The JPG newsletter: just here doing Hot Castle Shit
the quality of this newsletter is inversely proportional to the cryptocurrency weekly price chart
Mentally I am here
Writing this while in France, where I’m attending the Glitch NFT residency at Chateau De Fey. I arrived here almost straight from the Lobkowicz Palace in Prague, so everything’s a bit surreal right now, but there are lots of things happening at JPG, with jpegs and to the jpegs of JPG.
So, what’s happened in the past weeks (from my perspective, because it’s impossible to keep up with the NFT space):
NFCastle happened in Prague - the Lobkowicz palace set up a very proper NFT exhibition with no cables in sight, wonderful displays, and fun and historical pieces, as well as their own, that were minted as part of a fundraiser for the restoration of historical IRL pieces. On the topic of restoration, I am thinking that there is a lot of work to be done to ensure our cultural artifacts won’t fall prey of history and humanity, so preservation, storage, archiving, on chain records (coughs*** JPG fixes this) need to go up in the NFT agenda, and I’m thinking that if we have an agenda at all, perhaps we should be de-prioritizing the 10k supply 300 pfp projects a day and give more fucks towards critical infrastructure.
The NFCastle also featured some quite good panels - Mitchell Chan was there and was a proper class act explaining the beauty of hashes and the versatility of Ethereum among other stuff. Will need to double-newsletter you with the link because they’re not ready yet. This also sorta is the Mitchell Week since he’s had record sales, twice.
Holly Herndon dropped a portrait series, Classified- models trained via OPENAI CLIP were instructed to make portraits of her and the drop was announced just yesterday. There are a few interesting things to note about the drop, but I personally believe the gesture (and action!) Of setting up a % of royalties within the smart contract going directly to the developers of Openclip AI is probably my favourite thing about it. It made me think about a flawless talk that Nadia Eghbal gave at The Long Now seminars, where she explains how much work we need to do to raise awareness for open source software maintainers - which ties quite nicely with the work of community builders in the NFT space, that has gone unnoticed for many years. Another area to work on, I guess.
This has nothing to do with JPG but it has everything to do with our space. As everyone else. I’ve been obsessing quite a lot with Martin Shkreli and his universe. Before like, they discovered he was a fraud, he had bought the unreleased Wutang clan album, and turns out that PleasrDAO (and not Justin Sun who was my main suspect) purchased it. I have no idea what they gonna do with it but im so into it.
Our fabulous contributor William wrote an exploration of literary NFTs.
On the topic of literary NFTs, I’m liking a lot where NFT Culture Proof is going- it’s a text based performance, like the one we did with Gabagool on this newsletter, but this time it’s mintable and incredible people like Simon de la Rouviere (once again to the surprise of absolutely noone, but happy to know he’ll be there), Holly + Mat, Rhea Myers, Sarah Zucker, Sarah Friend, Deafbeef and others. The performance is led by Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall, and here’s where you should be finding out more about it.
On the more tech front, Hasu and Anish released a guide to effective NFT launches - covering the most common issues like pricing, randomness and gas-efficiency and working with these to create the proposal. Highly recommended for all artists out there (I assume that if you are reading me and are a technologist, you’ve read it)
Brian Frye who I covered in my last newsletter published a new thing that I totally need to look into, but nevertheless I’ll share here without having even clicked on it because I trust him to drop interesting stuff (lately I’ve been trusting way too many lawyers and that’s worrying me)
Keeping Up With The JPG Jpegs:
Together with a collective of amazing people (Department of Decentralization) and lead by the legendary Hito Steyerl, I’ve published a game map on e-flux (an art publication), you can play, choose your own path and take a psychological test. I’m a smart contract, apparently, lmk what you got.
Trent and I are gonna be speaking at NFTNYC - find us there
I’m going to be participating of probably the most interesting event I’ve ever been invited to speak at, at the New Museum in New York. Rhizome + Kadist are organising and Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield, Hito Steyerl, Rhea Myers, Artnome, the Flamingo DAO frens and many other people are gonna take part. This event is online access only, so here’s the link to participate
Sam’s joined Deafbeef, Mitchell Chan and the Fingerprints people at a Twitter space yesterday. You can still catch up with the discussion here (TODO LINK)
We will also be at some events in NYC presenting…. well JPG, of course. Stay tuned to learn how to join us. Also to find out more because I dont have many details right now.
Anyways, this was a brief update, but ill be doing one next week to showcase a new JPG community gallery, and another one before heading to NYC with some other JPG stuff so in case you’re in town, you can catch up with us.
Bis bald,
MP