Distributed Gallery, One Arm Crypto Bandit
Dearly beloved,
I’m writing this new installment at 7am on a Friday because everything’s a bit too crazy right now and my subconscious seems to have decided that sleep is not something I’ll be engaging with.
Throughout the past 10 days, JPG has been heads down working on the curator interface, improving the gallery and so many more things. Right now we got a team of 5 (Marshall’s our latest addition, a super-smart guy that always sends you on an existential spiral of thoughts with his insights and questions) and then some more. It’s all coming together.
I’m also gonna be in Art Basel tomorrow, joining Holly Herndon, Dan from Folia, and Simon Denny for a panel. If you’re around, come to the panel I’d love to meet you in person, granted our newfound social anxiety caused by two years of reclusion allows it.
Next week we’ll present two community-curated galleries, and from there we’ll start revealing more. Yes, this is an announcement of an announcement, we’re, after all, building on Ethereum, right?
Back to the newsletter in question, I’ve been compiling a bunch of things, but since there’s so much going on, finding an overarching theme for this week was impossible. And of course, I know, this is the best newsletter in NFTs (at least this is how we’re trying to market it), but I guess that it’s good because it lacks form, or context, or common sense, it just exists and it’s fun. So this week, you get a link dump + some other random stuff.
Blockchain as a medium
I’m in love with the potential of smart contracts as a medium. And there’s a bunch of people working on beautiful things on this front for a long time.
Brotchain is quite new, but I love how they have been also exploring Solidity as a medium. Solidity is the programming language on which you write smart contracts on Ethereum, by the way.
I’ve been following Distributed Gallery before even knowing who they were or what they did. Basically, one day in 2018, some French guys dropped a huge machine that looked like an old-time carnival game at the coworking space I was at and broke the protective glass. This obviously spun into a lot of swearing in French but later I was left alone with the Thing, actually called the Chaos Machine, and I discovered it burned fiat in exchange for songs - I also discovered there was a second one, installed at the Proof of Work 2018 exhibition, which I also went to admire. Anyways, Distributed Gallery kept in touch and now shared their latest project which again plays with blockchain + physical installation, One Arm Crypto Bandit, a slot machine that generates Ethereum addresses with each arm action. Really recommend you check their website and explore as well, 2017’s Ready-Made Token.
Collin Lafleche, AKA Usually, is a collaborator for Jenny Holzer exploring blockchain as a way to expand the artist toolset. He wrote a wonderful essay on the topic, so take some time to read it.
Owen (aka 0Xmons, the king of everything NFTs) has published an essay on on-chain encoding. I’m sharing without commentary because he’s just too smart for me.
And of course, Rhea! Rhea Myers has been making headlines for all the right reasons. JPG’s collaborator William wrote a new piece on This Contract is Art, Rhea’s first Ethereum project.
Finally, on this front, I’m avidly following Regina Harsanyi’s feed since she’s been sharing a lot of her knowledge on the topic of smart contracts and similar as a medium. Here’s some stuff on Kevin McCoy, creator of Monegraph, a precursor to Manifold.
Favorites
I mentioned before the Robin Sloan amulets in the haiku newsletter - the thing is that they keep getting better and better, now with improved UX through a website that has been created by the community. I’ve spent an indecent amount of time copy/pasting David Byrne lyrics into the website and seeing if I hit four consecutive 8s when coding into SHA-256, one of the requirements to mint an amulet, and failed. Finding that someone minted a Canterbury Tales Latin amulet was one of my favorite moments from last week, so here it is.
Sarah Meyohas, the creator of Bitchcoin, is a never-ending fountain of goodness. Non-existent token, her latest (?) project, explores ephemerality in ownership (just as Sarah Friend in Lifeforms, but I’ll write about this in some future edition), community interaction as a way to create the artwork itself, and of course, immateriality and materiality in form of “receipts” and “bubbles”. Sarah’s also published the sanest essay in response to Damian Hirst’s lame-ass project and knocked it out of the park. Read it to acquire common sense.
Last week I was also approached by a project that read some of my Walter Benjamin-related rants, and wanted to share Reprint, a scheme on which you are able to reproduce any NFT you liked but was too expensive for you. Exchanging some messages, we discussed the possible controversy/ outrage the project could create. Seen that this project is a performance, a game, and a critique towards the current NFT scene, reframing the idea of mechanical reproduction but for ERC-721s, that, by design, are unique and non-fungible, this project is a crown jewel and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow.
Extras
Travess Smalley, creator of the Folia-hosted Emoji Script NFTs has some incredibly fun browser painting software on his website that you can play with.
Rugstore, a project that allows you to mint ERC-721 rugs with different traits (all minted now) rugged Opensea by creating an exchange with smaller royalties. Bravo.
Anyways, see you next time, with the community galleries reveal, and probably some rant about physical art events and what I liked about them lately. Or disliked.
Please don’t drop any cool NFTs this weekend, I’m AFK.