The JPG Miami Newsletter: v fresh stuff inside
so fun to go sell jpegs in Miami in the midst of the most boring apocalypse ever
Writing this newsletter on a Friday evening in hopes I can get it to you before flying, as I have no idea whether I’ll have sober moments in Florida or sobering moments in Florida. You really never know when it comes to Florida - and I want to make sure the newsletter’s back to regular installments.
(of course, during the weekend you all decided to just not leave twitter the fuck alone and dropped some alpha, so actually, I had to update everything and now the NL is full of fresh stuff)
Trent and I will be around Art Basel, and I’ll be speaking at Bitchcoin Salon - so holla if you are around and let’s catch that new covid strain together because there’s nothing left to do about that.
Fresh alpha
Before we start, since I’m 100% certain nobody ever gets to read till the end of any text ever, here is some alpha: it has been brought to my attention that Folia will very soon be doing a new drop, and it’s going to be a really fun one. So make sure you follow them on Discord and Twitter because it’s going to be announced this week.
Figure31 aka Loucas aka our JPG adjacent fren and one of the SALTv4 dads, is once again, bringing great new stuff. Here’s his summary EXCLUSIVELY for the JPG newsletter: “It’s 10 000 3D assets. All are either procedurally generated from manual input or are “hand made” (wtv that means). People will have the choice to either keep the assets or use them to “burry” other existing NFTs and get a “grave” in exchange. It’ll be like a graveyard for all the 10k PFP projects out there. The usual character will be switched for the most banal physical thing you can imagine. Visually, the assets will have a rough unshaded sketch look. I sculpted natural things using digital means. One final celebration of this overused bussiness model before putting it to rest (hopefully). Putting a metaphorical “dot” to the end of this creative trend.
Early supporters (aka SALT, LYAM collectors) can claim one for free. Information Token collectors from Gabagool also get one, we’ve been working in dialogue on different things. Anyone who wants to claim one has to burn another NFT of their choosing in exchange. Project goes public towards the end of the week/beginning of the next. Smart contract work by Jonathan Chomko”. More here.
Simon De La Rouviere has also dropped a new project! The Signature is a cool new project that explores provenance and time, encapsulating these into a conceptual art project. It mints forever and you only pay gas. Go off at it - but make sure you read the blogpost here, it’s good, like everything else he does.
On the topic of time exploration, gm to everyone but Terra0’s Paul that dropped a 32 token project together with his Nascent collaborators, while I was away from my computer. I missed out, but the project’s quite cool, based on block time instead of your old regular universal time. I find it super interesting since one of my favorite things to track when people calculate and announce things within Ethereum in block time (eg. an x network upgrade will take place at 0303456 block) is the twittersphere struggling with assigning universal time to these announcements.
Finally, today I woke up to an amazing parody project inspired on my shitpost about that time Christie’s made us all very sad again by fucking up an art blocks exhibition. Seemingly, they weren’t going for a 2013 Corporate TradeShow vibe, they’re just cringe. And Matthew Plummer-Fernández who you should follow because his feed is awesome, created a parody Christie’s Art Blocks exhibition generator that made my morning :)
Non alpha but still quite fresh
Moving on, I’ve been avidly following Taylor dragging OpenSea , and even if I do appreciate OpenSea, I appreciate some mild drama even more. Lefteris has also been at it but on the API level, and Frederik from MyCrypto got to work and posted about the start of an open-source API he has been building. Needless to say that as a believer in decentralization, open-source, and having a lot of choices, I love this - even if OpenSea gives great value and is a cornerstone in the NFT realm, I believe the Ethereum dev community is not short on power or talents to allow for new alternatives and helping out to improve the state of infrastructure. Insert meme bernie “I am once again asking you to allocate some fucks towards NFT infrastructure”.
Austin Griffith, who’s been producing amazing hacks, educational material, and more for years and years, wrote this awesome thread on on-chain innovation in NFTs, and this project called Snakes On A Chain - even if the project or Austin weren’t great, I would still see myself obliged to report on a project called Snakes On A Chain, just because newsletters need memes, and Snakes On A Plane memes are better than generic memes.
Also on the NFT OG front + intersection with IRL art events related or informed by blockchain, Matt Liston started a very perfect thread with shows + resources not to be missed.
This article on Monegraph + contracts as art objects and beyond, has been doing some rounds on Twitter and is also incredibly important when it comes to learning about the history of NFTs. The article features an amazing conversation among the best digital art people of the mid 00’s, including the curators of the 2016 Berlin Biennale that featured a giant Rihanna. I have no idea how that’s related to Monegraph, but Giant Rihanna has been living rent free in my head since then, and this is my newsletter, so, yeah.
An extract from the article, by Morgan Sutherland: “I mention Ethereum to point to the possibility of distributed applications beyond the sort of distributed storage offered by Bitcoin and other blockchains. Ethereum refers to these distributed applications as “contracts.” A common example they use is escrow: a certain quantity of digital currency is held by a “contract” and is released upon certain conditions being met, i.e. two people agreeing that a transaction has gone according to plan. There’s an interesting history of contracts pertaining to the ownership and transfer of artworks, from Seth Sieglaub and Bob Projansky’s “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” to Rafaël Rozendaal’s “Art Website Sales Contract”, but the possibility for distributed, programmatic contracts could expand this space dramatically.”
Okay, so this is it for now. Once again, I’ll be AFK AFT (Away From Twitter) for like 12 hours so please avoid dropping alpha.
Till soon,
MP