Someone much smarter than us (Heraclitus) once said, “Change is the only constant in life.” Someone else (smartness unknown) said, “Change is as good as a holiday.” But we’re not taking a holiday; we’re just moving to another newsletter platform.

The Metaversalist is now on Substack, and all the posts you see here can be read there, too. If you’ve arrived here and want to subscribe, click here.

If you’re a longtime reader, nothing much changes except the newsletters you receive via email now come from Substack rather than Beehiiv. If you’re not seeing them, please check your spam folder and add content@metaversal.gg to your contacts.

Thanks for reading!

Ch… ch… changes 👨‍🎤

Two years ago, in December 2021, we launched The Metaversalist as a way to keep the Web3 curious plugged in to the rapidly changing landscape of digital art, collectibles, access passes, and other developments in the nascent metaverse.

As time went on, we added interviews with creators, curators, artists, gallerists, and other luminaries of the space and began to dive deeper and get beyond the headlines.

Now we’re planning the next phase of The Metaversalist to ensure it meets the needs of you, the reader. We’d love your feedback so we can build a better newsletter for you. To do that, we’ve put together a short survey. We’d really appreciate it if you could fill it out:

To thank you for your time, you’ll have the option to be entered into a draw to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card.

We’re excited to bring you more of what you want and less of what you don’t as The Metaversalist enters its next phase.

Yours sincerely,

The Metaversal Team

Join our Telegram 🤝

We’ve also overhauled our Telegram, creating a space for artists and collectors to connect, the Web3 curious to learn, and the Metaversal community to share news, inspiration, and art.

Join the Metaversal Telegram

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or Telegram. ✌️

DYOR 🔬

This week, we were honored to be able to reveal a project that’s been months in the making. Earlier this year, we commissioned digital artist Fahad Karim — shortlisted for this year’s inaugural Metaversal Generative Art Award from the Lumen Prize — to create a generative artwork for our collection.

The result is a 1/1 artwork entitled, “Would you like some assistance today?” (WYLSAT) The star of the work is an AI-powered generative art assistant named Spaghetty, and we invite you to interact with it, create a work of your own, and possibly learn something about yourself and your relationship with artificial intelligence in the process.

Twitter tweet

If Spaghetty looks familiar, that’s no accident. As Karim explains:

Aside from the questions WYLSAT raises about human-AI relations — and what those might look like in the future — the work includes various elements that hark back to Karim’s earlier works. Getting to rearrange them and alter their palettes is a reminder of the infinite possibilities generative art affords the artist and how often much of the artistry of the category often comes down to the choices the artist makes and the limitations they place on themselves.

Twitter tweet

WYLSAT rewards protracted investigation, and as Karim explains, “If you don't come out of the Spaghetty experience feeling a little anxious or shocked, there's more to uncover by spending longer with the artwork!”

We want to thank Karim for his hard work bringing this project to life, and we’d like to invite you to uncover Spaghetty’s secrets for yourself:

If someone forwarded this to you, consider thanking them — and supporting our work — by subscribing and joining 7,250+ Metaversalists embracing the possibilities of decentralized ownership each week.

Headliners 🤘

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is testifying this week, and early indications are if he wasn’t going to jail before he decided to take the stand, he probably is in the wake of it.

• Leica has unveiled a new camera, the M11-P ($9,195), that stores metadata in line with the Content Authenticity Initiative, which seeks to prove image provenance to combat deep fakery and promote transparency about the use of AI.

• Speaking of AI, Adobe hosted its annual Adobe Max event and revealed a vast selection of new AI-powered tools it’s adding to its suite of apps:

• Voting is open for the 2023 edition of The Crypties, Decrypt’s annual Web3 awards. You’ll need to connect a wallet and mint a free voting pass to participate, and voting closes on November 3.

• Serial provocateur grifter Ryder Ripps and his buddy Jeremy Cahen have been ordered to pay Yuga Labs (creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club) $1.575 million for trademark infringement and hand over all of their derivative works and domains by a district judge in California.

• Luxury brand Maison Margiela has entered the world of Web3 with a gamified experience that looks a lot like, err, bingo:

Twitter tweet

• The Norman Rockwell Museum is launching a collection of previously unreleased images of (and by) the iconic illustrator as non-fungible tokens in partnership with Iconic Moments.

• Monetize-your-mates service Friend.tech has dominated Web3 headlines and conversations since it launched, but in a new deep dive into the service, nft now wonders whether it can last.

• Here & Now is hosting a retrospective in a virtual gallery powered by oncyber:

Twitter tweet

• The Metagovernance Project released the first version of its State of Web3 Grants Report, which details where grants in the space have gone and how they’ve been used.

• Azuki is hosting a raffle for 530 “Mind of Gus” vinyl toys tied to one of the key characters in its Beanz NFT collection that promises the “power to journey into the depths of Gus’s innermost bean”:

Twitter tweet

• The French National Assembly ruled that NFT games don’t constitute gambling in a move that could have ramifications for the rest of the EU and which could provide a model for US regulators.

• William Mapan’s latest collection “Sketchbook A” raised nearly $650,000, with individual pieces selling for over $10,000 each.

• RTFKT x Air Force 1 sneakers are already selling for four figures on eBay.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Threads, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky.

Need an invite code for Bluesky? Here you go:

• bsky-social-gqpuc-apejq

• bsky-social-2f7g2-rntnq

• bsky-social-4loqk-i4cj2

• bsky-social-x5qxm-2xkop

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or staring deep into one of Spaghetti’s three eyes. 😵‍💫

Are you in New York, because if so, Metaversal would like to invite you to ARTificial, a one-night-only exhibition of digital art created with, about, or inspired by artificial intelligence from the likes of Sofia Crespo, NessGraphics, Raoul Marks, and many more.

ARTificial is going down on Friday, October 27, at 88 Clinton St, New York, 10002 from 6pm - 8pm. RSVP below 👇

Fahad Karim is a South Asian new media artist specializing in generative art and currently based in Mexico. This year, he was shortlisted for the inaugural Metaversal Generative Art Award from the Lumen Prize.

Karim has lived in Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines, the US, and Mexico, and his work is informed by the various cultures, traditions folklore, and architecture he’s encountered along the way.

Fahad Karim (Image: Fahad Karim)

His submission for the Lumen Prize, entitled Pohualli, is an Aztec-inspired series of 100 dynamic outputs that grow, evolve, and eventually die, only to be reborn and for the process to repeat, ad infinitium.

Karim spoke to Metaversal’s content director Craig Wilson from Mexico City about his process, his relationship with time, and a very special commission.

Craig Wilson: How did you get to hear about the Lumen Prize and what prompted you to enter?

Fahad Karim: I heard about Lumen through some other artists who had submitted in previous years — it's a pretty tight community. I looked into it, and felt like Pohualli could be a good submission. It’s a project that I'm extremely proud of, and thought it got a lot of attention at the exhibition, I felt like there was more of a story to tell and Lumen seemed like a great opportunity to bring it up again.

CW: Generative art is many decades old, and has lots of practitioners, but it feels like there's been a change in recent years in how it’s received, how collectors feel about it, and who’s creating it. What do you attribute this uptick in interest to?

FK: I think things like the Lumen Prize are helping [laughs]. Having a category for generative art brings it to the stage with all these other categories in digital art that are perhaps more familiar to the public. I also love going through the entries to Lumen Prize that are adjacent to familiar categories but outside of the traditional art world.

Things like the Lumen Prize help to make [generative art] a little bit more mainstream and a little bit more recognizable. Code-based systems are often perceived as less advanced or cold, but I think as our world becomes more technology driven there’s more acceptance of them.

How did you first get interested in generative art?

My first exposure to it was in university — I studied computer science and I was always fascinated by art. My mom is an artist. She's incredible. Her name is Vinita Karim. She makes paintings — abstract cityscapes — also inspired by all the places we've lived.

I always had artistic inspiration in my life, and at university I stumbled across this class called “Computing in the Arts” that was basically generative art 101, but which also included music and visuals. It was my first time building a program that would allow you to generate an infinite number of outputs through a careful set of rules that I’d curated.

That was my first exposure, and I loved it, but I probably put that away for a couple years and I spent more time on sketching by hand and more traditional mediums. But every now and then something would pop up in my wandering through the internet.

I found this library p5.js — which is a common entry point for a lot of generative artists — and I started with that and started seeing some of the more ambitious possibilities there.

How did you get involved with Art Blocks? 

It was one of my dreams was to work on a more ambitious, generative art project. I’d been working in software for a long time and decided to take a break from that and pursue more creative ventures.

I wanted to explore generative art, but I had kind of stayed oblivious to everything going on with NFTs and didn't know about Art Blocks or any of that at the time. As I decided I wanted to make a generative art project and started research, I found Art Blocks in a day or two.

I thought to myself, “Oh my god, people are really putting a lot of attention and effort into creating incredible works.” I’d never spent more than a weekend on a project, so I decided to give myself several months to see what I could create.

Art Blocks showed me what was possible with more effort, and that there was a market for this sort of thing. So I just really poured myself into it. I was actually traveling through Mexico at the time, and that’s when the project I submitted to Art Blocks — Alan Ki Aankhen — was created.

Alan Ki Aankhen #326. (Image: Fahad Karim)

I had wanted to do a project that could translate some of my intuition and my visual style in hand drawing into a system, and to see what would happen if I introduced automation. Would I be able to create works that resembled the types of things that I would have drawn? I would send them to my family and friends and say nothing about generative art and they'd say, “Oh, nice drawing!” so it was worth it.

I have generally been drawn to things that are a little bit more figurative, a little bit more illustrative, than pure abstraction, especially within generative art.

Did you start working on Pohualli on the same trip?

Yes, I was in Oaxaca and still working on Alan Ki Aankhen. I was sitting in a cafe and the idea for Pohualli came to me because one of the people working there had this incredible tattoo on her shoulder inspired by traditional Aztec figures, which are very blocky, and have a very specific look to them, but this one had become a little bit more abstract and extended.

In my head, everything started turning, and I thought, this is a system that I want to explore. I want to see how I can take these visuals and stitch them together to create very wild, but still Aztec-feeling figures. I started sketching ideas for it, but I was still in the middle of Alan Ki Aankhen.

I started working on [Pohualli] here and there, making sure to go to as many museums in Mexico as I could and taking photos, trying to work out what are the styles? What is the role of the feather? What is the role of the shield in these symbols? I started collecting all of that.

As soon as Alan Ki Aankhen was done and dusted, I switched gears to finishing off Pohualli.

You refer to the 100 pieces in Pohualli as “creatures,” because they have this life-and-death cycle that can take a few days, or thousands of them. Time is a core feature of the work, which I find really interesting, because although there’s all this research and preparatory work that goes into a piece of generative art, thanks to the power of modern computers, sometimes creating the outputs can take mere seconds. Can talk about the slowness and deliberateness and forced-patience you place on the collector or viewer with this work?

Yeah, I think it will always be a goal of mine with my art to try to reverse some of the trends in the tension we have with patience, and everything else fighting against it. Creating art through the medium of code unlocks this dimension of interactivity and dynamism. It definitely isn't necessary to employ or to explore it all the time, but to me, not doing so feels a bit like having wings and never flying.

I'm so excited about the idea that you can unlock this different type of interaction that spans time with the person viewing it at the time. For two reasons. One is that, it’s relating and providing some commentary on a very historic art form, the art form of the Aztecs.

“Pohualli #89” by Fahad Karim. (Image: Fahad Karim)

I was thinking a lot about time in that context and I was thinking about how Mexico and its cities have changed over time, but at the same time I was also starting to create what resembled creatures, and they felt alive and I wanted them to be able to have a life of their own and allow code to enable that.

The creatures have an age at which they're born and an age at which they die. They have multiple life cycles, and people who collect them can inspect them and see how they've changed over time. I love that about it.

Code also lets you make art that’s theoretically infinite. When each creature is reborn is its life the same on the next pass?

It's kind of funny, because the easier technical implementation was for it to always be different. Being able to ensure determinism requires a lot more thought and a lot more testing. If you're okay with things changing, then it's actually quite a bit easier. That's what it was at first and I had to roll it back and make it more constrained.

The creature will take a similar growth pattern over days. There are a mix of organic and inorganic elements. There feathers and vines which are organic, and those will constantly be flowing with time. The same vine of a creature seen on day 100 versus seen on day 200 of its life will have swayed and moved.

Their shapes will more or less be the same on day 100 and day 200 of multiple lives, but, in one lifetime, if a creature dies at a very young age, there's auto scaling and positioning built into the program, so you're gonna see it in a much more minimalistic way. It has a very different aesthetic versus if it grows to thousands of days old and is highly detailed and complex.

By making an infinite project like this you’re building an ongoing relationship with collectors of the sort you don’t really get with a static or non-dynamic work. Have you seen some collectors gravitating towards certain palettes or attributes?

It's a very interesting question. I've tried to detect patterns in this as well. I think because the work evolves, people who know how the project works have less of an attachment to any particular look. They're excited to collect a creature knowing it will change over time versus putting too much of a bias on what the thumbnail — which is the snapshot when it was minted — looks like.

For people who don't really know how it works they’ll see the snapshot — what it looks like on OpenSea or any other marketplace — and evaluate the artwork as that.

For me, every now and then, something will draw my attention to a particular edition in the collection, and I'll go back and look at its live view and compare it with what it looked like when it was minted, and it's really refreshing. How has it changed? What does it look like now?

We're approaching the one-year anniversary since they were first minted [in November 2022]. So all of these creatures will have added about 350 days to their lives. Some of them grow to 3,000 days or so, so it's about 10% of their lives, and I just want to have a look.

What I would love to build one day is more of an exploration website dedicated to this project that’s like looking through a photo album. You can pick different creatures, scan through their lives, and see what happened in the past. Or you can see how a snapshot of what the entire population looks like on any day, because I put a lot of intentionality into that.

When the creatures were initially minted, I modeled an age distribution to correlate with the age distribution of Mexico. I wanted it to feel like the number of children, the number of adults, the number of elders, and that's how it started. But then obviously as the cycle of time and life and death begins, things get out of phase. Maybe one day there'll be a more biased young population, or a biased older population.

If you haven’t already RSVP’d for or AI-art event in New York next week, may we entice you once more?

What did quality control look like? How many iterations did you have to go through or how long did you have to work on it to get it to the point where you were consistently happy with the outputs?

It took a long time. I worked on this project over the span of seven months, and because it has the dimension of time in it, the testing needed just exploded.

I often approach my art with form before color and texture. I will often work on my work purely in black and white, with just lines, until I'm happy with a form so I can isolate that attribute and feel happy with it before I introduce colors.

That was the case with this project. There are a lot of different dimensions to the artwork that are baked in to create a lot of variety in the set. For example, when I felt a lot of them were feeling too clumped together or too dense, I introduced a mechanism to basically track a heat map for creature density and then I varied that through randomization. So you get some that are very sparse and will not overlap with their own elements, and others that are happy to build on top of each other.

There are all these sorts of dimensions that are not all purely visual — like, pick a color between these 10 — but are more about how the growth should happen. Are you allowed to repeat a growth in the same place? What are the biases for the types of elements to use when growing? How likely are shields to come up? They’re things that describe a creature or an organism, and those became the core of the variation in the algorithm.

What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for the inaugural Metaversal Generative Art Award from the Lumen Prize?

It means a ton. I've been so ecstatic about it. I think, with generative art, I’ve found a medium that feels so right for me. So to be able to get some recognition for it, and to be able to show Pohualli to more people and raise awareness of it is really exciting.

An ink drawing completed during preparation and research for Pohualli. (Image: Fahad Karim)

Most of my work used to be sketching and ink drawings, and my artistic practice has a ton of that still in the brainstorming stage, but I'm so addicted to generative art that I haven’t made as much time for purely sketching again. So being short-listed for this award is something I'm feeling very moved by.

