Crypto-Native

technologies. Javascript, GLSL

iterations. 3837 (timed edition generative series)

drop. Highlight.xyz as part of On Chain Summer with Base, August 2023 (Link)

opensea. Link

relevant article 1. Is It Art? by Melissa Wiederrecht, Right Click Save

relevant article 2. “Crypto-Native” by Melissa Wiederrecht, project feature on the Highlight Blog 

 

In “Crypto-Native,” the artist incites the viewer to contemplate hundreds of questions centering around the concept of value in art, from the perspective of a web3 crypto-native gen-artist in 2023. She lays bare the thoughts, worries, and sometimes outright strange things that a crypto artist thinks about on a daily basis - shedding light on some of the culture, values, and idiosyncrasies of the crypto-art and NFT movement. She also begs to know, as a crypto-artist: “is my art ‘real’ art?”, “who gets to decide that?”, and “what makes my art valuable… or not?”

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The work is generative, and specifically algorithmically generative - meaning that it is generated from an algorithm designed by the artist in code (Javascript and GLSL), and also meaning that every single output is completely unique from all the others because the artist introduced a hefty dose of randomness into the algorithm. However, this particular algorithm also inputs AI images generated via prompting. These are integrated into the background of the piece, two at a time, and artfully blended together by the artist’s code. A third AI image is imported as a texture and overlaid on top of each individual output. The drippy paint bits, the rectangles of color, and the arrangements and layouts of text have no AI involved and were designed with much craft, intention, mathematics, and time.

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There were a few interesting mechanics about the minting:

• If someone minted more than one piece at once, all pieces in that batch have a matching color palette, font, and a few other matching traits as well.

• If someone minted 159 at once (and 3 people did), they got one of every single question, in the same single-question style, and all in the same color palette and font.