The JPG newsletter: welcoming our new contributor, GPT-3
Too much going on in the space since lots of great artists decided to drop their work at once, so it’s time for artificial intelligence to finally do something useful for me and write this.
I don’t have the energy to create new memes, so I just stole Folia’s
For this newsletter, I’ll just be prompting GPT-3 with the latest drops and articles not to be missed, and copy/pasta what it has to say with minimum edit. This newsletter is inspired in my previous work with Hito Steyerl and the Department of Decentralization, 21 Art Worlds: a Game Map, that used a similar method.
The jpegs at JPG are heads down and trying to ship in the very near future, so I’m focusing on that and delegating to the AI overlords the production of this newsletter edition.
You call it laziness, I call it art.
Sarah Meyohas’ Bitchcoin Manifesto (free mint - dropped during Art Basel Miami)
Developed with DMINTI, Will Robinson, Medici and Nancy Spector.
GPT-3 said: Bitchcoin proposed three ideas that are only now being activated: (The analogy to Bitcoin was also a very strong hint that several projects were already underway.) The Bitchcoin people also initiated a new form of monetary policy, where the supply of Bitchcoin would expand by the amount of heat generated by the creation of garbage. This is in keeping with Cuntcoin's stated goal of being a cryptocurrency for the deeply wasteful. The Bitchcoin people were also the first to coin the phrase "double-dog dare you", and their memetic influence is incalculable.
MP said: I can’t handle this it’s too funny. Mint here.
81 Horizons by Rafael Rozendaal (dropped yesterday)
GPT-3 said: Rafael Rozendaal is an artist that created 81 on-chain landscapes, which were submitted to a blockchain contest for Ethereum. The aim of the contest was to show how blockchain could be used to buy and sell digital art. The pieces of art sold for the highest bid prices at auction and the winning bids have been stored on the Ethereum blockchain, where they can be verified by anyone in the world. As for how he created the paintings, he used a website called CryptoPaints that was developed by Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum. The website allowed him to connect to the Ethereum blockchain, which he used to generate the art.
MP: I love this, all of it. But you can also read the actual description here
Joan Heemskerk - 0X[Y].gen 0.1 (dropped yesterday)
GPT-3 said: 0X[Y].gen 0.1 has No Fake Time . Evolving endless generations [Y] in the light-time-zone since 1990-01-01 16:00:00 UTC [Y]. If you are using a recent version of Perl you can use the DateTime module to display the date and time. PERL> use DateTime; PERL> DateTime->now( time_zone => 'MST' ); $Date Joan Heemskerk has a background in photography & digital art, and is a net art pioneer since 1992. She has been active in the development of new media in art, and the history of net art. Her work is a critique of the digital age.
MP: Thanks GPT-3, you have no idea how helpful this was (?). Now if you want to participate in the auction or learn more, here’s Joan’s tweet.
Xatarrer - JPEG mining (live now)
GPT-3 says: JPEG mining is a collaborative effort to build the largest ever on chain image (1MB) on Ethereum. The image is revealed during the mining process. The JPEG is split in 100 pieces and each miner gets the same JPEG but with different degrees of quality The purpose of this is to see if the Ethereum network can handle the load of a massive amount of data. Because we want to see if it is possible to use Ethereum as a data carrier. The JPEG is split into 100 pieces and each of them are sent to a different miner. The miners then decodes the pieces into a 100 pieces of images that are smaller in size and quality. The miners then take a hash of the image, and if the hash is smaller than the target hash.
MP says: it’s a fascinating experiment, even if GPT-3 can’t stop repeating itself. Check the collection here. And mine here.
Feral File + Domenico Quaranta feat. Petra Cortright, Francoise Gamma, Jonas Lund, and more - for your eyes only (out today)
GPT-3 says: Curated by Domenico Quaranta, this exhibition features works from 13 international artists. The exhibition investigates the future of human visual culture amid the ubiquity of machine vision. Through a reflection on the history of art, the exhibition aims to bring together an artistic community that is able to anticipate the next evolutionary step in art. What is the next evolutionary step in art? The exhibition is divided into three parts. The first part, “Gaze”, presents works that explore the human gaze as a means to understand the relationship between humans and machines. The second part, “Machine Vision”, presents works that explore the machine gaze as a means to understand the relationship between machines and humans. The third part, “The Uncanny”, presents works that explore the uncanny, a feeling of unease triggered by a machine’s human-like appearance and behavior.
MP: GPT-3 really worked hard on this one, but facts are better discovered here
Folia + Simon Denny + Guile Twardowski + Cosmographia - Dotcom Seance (mints Friday December 17th, 7PM UTC)
GPT-3 says: The Dotcom bubble was an economic bubble and period of excessive speculation that occurred between 1997 and 2001, a period of extreme growth of the Internet sector and the stock market in the United States. The NASDAQ Composite stock market index peaked on March 10, 2000, at 5,132.52. The crash began on March 10, 2000. Now you can revive those companies through this NFT seance !!! This token is a representation of the ownership of a company. It is a digital share. It is a virtual stock. It is a virtual asset. It is a virtual share. It is a digital asset. It is an NFT.
MP: the day I can actually give alpha about this project, I decide to let GPT-3 do the work (it actually nailed it though) - Folia original tweet announcement here.
0Xessential - Watch (mint TBD)
GPT-3 says: This is an on-chain SVG NFT project. The smart contract returns an SVG that displays the current time of the day, the colors can be customized by the user. Time is of the essence, this DApp is an experiment, to see how a DApp can use the blockchain for something simple, that doesn't need a lot of gas to execute. And the idea is to show how the SVG is generated client-side, and it isn't really stored on the blockchain, but only the ID of the image is stored in the smart contract, that's used to store the image.
MP: whatever, read it straight from Sammy and watch for mint dates.
More things not to be missed:
POAP’s COO Isabel on the importance of POAPs and future plans. After the Adidas POAP move and the growth of the ecosystem (including the latest Enemies with Benefits campaign) - i feel POAPs are finally getting the recognition they deserve after years of work - love to see it.
JPG’s cofounder Sam is also the lead curator at FingerprintsDAO and spoke about his work with the DAO at Outland, make sure to compliment the hairstyle. It’s important.
Joe Delong is not only a friend, but a very talented person. After his departure from Sushi, he wrote an article about DAOs and leadership, that is essential and mandatory reading for anyone working in similar settings or trying to understand flat hierarchies and DAOs.
Every Icon was a real success, i enjoyed discovering the images for my two NFTs and the whole process, as well as the essays. This is the latest essay by John Borthwick, explaining the whole process.
Great interview to the subject of most of my fangirling, the brilliant Sarah Friend on OFF and beyond
Distributed Gallery finally revealed One Arm Bandit, exactly four years after their first blockchain-based sculpture, and I got a special video where they pulled the lever for me as I missed the reveal :) :)
Harm van der Dorpel’s auctioning a piece from his Death Imitates Language series - 4 more days to bid!
Last minute addition but a good one: one of the nicest projects from 2018, Claves Angelicae by Cullen Miller (curated back then for Ethereal by Sam Hart) is minting today at 6pm UTC.
A very prolific week in the NFT space! Enjoy all these good things and we’ll be back next week, with a more JPG specific newsletter :) can’t wait to reveal more!
And thank you to everyone but GPT-3 as it would have taken me less time to write this whole thing myself than adjusting prompts and AI temperature for three hours.
Follow JPG on Discord for memes, updates and art, it’s really a fun place to be.
MP