Metaversal’s commissioned you to create a generative work for its corporate collection which will be revealed next week. What’s the elevator pitch for it? 

I’m still working on that [laughs]. I wanted to create a work that will make people think about their relationship with AI, and I wanted to do that through a throwback to one of the most memorable, original productivity assistants, Clippy. I created a cousin of Clippy to serve as your assistant as you go through an experience in which you create generative art with its help.

I’ve gotten to play around with it a bit, and I love how it incorporates elements from your archive and shows your style and tastes. Without giving too much away, what are some of your favorite features of it?

I like how it goes from being an interactive art program — where you're creating art, moving around objects, working on composition, things like that — to confronting the viewer with the types of questions we’re all facing when we're dealing with more advanced AIs these days. Like, where is my data going? How’s it being used? Should I care for this thing?

We’re in a moment where ChatGPT and other LLMs [large language models] are becoming more common, and I wanted to make us think about what AI will look like in a decade, and what our relationship with it might look like.

In addition to being something that maybe makes you question how you feel about technology and AI, it also brings back your memories about early Microsoft Word and Clippy.

I also saw it as a little bit of an educational tool for generative art itself, set up as a public installation. It acts as a wizard asking you to make choices from infinite outputs, and that infinite set of possibilities in an artwork isn’t something most people are familiar with.

You have to let it unfold by participation. I'm trying to strike the right balance of keeping users engaged, but not succumbing to needing something to be super satisfying for their attention too quickly. People need to put a little bit of attention and a little bit of time into it. You will be rewarded if you stay engaged for a few minutes rather than a few seconds.

What is your relationship like with AI?

I am fascinated by it. I try to maintain that it needs to be controlled and needs to be rolled out and worked on in a safe way. I have to remind myself about that though, because I get so excited about the possibilities.

Outside of just playing with the text-to-image generators and things like that, I haven't really seriously embarked on any AI art projects or used it as a tool. I think it’s incredible that these tools exist, though.

It’s prompting the same questions every new technological development does. Does art require effort? What kind of effort and intentionality should be required for art? It happened with photography, with digital art, and with generative art. I like seeing the discussions and what people think.

I'm originally South Asian, so I come from a world where art is much more detailed, generally, than it is in the west. In the west there's more appreciation for abstract and conceptual art — which I love — and less room for highly detailed works. This is a huge generalization, of course, but in my experience, there’s a sort of spectrum of how the effort spent on creating an artwork is incorporated into perceived value.

I see some of the debate about AI as similar, because when someone says they took a million photos and trained their own AI model, then suddenly the people who are critiquing AI art prick up their ears because of the technical complexity of it. But if you're just trying to be an art appreciator you're not gonna catch all of that, so it's challenging.

What else have you got in the pipeline?

This commission was my first, and I’ve been very moved by the experience, so now I’m curious about exploring more of these sorts of single-artwork experiences. But I need to find the right avenue and figure some things out on my own for that.

I also love curating experiences. With Pohualli, Bright Moments got me this epic space where I could take everybody through an Aztec birth ceremony that ended in them getting an artwork.

The Pohualli Bright Moments minting room. (Image: Fahad Karim)

So I’m thinking about whether I can reach more people and curate an experience through the devices everybody's looking at all the time. I think that's a very exciting way for me to channel my voice.

But outside of that, this year I've been working on another project that's a little bit more medically inspired. With it, and with future projects, I'm constantly thinking about this interaction between the collector and the artwork, and that sort of dynamic dimension. So there's going to be certainly more of that.

Now that I'm in Mexico, I've also had lots of Pohualli-inspired ideas. I’d like to work with local artisans to maybe provide some sort of scaffolding for sculptures through generative systems, and work with people to realize them.

As someone originally from outside the US and Europe — which dominate contemporary generative art — what do you think we should be doing to encourage a more diverse selection of artists to participate in the space? 

I appreciate the question. I think what we can first is keep asking that question. I think a good start is to improve access to technology, because the barrier to entry into this world is still extremely high.

It’s the same challenge with everything crypto-related. We have to make the barriers to entry lower and more accessible, so people aren’t panicking about remembering their seed phrase, or which wallet they’re using, or things like that.

If you're already a little bit skeptical about art that you can't hang on a wall as easily as physical art, then these sorts of obstacles are going to deter you. There are all of those common problems, but I think seeing more representation of this type of art at fairs and at events in other places around the world is helping. I think that's important just to bring more visibility to it.

If the bigger sort of galleries and platforms have the bandwidth to sponsor events in other parts of the world and just bring awareness and education, that helps a ton.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find out more about Fahad Karim’s work here.

You can learn more about the Lumen Prize here.

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

DYOR 🔬

We love pixel art, we love CC0, and we love CryptoPunks (especially the zombies). This week, we decided to combine all three into a fun, free mint in honor of the spooky month. Taking inspiration from Dmitri Cherniak’s Goose Generator, we’re proud to present GoosePunks.

Twitter tweet

It all started when Metaversal investment analyst Matt Miller talked to creative producer Patrick Lawler about creating a PFP project based on Cherniak’s Goose Generator but with CryptoPunk traits and a Halloween feel.

While Lawler’s previously created pixel art, GoosePunks offered a unique challenge: a workspace of only 10 × 10 pixels (compared to Punks’ comparatively expansive 24 × 24 pixels).

Lawler manually drew a range of Punk traits to achieve the right look and feel and chose ones that worked at a lower resolution.

Various Goosepunks. (Image: Patrick Lawler)

“Our 1/1 micro Zombie Punk was quite difficult to perfect,” Lawler explains. “I ended up turning off aliasing and shrunk down our punk image from 24 to 10, which looked awful in most cases, but I noticed when I’d move the shrunken image left, right, up, or down by 1px Photoshop would completely reinterpret the pixel distribution and leave me with parts of a punk that looked good.”

That process enabled Lawler to work out the basic head shape, and within 24 hours, he’d finalized the art for the collection.

Twitter tweet

Lawler used the no-code platform Bueno for trait distribution and rarity, and with some help from other members of the Metaversal team, he took the project from the drawing board to minting out in just over a week.

If you want a GoosePunk of your own, you’ll have to turn to the secondary market, because it minted out in seconds… and topped OpenSea’s charts yesterday. We’re delighted to share a little silliness with the world, and we hope you like GoosePunks as much as we liked making them.

If someone forwarded this to you, consider thanking them — and supporting our work — by subscribing and joining 7,250+ Metaversalists embracing the possibilities of decentralized ownership each week.

Headliners 🤘

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised and added it to its permanent collection. It’s massive news for Anadol, but also for the wider Web3 world, as it’s the first piece of tokenized art MoMA’s added to its illustrious vaults:

Twitter tweet

• Venture capital firm Spencer Ventures bought six figures worth of Pudgy Penguin NFTs (144 of them, to be precise) previously held by Three Arrows Capital (3AC).

• The founders of nft now announced now media, a new umbrella under which they’re organizing their publications, platforms, and events, along with rebrands of some of them.

• Annual Web3 conference NFT Paris launched a token called $NFTPARIS, that it’ll distribute to ticket holders to encourage early bird ticket sales and reward loyalty:

Twitter tweet

• Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs frustrated fans when it revealed prizes for the sixth season of its game HV-MTL worth significantly less than fans spent to get in the running for them.

• 10KTF revealed its forthcoming collection of NFTs will be called “The Grailed” and says it’s “inspired by seminal moments in Wagmi-san's life.”

• Would you get a generative art tattoo designed by Tyler Hobbs and tattooed by a robot? The company behind the robo tattooist, Blackdot, clearly thinks some people will… and that they’ll pay $10,000 for the pleasure:

Twitter tweet

• NFT marketplace Magic Eden is introducing “tokenized digital collectibles,” starting with 100 Pokemon cards that can be used to redeem their physical equivalents.

• Ledger is making a Pepe-themed hardware wallet.

• The first episode of nft now’s docuseries about CryptoPunks is out and features Larva Labs’ founders:

• DeGods kicked off the first chapter of what it’s calling “The Comeback” by resetting all DeGods art and allowing holders to customize it on-chain.

• Nike’s making real-world versions of the RTFKT Dunk Genesis sneaker that only holders of the Dunk Genesis NFT can order.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Need an invite code for Bluesky? Here you go:

• bsky-social-22jby-z5kpk

• bsky-social-2f7g2-rntnq

• bsky-social-uhdll-vauib

• bsky-social-nj7b2-7vl6m

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or the lobby at MoMA. 🖼️

DYOR 🔬

This week’s newsletter is turtles all the way down except, instead of turtles, it’s news posts. Because there’s a lot of news this week. Or it feels that way because I’ve been on vacation for two weeks. Either way, here’s what I’ve missed, and you might’ve.

The Good 😇

• Avant Arte has partnered with CryptoPunks to allow Punk holders to order high-end, one-off prints of Punks they hold. Prints cost $647 unframed or $944 framed. Holders can register interest now and order prints for 48 hours, starting October 26 (and if you don’t hold a Punk, you can still buy a print of all 10,000 of them if you so wish):

Twitter tweet

• Instagram head Adam Mosseri is “still bullish on NFTs,” nft now reports. Mosseri made the comment during a conversation with tech reviewer Marques Brownlee at Instagram’s Creator Innovation Summit.

• NFT marketplace OpenSea announced a new no-code "one-stop shop” for creators to launch and manage digital art and collectibles projects called OpenSea Studio.

• New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is releasing the MoMA Postcard project featuring more than a dozen renowned digital artists. The museum’s partnered with Autonomy for the project, and if you’re confused about how it works, Autonomy has an explainer:

Twitter tweet

• The Saatchi Gallery in London is hosting its first crypto art exhibition this week, curated by IHAM Gallery’s Grida.

• Hardware wallet-maker Ledger has partnered with Sotheby’s to create a limited edition wallet for collectors emblazoned with the auction house’s branding and tied to educational content on Ledger Academy.

• Do you like Web3 and reality TV? Then Love On Leverage is for you. It’s a reality dating show hosted by Unlonely that viewers can bet on. Because degens are gonna degen:

Twitter tweet

• Over 2,000 Walmart stores are now carrying Pudgy Toys, plushy renditions of Pudgy Penguins. The toys were originally launched in May and were previously available from Amazon, but having them in a bricks-and-mortar chain is a massive step towards mainstream awareness and (potentially) adoption.

• Phygitals facilitator IYK, which makes the tap-to-claim-a-digital-token used by the likes of gmoney’s 9dcc raised $16.8 million in a round led by A16z.

• Sportswear giant Adidas and luxury brand Moncler have teamed up to release a collection of digital and physical wares:

Twitter tweet

• On November 2, a statue of Kabosu, the Shibu Inu pupper who inspired the doge meme (and, hence, Dogecoin), will be unveiled in one of the late pooch’s favorite parks in Japan.

• Paris’s second-biggest museum, the Musée d’Orsay, this week started offering visitors NFT souvenirs tied to a new Van Gogh exhibition.

• Facebook CEO and chronic Ancient Roman hairstyle stan Mark Zuckerburg managed to show off metaverse avatars with legs that didn’t look like Nintendo Miis in a video podcast with Lex Fridman:

• Coffee behemoth Starbucks is selling virtual pumpkin spice lattes to members of its NFT-powered Odyssey loyalty program.

• Bored Ape Yacht Club and streetwear brand BAPE dropped a capsule of collab jawnz.

The Bad 👿

• It’s been a couple of weeks for layoffs in Web3, with Ledger, PROOF and Yuga Labs all announcing they’re pruning their teams:

Twitter tweet

• Messari’s Q3 State of Crypto Fundraising report shows that investments in Web3 dropped to the lowest point since late 2020.

• Digital art platform Versum is shutting shop later this year. The company announced it will halt minting on October 20 and market listings on November 1. The site will be shut down completely on December 1:

  Twitter tweet

The Ugly 👹

• Reviews for Going Infinite, the book about disgraced (and likely soon to be incarcerated-for-a-long-time) FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, are starting to surface, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has a great take(as usual). Meanwhile, testimony from his former romantic partner, roommate, and business partners are rolling in and the TL;DR is SBF is screwed, and not in the polycule way:

Twitter tweet

Connect for more 🔌

Once more, you’ve made it to Friday, dear reader. If you’re in the US (and your time-off policy doesn’t suck), we hope you have a wonderful long weekend. Remember, the third day is for hobbies. So go and make something beautiful. Or something ugly. The joy is in the making, after all.

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Need an invite code for Bluesky? We’ve got you:

• bsky-social-2f7g2-rntnq

• bsky-social-uhdll-vauib

• bsky-social-dueec-3xfmq

• bsky-social-3i6u3-ah65n

• bsky-social-yvzdm-y2jnp

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or the hobby shop. 🪚

Rebecca Xu is an artist and academic, based in Syracuse, New York. She’s been making art for decades, including animations, visual music, generative art, and more. Her piece Dépaysement, which blends the digital and the physical, the printed and the found, and the designed and the fortuitous, is shortlisted for the inaugural Metaversal Lumen Prize Generative Art Award.

Rebecca Xu. (Image: Rebecca Xu)

She often collaborates with Sean Zhai, a fellow academic and artist, and did so again for Dépaysement. Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, connected with Xu and Zhai to talk about the work, their work, and what the Lumen Prize means to them.

Craig Wilson: How did you first get interested in generative art?

Rebecca Xu: It started when I was in grad school — that's a long time ago now [laughs]. I was also teaching programming at the same time, and I did a project called Rain, which is based on Chinese traditional music. That's was my first visual music piece, and I learned a lot making it. That piece later got into the first Visual Music Marathon. I learned a lot. I was using 3D software, like Maya, C with OpenGL, and also Photoshop — of course — to create my artwork.

It made me realize I had more flexibility when working with programming directly, and more control. And so, in terms of, the generative, it actually fitted into my workflow very nicely when I was creating visual music. That's where I started, and I’ve stayed with it ever since. I shift, and sometimes I do other stuff, but time after time I always come back to using programming to generate my art.

CW: Sean, I know you and Rebecca have collaborated before, but what was it about Dépaysement specifically that attracted you to the project?

Sean Zhai: This project started when I was working on the printmaking process, specifically using monotype. And I discovered this process that you can transfer digital images onto the fine art print paper via a chemical transfer.

I naturally thought about a previous visual music project I collaborated with Rebecca on before, When Leaving Becomes Arriving. It seemed natural to take some digital images from that, and that we could create something new. Based on that, we created Dépaysement.

When Leaving Becomes Arriving

In this work, I attempt to elicit the immensely upsetting yet anticipative feel at the ending of a chapter before moving on to our next journey towards the greater…

vimeo.com/153795190

This project includes digital imagery, printed materials, stencils, found objects. How do you make a generative artwork where the physical elements are core to it? How do you decide which elements are physical and which are digitally created, and how does the code influence the physicality?

RX: When Leaving Becomes Arriving, is about a feeling you get in late February or early March when the winter’s almost ended, but the spring isn’t here yet. It's a description of that moment and that feeling in that particular environment. I listen to the sound, to the music, and what's in my mind is the environment: the gray weather, the tree branches without leaves but with little buds starting to pop up.

When Sean described the printmaking process to me, we asked ourselves, what kind of natural elements can we add to it to emphasize that feeling? And how can we incorporate the feeling of what we all experienced with the pandemic? That sense that you’re in a strange place and you’re not sure what to do — it's that kind of in-between or new place.

I think the physical objects give us a way to keep building on what we had before. Hopefully, we found a very good balance between the digital content and the physical objects. On the conceptual side, at the idea level, another motivation was thinking about the longing we were all feeling during the pandemic for a real-world connection.

