NFT Art

Preamble

Do you hate NFTs? Fine.
This article is not about markets, prices, scams, and speculation (the things you most likely hate), but it’s about NFTs as a way to make art, as much as painting, music, etc.

I have intentionally omitted any direct link to the artworks that I am mentioning here because my goal is not to “shill” some NFTs, but to explain what’s happening in the substrate of the crypto society called “on-chain NFT art”. It’s a kingdom that is seldom explored by the mainstream media but that deserves attention, especially within the broader context of the arts.

I hope to be able to give you a new perspective on what this new type of artist is creating with this novel medium of expression and also to show you that there are people with a genuine creative drive working in this space.

Introduction

Art is everything and everywhere. It’s hard and unnecessary to try to draw a line between what’s art and what’s not.

You perform art by just filtering what the universe offers to you.

If a white square with nothing else but a frame speaks to you, let it be art.

If a picture of an ape with laser eyes triggers deep ancient emotions in you, well… let it be art.

There is another point of debate that I find more interesting: how the medium is used for artistic expression, which is what I will elaborate on in this article, specifically with regard to NFTs.

The Medium

Artists can express what they feel and see in many different ways: words, images, motions, sounds… Different media are available and the question is whether they are used at their best.

A camera can be used to frame moments in time, portraits, and landscapes...

A canvas can be used to paint a king's portrait or a landscape. But one can paint the realm of dreams and fantasy too. Using a canvas only to paint “real world” subjects would be reductive.

A film can be used to portray moving subjects, taking the time dimension in the frame. It would be again reductive to create a movie of still paintings.

Now we come to the NFT: it is not only a technology to handle ownership of art (and anything else really), but it’s also a medium that gives an arsenal of expressive options to the artist.

The NFT

The examples above show, very simplistically, how different tools can be used or NOT used.

The NFT can be seen through the same lenses: most of the currently circulating NFTs are still pictures or still animations, drawn with tool X or Y and imported on the blockchain.

What I mean is that what you end up owning once you buy one of these NFTs is a… URL. Nothing more. A URL that might contain a picture or a video today, and nothing tomorrow. But that’s pretty much it. The artist has certainly done some work, but the NFT technology was only used as a way to sell. Attention: it is not wrong. It’s just like an artist making a video of their painting and selling the streaming rights to Netflix. The artist sold their amazing work, but they cannot call themselves “video-makers”.

So what’s exactly the thing an artist can do to qualify as NFT Artist (in my own very personal view)?

Generative Art

Let’s start with a little digression into what I believe is at the foundation of everything that is currently happening in this space: generative computer art.

Born way before Bitcoin was invented, and even before the Internet existed, this niche category of the arts started around the beginning of the 60s, when employees at Bell’s Lab found an intriguing aesthetics in plotter’s errors.

Although looking at the purely aesthetical side of it, Piet Mondrian was surely a pioneer of this type of artifacts

Computer Generated Art is a type of art where the visual output is delegated to a machine. The human product is the algorithm that gives life to it.
This is art that speaks to the viewer, but also to the maker, mesmerized by the surprising beauties that can emerge from mere electronic circuitry.

The artist-collector relationship is the same as for all other types of traditional art: the artist creates the output, and the collector buys it.

Let’s see how NFTs evolved this equation.

Generative NFTs

The first, and most fundamental aspect that NFTs bring to the world of arts is the possibility to turn the algorithm into the artwork.

The job of the artist is now to define the rules, not to select the outputs. Everything else will be determined by the chance.

The first example of NFT generative art is Autoglyphs, by Larva Labs.

The look of this is not far from what we have seen in the previous chapter, but there is a nuance to it: the artist created only a contract defining the rules. What you see is not a print from the artist, but the direct result of the contract computation, based on some randomness that was created during the purchase.

The artist becomes the meta-creator. The final collection is determined through the action of the collectors and it comes into existence only at the moment someone looks at it, triggering the machine to produce its visual output.

This is the foundation upon which most of the NFTs are built. What comes next is “just” an extension of it. We will try to answer the question: how far can the artist go programming their artwork? Can NFTs be alive?

Time

At the very base of every living being there is time.

Time inevitably affects art, both anthropologically and physically. A painting deteriorates through time. A cave drawing probably changes color and shades through the centuries.

In a way, most of the artworks are alive, as they evolve through time. But it’s currently out of the control of the artist to tell what time should do to their artwork.

Now imagine if the artist could define not only the rules of how to generate the look of their work but also of how time should influence it.

One example to clarify the concept is Chaos Roads, by Chainleft.

This NFT uses Time to release chaos: the visual look of the NFT starts from a low entropy state (first image) to slowly descend into chaos, through the passage of time (second image, different NFT, higher entropy).

…more chaos…

What you have today will look different and more chaotic in a month. A continuous surprise awaits the owners of this NFT.

As an analogy, imagine a Mona Lisa whose hair looks whiter every day.

Some may argue: “I could have an image in my computer and have a script that changes it every day”. Correct. The difference is mainly in the very definition of what an NFT is: ownable.

I can buy the image of your computer, you could run away tomorrow with it and my evolutionary art piece is gone.

The behavior I just showcased can instead, with NFTs, be embedded in the artwork that you buy. No one will ever be able to stop your NFT visual from changing tomorrow. Only the collapse of an entire financial system (called Ethereum) could cause this permanent loss.

The chances are lower than the entire Louvre burning down to ashes.

What else? We explored time as a new tool for the artists to express their inner vision of the universe, is that it? No: we are just scratching the surface. Generative algorithms and Time are the base dough of everything that will be described later, many tools are available on top.

