The post-shipping edition of the JPG newsletter: new exhibitions
Trent and I have published two exhibitions to show use-cases for JPG, and because it's fun, really fun.
Last Friday we successfully announced our launch and seed round, the response we’ve gotten so far is really incredible! We’re now in the process of whitelisting more users to jump into the closed beta - so bear with us.
This time I want to introduce the two galleries we tested the closed beta with: Trent’s 0xmon Sleep Paralysis Demons and Virality and Virtuality, which I created. The exhibitions pursue different goals, and we tried to demonstrate several use-cases for JPG with them, which we hope serve as inspiration for your future creations.
0xmon Sleep Paralysis Demons
JPG can be used in many ways, and given its ease of use and easy onboarding, one of the first quick and fun ways to onboard and test your creativity is to create galleries of favorites from particular collections you like. These quick and fun creations have the power to catalyse individual expression and community engagement.
Trent curated this 0xmons exhibition as a huge fan of Owen (0xmons, who worked with us for the SALT drop in July 2021 - and who you might also know as he’s a prolific creator and the mastermind behind SudoSwap, the p2p exchange for NFTs).
After spending some time looking through the collection, Trent decided to put something together -- it was quick and easy, looking through the collection, seeing which ones had some sort of anthropomorphic appearance and loading them in.
Since we’re working on getting users accustomed to the curation process and finding value in it, our exhibitions are currently off-chain, therefore, you don’t even have to cover gas fees to curate, and creating this kind of personal curations is completely free and a great fun experience.
Virality and Virtuality
I started drafting this exhibition during NFT.NYC but since I was quite busy and we were upgrading the platform, I set it aside for a while, since the diversity of assets was quite fitting as a stress test for the closed beta.
Since publishing There’s No Thing As Blockchain Art in 2019, I’ve been quite into malware as conceptual art, and have been compiling data and artworks on this topic on my phone’s notepad since then. Through the 2020 DeFi summer, I also collected data on rugpulls, and when the NFT boom exploded in early 2021, I kept at it, this time with NFTs.
So, quite cool that now I get to create galleries instead of endless hyperlink lists on my iphone notes app, right? Virality and Virtuality focuses on malware as conceptual art, hacks, appropriation and pwning - through a selection of NFTs that speak about these themes or have been part of rugpulls and similar events. Through the exhibition I also got practical and demonstrated that JPG can be used for:
Combining your collection with other NFTs to add context and create a new universe around particular assets you own - extracting them from the context given by your wallet (which, let’s face it, it’s never carefully curated!). For the gallery, I curated two of Brian Frye’s NFTs I own, among a total of 16 NFTs displayed:
Storytelling: from adopting a different “Scammer” identity, to different examples of rugpulls, pwning Times Square, right click saving and minting Andy Warhol and spreading an NFT virus - the exhibition shows and tells stories about different angles of malware as conceptual art and beyond.
Catalogue of notable events through NFTs: I curated notable NFTs that had been part of rugpulls through the creator changing the image file after the assets had been purchased, like neitherconfirm’s or Dead Raccoon Society’s. I also curated a few Proof of Beauty NFTs, that show particular transactions within the Ethereum network. For this exhibition, I selected two NFTs that were created based on transactions pertinent to the 2016 The DAO hack.
As a critique tool: at JPG we see curation as second order creation. In this particular case, the creation Virality vs. Virtuality doubles as well, as a critique towards the fragility of the infrastructure we’re building and the controversy around this fragility.
To bookmark discovery: while we do have a bookmarking functionality in our near term milestones, I was able to already use my JPG exhibition to bookmark (in a curated manner) some of the dozens of links I’ve been accumulating in my notes.
Check Virality and Virtuality here
We hope you find this useful - we’ll be showing off more use-cases and resuming usual newsletter programming in the next editions!