Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who has been credited with pioneering the “body horror” genre, will debut a photograph of his kidney stones as an NFT.

This work, titled Kidney stones and inner beauty, will be released on the CryptoArt SuperRare marketplace on March 28. NFTs, or digital exchangeable assets containing information proving owner ownership, have become an increasingly popular way to buy and sell digital art. According to CoinDesk, a total of $25 billion has been spent on NFTs since June 2017, with an additional $21 billion spent on secondary sales.

Cronenberg said Newsweek that he originally took the picture of his kidney stones for a friend, who was suffering from the disease for the first time. The filmmaker had kept his kidney stones in a pill box.

“I found this photo quite beautiful, in such a weird way,” he said.

Although film critics have used the term “body horror” to describe the intersection of science fiction, technology and body transformation in Cronenberg’s work, he said he couldn’t find the interior of the horrible body, but rather fantastic and beautiful.

“My body went to great lengths to create these amazing shapes,” he said, noting that one person who saw the photo compared the unique aesthetic of each stone to “strange sea creatures “.

Cronenberg said the NFT also references his upcoming film, Future Crimesfeaturing his frequent collaborator Viggo Mortensen as a performance artist whose art consists of surgically removing organs from his own body in front of an audience.

Cronenberg’s first NFT, a short titled The death of David Cronenberg, debuted in September 2021. The minute-long video showed the 78-year-old filmmaker facing his own corpse and crawling into bed with himself dead. The work sold for 25 ethers, or about $90,000, according to The Canadian Press.

The artist said he was introduced to the digital collectibles market by his daughter, Caitlin, a photographer who created her own NFTs.

Proponents of the crypto asset argue that selling artwork digitally directly to a global audience can allow artists to keep a much larger share of their profits from sales, compared to the proceeds they would earn in through an auction house or gallery.

Cronenberg said he supports bringing NFTs into the art world, telling Newsweek“Ownership of an NFT is a very abstract thing. Honestly, that appeals to me – it’s a really new take on what art is.”