Ownership

NFTs are based on a few standards (ERC721, ERC1155, and more) that essentially create a very clear relationship between the artwork and its owners.

At every point in time, I can know which and how many NFTs a given person owns. Or I can say how many unique collectors own pieces from a specific collection. And more.

This information can be used by the work itself to change itself.

The Mesh by Takenstheorem is one good example of how ownership dynamics can affect the artwork. Each NFT draws data about its owner from the blockchain, in order to reveal, through a visual composition, the relationship of the collector to this and other artworks. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Another notable example is See You There by Simon de la Rouviere: it’s a single NFT that captures the chain of owners from its inception until the next 5 years. The spiral will have a different section for each of the collectors who owned the piece for at least 20 days.

Time and ownership will determine how it will evolve…. Who knows what will it look like in 1,2,3 years?

What these artists are doing is to express through art the intricate dynamics between a collector and their artworks, a dimension that was always hidden away in previous media.

Imagine if the Mona Lisa would suddenly start smiling when purchased by one of Leonardo’s descendants. Agreed, it would probably be quite creepy.

Activity

The most mind-bending detail is probably the following: NFTs are artworks that are, to an extent, self-aware.

Everything that happens to a single NFT can be used by the NFT itself and others to change, evolve, respond…

We can have an artwork that deteriorates if no one looks at it, and that restores itself if people trade it. Well, with some external help, more or less the same can happen even with paintings, buildings, etc...

But let’s bring it a step further: Gold, by James Bloom.

This collection responds to anything that happens in its own market. All the activity of their collectors (in relation to the NFT itself) is recorded and used to paint and re-paint its visuals.

Transfers, prices, sales, provenance, everything that you can possibly imagine becomes the paintbrush of this NFT.

You are Here by 0xff goes beyond Ethereum. This NFT records all the transfers that the token has undergone across different blockchains and simply shows the journey in a minimal, yet delightful way:

It’s a way to make the artwork life part of the artwork itself.

Image if the Mona Lisa, once moved to the Louvre, would have switched background from Montefeltro in the Marche to Paris.

Interdependency

In the previous chapter, I hinted at the fact that an NFT can know about itself. There is more: an NFT can know about others too. And it can draw itself based on this information.

XXYYZZ by emo.eth and Aspyn was created as a collection of colors, in all its conceptual purity. You really just buy a color:

In case the same collector owns as well a piece from another collection called Together (by the same author) the two NFTs are plugged together, composing the aesthetic features of the two artworks

This is a static example, but options are infinite: one could in theory create an NFT that reacts to the changes of another NFT.

Imagine a Mona Lisa that starts crying when the The Battle of Anghiari burns down.

Price

There is something that, with or without our liking, is and will always be a crucial factor in almost all types of art: price.

Hardly will you find an artist that does not put a price tag on their items. Art is a form of expression first, and a business then.

We should not consider this negatively, because artists, like all other professions, need money. But, as promised in the introduction, this is not going to be a discussion about how to price art.

What I want to show here is how NFT artists can use price not only for profit but also for fun.

Among the rules that one can bake in the NFT, we have the price rules. In most of the cases these are used in their most basic way: to set a fixed price for the NFT, or to implement some kind of auction mechanics.

But price can also be used in more creative ways. For instance, to incentivize/disincentivize certain behaviours among the collectors, which then become part of that artistic performance.

One example of NFT where price played a fundamental role in the concept itself is Black Hole by miragenesi (the author of this article).

For every purchase of this NFT, the price would increase. Every time a piece was destroyed, the price would instead decrease. All the money spent during the sale would be accumulated in the NFT itself and be released to the last person destroying their NFT.

The pricing, in this case, was conceived so as to make the Black Hole absorb money for eternity, hence behaving like an actual black hole.

NFT Art blurs the line between generative, performative, and interactive art.

NFT Art can make the collectors part of the artwork.

Infinity²

What we have seen until now are just bits of what’s possible with NFT Art and it’s not meant to be a comprehensive list of all possible types of NFTs that can be created.

FAR FROM IT!

An NFT is a whole computer turned into an ownable artifact, the possibilities for the artists are an infinite larger than what was possible earlier. There are even NFTs that can produce audio.

New NFT artists join this niche circle daily, bringing amazing experimental and experiential artworks to this space.

You can explore more following the X profiles linked throughout the article, but also:

• Folia and especially the works from the founder Billy Rennekamp, where interactivity and fun are so central to his NFTs that one might even call them game art
• Pushers, the Discord server from Chainleft, offers a very active and erudite NFT Art community, including specific channels for well-known artists where people can see new works and ask questions
• Onchainchecker from Tokenfox, which indexes a plethora of artworks in the NFT space, with many projects showing, to a higher or lesser extent, the traits showcased above
• Fingerprints DAO, a collective that owns and releases as well artworks in this category (and more traditional ones too)

I myself write about NFTs and create new concepts, every now and then. Feel free to follow me if interested, join my Discord, or if you have questions just write me an email at miragenesi |o| posteo |.| de.

I believe we are still in a phase of exploration and experimentation, where the technology is being tested, to both check what can technically be achieved and also to see how collectors relate and react to it. I imagine a future when the use of these tools will be as normal and simple as a brush is nowadays for painters, giving artists the power to bring art to a whole new level.

Thanks for reading this article, share it with haters and lovers, and let’s spread some good vibes for these wonderful artists 🙏

PS: I would like to repeat that all that was described in the article can indeed be performed without an NFT but just with a computer and a script. The difference is that, with NFTs, the algorithm is part of the artistic item and, hence, part of what the collectors are going to buy. Which can then exist independently and beyond the life of the artist itself.