We were thinking about how we could link the virtual world and the virtual content with the physical world. Most of the work we’ve collaborated on has existed in virtual space. We thought maybe it was time to link it back to the real world.

The original visual music which we started from is black and white, so we talked about how we could use that foundation when building this work. Because it’s not just an inspiration, it's also the foundation of this piece.

“Dépaysement” progress and outputs. (Image: Rebecca Xu)

So, for instance, in the original, the texture is generated with code, but we wanted to work with the physical. So where there’s a texture of a bird’s nest, we’re literally bringing a bird’s nest to the work, but that has it’s own texture, so we had to find ways to make the different elements all work together.

SZ: This is our first time working with monotype. So it's a new process to us and an unfamiliar domain. It's part of the reason we picked the word Dépaysement, because it's something we're not familiar with, but it spoke to something new we wanted to try.

The technical part of printmaking put some very interesting constraints on the work, and what we could do with it. For instance, with color, for printmaking, you don't have the unlimited options you have with digital. You have to physically mix the ink to get the color you want. That’s why, when we introduced color, we only used two contrasting colors, a warm color and a cold color.

RX: Another thing I wanted to add is that, though I used the texture as an example, there were also lots of other considerations and decisions we had to make. We had to think about the balance of negative and positive space, translating it into a 2D design, and how the composition and other details of the original would influence the new work.

The whole thing was very much an iteration process. Generative art is, in general, an iteration process already. With the printmaking, we did a few tests… and then quite a few more iterations.

When Sean started building on the prints and tried to experiment with different objects, we were talking about the concept, the composition, and which imagery we should select from the original visual music. We eventually ended up with seven pieces for Dépaysement.

SZ: We tried to make nine, but two of them didn’t work [laughs].

RX: It’s a process of selection, then iteration, then more selection and curation, all the way until the final outputs and the curation of the final pieces. It’s a very collaborative process throughout.

It sounds like there’s collaboration between the two of you, there’s collaboration between the code and the materials, and there’s collaboration with the printmaking and the happy accidents.

RX: Yes. There's more than just the collaboration between humans in this work.

Sean Zhai. (Image: Sean Zhai)

How do you explain “visual music” to people who’ve never encountered it before?

Oftentimes people confuse visual music with a music video. It's not a music video. Visual music is, for me, trying to figure out a way to make the music and visuals work together. That doesn't mean the visuals respond to the music — or create a one-to-one response to the music — but, rather, it’s about trying to create an interplay between those two.

Through the interplay between the two, the goal is to create a more cohesive or expanded experience. You want people to enjoy the visuals and the music, not necessarily equally, but at the same time.

There are different ways of making it. In some of my work I get involved with the composer very early on. I think that’s the best mode of collaboration, where I can think about how the visuals and the music will work together from very early on.

In other instances, like When Leaving Becomes Arriving, the music was ready-made by a composer, and then we generated imagery based on it. In that case, the process is slightly different, but the goal of creating a bigger, richer for the audience is still there.

SZ: People interpret the idea of “visual music” in lots of ways. Our visual music work is based on generative graphics, and we work primarily on abstract images. Technically, we use programming, audio, and sound analysis to get the parameters, the frequency, and the sound spectrum. But we're not trying to literally transfer everything we have in our artistic treatment to the sound. We want different sections to have different graphics with different styles to highlight what we want to emphasize.

When you’re working alone, you're free to make all of the creative decisions about an artwork, but when you collaborate, that necessarily changes. How did working with one another on Dépaysement shape the end result? 

RX: Well, we've been collaborating for a long time. At the beginning, it was challenging. Sean’s more on the technical side and I’m more on the artistic side. But over the years, we’ve learned to communicate better, and we’ve learned to respect each other’s boundaries.

Working with Sean has given me the opportunity to look into the technical side of things more, and he’s helped me a lot. Oftentimes I would talk to him about what I’d like to do — what the concept for a project is — and he’d help me build the programming foundation of it.

Over the years, I’ve been able to start working with the programming myself. At the same time, over the years, Sean’s been taking a lot of art and design classes. He’s getting his third master’s degree in design, on top of his electronic engineering and programming degrees.

“Dépaysement No. 3: When Leaving Becomes Arriving” by Rebecca Xu. (Image: Rebecca Xu)

Sean was the one physically in the studio doing the printmaking. So even if we talked about the process and the composition, he was the one literally putting the flowers or the petals on the printer. There were creative decisions that needed to be made in those moments. He did a lot of work, not just physically.

SZ: Printmaking is also very physical. You have to use your muscles to press the work, to push the print through the machine. How you control the media is physical, and the results are instant. With programming, once you run the code it’s instant, but it can take days or weeks of preparation to get there — to get a graphic to display properly. But with printmaking, feedback is immediate, and you have to make decisions on the spot.

What prompted you to enter the Lumen Prize?

RX: This award; because it's called the “Generative Art Award.” The Lumen Prize is a famous and prestigious award in the field of digital art, and I’ve admired a lot of the fabulous work that’s been submitted over the years, but this is the first Generative Art Award. We wanted to be part of that, and we’re very honored to be on the shortlist.

What do you think of the rise of platforms like Art Blocks and fxhash, and how they’ve changed the number of artists making generative art and the number of collectors collecting it?

RX: It's really great. Generative art has always been on sidelines, with not a lot of people doing it, and not a lot of people understanding it. And — particularly on the abstract side — I think people find it not only hard to understand, but also hard to critique.

Art Blocks and fxhash provide a platform for people to create a sense of community, which is so important when people have oftentimes felt marginalized for creating this sort of work. I won’t go into too much detail, but when I was up for tenure promotion — and even when I was up for promotion to full professor — it was really hard for me to find an external reviewer to be able to comment on my work.

These platforms help me feel like I’m part of a digital art community. And with Art Blocks, part of a generative art community. NFTs have also made generative art more a part of the art market, and I see that as a great thing.

For a long time, digital artists have been the outsiders of the art market. As a digital artist, it's harder to make a living. That's why I teach, right? [Laughs]

New platforms provide digital artists, particularly young digital artists, more ways to navigate their lives and careers in art-making, and perhaps allow them to be more hopeful about it.

I haven’t made my work into NFTs, but it’s a space I’m watching closely. I’m always interested in new tools, and I’m interested to see what blockchain technology can do in terms of protecting copyright in the age of AIGC [AI-generated content].

Just like digital art technology changes fast, so does blockchain technology, so we’re keeping an eye on it, and looking for new ways to explore new technologies and utilize them in our art. It’s a very exciting time.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find out more about Rebecca Xu’s work here. You can see some of Sean Zhai’s previous work here.

You can learn more about the Lumen Prize here.

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

Maya Man is a generative artist based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on internet culture, gender, and identity, or, as she puts it, whatever she’s obsessed with.

Man’s entry for the inaugural Metaversal Lumen Prize for Generative Art, a delightful, pastel-hued series of machine-made affirmations, inspirations, and slogans, FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, is one of the four projects shortlisted, so of course, we had to speak to her about it.

Maya Man (Image: Maya Man)

Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, sat down with Man on a soggy fall day in New York to talk about the challenges of maintaining a healthy social media diet, the perils of self-promotion, and going beyond the traditional confines — and expectations — of making art with code.

Craig Wilson: How did you go from making music videos in iMovie to creating sold-out collections of generative art? 

Maya Man: It's funny, because in hindsight, the narrative is very clear to me, but in the moment, growing up, it wasn’t totally clear at all. I always loved using digital tools like iMovie or Photobooth and spending time on the computer to make things, but I never saw that as a path forward for me in which I would be an artist.

That just wasn't a possibility that I had in mind. Because I thought artists were people who were good at painting and drawing, and I hadn't been exposed to artists in the museums or galleries who were making this type of digital work.

When I went to college, I decided to study computer science because I was interested in math. I had previously been interested in studying physics, but I was introduced to coding, like, two weeks before I went to college, and I decided to switch my major to computer science because I immediately loved it and loved that it gave you fine control over what you were creating on screen, but was also very logical and had the problem-solving aspect that I liked in math.

Then, after my first year of college, I met Lauren Lee McCarthy, the founder of p5.js. I was doing this program called Google Summer of Code, where I was working with the Processing Foundation. That's how I got introduced to her. She was so welcoming to me. I was a kid then and didn't know much about the world. She introduced me to p5 and had me get involved with it.

The community was so welcoming and inclusive, and I was really inspired by how the people in the community were making art with code as a medium and prioritizing access and inclusion. There just wasn't that same tech-bro energy that there was in many of the tech spaces I had been in previously with my computer science major.

It opened my mind to the possibility of pursuing a career focusing on making art that uses code as a medium. I mean, it's a long story, but, from there, it snowballed into wanting to pursue my own personal practice as a priority.

CW: In the rationale for FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, you talk about how on social media, “What do I believe?“ becomes “What do I want to appear to believe.” Is all social media inherently performative, or has it changed with the rise of influencer culture and the monoculture of social media?

MM: Yeah, it's changed so much over the past couple of decades with the rise of influencer culture and the emergence of this intense platform capitalism where you're stuck in these ecosystems and only operating within that.

When people used to think about social media on the internet in the really early days, you were going to a specific website, and you're going from website to website, and they sort of each encompass their own world.

Sample outputs from FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. (Image: Maya Man)

But to that question about performance, well, I always say that I believe there's no such thing as authenticity in the romanticized way people talk about it. On the internet everything is performance.

It doesn't differ much from how any social interaction you have off the internet with anyone you meet is a performance to an extent — because you're putting on a version of yourself that's appropriate for that interaction.

Even in our conversation right now I'm different than I would be with, say, my grandmother. But that's not because I'm being fake right now; it's just because I'm being what the context calls for.

The context of social media has changed over the years, and I think we're at this really intense point where it takes an extreme level of performance and self-promotion to stand out in the feed. It's encouraged that type of behavior online, but I don't feel like it wasn’t performative before.

Social media can be a potent marketing tool for artists but can also take a toll on their mental health. What does your social media diet look like, and how do you keep it healthy… if you do?

I wish I could say that I kept it healthy, but I don't necessarily. I just released my solo exhibition collection [I’m Feeling Lucky with Verse], and the auction finished last night at around 7 p.m. in New York. Promoting the collection meant a lot of time online.

I was very lucky that I had the physical installation — that was really important to me and a big reason why I was excited to work with the Verse team on the show — but I put so much work into the project and so much thinking and energy into it, and it feels like no one's gonna necessarily know about it unless I talk about it on social media because that's where everyone is spending their time.

It's a really exhausting process because you want people to see the work and engage with the work — that's the most special thing about being an artist. But, I found the process of continually talking about it and feeling the need to promote it extremely exhausting. I felt like I had to be online all the time.

I found it really hard, and I've been thinking throughout the process about how to have a little bit more balance. I feel like now I need to take a lot of time offline because I just spent a lot of time online. I don't have a foolproof method yet.

Most of your body of work speaks to onlineness and its implications. How has that changed from your early work to more recent projects as being online itself has changed?

My work is always about my particular current obsessions. So when I made FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, I was really deep into collecting that sub-genre of Instagram graphics. I had a separate account, and I was following all of these accounts that posted graphics like that and really trying to dissect them formally, in terms of the rhetoric that they were using, and also understand that they were emblematic of this particular piece of culture that I wanted to discuss.

I moved to Los Angeles in 2021 to pursue my MFA, and I was really struck by the intensity of the influence of astrology, which was the starting point for I'm Feeling Lucky. It's become hugely influential in the past decade, especially among young people who’re using apps like Co-Star and The Pattern.

An output from I'm Feeling Lucky by Maya Man. (Image: Verse)

I’m really interested in what this represents about us, this format of self-interrogation online, what it says about our current culture, and the secular nature of a lot of online life for young people. I feel like [my work] always reflects whatever piece of culture I’m thinking about more largely and which I can zoom into and use as a case study.

With FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, how much experimentation did you have to do to get it to a point where the outputs were not only consistently visually appealing but the messaging was also cohesive?

Oh my god. It took me a lot of iterations. I always feel like it's deceptively simple. People look at it, and they think, “Oh, that looks so easy.” But it was one of the most technically and, design-wise, challenging projects I've ever worked on because I wanted the language and the tone to feel right.

That’s why what actually came first was a sort of collaging style of language. It really worked well for me to get the tone that I wanted, but it also had this range between normalcy and absurdity in the phrases that were turned out.

The really challenging part for me was the visual aspect. I collected hundreds of examples, all from different accounts. There's a huge range of color palettes and hues and designs to consider. Then you have the added restraint when you're releasing a project on a platform like Art Blocks where you need all the code to be on-chain.

A lot of artists who make these sorts of things on Instagram bring in image design elements or that type of thing. And when you're working with text in this way, it's very obvious to an audience when something looks poorly designed. If the output had text that went out of the bounds of the square, say, it would immediately look wrong to people. When you're working with something that's a bit more abstracted, it's a lot more forgiving visually.

Inspiration from Instagram. (Image: Maya Man)

It was really challenging to get all of those elements right. I went through many iterations where I maybe liked them individually and thought they looked good, but then I’d export 100 of them together, and they didn’t feel cohesive or weren’t varied enough. I worked on [FITYMI] for about a year.

The rise of Art Blocks and fxhash seems to have grown both the number of artists creating generative artwork, and also the number of collectors collecting it. Do you think we’re in something of a golden age for generative art?

Generative art has been around since computers have been around so it's nothing new, but there's definitely a massive resurgence that I think is completely tied to the market aspect. When I met Lauren [Lee McCarthy] in 2015 and got interested in code, and in making generative art, there was no conversation about it being a potentially lucrative career.

In the contemporary art world, galleries were selling paintings and sculptures, but there was no market for most forms of digital art, especially software-based work and generative art. These platforms have really made the market for generative art very visible, which I think has played a huge role in increasing its popularity.

The other piece of it that I think is really important is that they've provided a technical way to view a collection of generative art that previously wasn't really possible.

Sure, I could write a piece of code, output 700 pieces, and say, “Oh, I just output these 700, and I didn't curate them at all.” Or some artist could curate 10 of their favorite outputs, and that would be the collection, but there's something so embedded in these platforms that makes it very clear that the code is running and it's outputting the collection.

There's an element of chance to it that I think it was difficult to emphasize before platforms like Art Blocks or fxhash to someone who wasn't deep into the culture of [generative art] already. That's been really cool.

You mentioned meeting Lauren Lee McCarthy made you feel the generative space was inclusive, but it’s still very homogenous — especially at the top — in terms of the most influential artists and collectors. How do we go about changing that?

It's a very hard question, and I don't have the answer, but I think about a community like p5.js and how inclusivity was a priority. It wasn't an afterthought for them. From the beginning, it was built into the software, built into the documentation, built into the community. It was something that they really prioritized.

I think it's not a priority in this space right now. You can see it reflected in the demographics of who is the most influential in terms of different vectors of roles in this space. I think it needs to be overt. It's not going to happen accidentally.

The people with influence need to acknowledge the truth of the community's demographics now and decide it’s a priority to change them.

What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for the inaugural Metaversal Lumen Prize for generative art? 

It's really exciting for me. When FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT was first released, it was extremely controversial within the community. It was so different from what most people's expectations are when they think of generative art, and it was so outside of people's comfort zones.

I knew why I was making it and felt strongly about it, and I was excited to release it, but I was nervous, and the initial reception was very polarized. So it's really meaningful to have the project recognized alongside other artists whom I really admire, especially for the inaugural award.

I feel like the longlist and shortlist both represent a range of work that’s happening in the generative art space, which is really refreshing. Because I think it's easy for people to think of generative art and think of three projects which all fall into the same general aesthetic category, and which some people think contain the borders of what generative art can be.

How did it feel to get backlash on a project you’d spent a year on? How did you contend with that?

