2015.
The History will remember the forests after their deforestation, but not their trees ⇒ Paris remembers the Age of Love of its bridge and now, by We Lock Love, will remind its couples, all these lovers, tourists or Parisians, strangers and anonymous, come from all over the world to leave a trace. And not only. As the outcome of a modern & urban archeological dig, we found unexpected treasures of the human Memory. And so much others are still to be found. And this is time to give them back to their guardians.
3. The Artwork ❤️
A historical monument augmented by technology, between physical and digital, past and present.
We Love Love is a concrete example of how technology can be used to extend traditional forms of art. The photos of every lovelock constitute the raw material of the artistic process ; associated with data and processed by the right tools (a bit like 2 colors would be mixed together to give the desired one, to be then painted with a special brush), they enable the researched finality of the creative vision at the origin of the project.
DATA here is the rigorous localization of each lovelock on the bridge, referenced and indexed during the shooting phase along a precise architectural decomposition, and TECH is this new tool : thanks to his multidisciplinary palette, Alexis wrote a code script that assembles together the lovelock according to their exact initial position, reconstituting the parts of the bridge with a high precision, and regenerating the bridge itself by extension in lovelock mosaics 🗝️
This is a powerful and innovative way of representation, focusing on the essential, elementary particles studied by the artist, the real object and reason of his artwork. The bridge, that has been remodeled in 3D afterwards, offers a unique and immersive experience : it is already possible to visit it, on the website, and explore it as it was before the lovelocks were removed, discover and read them all in very high resolution by zooming on them…
The architectural units of the bridge are the DNA of the artwork modeling and have been essential in the creative spirit behind We Lock Love. They consist in the following :
The digital-to-physical aspect of We Lock Love is another key component of the artwork:
1- in the beholder/visitor experience : an immersive and interactive walk through the IRL bridge projected in a virtual 3D environment
2- in the creative process in itself : the first step was to photograph all the physical lovelocks which took half a year, and a next phase was to use tech tools to clean, retreat and process the photos digitally to generate the mosaics by using informatic code.
The historical architecture and the original captures of the lost lovelocks finally gave life to this artwork spanning the river from past to present, at the crossroad between physical and digital art ; a complex piece being an experiential and augmented representation of a symbolic parisian monument, from which memories reappear, the Memory live again..
4. The Historic Collection 🔮
The fractions of bridge in a special NFT collection.
From the Artwork, a Collection: the reconstitution of the bridge through the lovelocks, by respecting their accurate repartition across the bridge’s structure, led to a singular NFT series of unique photographs representing the different parts of it.
Each NFT represents a “bundle” of lovelocks. One bundle (one NFT) embeds ~45 lovelocks on average in the mosaic. There are in total 796 bundles to collect. An acquirer becomes a Guardian of the bridge, holding the key of its lovelocks and associated stories.
From digital to physical, it is also possible for collectors to claim a unique edition of their bundle in an outstanding physical version, printed in high resolution under acrylic glass (in the representative size of a real panel). Metaverse-ready and for home, We Lock Love “bridges” the digital and physical aspects that are native to photography to offer a cross-medium experience to collectors.❤️🔒
The Historic Collection is also where NFTs go beyond their simple function of digital ownership. An interesting system of utility for NFT holders has been defined to push the multidimensional experience to its full potential : involving art lovers but also persons who simply feel concerned about the bridge’s story, Paris’ History, and Culture generally speaking. We Lock Love aims at democratizing new forms of utilitarian art projects, through a genuine use case of value creation thanks to the fusion of different communities/personna involved in a boundaryless and timeless initiative. It gathers traditional photography lovers and NFT/art tech collectors, Paris visitors and residents, individuals and public institutions… A monument is universal, so is the cultural heritage.
Soon you will discover the incentive system of staking and rewards, and the general protocol. Follow We Lock Love on social media to learn about it :
5. The Contribution 🗝️
Building the largest lovelock database and search engine of the world, an intro to the Describe-to-Earn.