I’ve often found an audience completely outside of the generative art world and Web3 world who my work really resonates with. It’s often women and young girls who encounter the work, or I show them the work, and they immediately get it — there's no explanation needed — because I think we’re spending time in the same corner of the internet and have this familiarity with these forms and phenomenons that I'm critiquing in my work and dealing with.

A lot of the initial controversy around FITYMI came down to two things. The first was the perceived simplicity we talked about earlier. The second was that I had to remind myself that I was making work about a specific phenomenon that not everyone understands, or is exposed to, or cares about.

An output from FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. (Image: Maya Man)

Visually, it's much more pared down than a lot of other projects, but I'm a very concept-driven artist, so it's not about making something that's visually driven for me. I always start with an idea, and then the visual form — the output — follows from that idea. The idea takes priority in making the work. I had to remind myself of that… and get offline.

I wanted to ask what's next for you, but it sounds like the answer is “Taking some time offline.” 

Actually, I'm making a book that's representative of the FITYMI collection. I’m really excited about it. I've been working with a book designer for a while — we’ve been working on it for a while — and I’m hoping to release it in early-ish 2024. I’m looking forward to having a physical form of the collection that people can touch.

That’s also a great way to extend the collection’s lifespan.

Well, FITYMI has had this really amazing lifespan beyond its release because people in the Art Blocks Discord keep calling it up. If you type #FITYMI? in a channel, it pulls up a random output from the collection.

It's become this ongoing meme and part of the ongoing conversation in the most active channel in the Art Blocks server because people use it to respond to other people’s questions, and it's become known for often being freakishly relevant to the conversation.

It goes back to a theme that's really present in my I'm Feeling Lucky collection: this belief in the sort of magical powers of the internet, or the algorithm as an oracle being able to — by the power of the universe — tell you what you want to hear — or what you need to hear — in that moment.

That's been a piece of the project that's been really fun and totally unexpected, which has helped its legacy.

Connect for more 🔌

You can learn more about Maya Man on her website, and learn about FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT on its own website.

You can learn more about the Lumen Prize and see all of the shortlisted artists here.

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

DYOR 🔬

“One Noun, Every Day, Forever.” ♾️

A little over two years ago, in August of 2021, a remarkable Web3 project started. Called Nouns, it combined cute, pixelated, and bespectacled characters with a grand experiment and bold question: Could a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) based on an infinite art project — and armed with a treasury that grew each day — turn into a global brand and a force for good?

Noun 1, created on August 8, 2021. (Image: Nouns)

The Nouns DAO Fork 🍴

We’ll get into the technicalities later, but what you need to know right now is that today marks a momentous occasion in Nouns’ history. Today, more than half of the nearly 900 Nouns in existence have chosen to join a Fork, a replica of the project that will see them leave the original DAO, and see the DAO’s treasury lose more than half its funds in the process.

At face value, this sounds calamitous. But speak to holders on either side of the leave/remain divide, and you’ll find most agree: the Fork is good for the project. For the disgruntled leavers, it’s a chance to demonstrate their unhappiness, exit, recoup fund, and create a new version of Nouns if they so wish. For remainers, it’s a chance to purge the doubters while making it easier for the true believers to get things done.

The Nouns DAO fork. (Image: Nouns)

Whichever side you’re on, it’s huge and will have ramifications for Web3, DAOs, and decentralized IP for years to come. Let’s get into the details.

The war chest 💰

The parameters of the Nouns project are simple: One Noun is trustlessly created and auctioned every 24 hours. The art is fully on-chain and in the public domain (CC0). All the funds from every sale go into the Nouns DAO treasury. One Noun equals one vote for proposals submitted to the DAO by Noun holders.

Nouns’ founders — the “Nounders” — are a group of crypto and digital art enthusiasts, engineers, and Web3 luminaries: seneca, gremplin, punk4156, eBoy, vapeape.eth, Solimander_, Dom, devcarrot, TimpersHD, and lastpunk9999.

The collective clout of the cohort meant early Nouns sometimes sold for hundreds of ETH (or hundred of thousands of dollars), and within two years, Nouns has accrued a treasury of over 28,000 ETH (~$50 million). It’s also voted on over 370 proposals for using those funds, from supporting fun Noun-elevating projects and charities to staking part of the treasury to help grow it.

In lieu of payment for their efforts, the Nounders receive every 10th Noun into a multi-sig wallet for the first five years of the project. And the Nounders retain a veto — never used or needed, so far — to prevent "51% attacks" where someone could buy enough Nouns/votes to push through proposals, and to prevent other malicious proposals that would undermine or endanger the project’s long-term prospects.

The V3 upgrade and the Fork 💾

As with any vibrant and growing community, there’s been some disagreement over how the treasury ought to be spent and on which uses of it are most likely to bolster the Nouns brand — and (hopefully) in the process, the price each auction closes at, which means more ETH in the treasury. There’s also been dissent over how much power the Nounders have.

An unhappy Noun holder votes with their Nouns. (Image: Nouns)

Web3 technology and smart contracts have also advanced since Nouns’ inception, and the implementation of version 3 (V3) of the Nouns protocol (via Proposal #356) presented an opportunity for the dissenters to have a say. If 20% of Nouns holders agreed, a new Fork mechanism would let them spin off a new version of the DAO, taking a pro-rata-per-Noun slice of the treasury with them.

Forks aren't new to crypto projects (for example, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic), but they are new to DAOs. Forks allow those with conflicting views to go their own way while leaving the original project to its own devices.

In this instance, the Nouns Fork allows those who choose to join to exit the original DAO, return their Noun to it, and receive a duplicate Forked Noun instead. They can then choose to forgo their Forked Noun, and receive a 35.5 ETH payout.

With only hours to go, 464 Nouns (or ~55% of the 846 total Nouns) have joined the fork. That means the Nouns DAO will be left with ~13,500 ETH in the treasury, while the Nouns DAO Fork will leave with ~16,500 ETH for its treasury.

The end or a new start?

Because macro-conditions (among other things) have seen the daily sales price for Nouns fall, there’s a group of holders who stand to benefit by taking their 35.5 ETH and running (if they paid less, it’s an arbitrage opportunity that’s hard to resist). It’s expected most who choose to join the Fork will do exactly that, including those who stand to lose money, but who’ve lost faith in the project and want out.

So, while it’s possible the Nouns DAO Fork could spin up its own UI and daily auction, that seems extremely unlikely, especially if 2/3rds of its newly minted community and accompanying treasury vanish in the coming days.

That’s good news for the OG Nouns DAO, which expects to find itself better able to manage proposals and advance the project with those who doubt its longevity or leadership, or disagree with its trajectory, having departed.

Moreover, the Nouns DAO will now have 464 Nouns (or more) returned to its inventory, which it can use to promote the project, honor supporters, or otherwise grow the brand.

Twitter tweet

For many Noun loyalists, the Fork represents a chance to clean house, take stock, regroup, and refocus. In such a low liquidity market, it’s not surprising some people are choosing to cash out and leave. Still, it’s telling how many are choosing to stay despite broader market conditions and the scarcity of liquidity.

In a Twitter Spaces discussing the Fork, Noun holder Valko said, “To grow, you must prune.” He may yet be proven correct.

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Could this have been avoided? 👀

To avoid this sort of drama, many DAOs have implemented a “rage quit” function — pioneered by the MolochDAO — that lets dissatisfied members divest and be replaced by people more aligned with the DAO’s mission. Had Nouns introduced something similar sooner, things might have played out differently.

But as it stands, the Fork represents the Nouns DAO’s version of a rage quit feature, and many holders are choosing to exercise it. Some see it as a proof that DAOs are doomed to fail. For others, it’s a chance for the Nouns’ to spring clean. We’re in the latter camp, broom at the ready.

Why we’re staying 🏠

Nouns represents a grand experiment of what’s possible in decentralized IP. At Metaversal, we’re pro-CC0, and while we acknowledge it’s a work in progress, we believe decentralized IP models have a crucial role to play in the future of culture, creativity, and ownership.

We don’t think the experiment is over. In fact, we think it’s just getting started. We’re creator-first, and we believe the future of cultural production and consumption will be underpinned by decentralized ownership and permissionless collaboration.

Noun 9, from the Metaversal collection. (Image: Nouns)

Nouns mirrors many of our ideals, and we want to be on the frontlines, collaborating with the Nouns community, and helping drive more effective memeification of what we believe will one day be one of the cornerstone projects in the history of not just Web3, but also IP more broadly.

The Nouns DAO Fork represents a hard reset for the Nouns DAO, but promises to leave a group of participants more aligned with the project’s ambitions, and ours. We’re proud to be part of the Nouns DAO and surrounding communities, so we’re doubling down and reasserting our commitment to it.

One Noun, every day, forever. ✊

Connect for more 🔌

Congratulations, you’ve made it to Friday and to the end of this week’s newsletter. Go make yourself a delicious snack and put your feet up; you’ve earned it. Or maybe you haven’t… in which case, well, there’s always next week. We believe in you! 🥪

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

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Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or in the OG Nouns Twitter mentions. 📣

DYOR 🔬

Web3 was meant to solve the right-click-save problems of the internet where most people expect most content to be free (or ad-subsidized) and it can be duplicated and distributed in an instant, creator be damned.

Despite ongoing issues around royalties, Web3’s partially succeeded thanks to the power of smart contracts (and the loyalty of some collectors), but its done so in very limited ways and only with a fairly narrow selection of intellectual property (IP) categories — art, and to a lesser extent, music. Story Protocol wants to change that.

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Story Protocol is billing itself as “the Github of IP,” and wants to offer a Lego-block-like structure for IP, where people can remix and rework each other’s work while maintaining provenance… because remixing is inevitable, but paying creators for their efforts isn’t.

To get to this goal, Story Protocol says two things are needed. First, a new standard — or protocol — is necessary that will enable creators to be compensated for the use of their work, and (even more ambitiously) which will be able to contend with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the way it puts replicating and remixing into overdrive.

Twitter tweet

The second is a “seamless and scalable licensing regime” where “ IP owners can set the parameters for their licensing rights, resulting in scalable one-to-many licensing.”

It’s a bold mission, because as we’ve seen with the very slow and often delayed rollout of the Matter smart home protocol, or OpenSea’s failed Seaport protocol, getting people to buy into new standards is hard. It’s also tough because the licensing regime is labyrinthine and deeply entrenched, and because by and large, AI providers are opting for the forgiveness-not-permission approach to purloining IP.

But two things suggest Story Protocol has a fighting chance. First, there’s its founding team of S.Y. Lee (formerly of Radish), Jason Levy (Episode), and Jason Zhao (Google DeepMind) Second, it has the support of a16zcrypto which lead the company’s $54 million raise. That’s sure to help, not only in terms of funding, but in terms of the Rolodex a16z brings to the table.

We agree how IP works needs a shakeup. We’re looking forward to the next chapter in Story Protocols tale.

ExtraOrdinally 🔏

• On Wednesday, “Ordfluencer” Leonidas announced the addition to the Ordinals Protocol of “parent-child” inscriptions, allowing for on-chain provenance, the use cases for which Ordinals fans are only just beginning to explore:

Twitter tweet

• Which explains why, on Thursday, Ord.io introduced “Recursive Modules,” which make it incredibly easy to explore Ordinals with recursive inscriptions:

Twitter tweet

• Meanwhile, Beeple’s told Ordinals enthusiast @nonfungible_jan the reason he hasn’t yet embraced Bitcoin and Ordinals “is because the infrastructure is still in its infancy and the UX has to improve.” In other words, build it and he will come:

Twitter tweet

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Headliners 🤘

• Cozomo de’Medici is partnering with The Hug and choosing six emerging digital artists whose work will be displayed alongside work from the likes of XCOPY, Beeple, Grant Yun, and Sam Spratt on the billboards of Tokyo’s iconic Shibuya Crossing. Click here to apply.

• If you’re going to be in Singapore next week for TOKEN2049, generative art platform fxhash is hosting what looks set to be an unmissable event:

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• Music NFT platform sound.xyz is releasing a new model for drops soon that’ll offer a combination of limited editions (for core collectors) and open editions (for reach), which could go a long way to solving one of the sector’s biggest challenges: balancing scarcity with scale.

• Artist 0xDEAFBEEF has announced a new collection of 100 “unique hand forged iron scuptures” linked to NFTs and requiring a trip to an event hosted in Patagonia in November by Bright Moments. Tickets for the collection will be sold between September 18-20:

Twitter tweet

• VeVe is dropping a collection of 5,800 Pink Panther-themed digital collectibles on Sunday, September 10, priced at $30 each and available in three rarities.

• Zygna-powered Web3 gaming project Sugartown is offering a free mint of 9,999 NFTs (6,000 public supply) dubbed the “Oras collection” on September 13.

• Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee does not like the Solana Saga phone:

• Justin Bieber sold 2,000 NFTs tied to his new single “Company” priced at $28 each, each promising holders 0.0005% of the royalties from the track’s streaming revenue. You couldn’t buy them in the US, because they look a whole lot like unregistered securities, but don’t feel hard done by, the track will need to reach 1.4 billion streams for holders to break even.

Metaversalism 🔥 

• Can you tell AI-generated images from genuine ones? It’s tough, as we learned in this week’s installment of Metaversal IRL:

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• Lars Wander would like you to buy his art, please, so he doesn’t have to defend his decision to quit his job at Google to his parents:

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It’s after Labor Day, so the white wardrobe items have been packed away and we’ve already seen our first 12-foot Home Depot skeleton in the wild. Bring on the spooky season! 💀

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Need an invite code for Bluesky? Here you go:

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Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or at the US Open, sipping a Honey Deuce, depending on your location and proclivities. 🍹

DYOR 🔬

Chromie Squiggles are the CryptoPunks of on-chain generative art. In the same way Punks created the profile picture (PFP) movement of recent years, Squiggles opened the floodgates for the on-chain generative art renaissance that’s underway. So the news that the last Squiggles will soon be minted marks the end of an era, and the start of something new.

Squiggles were created by Erick “Snowfro” Calderon and became the poster-child of Calderon’s generative art platform on Ethereum, Art Blocks. Since then, they’ve come to signify the beginning of a movement and have served as an instant badge of recognition for on-chain generative art aficionados. They are, in a word, iconic.

Twitter tweet

Calderon announced this week that all but two of the last remaining Squiggles would be minted, with the final two (#9998 and #9999) being allocated to "a special commemorative thing” and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), respectively.

As Calderon explains, the 66 new Squiggles have gone to “[a]rtists, collectors, fellow builders, personal friends and supporters, a few institutions, and finally to my family,” with a few held back for future giveaways.

Twitter tweet

Some might balk at Calderon’s control over the collection, but it’s actually perfectly in keeping with its ethos and mission. The purpose of Squiggles was much more than a proof of concept or a money-making endeavor. Squiggles was a project designed to open people’s eyes to the joys of minting, on-chain generative art, and Ethereum.

In that sense, it’s been a runaway success, not only coming to represent the possibilities of a nascent technology, but introducing thousands to the possibilities of Web3, and creating myriad new generative art lovers in the process. Calderon rewarding supporters and the Art Blocks team with pieces most of them are likely now priced out of is simply the cherry of an already impressive cake.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Calderon’s well onto his next project, Heart + Craft, “an everlasting generative art drop that invites the collector to create a physical counterpart,” that started minting on prohibition.art last month.

With no more Squiggles to mint, speculation about what’s to come will necessarily come to an end, but we expect interest in the collection will only grow as they years go by.

Headliners 🤘

• The Lumen Prize revealed the shortlisted artists for the 2023 awards this week, including the four artists shortlisted for the inaugural generative art award, sponsored by Metaversal:

Twitter tweet

• German airline Lufthansa has launched an NFT-powered loyalty program called Uptrip.

• OpenSea’s added a slew of new standards for creating NFTs with accompanying redeemable physical items:

Twitter tweet

• MoonPay is running an IRL NFT scavenger hunt around the Seaport area of Manhattan, New York.

• Pioneering (and multi-chain) generative artist, William Mapan, has new work incoming via a collab with LACMA and Cactoid Labs:

Twitter tweet

• Sportswear brand Adidas’s Three Stripes Studio has unveiled the latest artists to participate in its Residency project, MONKEEMOTO and DearNostalgia (AKA Adra Kandil).

• Artist Refik Anadol’s work tends to be best enjoyed on gigantic digital displays, so it was only a matter of time before it made it onto the Sphere in Las Vegas:

Twitter tweet

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NGMI ☄️

This week’s biggest L was chalked up by the SEC, which lost its case against cryptocurrency asset manager Grayscale, potentially opening the door to Bitcoin ETFs in the process, and adding to SEC chair Gary Gensler’s growing list of legal defeats:

Breaking: Grayscale wins SEC lawsuit for Bitcoin ETF review

It was ordered that “Grayscale’s petition for review be granted and the Commission’s order be vacated.”

cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-wins-sec-lawsuit

Metaversalism 🔥 

• At Metaversal HQ, we sat down with the Lars Wander to talk about quitting his job and the challenges of storing art in a New York apartment:

Twitter tweet

• Meanwhile, in this week’s From the Collection video, we looked at the iconic work of AI collaborative artist, Claire Silver:

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• And, in the latest episode of HyperCulture we looked at the power of memes, and why they’re impossible for our reptilian brains to resist:

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To those of you reading this in the United States, happy Labor Day weekend. Enjoy the US Open tennis tournament and the sunshine, while you can. To those of you reading this somewhere else… well… at least there’s the tennis, and possibly the first signs of spring. 🎾

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or in Las Vegas, mesmerized by the Sphere. 👀

DYOR 🔬

In the midst of a bear market, New York-based digital artist Sam Spratt sold nearly $2 million worth of digital art this week via his project, “IX. The Monument Game.” How did he manage it? By finding a novel use for Web3 technology, by fostering a community, and by coercing that community into investing part of itself into his vision.

Twitter tweet

But to understand how we got here, we need to rewind a bit. Spratt’s been working on his “Luci” series for more than a year, building its lore, slowly growing the body of work, and — crucially — curating a highly influential, deep-pocketed, and extremely loyal collector base.

Early Luci works were auctioned by Christie’s, and a collection of 50 pieces, “The Skulls of Luci,” followed. Those have since become highly coveted, with many owned by some of the most prominent artists and collectors in Web3, and a current floor price of 192 ETH (~$314,000).

Twitter tweet

The Skulls now get holders a seat at the table at a super-exclusive, super-insidery, collectors’ club. For Spratt, it means direct access to some of the sector’s key tastemakers, both as a sounding board for ideas, and as a readymade market for his work. And there are three Skulls of Luci that don’t have owners… which is where “XI. The Monument Game” comes in.

The enormous, 20,000-pixel-wide work sold as a 1/1 early this week for 420.69 ETH (~$690,000) to Ryan Zurrer’s 1OF1 collectors’ group (which also bought Beeple’s “Human One” sculpture).

But that wasn’t really the interesting part. Alongside the 1/1, Spratt created 256 “Player” tokens. A fifth of them were distributed to carefully chosen artists and collectors, with the rest sold via Dutch auction for 3.3 ETH each (~$5,400). Each Player NFT allowed the holder to drop a pin on a part of the epic artwork and leave a comment — usually in the form of a story or poem.

Twitter tweet

Skull holders — dubbed “The Council of Luci” — are voting to decide the best three player submissions, each of which will get a Skull and, in the process, a seat at the table of heavyweights Spratt has built.

At the same time, there’s now a burgeoning secondary market for Player tokens, which have had their respective submissions added to their metadata. When the voting closes on Monday, whoever holds the winning ticket gets the Skull, even if they didn’t create the submission.

Twitter tweet

What can we learn from Spratt’s mega-success in the least ideal market conditions anyone could wish for? Innovation will always find a market. Incredible art will always find collectors. And if you can reach the sector’s tastemakers and make them believe in your vision, they’ll support you regardless of macro-conditions.

Congratulations to Spratt and his wife, Rachel (who, as he explains, played a key role in bringing the project to life), because with The Monument Game, they’ve raised the bar for what a Web3 project can be, doubtless inspiring countless other creators in the process.

The project’s influence is going to be felt for decades to come. It’s a monumental achievement. And it’s exactly the sort of thing we imagine we might one day see in a major museum.

Headliners 🤘

• Our friends at the generative art institution Le Random have a must-read piece on the artist, academic, and theorist Philip Galanter and the definition of generative art he offered 20 years ago:

Decoupling Generative Art with Philip Galanter

‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) reflects on Philip Galanter's classic 2003 definition of generative art before briefly speaking with the artist, Texas A&M professor and theorist about the definition twenty years later.

www.lerandom.art/editorial/decoupling-generative-art-with-philip-galanter

• Online retail infrastructure giant Shopify has added support for Solana Pay and will support USDC payments at first, with additional cryptocurrencies expected to follow in coming months, TechCrunch reports.

• Pudgy Penguins and limited collection collectibles designer Mighty Jaxx have teamed up to create a collection of *checks notes* 300 pineapple-clad pengus priced at $199 each:

Twitter tweet

• Threads, the X (formerly known as Twitter) clone from Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook), is now available on desktops for most users. I’m sorry / You’re welcome.

• In other tongue-twisting news, Patrick Mahomes’ Museum of Mahomes project will offer exclusive physical trading cards to Azuki holders. The collection will include a 1/1 card that’s likely to be instantly worth a pretty penny the moment its unwrapped:

Twitter tweet

If someone sent you this edition, consider subscribing and joining the 7,200+ Metaversalists learning about the power of decentralized ownership each week. As always, thanks for reading!

NGMI ☄️

Diamonds might be forever, but @RecurForever isn’t. Well, this is awkward. The company, which raised $50 million and NFTerized all sorts of notable IP — from Star Trek to Care Bears — announced it can’t keep the lights on anymore and it’s shutting shop. Many people are, unsurprisingly, calling it a rugpull.

Twitter tweet

If you bought a RECUR pass, or any related NFTs, there’s an FAQ on how to hang onto your NFTs before the platform is fully deprecated on November 16. If you’re at all sympathetic to RECUR’s plight, pour one out for the latest victim of the bear, and remember, iconic IP doesn’t a strategy make. As collectors become more discerning — and times tougher — merely digitizing nostalgic brands isn’t going to be enough to build a sustainable Web3 business.

Metaversalism 🔥 

• In this week’s Metaversal IRL, we played a little “hot or not” with ScarJo, MarRo, our Zombie CryptoPunk, and the people of Times Square:

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• Back at Metaversal HQ, we sat down with the inimitable Olive Allen to touch on more serious topics:

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• And, in our From the Collection series, we looked at Roop Rainisto’s time-space-and-mind-bending AI art:

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This is the last newsletter of (northern hemisphere) summer. So long, linen trousers and Panana hats. So, if you’re above the equator and reading this… you should probably go and touch grass… in your swimwear... while you can. Good-bye, my Speedo and I are heading to the park. 🌿👙

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

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Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or on Bluesky, or maybe even on Threads on desktop! 👀

If someone sent you this edition, consider subscribing and joining the 7,200+ Metaversalists learning about the power of decentralized ownership each week. As always, thanks for reading!

DYOR 🔬

Yesterday, NFT marketplace OpenSea announced sweeping changes to how it handles “creator fees” (AKA, royalties). Starting August 31, 2023, OpenSea will move to optional royalties. Those collections that used the Operator Filter — which limited sales on non-royalty-enforcing platforms — will see it enforced until February 29, 2024.

Twitter tweet

The TL;DR is this: OpenSea has capitulated to the market pressure exerted by rival platforms like Blur and join the race to the bottom. Is this surprising? No. Is it unfortunate? Yes.

As OpenSea admits, making Operator Filter work would require buy-in from all players in the ecosystem. But that was never going to happen. It claims that, “creator fees aren’t going away – the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them is,” but that’s not really how things work.

Making royalties voluntary puts the onus on sellers to honor them… which many won’t, especially in thin-margin trades and the depths of a bear market. It also puts artists in an awkward position. If they can’t rely on royalties they need to charge more for initial sales, or create bigger collections, or simply create more work. Charging more can limit sales. Scaling their output can dilute the value of their catalogs.

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Investor Mark Cuban had some fighting words for OpenSea, despite being an investor in the company, and there’s been plenty of added vitriol directed at the marketplace from artists.

But as with most things, one person’s loss is another’s gain, and other platforms that do enforce royalties have seized on the chance to big themselves up.

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It’s not just lip service, though, enforcing royalties can be a differentiator, and one that a certain sort of collector might fine attractive when deciding where to direct their capital.

This week I attended a gig for a band that plays 200-plus gigs a year but will probably never play a venue that holds more than 500 people. After the show I bought a record that cost $3 more (or ~10% more) than it would’ve if I bought it elsewhere, but I did it anyway. Because, 1. I know more of the $30 goes to the artist that way, 2. I got to literally put the money in their hand, and 3. I want to help them keep doing what they do.

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If you believe artists deserve royalties and you want to support them, vote with your feet… or your transaction approvals. Buy their work on the sorts of platforms that help them build sustainable careers. Or reach out to them directly. But don’t continue to support broken platforms and then bemoan the world that inevitably creates in years to come.

Headliners 🤘

• As part of it’s “Onchain summer” promo for its new base network, Coinbase is offering consumers a $2 NFT of infamous Pixelmon character Kevin, clad in summery finery. Minters get entered into a draw to win a PIxelmon egg and the chance to buy a Kevin physical collectible:

Twitter tweet

• DeGods co-founder Finn is leaving the project, but claims their “departure has nothing to do with any recent events,” as they began their transition out of the company “in early July.” The pounding DeGods has taken this week can’t have helped, though.

• Magic Eden has created a $1 million fund to “launch the next generation of bluechip NFT projects on [*checks notes*] Polygon.”

• Hardware wallet-maker Ledger has added support for PayPal, allowing users to buy Ether and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies via the Ledger Live app:

Twitter tweet

• Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail was revoked. LOL.

• Meanwhille, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to give the thumbs-up to Ether-futures ETFs as soon as October:

Twitter tweet

NGMI ☄️

Grimes’ baby daddy and plumbing fan, Elon Reeve Musk, is planning to remove the option to block accounts on X, the service formerly known as Twitter (and still referred to as such by all reasonably people).

Musk has done some dumb stuff (and lost a lot of money) since taking over the microblogging service/social network, but this one is impressively dumb even by his admittedly low standards.

Twitter tweet

One of the hardest parts about social media (just ask Mark Elliot Zuckerberg) is moderation. It’s essential but nearly impossible to do well. Twitter doesn’t do it well, so the block feature lets users take matters into their own hands to fend off scammers, harrassers, and other ne’er-do-wellers, and “mute” doesn’t do it well enough, because scammers can still see your content.

Removing the option to block users while letting people buy timeline prominence through paid verification is only going to further enshitificate things. But remember, it’s not too late to block/mute Elon Musk… or to move to Bluesky.

Metaversalism 🔥 

• We’ve been taking to the streets of New York to ask people on the street (🎶 dee da dee da dey 🎶) questions about NFTs. The results have been hilarious and encouraging. Hilarious because most people still have no idea. Encouraging, because that means — despite everything that’s happened over the last two years — we really, truly, genuinely, unambiguously, are still early:

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• We like talking to other humans, especially in person, which is why we’re been taking every chance we can to do precisely that with Web3 artists, movers, shakers, and other luminaries. Most recently? Self-taught photographer and master community builder, Dave Krugman (look out for the full interview on our socials soon):

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• And last but by no means least, we’ve also been working on a new series called #Hyperculture, that brings you orb-grade ponderings about Web3:

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That it. That’s the newsletter.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Need a Bluesky invite? Here you go:

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Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or on Bluesky! 👀

Carla Rapoport is the founder of the Lumen Prize and Lumen Art Projects. Previously a financial journalist, Rapoport has always loved art. An encounter a decade ago with landscape paintings created on iPads piqued her interest in the use of technology in art-making, and prompted her to create a prize to recognize excellence in the field.

Carla Rapoport. (Image: Carla Rapoport / Patrick Lawler)

Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, hopped on a call with Rapoport — who’s based in the Welsh countryside — to talk about the remarkable things that happen when art and technology intertwine, the value and power of community, and the joys of looking at anything by David Hockney.

Craig Wilson: What prompted you to start the Lumen Prize in the first place?

Carla Rapoport: Well, my background is not art. I spent my career as a financial journalist. So I would say I'm uniquely unqualified to have founded and run a digital art prize and a digital art business. But maybe it's because I wasn't in the field that I had no inhibitions about what could be tried.

I was always interested in art, and I was always told by my family that it wasn't a career. So I kept it as a hobby all my life. And then, when I stepped away from journalism, I realized I wanted to do something connected to the arts.

And just coincidentally, I wandered into the 2012 Royal Academy exhibition, “A Bigger Picture” by David Hockney. And I just kept going back and going back and going back.

"The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven)" by David Hockney. (Image: David Hockney)

I was writing about technology at my last job at the Economist Group, and I was writing about how technology had flipped journalism, it had flipped publishing completely, but it didn't seem to have touched the art world… except for David Hockney, who was doing all these incredible digital paintings on iPads.

CW: As it happens, I went to that show too… I was blown away by the fact that he’d done these incredible landscape images that were essentially finger drawings because it was long before the Apple Pencil came out.

So you know exactly what hit me between the eyes. I found myself explaining it to people. These are iPads. This is art. And it occurred to me that it couldn't just be Hockney doing this.

I went to a friend who's a curator at the British Museum, and she connected me to a Chinese artist who was doing something called “photo manipulation.” And I just went down a rabbit hole, and I really never came back.

It occurred to me at that point that the best way to shine a light on this amazing ecosystem of incredible artists who are willing to experiment with tech tools would be to create a prize. That was really the beginning of Lumen.

CW: How did you get the first sponsors on board? It must have been very difficult selling something with no precedent to point to.

CR: We didn't get any sponsors on board [laughs]. I mean, it was a passion project from the beginning. I found some people — friends really — who gave a bit of money here and a bit of money there. The City of Cardiff, bless them, gave us an office, specifically, the Office for Economic Development in Cardiff. I was based in Wales — then as now — and they gave us an office and some money to hire a young person to help me, but we’re still looking for that sponsor.

There’s Metaversal, of course. Our relationship with you is as close as we've gotten. But people kept saying to me, “Why don't you call Microsoft?”

“That's a good idea.” I'd say, “I'll just get Bill Gates on the phone.”

Anyway, it was really a question of making the decision to ask artists for a small entry fee. Opening up the competition and realizing, thanks to the cloud — which was just becoming a thing at the time — that you could store all kinds of stuff very cheaply online without having to pay huge amounts of money for storage.

So we could store the artwork that was coming in inexpensively and build a judging platform inexpensively. All those things were getting cheaper at that point.

We basically bootstrapped it… and then the art just came in. We built it and they came. It was so humbling to see the quality of work that came in those first few years, and then people heard about us, and we got some amazing partnerships with a museum in Norway and the British Computer Society.

But it was very organic, and it's always been very organic. It was always meeting people in person who got to love what we were doing. But we still haven't found that magic connection to X company. It's still very independent and feels very independent, which I like and I hope we can stay that way.

How has the art that people are submitting changed over the 12 years since the Prize’s inception?

It's changed completely, as tech has changed completely. So art comes first, of course, these are artists, but the tools that they can access have changed completely in 12 years. When we started, no one thought about AI and art. And now people think of little else but AI and art.

It's in the latest long list. ChatGPT shows up. A year ago, would I have even known what that was? I'm not sure it was around a year ago. So each year the long list reflects what's happening in tech from an art perspective. And that's why it's so exciting to look at the new works each year.

A still from “The Future Tense” by Russell Perkins, winner of the 2022 Lumen Prize for Future Worlds. (Image: Lumen Prize)

We build a community of artists through the long list. Once you're on a long list, you're part of our Lumen community and we then get opportunities to place the work with partners. And this has been one of the most rewarding developments of the prize, that the prize has created a community for artists to meet each other and network and so on, but also for us to connect institutions that want to find out about this with this art.

Naturally, as the sponsor of the inaugural generative art award, we have a special interest in that category. Generative art isn’t new by any measure, but it does feel like it’s having a moment, thanks to the perfect storm of crypto technology and distribution mechanisms and platforms like Art Blocks and fxhash. How do you feel about it as a category, and about where it’s heading?

It's another beautiful example of how the genre has developed over the years. Back in 2015, Scott Draves won the Founder’s Award with “Electric Sheep.” It was the second year we saw generative work that used CPUs to program new software.

I love the fact that his day job was working in software development for a financial firm, and in his night job he was doing these amazing generative works. In fact, he’d been doing them for many years.

An image from "Electric Sheep" by Scott Draves. (Image: Lumen Prize)

Then the tools became more sophisticated and developed and crypto and blockchain came along. It's just beautiful to see what's happened and how, again, the artist community embraced these tools and created this magic kind of art.

As you say, it's definitely having a moment. Now we have a prize — thanks to your sponsorship of it — and it's just amazing to see this develop in a way that you never could have imagined 10, 12 years ago.

It’s also so thrilling to see it being taken seriously in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. Even the great Vera Molnár speaks about how, in the early days, there was ridicule for “computer-aided art,” — that it wasn't real art. I wonder whether you've seen examples of that in Lumen over the years, of things that have gone from being derided to being more accepted by the art establishment?

Oh definitely, I mean I've had artists say to me, "Oh, a lame computer art prize… oh, this isn't art.” We were basically put in a niche for a long time, a very small niche, and inevitably people would make that old joke about monkeys with typewriters. I got that comment on a panel once.

But thanks to the great pioneers of the ‘60s and their works that have been put in museums and collected, now — today — people don't talk like that. When I go to events there isn't someone on the stage talking about monkeys and typewriters anymore.

Nobody says, “It's the computer making it.” But in the early days, people would say that all the time. “It's cold, it's artificial, it's clinical.” None of those things are the case. As you know, from going to that 2012 show at the Royal Academy of David Hockney, it was the most life-affirming show that you could think of.

Still from “RADIO GHOS” by ZU-UK, the 2022 Lumen Prize winner of the 3D/Interactive Award. (Image: Lumen Prize)

The work only gets increasingly more a part of our lives, especially the interactive work, which kind of developed as we rolled along, and we created categories as the work developed. 3D Interactive became a category, and then AI became a category, and then generative art.

It's been brilliant being able to track the progress of this genre, and to see the contemporary art world come knocking and get interested. I think I'm okay to say publicly that Tate is working on its first big digital acquisition, which is really exciting.

When the serious collecting institutions start putting this in their collections, that's a big move for the genre of art and technology.

Absolutely, well we've seen LACMA and the Centre Pompidou adding CryptoPunks to their collections.

And Whitney, of course, is a trailblazer. I haven't seen it, but MoMA has Refik Anadol in the lobby as you come in. It's attracted some criticism. One of the famous art critics didn't like it. But it's just been beloved by people who've come in.

I've been meaning to go, and I should do it sooner rather than later, because it was meant to end months ago, but MoMA keeps extending the deadline.

Well, there's the proof in the pudding. It's pulling in so many people, People vote with their feet, if they didn't like it they wouldn't come. It's really changed the game. Refik — who won the Lumen Prize in 2019 [for “Melting Memories”] — has become as close to a household name as possible from this genre, and that's really exciting. What a lovely artist for that to happen to.

"Melting Memories" by Refik Anadol. (Image: Refik Anadol)

Right, and while he’s become a household name, for many other artists, art is necessarily a hobby or side hustle. Are there artists that Lumen has helped to turn their practice into a full-time pursuit as a result of being long-listed, or winning an award?

Yeah, quite a few artists that we work with have. Andy Lomas was doing animation for Hollywood films and doing a teaching job on the side. He won in 2014 and now he has a full-fledged art career.

There are also lots of artists who come into the community and develop what they do over the years. There was a collective of artists who became part of a show we did for Eureka! — which is the National Children's Museum in Halifax in the UK. It started four years ago, and it's still going, and all of the artists in that collective have been able to use what they did.

Also, an artist on the West Coast who has a big job in a creative agency has been working with us over the years, and he would be one of the ones that I would expect would become a full-fledged artist.

You can use your connection to the prize to get yourself out of education. A lot of those who submit are teachers — but not at the level that they want to be teaching necessarily — so they either go up the education tree, or they break out of education, and they go into exhibitions.

Nitcha Tothong and Kengchakaj Kengkarnka. (Image: Lumen Prize)

Or they're in the creative world — they do landscapes for games, for instance, which is very lucrative, but maybe that's not what they want to do full-time — but they've done enough of it, so they use this as a springboard.

When I founded the Prize, just as you said, I expected we'd get moonlighters — people who did this at night over the weekend. Over the years about half the winners are in that category: They've never won a prize, they do this on the side.

Last year's winner was a duo from Thailand [Nitcha Tothong and Kengchakaj Kengkarnka, who won for their work, “Jitr จิตร”] who’ve have had this huge boost from winning.

Then there are the other half of winners who are already big names in the space, like Mario Klingemann or Refik. It's about half and half at the top level, but at the lower levels, it's all kinds of moonlighters, which is really lovely.

One of the categories that’s my baby is the Student Award, and the winner of that two years ago, Cezar Mocan, has really gone on to a fantastic career. We were all gobsmacked when his work came in, and he's been public about the fact that winning the Student Award really propelled his career.

One of the things we loved about the Lumen Prize is how global it is. There must be plenty of entrants you’ve never met if they’re not EU-based?

Oh, absolutely. We have 27 countries represented on the 70-person long list this year. It's very international, and it gets more international each year.

For a long time, there were very few entries from what we used to call the “global south,” and we now call the “global majority,” because the countries represent most of the people in the world. We set up an award for that, and that's helped, but it is still hard for us to get entries from those countries.

There are communication networks we’re developing, and that we need to develop. Scandinavia has also been a big, big, big part of what we do. We've had some really valuable partnerships with a regional museum in Norway. So there's interest in surprising parts of the world, and I hope that continues.

In the same way the gen art award is new, are there other categories you’d like to see added to the Lumen Prize in future? 

I can't answer that one, Craig, because the only lagging indicator about Lumen is the technology itself.

Right, so you find someone who's got an entry that doesn't quite fit anywhere else, and take your lead from that?

Exactly. We learn from the entries, and we say, “Oh my word, 10 artists have entered using this technology and it's not fair to have them in this category,” and that's how we learn. Every year we reassess the categories on that basis.

I know artists and deadlines aren’t great bedfellows. What’s your advice to someone who's been umming and ahhing about entering? Who perhaps thinks they’re too amateur or their work is too amateurish. How do you get them over the line and get them to hit the submit button?

It's such a good question, and we think about this a lot. I talk to groups myself to encourage artists to enter. At universities, for instance, I have a short talk that I give to students, and I have a couple of things I say.

One is, you can't win if you don't enter. Another is, your work will be looked at. It's a case of trying and trying again. You can't see it as a one-off. You have to give it a couple of tries, and then you have to look closely at who did win.

If you don't win, it doesn't mean your work is bad, but it means it didn't catch the judge's eye. What did catch the judge’s eye? And is that something you want to work towards? If yes, try again. If no, you've got yourself an answer.

Still from “Apodemy” by Katerina Athanasopoulou, winner of the 2013 First Prize. (Image: Lumen Prize)

The last thing I say is that entering a prize like this — which has a small fee, not a big one — supports the genre because we put the proceeds to use by promoting the work to institutions and partners worldwide. So even if you don't win, your money goes directly into the promotion of this kind of art and it will be a fellow creator of it who will benefit.

So that's the pitch. But, at the end of the day, it's got to come from your heart. You've got to think, “I want to show the world what I've got. And I'm willing to try a couple of times to see if this will happen.” Even then, having the courage to do it isn't everybody's cup of tea, and we totally get that.

But we really hope that they do want to join, because even if they get on the long list — which is 70 works — they become part of a community, and that means we share opportunities with them.

Right, it’s not just about winning, it’s about becoming part of a community of people working with technology to make art.

Exactly. And while we don't represent artists who aren't selected for the long list, we are interested in approaches from artists’ collectives who we could work with. For instance, if you are a collective and you're in South Sudan and you want to reach out to other collectives that are in this genre, we like to make those connections: it's what we're about.

Even if you don't want to enter the prize but you have a good idea for an exhibition, or you have a collective with a lot of people in a country we don't know anything much about because they don't have a lot of light shone on them, they should get in touch. Because we aren't just the Lumen Prize we're also Lumen Art Projects.

Lumen Art Projects is the parent company and its goal is to promote the understanding and excitement and enjoyment of art and technology. If you feel that your part of the world or your genre is underrepresented for any reason, we'd love to hear from you.

Connect for more 🔌

You can learn more about — and submit entries to — the Lumen Prize here.

You can find our more about Lumen Art Projects here.

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

Welcome to this week’s 161 new subscribers. If someone sent you this edition, consider subscribing and joining the 7,200+ Metaversalists learning about the power of decentralized ownership each week. As always, thanks for reading!

DYOR 🔬

Beeple bought a Punk.

The artist — also known as Michael Joseph Winkelmann to his grandmother — has bought plenty of crypto art and NFTs over the years, but this marks his first foray into the world of profile picture projects (PFPs).

Given Beeple’s the artist behind the most expensive NFT ever sold, it’s a pretty momentous move, and yet another endorsement of CryptoPunks as the OG of OG PFP projects.

It also wasn’t a decision he made lightly. For weeks Beeple’s been soliciting advice from Twitter users and his peers about which CryptoPunk traits and categories to consider. Plus, there’s the price point.

Twitter tweet

Beeple paid 113.7 ETH (~$210,000) for CryptoPunk #4593, a three-trait Punk with “clown Eyes,” a “clown nose,” and a “mohawk.” That’s not record-breaking for a Punk by any measure — a few weeks ago we bought a $1 million Punk 💅 — but it’s well above the floor price for a Punk of that caliber.

That suggests two things. 1.) Beeple really wanted a clown punk, and 2.) He’s planning to hang onto it for the long run. He confirmed as much in his tweet about it, saying, “[I] wanted to get something with very recognizable features that to me embodied the spirit of punks and that I could build a story around through the Everydays.”

Twitter tweet

He also had plenty of praise for CryptoPunks and its creators, “[T]he fact that this ridiculously innovative artwork was GIVEN AWAY years ago and at the time almost nobody cared, but that this idea then eventually spawned an entire ASSET CLASS, to me is just beyond comprehension.

I have watched in awe as this project changed the way we think about identity and ownership. i believe this is a historic work from both a technological and artistic perspective and it's influence on NFTs and this space is already undeniable.”

Twitter tweet

Metaversal Investment Analyst Matt Miller — AKA balon.eth — says we’re seeing more of these sorts of purchases of late. “There are serious collectors out there who, if they find a Punk that resonates with them, they’re willing to pay more for it. We saw a lot of that during the bull run — people buying ‘forever punks.’”

Miller says the move only reinforces his longterm belief in the project, because as more people buy Punks with the intention of holding onto them, overall supply is going to contact which demand continues to grow. “I think people will continue to appreciate the project’s unique history,” he says.

“The more you spend time with the collection the more you appreciate it,” Miller says. “Beeple did that very publicly — asking people what their favorite attributes are — and he was very thoughtful in how he went about it. You could tell this was a long time coming.”

In the words of Beeple himself, “TLDR; LFGGGGGGGGG, fun times ahead!! <3”

To the moon 🌙

• Animoca Brands game developer subsidiary, nWay, is launching a fighting game called Wreck League that’ll include characters from Yuga Labs’ universe, including Bored Ape Yacht Club.

• Sticking with gaming, retail giant Amazon is dishing out free NFTs for a new title called Mojo Melee to Prime Gaming users for the next six months:

Twitter tweet

• The team behind Ordinals is further formalizing the space by moving to a non-profit model and rebranding as the Open Ordinals Institute. It’s also launched a new website — ordinals.org —for community updates and other Ordinals-related news.

• Meanwhile, hardware wallet Ledger now supports Ordinals.

• Omega RUNNER’s free mint of its character collection raced passed the finish line in under four minutes last week, and the art reveal got the chequered flag yesterday:

Twitter tweet

• Coinbase’s Ethereum scaling solution Base (an L2 network on top of Ethereum), which it announced back in February, is launching next week on August 9.

• Yuga Labs is buying Roar Studios, “a company at the convergence of gaming, social media, and the metaverse with deep technology and AI roots,” to help it build out its forthcoming Otherside game/metaverse.

• NFT platform Nifty’s is shutting down. The group developed NFTs for IP like Looney Tunes and The Matrix. Wallet holders can follow this link to export their private keys and can read more below:

Twitter tweet

• Binance has made its Bixel tool available to everyone. Previously in beta in the EU, the tool lets users harness AI to create and mint NFTs on the BNB Smart Chain. Users can generate 10 images a day, and minting costs 0.008 BNB (~$2) per NFT.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter (for now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), Threads, Bluesky (Need an invite? Here’s one: bsky-social-o5236-a2hmw), LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!

DYOR 🔬

This week represented a unique milestone in the world of Web3. Vera Molnár, the 99-year-old generative artist and computer/algorithmic art pioneer, released her first (and “only”) on-chain collection of digital artworks in collaboration with artist Martin Grasser (who also, incidentally, was behind the iconic, now-retired Twitter bird logo the company adopted in 2012).

Dubbed “Themes and Variations,” the collection of 500 pieces was sold via Sotherby’s, with buyers getting the chance to mint a piece, rather than seeing what they were buying beforehand.

Twitter tweet

The collection also represented the first time Sotheby’s has used a Dutch auction mechanism, with a starting price of 20 ETH per piece, which went down by 0.1 ETH every 15 seconds. The 480 available pieces (Molnár and Sotheby’s kept 10 each) sold out in less than an hour, raising 631 ETH (~$1.2 million) in the process.

Each work riffed on the letters N, F, and T, on account of the way those three letters in combination (often treated as a four-letter work by the art establishment) “changed the conversation around digital art forever.”

It’s hard to overstate Molnár’s influence on generative art, a genre that’s enjoyed renewed interest — and record-breaking sales — in recent years thanks to platforms like Art Blocks and fx hash and the growing interest in the blockchain technologies they harness.

We’re such fans of generative art we incubated digital generative art institution, Le Random, which takes its name from Molnár’s comments on the power of randomness as a creative force. Le Random minted 26 pieces from the collection, which collectively do an excellent job of showing the algorithm’s range.

Twitter tweet

There’s something about generative art collections that reminds us of iconic musical albums. There’s a unifying style and theme that make it clear each work is from the same artist, but there’s also sufficient variety to each track that makes them interesting in isolation.

It’s little wonder then that part of Molnár’s practice is inspired by music. As the artist explains:

“All these variations around letters resonate in me like music. Even though I stopped playing the piano at the age of 15, music has never left me. I immediately think of Goldberg Variations or Beethoven's Diabelli Variations on a Waltz. That's why I gave the title Theme and Variations to the latest project with the letters N, F, and T that I am working on for my first and only long-form generative art project.”

We expect the generative movement will continue to mine its rich history for gems, and we’re excited to see what gets unearthed because the era of computer-aided is just coming into its own, and future generations are going to look back in awe while many of those who lived through it will be kicking themselves for not supporting it sooner.

To the moon 🌙

• This week, the Lumen Prize — which celebrates artists using technology to produce their work — announced its longlist for each category. We’re the proud sponsor of the inaugural generative art award and were ecstatic at the caliber of entries we received:

Twitter tweet

• Speaking of awards, entries for the Mona Shorts Fest — “the world’s first metaverse short film festival” — are open. Entrants need to create their shorts in the Monaverse, and stand to win $3,000 in categories like “Mona Short for Anime” and “Best Leading Avatar.”

• Gucci and 10KTF are letting holders of Gucci Material Vault NFTs exchange them for physical Gucci goodies. One NFT gets you a wallet; three gets you a duffel bag:

Twitter tweet

• Americana, a service that lets customers “vault” physical items from cars to postage stamps and create a tokenized version for displaying, trading, or loaning, has made its offering available to the public.

• If you own a Bored Ape and want to use its likeness for merchandise, sparkling water, custom jewelry, or anything else, you can now apply for a license from Yuga Labs through a new initiative called “Made by Apes,” which will also allow you to brand your wares accordingly. Maybe Justin Bieber will be able to recoup a bit on his Ape after all:

Twitter tweet

• In a reversal of Americana’s digitize-the-physical model, digital fashion brand MNTGE’s latest NFT drop, “Patchwork” lets buyers of the 7,500 pieces claim physical patches. The patches are designed by 11 artists, including Coldie, OSF, and Jen Stark.

• Electronic music platform Beatport has launched Beatport.io, a new platform that lets artists create and distribute digital collectibles. Its first offering is a piece called “Nachts Berlin” by photographer Mischa Fanghaenel and composer Gerd Janson commemorating Berlin night life.

Twitter tweet

• Beeple’s first sculpture, “Human One,” is on display in the U.S. for the first time. The piece, bought for $29 million by tech entrepreneur Ryan Zurrer, is on display at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, until early 2024.

Thought of the week 🧠

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Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!

DYOR 🔬

You've probably seen talk of Opepen and the phrase "For the culture" on your timeline this week. If you don't know what it's all about, we're here to help.

Back in January, Jack Butcher, the British-born, Tennesse-based digital artist (and friend of The Metaversalist) known for his innovative Web3 artworks like Checks and his powerful, minimalist imagery under the banner Visualize Value, created a free mint, open edition NFT project called "Opepen Edition."

Twitter tweet

The project generated ~16,000 pieces, but the Opepen movement really exploded last week thanks to two pseudonymous Web3 influencers taking an interest in it.

The biggest holder of Opepens, Bored Elon, proposed a trade with ThreadGuy where he’d swap an early Opepen in exchange for the Mutant Ape ThreadGuy's built his online persona around. The trade didn't work out, but it got ThreadGuy interested in Opepens... along with much of Web3 Twitter.

Unprompted, Butcher created a custom Opepen based on the palette of ThreadGuy's Mutant, which ThreadGuy (also unprompted) set as his profile picture — a massive gesture of support given the Mutant is so central to ThreadGuy’s digital identity.

Butcher then created "Opepen Threadition," an open edition of the custom ThreadGuy Opepen, with proceeds from the sale of the ~$2 pieces going to ThreadGuy to thank him for his contributions to the Web3 space.

Twitter tweet

That really opened the floodgates, with influencers and brands creating Opepens of their own and using them as their profile pictures (though many brands did it for a day before reverting to their usual PFPS… what can we say, bandwagon-jumpers gonna jump).

True to the maxim that, “If it trends in Web3 for long enough Beeple will make art about it,” the infamous digital artist got on board with the trend, too, creating multiple pieces commemorating the act of Web3-enabled altruism.

Twitter tweet

Butcher and his code wizard pal, Jalil, have also released an AI-powered Opepen tool (that was actually built a few months back) that lets users create Opepens of their own using text prompts.

Twitter tweet

Where the Opepen project will go is anybody's guess, but its vision of an open, participatory future supported by AI and digital art is precisely the sort of thing we at Metaversal can get behind.

For the culture!

To the moon 🌙

• In other news, we bought a CryptoPunk:

Twitter tweet

• Proof, the entity behind the Proof Collective and Moonbirds, has launched “Mythics,” its new NFT collection of 20,000 that’ll be revealed at a rate of 100 a day for 200 days.

• Doodles confirmed it’ll open the doors to its Doodles x CAMP experience in Chicago on August 19. You’ll need a timed ticket to attend. Tickets are on sale now and cost $28:

Twitter tweet

• The second-griftiest Trump, Melania, ran afoul of NASA this week after releasing an Apollo 11 moon-landing-themed NFT called “Man on the Moon” (at $75 a pop) that shamelessly used an image of Buzz Aldrin’s famous stroll on the surface of Earth’s longest-standing satellite without consent.

• Super Bowl star Patrick Mahomes plans to drop a 15,000-piece NFT collection in September dubbed the “Museum of Mahomes”:

Twitter tweet

• Another week, another NFT marketplace, this time from digital wallet operator Argent, called “Unframed” and build on the L2, Starknet.

• Got cryptocurrency burning a hole in your pocket? Have you considered betting on live-streamed hamster racing?

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Thread of the week 🧵

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Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!

To thank every one of you who collected Metaversal Badges, we got the creative force behind them, Patrick Lawler, to create a mega artwork referencing them, pieces from the Metaversal collection, and celebrating the projects, personalities, and peculiarities of the first half of 2023 in Web3. It’s called “Metaversalopolis,” and you should find it in the wallet you used to claim Badges soon!

A preview of “Metaversalopolis” by Patrick Lawler.

DYOR 🔬

Building hype and a sizeable social media following ahead of a drop is often key to ensuring it’s oversubscribed and sells out fast, but it’s no guarantee. We were reminded of this earlier this week when Ether — one of the most highly-anticipated Ethereum drops in recent memory — failed to convert tens of thousands of followers into paying customers/card-holding community members on the terms it originally hoped to.

Twitter tweet

Originally Ether was meant to mint a 10,000-piece profile picture project (PFP) collection at the end of 2022 at a price point that looks outlandishly optimistic from today’s vantage point: 1 ETH for the public mint and 0.5 ETH for those on the allowlist.

The mint was delayed and — fast forward six months — the mint price was reduced to 0.65 ETH / 0.35 ETH. Nonetheless, allowlist minting was slower than expected, prompting the team to cut the supply to 5,555.

Ether’s anonymous co-founders. (Image: Ether)

Despite this, the public mint was sluggish too (and a week after the allowlist, which is an eon in Web3 time), so the team shifted tack again, airdropping a second PFP to those who minted one, and using a Dutch auction to move the rest.

Eventually, the collection did mint out, and the project raised around 1,000 ETH (~$1.9 million) in the process, but what was billed as a sure thing turned out to be a shambolic series of missteps, pivots, reorientations, and scrambles.

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Unsurprisingly, fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) abounded as the process unfolded, inevitably affecting Ether’s performance. It also didn’t help that Azuki’s Elementals launch happened just before Ether’s drop, siphoning liquidity from the market (and introducing all sorts of FUD of its own).

What can we learn from Ether’s errors?

• It’s very hard to time the NFT market

• There’s no telling what market conditions will look like when drop time comes when you’re months away from it in the planning phase.

• Price point matters, and so does how far in advance you announce it.

• People will fill any and all informational vacuums, usually with worst-case scenarios.

• Pivoting might be essential for a project, but it makes it look like the founders are making things up as they go, eroding trust in the process.

• Hype and social media followers don’t guarantee success.

• FUD is inevitable, so have a response ready.

• Transparency creates trust — a vague roadmap doesn’t.

• And perhaps surprisingly, you can still be an anon founder in 2023, and the market still has an appetite for anime-themed NFTs… but neither of those will likely be true forever.

To the moon 🌙

• Google announced NFT-friendly updates to the policies of its Google Play app store “to open new ways to transact blockchain-based digital content within apps and games.” Your move, Apple.

• A federal judge ruled secondary sales of Ripple’s $XRP token do not constitute the sale of a security, which could have major ramifications for other tokens, and how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) views and regulates them:

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• BlackRock chairman and CEO, Larry Fink, is bullish on cryptocurrency and its role in “democratizing investment,” and its ability to “transcend any one currency.”

• Art Blocks founder and generative art pioneer Erick “Snowfro” Calderon announced an important update about his seminal project, Chromie Squiggles:

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• Warner Bros. is releasing the movie “The Flash” in cinemas and online at the same time next week. Those looking to watch it at home will be able to do so after buying a corresponding NFT.

• Music NFT platform Sound.xyz completed a $20 million raise and is now open to any artist who wants to use its service. It also released a free commemorative NFT anyone can claim for the next three days:

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• To celebrate its annual Slurpee Day event on its namesake date, 7/11, retailer 7-eleven is letting customers claim a free “digital collectible” Slurpee… just don’t call it an NFT.

• CryptoPunk #8348 owner/helmet wearer DJ Seedphrase (AKA, Daniel Maegaard) has signed with talent management agency WME:

Twitter tweet

• Particle — which creates NFTs that offer holders fractionalized ownership of art — says it’s lending the Banksy painting “Love is in the Air,” to major museums. The move comes after a vote passed muster with the ~2,600 holders of the fractionalized NFTs tied to the work.

Thread of the week 🧵

Twitter tweet

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!

Badges update 🏅

For 20 editions of The Metaversalist, we offered you, dear reader, free NFT Badges. Thousands of Badges were distributed, along with a selection of prizes for collectors, including art from XCOPY, a Mad Lads PFP, and fashion from Gossamer Rozen.

We’re hard at work planning Badges 2.0, but for now, we want to thank everyone who collected Badges, and we suggest you keep an eye on your wallet next week... 👀

DYOR 🔬

Ethereum co-founder and drip king Vitalik Buterin ruffled some Bitcoin maxis’ feathers this week when he went on a Twitter Spaces with Taproot Wizards founders and Ordinals maxis Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, entitled “What bitcoiners can learn from Ethereum.”

Buterin thinks Ordinals are bringing back a "builder culture" to the Bitcoin network and is excited about both Ordinals and the BRC-20 token standard’s potential to shake up the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Twitter tweet

“Ordinals are starting to bring back a culture of actually doing things,” Buterin said. “It feels like there's real pushback to the laser-eye movement, which is good.”

One of the big topics of the two-hour conversation was scalability. Wall voiced his concerns about the Lightning Network, saying it can't handle future users and often fails when processing even medium-sized payments. Buterin had some suggestions, though. He thinks the focus should be on Layer-2 solutions and finding ways to make the Bitcoin base layer more efficient.

Not all style icons wear Prada.

Wertheimer, meanwhile, is all for introducing zero-knowledge rollups to Bitcoin because that could allow for the execution of smart contracts.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is on board with these ideas. Some hardcore Bitcoiners believe adding things like Ordinals inscriptions and smart contracts to the Bitcoin network goes against its original purpose as a peer-to-peer cash system. They argue that it's just taking up valuable block space.

Samson Mow, the CEO of Jan3, is one of such critic, but Wertheimer wasted no time expressing his disdain for Mow and his dismissive take on the conversation on Twitter.

Twitter tweet

On a more conciliatory note, Wall suggested a compromise that might keep maxis’ rage in check: Using Bitcoin as a "proof system" for zero-knowledge proofs rather than running everything on-chain.

What would crypto be without beefs? Dull, that’s what. Moreover, it's through conversations, debates, and exploring new ideas that the crypto community keeps pushing the boundaries of innovation. Plus, you know, it helps keep social media interesting.

To the moon 🌙

• Speaking of social media, on Wednesday, Metagramstabook unveiled its Twitter copycat service Threads, and it promptly got approximately a gazillion users thanks to the ease of setup. Got an Instagram account? Setting up a Threads account takes a few clicks. Is swapping Musk’s service for Zuck’s service a net positive for digital denizens? Probably not. But you can’t blame Zuck for sticking the boot in while Musk is down — that’s the capitalist imperative, baby!

• In slightly more wholesome but still capitalism-powered news, tennis star Andy Murray, Wimbledon, and artist Refik Anadol are selling $150 pieces of dynamic digital art on Manifold:

Twitter tweet

• Robbie Barrat’s AI-Generated piece “Nude Portrait #7 Frame #111” sold for 175 ETH (~$344,000).

• In genuinely wholesome news, pseudonymous NFT collector and founder of The Edicurial Collection, Elsie, unveiled The Permanent Collection, a selection of 100 crypto artworks collected between 2021 and 2022 covering a range of media and artists:

Twitter tweet

• Former First Lady Melania Trump released a new selection of NFTs for the 4th of July dubbed “The 1776 Collection.” The $50 NFTs are emblazoned with schlocky patriotic drivel and, at the time of writing, have blessedly failed to sell out, unlike their creator or her spouse, who’ve made grift their entire personalities.

• Luxury brand Dior released a $1,350 physical sneaker called the “B33” that comes with a digital twin:

Twitter tweet

• Could’ve-been-Zuckerberg Ken dolls, the Winklevii, filed a suit against Grayscale founder Barry Silbert over the Genesis debacle that left the twins’ crypto exchange Gemini with egg on its face.

• NFT marketplace OpenSea announced support for NFT-minting platform Zora:

Twitter tweet

• Sorry Swifties, but it looks like FTX pulled out of the sponsorship deal with one of pop music’s biggest stars (rumored to be worth $100 million), not the other way around. Nonetheless, it turned out to be beneficial to Swift and meaningless to FTX, which was screwed regardless.

Thread of the week 🧵

Twitter tweet

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse!

Metaversal Badges are your entry point into the Metaversal community. They unlock unique opportunities, access, and experiences. Complete your collection, and you never know what might come your way.

Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine are the dynamic duo better known to many in the art world as Operator, an artistic collective of two which the pair started in 2016. Known for their experiential works, the pair have also ventured into Web3 in recent years, exploring ideas around privacy, transparency, ownership, and the relationship between artist and audience, creator and collector.

Dejha Ti (L) and Ania Catherine (R). (Image: Operator)

Metaversal’s content director, Craig Wilson, sat down with Ti and Catherine days before a planned more from Berlin to Madrid to talk about the temporary popularity queer artists enjoy during Pride month, the complexities of combining choreography with generative art, and accepting the input of feline collaborators.

Craig Wilson: I wanted to get straight into it and ask you a question that I think a lot of fans and Twitter followers would like to know the answer to. Did you choose Claude the cat's choice for a Human Unreadable movement score or not? Because you kind of left us hanging on Twitter.

Twitter tweet

Dejha Ti: Well, actually, this is the thing I'm working on right now instead of packing.

Ania Catherine: So, it did make us question everything.

DT: It did make us question, but it's a modular design. So I'm trying out both options.

AC: She seems really sure, though.

DT: Yeah, I know. But it's a tighter design, and the other one's a bit more open. So I'm going to try it. I'm actually testing it out right now with mint number 373, which has 15 moves in the sequence, which is the maximum number of moves that you can have in a Human Unreadable piece. So I'm seeing if the design can withstand 15 moves.

CW: Well, it’s good that it's a whole family effort, and everyone's input is valued.

DT: Yeah, it’s a family business.

CW: To change tack entirely, I’ve got a more serious question. How do we begin to improve representation and diversity in a space that, despite a lot of lip service about inclusivity, remains dominated by cishet Caucasian males?

AC: I've been thinking about this a lot, especially because it's so interesting how, if you're visibly an out, queer person, then suddenly in May, people who ignore you the rest of the year are telling you how much they love your work because they want to do something for Pride.

We actually had this really interesting moment related to Human Unreadable where, on the homepage of OpenSea, it said “Pride Month Artists Spotlight,” and then right under it was “Trending in Art.”

Human Unreadable was in the “Trending in Art” section and not in the “Pride Spotlight.” I thought, yeah, this is actually the best version of representation when artists who happen to be queer have their work seen and discussed and talked about and recognized year-round, versus having it always being in a context where their identity is central.

(Image: Operator)

Because, while some artists do make work about queerness or do make work about being women, we make work about many subjects, mostly privacy in recent years. f we're only spotlighting artists of color, queer people, women, and non-binary artists in these specific timeframes and contexts, it always feels like supporting them or caring about our work is a charity project. On the artist’s side, that doesn't feel very good.

So, what I would say is, ditch Pride Month, and year-round, if you're doing a show about, for example, black and white photography in the early 1990s, and you're showing seven artists’ work, make sure you have ranges of voices represented who happen to be working in that medium at that time. Do your research and find those voices in those moments, not at the end of May. Prioritize diversity in your year-round programming and stop making it always about the identity of the artist, which often undermines what many of us are trying to do; this kind of performativity and virtue signaling that we see a lot of is getting very old and seems ingenuine.

DT: Recently, there was a fashion brand that wanted to work with us, and a curator had put us forward, but the brand didn’t think our work seemed “gay enough.”

AC: I guess our work was too monochrome for them — not that Human Unreadable is strictly monochrome, but yeah, it’s seen that way, and it’s clearly not gay enough.

Not enough unicorns and rainbows, clearly.

AC: Clearly.

Speaking of Human Unreadable and being enough of something, how did you embrace but also mitigate risk in the collection? There were so many parameters and so many inputs at play, how did you ensure sufficient variety in the outputs but also ensure that the collection lived up to your own expectations for it?

DT: Testing. Revision. Testing. Revision. Lack of sleep. Testing [laughs]. This artwork was nine months in the making, and at every step of the way, we had a rigorous, rapid prototyping process, like how you would rapid prototype software.

We had a double challenge. Usually, in long-form generative art, whatever the algorithm outputs on the day of the mint, that’s what everyone has to live with. Versus early generative art, where there were maybe hundreds of outputs, and the artist was able to curate and choose the ones they felt represented the work.

In the case of Human Unreadable, not only did we have to be concerned and pay attention to the visual output that collectors would be collecting from the mint and the reveal on Art Blocks. But we also had the double challenge of the choreography needing to look something like art instead of like a computer made it.

Our early process, before we even got to p5.js and even getting the motion data on-chain, we first ran analog algorithms and created a movement library, and kept revising and revising and doing rehearsals with performers to see if the sequences looked good.

(Image: Operator)

We started there because, as Human Unreadable is driven by the choreography itself, that's where we had to start. We did that for three months straight. And then, once we were happy with motion capture and the motion library, we moved to the generative, programmed one — the coded one — and we then ran more rehearsals from the generative model output of the sequences.

From there, we asked, “What does this look like visually?” There are a lot of moving parts. It's a very complex project because we also have intensive glass shaders — that is, generative glass, or making glass with math. A lot of it ends up looking like paint instead of glass, but some of it looks glossy.

We have programmatically drawn body parts. And we have an x-ray shader which we call “The x-ray machine” that we built in p5. So all of these elements come together. When they come together, they create really unexpected results compositionally — the way that light interacts and refracts into glass… it’s very unexpected, like when light hits water.

We also built some tools in the early days of Human Unreadable, like a testnet, because we were seeing 1,000s of outputs… but 95% of them looked like shit. Sure, 5% of them were gold, but we had no idea how to get to them. So we created a data analytics tool where we could create buckets and say, “Okay, these 500 are good because they are good compositions. These 500 are bad because they're messy, and they're compositionally too complex.”

We could flag ones with terrible color palettes or good composition and then we ran an analytics script that one of our lead engineers, Isaac Patka, created, and it created almost like a tasting tool that was reflecting our tastes and analytics on our tastes.

Then we were able to see the parameter ranges based on our tastes, and we could trim them down. From there, we began to finesse it and finesse it, because there were an infinite amount of possibilities. That’s part of the reason it took nine months.

A sample piece from “Human Unreadable.” (Image: Operator)

Given the project's complexity, are there elements of it you’ll repurpose for future works, or do you think of the tools you’ve built as single-use?

DT: We're developing a white paper which will be released later this year. It’ll lay out the conceptual model of the on-chain generative choreography method so everyone can see what our mental model is and what the flow and our thought processes are. But we will also be providing technical documentation and releasing as open source most of the tools that would be applicable for others to take the code and build from there.

We're very interested in sharing what we did, because it was a massive amount of work, and we'd like to pay that forward for other artists and creators to take it further and implement it into their processes. It's important for us that the human body has more presence in not just generative art but crypto art and digital art at large. We’re happy whether it’s us increasing that presence or other artists.

AC: In terms of another artwork that we would make using the method, I almost feel like Human Unreadable is an artwork, and the method is also an artwork and beyond, as it can birth other works. A couple of artists have already come up to us and shared brilliant concepts with us of artworks they want to do that are using this sort of motion data, conceptually or anthropologically, to capture moments.

Unless there were specifically a concept or an artwork we had in mind that needed to use this method, I wouldn’t return to it naturally.

I feel so happy, number one, that Human Unreadable exists. And, number two, that this method is now a new sandbox that other artists are going to play in. It feels like it has a life of its own now, and we love that. I'm just excited to see what comes out of it.

Also, it’s important to note that often times technologies artists use were created by the military, porn industry, entertainment, or by were created for purposes of surveillance capitalism. Those are the tools many of us have available to us to explore. Thinking about the method as a set of tools that were designed by artists and that can shape and affect others’ creativity, ideas, and what they want to make, that's in a way a continuation of the piece itself.

Do you think that Web3 artists take enough risks, and do you think collectors of Web3 art take enough risks?

AC: That's an interesting question. I can name a lot of artists that I think take a lot of risks. But I don't necessarily think the artists that take the most risks are the ones that have the most market success or the most visibility. I think that kind of leads into your second question, like, if collectors are wanting to be safe with their collecting, and artists are trying to survive by making their art and selling their art, then does the taste of certain major collectors or like the larger share of collectors actually incentivize artists to make work that is safer and speaking to those tastes?

It's kind of a cycle. And I think that is something that we wanted Human Unreadable to kind of challenge. We were told, actually, from well-meaning people, “The Art Blocks audience doesn't really like black and white.”

DT: Human Unreadable isn't technically black and white, but a lot of people read it that way.

AC: Right, and there were things we could have done that would have been safer. If we were going for major market success with our creative choices, we might not have gone for so much complexity or so little color. I think it would be great if the gap disappeared between risky art that has a lot of voice, and collectors who are buying works for significant amounts of money. I’d like to see that gap close and more experimental or risky forms of art see financial success, because right now, it does feel like safety and a lack of risk is rewarded financially. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.

DT: What was interesting about Human Unreadable is that, in terms of us interacting with the collectors, right before the sale, we tweeted something that I guess occurred to us that day, which was that, by the end of the day, hundreds of people would own choreography. We were like, “That's really cool.”

Twitter tweet

AC: A lot of fine art collectors don't know much about choreography because there isn’t really a history of collecting it. They might own a picture or an artifact of a performance, but that’s not the same as actually owning a choreographic sequence.

DT: It was so interesting, because now, at a historical milestone of collecting choreography, we have generative art collectors and crypto art collectors at the center, along with funds and major digital art collections. The variety in the types of people who collected Human Unreadable is really astounding.

Another interesting thing happened around this work, all of a sudden, everyone who was interested in performance is showing up and curious and it happens whenever we give our generative choreography talk. It’s almost as if people were craving dance and choreography to make their way into generative art or crypto art in this type of way.

We're in Block Talk, for instance — which is the Discord channel where you interact with supporters, community, and collectors on Art Blocks — and many of the collectors and supporters in there say things like, “My wife is a dancer and she doesn’t really understand everything I collect, but now all of a sudden she’s really obsessed.”

One day we suggested they check out the film One Day Pina Asked, which is a documentary created and directed by Chantal Akerman about one of our favorite choreographers Pina Bausch…

AC: … it’s very arthouse…

DT: …and to our surprise, some of the collectors watched it and reported back and wanted to discuss it. We were so pleasantly surprised and invigorated by that. So we have all these collectors who seemed to be solely focused on generative art, who are now really excited to receive the secondary token [the movement score from Human Unreadable] or see their choreography performed in an institution where the final artwork is completely out of the screen and moved into the body.

(Image: Icarus Films)

I guess my takeaway is this: there is a hunger from collectors to explore different histories and throughlines and different areas of art that maybe they haven't explored before. This release just happened to be a kind of a gateway into further exploration of the history of dance and technology, which is rich territory.

It was a highly experimental project released in a bear market, and to release it at that time was very nerve-wracking. We took quite a bit of care to communicate as clearly as possible and as simply as possible this very complex project, and to share our process.

There’s a sort of nest of storytelling we created around it, and it felt like an educational process — pointing to the histories and pointing to the process and the method, and bringing people inside that, and having conversations with the community and collectors leading up to the launch so they really could understand the work prior.

I feel that, in this way, where the market and an experimental artwork meet, there needs to be a significant amount of education, and that fell on us because we were the ones delivering it to the world. That communication of the work felt like an extension of the work itself and while it was a fun creative challenge, it took an immense amount of effort.

Your work often encourages a dialogue with its collectors, not just in the short term but over a protracted period. What's so appealing to you about the ability to do that? And is it unique to some of these technologies?

AC: Duration is super important for us, especially as immersive and experiential artists. I think time is a very powerful medium that we play with very intentionally, and we always have.

If you're doing an experiential artwork, and it's something that someone goes and sees in a museum, and maybe they spend 25 minutes with the piece, and then they leave, or if we do a project that's at a festival, and so it's up for one week, and then people leave, that’s sort of a limitation.

In those cases, we’re limited by the constraints of geography and how long the work can stay up practically, technically, financially. One thing that's really interesting to us about blockchain is that it has kind of unlocked this durational relationship potential between us and our collectors.

“Let me check with the wife.” (Image: Operator)

A really good example of this is our marriage certificate piece called “Let me check with the wife,” where the collector actually owns our marriage certificate, and there’s a secondary, dynamic NFT that allows us, every year on our anniversary, to make a request of the collector. It's kind of our sassy protest against the idea of utility — we have reverse utility, where every year we get to place a request. We could say, “Send us flowers to this address,” or “Let's meet for dinner at this restaurant at 8pm.”

The idea is that whoever owns that artwork has a relationship with us for as long as we're married, which is probably going to be 70 more years. I don't think creating this kind of durational 75-year relationship with a collector would be possible without blockchain and without the NFT.

Who do you think are some of the most criminally underrated or overlooked artists, whether in Web3 or more broadly?

AC: One is Lauren Lee McCarthy. She's the inventor of p5.js, which a lot of people don’t know. So when people ask, “Where are all the women?” I'm like, “Women built the tools that all of you are making millions from.” The women are here, we've always been here; we just usually don't get recognized for what we're doing.

So anyway, Lauren Lee McCarthy, who's also a really brilliant conceptual performance artist and has been working as a digital artist for a long time. She's a professor at UCLA. She's super brilliant.

DT: And then Evelyn Bencicova, who’s a photographer and beyond. She is in our opinion one of the most exciting artists of our time, and in addition to photography is also doing exceptional work with VR and performance. So she would be up there. And Sarah Friend, who is well known, but many people still might not realize how significant the work she’s doing is, she has got intense technical chops is an incredible conceptual thinker, developer, and artist.

Also, Primavera De Filippi. She has a groundbreaking project, a blockchain-based life form called Plantoid. She's an artist, lawyer, and researcher at Harvard, and her work is really conceptual — she's just brilliant. Plantoid is a crypto artwork she started nearly 10 years ago.

Do you think of NFTs as a medium? A means of delivery? Something that's purely transactional? And does the fact that you're creating NFTs influence the work you make with them?

DT: In 2019, Ania and I created the Operator rules for art and technology. One of them is: Tech doesn't age well, concepts do. Another one is: No tech demos. Another one is: Say no to spectacle (which is Yvonne Rainer).

Of those, the idea that tech doesn't age well, concepts do, is really, really important to us. And the idea of not flexing and heroing the technology, but using the technology that is needed to support the concept. If we always start there, then we kind of don't even need to answer that question, because it's just serving the artwork itself.

That being said, yes. Yes, technology, any technology that we use 100% shapes the output and the final artwork… it has to. Because it has capabilities, but it also has limitations.

With every project we look at the tools that are readily available and which tools we need to build ourselves — which we can build on top of, and which are out-of-the-box ready, and we build and choose based on that.

Human Unreadable is the way it is because of the constraints of blockchain technology, as well as the constraints of Art Blocks. For instance, it can only have one library dependency. Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but it meant probably 70 hours more work for us and a different way of approaching it.

(Image: Operator)

The fact that blockchain technology isn't really meant for high-volume data storage meant that our initial dataset with motion capture would have cost us $200,000 to upload. We then had to spend another three and a half months to figure out how to choreograph in spreadsheets in a way that would preserve the movements and create a pipeline for taking high-resolution motion data of the sort you would rig to a video game avatar or a Hollywood avatar in a film and get it to a reasonable data size that we can store on-chain. We got the costs down significantly.

Even if we had 200 grand, it wouldn't be respecting the medium of blockchain. Because it's not really meant for that. Even if we had the money and, through brute force, could have uploaded all this data, it still didn’t feel like it made sense. Because of that limitation, and because of the nature of the technology, it changes everything. In the same way using clay or stone would change the outcome.

Let’s talk about phase two of Human Unreadable, the movement scores. How difficult have they been to bring to life, and why were they such an important part of the project for you?

AC: When I spoke to dancers and choreographers and people who have familiarity with dance notation, they asked, “Are you using Laban notation, or what notation system are you using?” One thing that's been exciting to us about the idea of the movement score is making it so the collector can show it to almost anyone, and they’ll be like, “Okay, so in the first movement, the arm goes over here, and then the body falls down.” We wanted anyone to be able to figure it out.

I'm not an illustrator. I do not draw. I dance, I move, I choreograph, I direct films, I don't draw things. But it was really interesting trying to capture movement in this completely different way that is not following any sophisticated system that requires, for instance, an understanding of dance notation.

(Image: Operator)

Instead, I’ve been trying to think of this really hyper-accessible way where a collector could give it to their kid and have them perform it. Trying to make the movement accessible is kind of part of the artwork. It's actually all part of the experience of embodied generative art.

Dance has layers of interpretation anyway. You have the choreographer who imagines a move, and then it’s interpreted by how their body actually shows the move to the dancer, then it’s translated again into how the dancer performs it. I think the way that the score we're releasing can be translated by as many people who try to is a really cool aspect. There's no right or wrong — it’s not precious dance is always a translation because no two human bodies are the same.

DT: We also like the idea that it becomes more “human readable” as we go. We have Act I, where all the motion data is transparently there on-chain, anyone can go see it right now and see the full fidelity of the movement library, but it doesn't mean anything because it's not human-readable.

We didn't want to make the notation sophisticated because we want it to feel a bit more open-source and more human-readable versus something only a choreographer with a PhD can interpret.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.

You can find Operator’s work here.

Until next time, see you in the metaverse.

Metaversal Badges are your entry point into the Metaversal community. They unlock unique opportunities, access, and experiences. Complete your collection, and you never know what might come your way.