The contribution is essential to the project. “The master key which opens them all’. Indeed, a call to community is necessary to bring We Lock Love’s entire ambition to full achievement. An important phase of the project consists in the documentation of the lovelocks’ database, to make them all identifiable. 💫
Use case : “Bob & Julia from UK, in honey moon in Paris in 2006, visited the bridge and locked their love with a lovelock they had bought in a tourist shop and personalized with a marker” ⇒ Instead of going through each of the 40 000 images from the 796 bundles one by one (what would be the definition of the french expression “searching for a needle in a haystack”, and in practice would not happen), they can type keywords that will return a few photos of eligible lovelocks. They remember their names are “Bob” and “Julia” (thanks for them!), and that they came in “2006” ; they type these 3 words in the lovelocks search bar, and 2 photos of candidate lovelocks are proposed ; they recognize their one, on the bundle they had chosen, on this precise part of the bridge. By proving their are the real persons behind this lovelock to the project team, they can receive a special unique edition of this lovelock in NFT. The technology and meticulous work of Alexis Bourdillat makes it possible for lovers from Paris and all over the world to retrieve their lost symbol, in 2 clicks.
To build this database, the contribution of the community is thus an initial condition. This phase illustrates the beauty and the power of collaboration, co-construction and even co-creation. Everyone brings their own stone to the project, to build on the foundations and for the vision the Artist has set.
A user-friendly and gamified experience has been created to make the experience of database contribution pleasant, fun, and rewarding. Contributors will unlock and receive special NFTs stepwise, depending on their level of involvement in the documentation. The documentation consists, simply, in describing the 36 979 lovelocks by entering their readable/decryptable text and ticking the presence/value of attributes (presence of drawing, of heart, latin vs other alphabet…).
Data quality will be a success factor and this is why each lovelock description will be validated after a certain number of occurrences (through as many different users). The program has been designed so that the ambitious database is built by a large number of participants through time, and the more contributors across the world will participate, the quicker it will be ready. In practice it would represent around 500 000 entries in total, like if one fifth of the Paris population would document only one lovelock each. Nothing impossible through team work…🔮
Discover here below the simple steps to start enjoying the contribution:
Beautiful moment of emotion at the Art3f art fair in Paris, last september, when a visitor from US, who remembered exactly on which panel he had “locked his love” with his wife 15 years ago during their first travel in France, found the precious lovelock in the respective mosaic, extracted from the full production by Alexis himself…. After 20 minutes of search. The contribution phase will enable anyone to make it in a few seconds, without the condition to remember a precise area to look in. Thousands of lovers across the world can retrieve a physical witness of their personal story, not only in the blockchain, but in a giant artwork.
6. The Bridge of the Future🪄
Building the NFT marketplace of digital lovelocks in the Metaverse…
We Lock Love is a projection of the past into the present, and also a bridge to the future. Indeed, Alexis Bourdillat’s vision goes beyond the experience around the reconstitution of the bridge. If it has been possible to save historic lovelocks of the Pont des Arts, then it will be possible to immortalize them, and all future ones, in a dedicated metaverse. Engraving their message and locking their love in the blockchain through digital lovelocks will be soon possible for lovers. Those will be real creations proposed by artists through different art collections.
Before minting and offering them, customization will be possible with personal texts and items. “Tell your love with art NFT, on an universal bridge”. The digital lovelock will be a dedicated medium of creation for talentful artists open to new formats of expression, finding, by design, a full utility ; and of feeling expression for their users. With a digital-to-physical ambition, some physical versions of special collections will also be produced IRL.
This is also a concrete application reflecting new possible models in the creator economy, where the artists/creators become a central layer in the value creation chain of goods, augmenting them into differentiated and unique objects or even real pieces of art. On the creators side, the platform will propose a launchpad to create and submit new lovelock creations and collections.
In conclusion, the Bridge of the Future will be a 3D immersive environment embedding a projection of the Pont des Arts and its thousands of historic lovelocks (a dedicated article to be released soon detailing the utility that the Historic Collection NFT holders will have over them), and a one-of-a-kind marketplace gathering digital (and digital-to-physical) lovelocks collections created by crypto or contemporary artists, selected through a permanent curation as well as punctual artist open or thematic calls.
The lovelock has become over the last decades a symbol of love and romanticism across the world. Thanks to Art and Technology, We Lock Love makes the digital lovelock a real medium of both creation and emotional value ; using them or physical ones will reflect the same act. As a rose that never fades, they will be immortal in the blockchain and a phygital extension of human feelings, relationships and stories… that will never stop to be written. ❤️🔒
About Lezar House:
Lezar House is a curative art and design studio promoting ambitious projects that embody the fusion of physical and digital art. It offers its tech resources and creative model to talented creators (artists & companies) that share the same digital-to-physical ambition, through a residence and acceleration program.
Official Lezar links: